Cherry jam

One of Jimmy's favorite books introduces the preposterous idea that it's possible to get tired of jam. Obviously, Frances' mother must have stocked her pantry with the store-bought variety, because as anyone who puts up their own preserves knows: there's no such thing as too much homemade jam.

Through Jim's folks, we got a great deal on Bing cherries; we bought 40 pounds at 50¢ a pound. We pitted and canned the first 25 pounds, which yielded 18 quarts. With the last 15 pounds, I made a quadruple batch of sugar-free cherry jam, and we still had a few pounds left over for eating fresh.

I used the same recipe from the pectin package as I did for the strawberry jam, but with a few additional modifications.

A single batch of cherry jam calls for three pounds of prepared fruit and the equivalent of that is about one cup to one pound. Since cherries compress quite a bit when they are pitted and ground, I started with four heaping quarts of cherries--I measured them out in a big glass two-quart measuring cup, which I heaped as high as possible. Then I pitted the cherries before grinding them.

I fired up our KitchenAid stand mixer, used the food grinder attachment, and made a total of 12 cups of ground cherries. I simmered them down for about a half hour to thicken the consistency before adding the other ingredients.

Then I used half the amount of pectin called for, because when I cracked into a jar of my new strawberry jam on Sunday, I found that the texture was more like paste than jam--tasty paste to be sure, but a bit too thick for my liking. I also used less Splenda because I wanted to bring out the tart flavor of the cherries; I used 1 cup per batch.

The quadruple batch yielded 7 pints of jam, and I was very pleased with the results of my alterations to the recipe. The flavor was sweet but tangy, and the consistency was thick but not gelatinous. Ah, success!