Today at LuthorCorp I received a phone call from a dear friend who read my great post-election conniption and, just because she knew I needed it, did a spot-on imitation of Tucker Carlson on the night Jon Stewart appeared on Crossfire. "Why aren't you being foody tonight? You were supposed to be foody. Come on, be foody." Why, certainly.
It is a good thing that Gareth Blackstock, the mercurial and acid-tongued chef played by Lenny Henry on Chef!, is not my editor, or my site administrator. If he were, he would probably be shouting right now: "Several WEEKS ago I remember hearing promises for a recipe for paradise JELLY. Since no paradise jelly recipe has been forthcoming, I can only assumed it hasn't ARRIVED yet...don't think I don't mind giving bog-variety preserving lessons on your behalf. I mean, I only have NINETY covers to prepare in the next hour and a half. I was hoping that something would come up to pass the time!" Dear friends, I am sorry about that.
I have been Googling tonight for a history of paradise jelly, but so far all I've been able to come up with is a single recipe posted in several sites under two different handles. It sounds like somebody is plagiarizing somebody, but I'll let them fight it out for themselves. I first read about paradise jelly in Laurie Colwin's last novel, A Big Storm Knocked It Over. Because Mrs. Colwin was a fan of the 1943 Joy of Cooking, I decided to look at my own copy to see if it included a paradise jelly recipe, and indeed it did. I believe that the internet versions of this jelly sprung off from the Joy recipe, because the proportions are the same: 20 apples, 10 quinces, 2 quarts of cranberries. (The internet recipe also includes two vanilla beans, but I've never tried it this way.) Because fruit varies so much by weight, I interpret these measures as 10 pounds of apples, 5 pounds of quinces and two one-pound bags of cranberries. If you don't want to be stuck dealing with jar upon jar upon jar of jelly, you can certainly scale the measures down, but I would definitely use twice as many apples as quinces, and I would trust your own judgment on cranberries. If you like them, use more. If you're not a fan, use less.
Last year I found myself caught unawares by the fall fruit season. Nearly all of the fruit I bought ended up in a pie -- and don't think for one second that I'm not noodling around with a version of paradise pie, to be shared with you as soon as I get something that sings out make me, bake me, eat me up, yum -- but I never got the hang of making pie and jelly in a single weekend, and as a result, it was a paradise jellyless Christmas last year. Lloyd and my parents were too kind to chide me for this, but I knew they missed it. My parents missed it on their toast and Lloyd missed his open-face jelly sandwiches, which he created one weekend out of a slice of focaccia (another house standard, based on a Carol Field recipe that includes olive oil and white wine in the dough, and is one of the most delicious loaves of bread I know how to make), a thin layer of creme fraiche and a thick layer of paradise jelly. This year, I won't be lazy, or disaffected, or clueless. I'll remember that every step of this jelly is a gift, from the selection of which apples to use (the house Winesaps? Golden Russets? Baldwins? Northern Spies?), to delving into the crate of quinces at the farmer's market, getting my hands and nose covered with quince fuzz and my head filled with that honeyed perfume, to watching the apples and cranberries turn a vivid red in the preserving pot, to doing the dance of cooking everything together, to the moment where we pop the seal on the first jar and dip the spoon in, inhale, sigh in a way that seems a bit over the top for a mere jelly, taste it and realize that no, we weren't being over the top. This is jelly with something to say.
Paradise Jelly
Yield: at least 8 jars (I'll have to let you know when I'm done!)
10 pounds tart apples
5 pounds quinces
2 one-pound bags fresh cranberries
sugar (see instructions)
juice of 2 lemons
Wash the apples and quinces, but do not peel. Cut the blossoms from the quinces and cut into 4 pieces. Put in a preserving pan, add water just to cover, bring the fruit and water to a boil and boil until fruit is collapsing. Pour the mix into a jelly bag and let drain.
Cut the blossoms and stems from the apples and cut into 4-8 pieces. Put them into the preserving pan along with the cranberries, add water just to cover, boil as with the quinces and pour into a separate jelly bag. Let both bags drain overnight, or for at least 4 hours. Do not squeeze the jelly bags, no matter how much they look like they need squeezing, for squeezing will turn the juice cloudy.
The next day, measure the juice. For every cup of juice, measure 3/4 cup of sugar, if you like a more tart, cranberry-accented jelly or 1 cup if you like a sweeter, more quince-flavored jelly. Bring the juice to a boil, add the sugar and lemon juice, stir, skim and begin testing for a set after 10 minutes. (Most cookbooks recommend that you cook no more than 4 cups of juice at a time, because it is trickier to determine a set if you cook much more than that, but sometimes I like to live dangerously and cook 6 cups at a time. Born to be wild, c'est moi.)
Meanwhile, boil your jars and sterilize your lids. When you see your jelly has turned into jelly (either by the sheeting test, the plate test or the thermometer test), decant it into the sterilized jars, apply the lids and screwbands and return them to the canner. Process them for 10 minutes. Take them out, listen for the satisfying ping of the seals forming, and wait for the jelly to cool down enough for enthusiastic consumption of it.
When you're done, you will have jars and jars of the world's loveliest jelly to show for your efforts, but odds are you will also be sweaty and disheveled and more than a little tired. (Or, if you are smarter about this than I am, you can ask a canning-inclined friend if s/he has made any paradise jelly, and are there any jars left? No sweat, no dishevelment, and you still have some jelly to show for your efforts.) One of the nicest things you can do for yourself at this moment is to fix yourself a cup of tea and a little snack, maybe some cream crackers with some of the leftover jelly you have decanted into a clean glass or jar for immediate consumption, and settle down with a good book. I finally picked up a book I have been noticing, looking at and poring over since its publication in 2000, Sallie Tisdale's purely amazing The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food. I like this book so well that I could quote the whole thing, but that would be a gross violation of Ms. Tisdale's copyright. Better that you go directly to your library and/or bookstore and peruse for yourself. In the meantime, I will share just one of the passages that sent me over the moon, one that addresses one of the noisiest bees in my bonnet, the degradation of language and meaning:
The individual is once again first and forward. The youth revolution first seen in the twenties, and its vibrant revival in the sixties and seventies, shrank in the eighties into something else. We call health "fitness" now. A minority of Americans eat healthy food and exercise regularly, but socioculturally this is the leading image of consumption and success. The constant presence of lean, mean, athletic and perpetually young white people in our shared images renders all the rest of us invisible. Wages fall, security drops away, the rich grow richer and the poor poorer, and at the same time -- and not coincidentally -- the image of happiness gets richer, leaner, younger, and farther and farther out of reach. We laugh at the bemused housewife of midcentury, caught between Betty Crocker and Betty Grable, but we are caught between teenage models and marathon-running CEOs, and we buy it, we buy it all the way.
Words like labor-saving, leisure, freedom and economical are early examples of a degradation of language forced by social change, something T.J. Jackson Lears calls the "collapse of meaning." For close to two hundred years, how things look has been becoming more important than how things are. Advertising offered less and less information and more and more messages of desire, more blurring between lies and truth -- shadows thrown and lights carefully cast to create false impressions. By the early twentieth century, slogns, jingles, free samples, and mascots were everywhere. Words like natural and homestyle appeared as new disinformation; in Waverley Root's phrase, these are the kind of words that deliberately "evoke but don't inform." Canned foods were a return to "home cooking," while raw and bulk foods were labelled "unwashed."
More recently, the words changed again. The food technology industry first co-opted natural, homemade and fresh from the natural-foods movement, and then corrupted their meaning by adding light and low. In the 1980s, New York's Rainbow Room offered a "fitness" menu guaranteeing the diner fewer than 500 calories and a bill of more than $30. There is a trend in kitschy and old-fashioned cookbooks, a return to the past, but it is not what it seems. "The classics," says a food magazine, "lightened and reinterpreted, are reappearing." Endless recipes are "reinterpreted" and "refined" and "intensified" and especially "lightened." Lightened, buoyant foods of flight, foods of the rarefied, the few...Food and Wine recently interviewed Ferdinand Metz, the president of the Culinary Institute of America and one of the keepers of the highest culinary standards in this country. Metz says he eats only super-low-fat, light food. He recommends making a souffle with skim milk and substituting cornstarch for the eggs. Other cooks, like those of the French Culinary Institute, offers similar recipes "favorable to your waistline," but they are changes that betray the meaning of souffle at least as much as calling frozen peas "fresh" betrays the meaning of fresh, the very meaning of peas.