[Sca-cooks] Wilson on 'Jams'
Johnna Holloway
johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu
Tue Oct 30 04:51:02 PDT 2007
Echoing what Huette and Alys wrote, here's some more
on the emergence of jams in English cookery: This may help in our
discussions.
On the topic of jam, C. Anne Wilson in the revised edition of The Book
of Marmalade (1999) writes:
“The British themselves have not always had their soft-fruit jams. The
word ‘jam’ began to creep into manuscript cookery-books in the last
quarter of the seventeenth century, and into the printed ones early in
the eighteenth. It had entered the English language only about a hundred
years before; and perhaps it had a middle eastern origin, for there is
an Arab word ‘jam’ which means ‘close-packed’ or ‘all together’. From
its more general usuage in English for things that were jammed against
one another, the word passed into the realm of confectionery, to denote
those preserves where soft fruits cooked with sugar were crushed
together, rather than sieved, and could thus be described as ‘jammed’,
or ‘in a jam’. pp. 16-17
“Recipes for the marmalades of home-grown fruits other than quinces
appeared in the preserving books all through the seventeenth century.
The latter ones show a somewhat softer conserve, still dense and sticky,
but potted, not boxed, made from such fruit fruits as raspberries,
mulberries, cherries, white or red currants, gooseberries, apricots or
damsons, and it was for this type of conserve that the name ’jam’ was
coined. P.45
The revised edition of The Book of Marmalade is still in print. The
Florilegium carries a number of endorsements
regarding the book.
Johnnae
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list