Making jam has become a wildly popular pursuit across the US with the recent pandemic, such that there’s actually a nationwide shortage of jars! There’s an undeniable pleasure in canning, and it can be seen throughout history. In this post, we’re going to talk about how you can trace that exact interest through history and how great that really is.
For a long, long time (think in the millions of years), people have been preserving food. Generally speaking, early preserving methods revolved around separating a food product from water and air. This meant that products were often salted and dried, or even coated in honey (which forms a barrier against the elements).
In ancient Greece, quince was mixed with honey, dried, and packed into jars. The Romans improved upon this method by cooking the quince and honey together, thereby producing a meld of the ingredients. If you’re up to date on how preserves are made, you’ll see the bones of the style starting to emerge here.
Generally speaking, the first jams and preserves are accredited to cooks in the Middle East at some point before the eleventh century - it’s hard to pin down an exact time frame. These preserves used honey as their sweetener, though sugar quickly surpassed honey in popularity for making jams. From that point onwards, you can essentially follow the spread of sugar around the world on a map. If a place had sugar and fruit, people would likely combine the two to make a preserve.
Jam making and preserves came to the US with colonists, who had sampled jam in their home countries. Generally speaking, jams became popular throughout Europe due to the sweet tooth of assorted royal families who could afford the sugar that was required to make them. As sugar became more widespread, poorer people in European cities were able to make jam themselves and took that skill to the US with them.
As time went on, more and more people made jam in the US. There was ready access to both sugar and fruit, so they made plenty of preserves, along with all other kinds of foodstuffs. The next great advancement in the jam-making world was the process of aseptic canning.
If you’re used to making jam in your home, then you’ll surely know what that is. Aseptic canning is the process of heating the jam and the can separately, in order to ensure that all surfaces are sterile. This allows the jam that is added to the can to stay sterile and safe to eat for a long time - it is completely shelf-stable.
When sugar prices soared in the 1970s, companies began to regularly add high-fructose corn syrup to their jams instead of sugar, which was particularly unhealthy. It is only in the fairly recent past that people have gone back to sugar and alternative sweetness, allowing for a great artisan, home-making movement to arise.
We love jam, and we love that it has such a huge footprint across history - what other foodstuff has remained to prevalent the world over? Well, now that you’re armed with a little more knowledge about the history of jam - happy canning!
