Sand Hill Plum Jelly

My grandmother canned food from necessity rather than for pleasure, and to my knowledge she never in her lifetime took a photo of anything she canned.  She just fed it to us, with love, and we were humbled by the knowledge of the sheer hard work behind every stockpot full of bacon seasoned green beans, bowl of stewed apples, or cut glass dish of pickled beets.  

 I have a confession.

I don't generally believe that canning one's own produce is worth the trouble.  As a Kansas farm wife of 45 years, that's quite a dark reveal.

Home canning doesn't work well with my personality; I am germ-phobic on one hand but carefree on the other, as I seldom measure ingredients when I cook.  I am intimidated by the dire warnings of disastrous outcomes if I should fail to follow every direction perfectly.

Also, I'm sorry, but home canning makes a horrific mess.  Again, I have a personality conflict with the whole procedure.  I like fresh produce as much as the next person, but when it comes to "laying it by," a little voice in my head whispers that I can buy a can of green beans in the store for 89 cents, so why would I spend an entire day picking, stemming, boiling, and worrying about whether I have done things safely...or not?

I like to freeze things.  I even freeze tomatoes, if you can believe that.  Heath officials and extension agents do not generally issue frightening warnings about home frozen food.  But that's another blog post.

An exception to all the angst I've just described is jelly, specifically Sand Hill (or wild) plum jelly.  For the reward of a shelf full of jewel-toned, tart and sweet deliciousness made from fruit that grows wild across the country road from my house, I will wash, boil, strain, juice, read, reread, and read again the tiny print of the directions on the Sure Jell box.  I will gladly dirty most of the pots and pans I own, and deal with sugar spills and sticky countertops.  It's worth it, even though I treat the whole process more as an art project than as a way of laying by food for the winter.  And although I do my very best to process the jelly exactly according to direction, I am comforted that it would be a foolish bacterium that would even attempt to survive in something that is at once highly acidic and yet sweet as jelly made with the very sour juice of a wild plum.

At Thanksgiving this year I will fill crystal jelly dishes with this jelly and in response to my mother-in-law's query will reply modestly and matter of factly, "Oh yes, of course this is homemade. I put it up last summer.  Filled the pantry. The Sand Hill plums were beautiful this year."

Note:  These plums may be wild plums rather than Sand Hill plums--a Google search tells me that in our area of Kansas wild plum dominates, while the Sand Hill plum predominates in Western Kansas.  But we have always called them Sand Hill plums!