Preserve

This week of the 52 ancestors in 52 weeks the keyword is preserves. There could be lot of meanings to preserve. When I first read this I thought not of saving records, but of my mother making preserves with various fruits in the summer. She made peach and pear preserves every summer.  When I was first married, I lived in California, and we could get bushels of fruit very easily. Since I had large quantities of fruit, I asked Mom for her preserves recipe. The next letter from her included the recipe. Now I don’t remember the exact details as to how much sugar to how much fruit. But it was some pounds of sugar to some other pounds of fruit. And the rest of the recipe said, “you know what to do.”  Well, I guess I never looked that closely at how she made preserves. I knew to put the fruit in the pot and add the sugar on top.  Not to stir it while it was heating so that the sugar didn’t get to the bottom of the pan and burn. Once the fruit was bubbling then it was safe to stir it. The missing piece was what to do next. It stayed pretty liquid, so, I kept heating it. It got to be bedtime, I turned off the stove and went to bed.  The next day this stuff in the pan was a solid rock!  I don’t remember if I tried to clean the pan or just threw it all out.  That was went I discovered powdered pectin that was added to the fruit before starting to heat it. And I never went back to making preserves without pectin!