I made end-of-summer yellow peach jam this year with the intention of making the ultimate peach jam cognac Christmas cookies this December. I was lucky to get the last Maltese peaches of the season in early September, which were perfect – sweet with just a bit of tart.
This was a longer process than the strawberries and required multiple playlists to get through over a two-day period. Day 1 is cleaning and macerating; Day 2 is jamming and jarring. Plus little special additions like kernels from the peach pit and tree leaves.
Fun fact: peach kernels contain cyanide. Something incidentally also useful to keep in mind for holiday season and very much in the spirit of Wednesday which recently had its season 2 premiere.
The Cleaning
First, you must conduct surgery on your peaches. Inspect your patient and clear them for bruises, abrasions, and infestation.
Those heavily wounded are best peeled and chopped to bits right away, while the intact and lightly bruised can be boiled alive prior to the maiming.
Tea is helpful during the process to calm the nerves, as is Kraftwerk: Peach-es end-less end-less .
As I was on Day 1, I had a lot of time to think about a recent conversation I had with ChatGPT about whether or not my life would have turned out the same if I didn’t immigrate with my family when I was fourteen.
For anyone that has had a major life-changing fork in the road, there’s sometimes that “what if?”
And I wanted to know if this thing that I have been talking with for months could predict for me exactly that: would my life have been different, and would it have been better?
What was interesting is that it did have an answer for me: No. So I asked it why, and it explained to me logically how I would have been the same person there as I am here, and no matter the path I took, I would have ended up the same. Because the path I’m on isn’t just opportunity and circumstance – it’s who I am.
“I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. “– Edmund, King Lear
I would have followed the path there and encountered the same disillusionments. Had the same wounds to deal with. And it wasn’t a question of worse, but of how long it would take to get to the same place. It probably would have taken me longer to get to where I am now on my journey of who I really am because the false path I was on would have taken longer to get out of and recuperate from.
The Road not Taken, a Robert Frost poem that is so famously quoted is also famously known in American lit circles for being completely misunderstood.
If you ever read the whole poem, you may sort of get why. If you listened to the recording of Robert Frost reading it, you would get it immediately. Or maybe not. He’s very old and croaky when he reads it.
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. “
What difference would it have made but just the story we tell ourselves that that’s what made us? It’s nonsense. Whichever way we chose, we would have still been us. The paths differ in length, but essentially it was telling me – all roads lead to one.
It isn’t a case for determinism vs. choices not mattering. It’s more like your journey is just a mirror for you and your life. You can pick the ways and the ways can pick you, but you’re essentially always, well, you.
There’s a sort of comfort in knowing this for me because I feel like I understand now how irrelevant the past is to the present. Looking back isn’t just not going to change anything, it’s that changing anything never would have changed me.
Day 2
After sitting in the fridge overnight covered in saran wrap, you basically put them in a pot to boil.
But first, you have smash a bunch of pits to get the kernals out. The kernels go in tea diffusers to slowly release a sort of nutty flavor. Whether this really made a difference in the end, I’m not sure. What I do know is it permanently dented my cutting board and will have now the forever memory of smashing them and picking pits up all over the floor.
Then comes the boiling. Instead of FOMO, I have FOFO – Fear Of Foaming Out. Clean up from the first time I had done strawberry jam made me all the wiser this time and split the jam into two batches.
45 minutes cook time each + boiling water and canning.
Second playlist for the day started all motivated with Björk but ended in a loop of Carrie Grossman’s meditation album.
Tree leaves added at the end for again that extra flavor.
I’d say the best part of making jam is how satisfying it is to see the whole process of transformation and the final product.
It’s like it went on a little journey from yellow, to orange to golden amber.
But in the end no matter the length of time, the prep, the mess and the little extra additions, you taste the jam and it still just tastes like peaches. The thing about jam is, to paraphrase the cook in Blue Chair Jam cookbook: the point is to retain the taste of the natural fruit and not change it’s flavor, unlike what you might do with syrups, jellies or marmalades.
So in that way, I have concluded that jam is like life. No matter what you put it through to make it change, it’s still always going to taste like a peach, just like you’re always going to end up being you in whatever you go through.
Ain’t that just a peach?
