Rosehips, Beach Plums, and Nantucket Jams

It’s an early Saturday morning in July. The sun is coming through the windows in the kitchen. I am six years old, peeling white labels off a sheet and placing them carefully onto the dark bellies of jars. Lined up on the table, strawberry, raspberry, peach, beach plum, and translucent rosehip gleam out from their little 8 ounce jars. Their golden tops catch the light.

My mother is fussing at the oven, cutting big sheets of apple-cinnamon coffee cake into squares, putting empty silver pans into the sink, dusting her hands off on her apron. For years during my childhood, my mother ran a table with Sustainable Nantucket’s Farmers & Artisans Market downtown. Through her small business, Nantucket Jams, she sold her handmade jams and jellies, and fresh baked breakfast goods, which were usually coffee cake, cookies, and little bags of chocolate chip granola. 

My mother and I woke up with dawn every summer Saturday, me and my father helping with stickers, wrapping, setting the jams into their cardboard boxes, loading them into the car. I remember her those days, spending all evening standing over the stove, stirring her big metal pots of bubbling jelly, the whole house smelling like sugar, her hands sticky.

I was still young, but I remember driving out to Madaket with her and my father with blue plastic buckets and searching the bushes for beach plums, digging for the purple and red jewels nestled in the brush. It was like searching for hidden treasures. We carried them home, and my mother dunked them in the sink, stripping their stems and green leaves. 

The rosehips, which glowed like headlights from the rose bushes at Steps Beach, were a little more precarious — the bushes can prick if you’re not careful. Their orange bellies had to be picked gently, one by one.

Then, into the pot they went, heaped with sugar, gelatin dissolving in a little glass bowl next to the stove. She stirred with a wooden spoon, the steam rising to the hood of the stove. Then the ladle, the open-mouthed jars lined up waiting, the metal tongs dipping them back into the boiling water to can them. All night, we could hear their lids popping in the dark.

When the season ended, what prepared fruits didn’t make it into the jars she froze in gallon plastic bags. Our freezer is still stacked with frozen sheets of beach plums, raspberries, rosehips, green tomatoes — sitting, waiting to be boiled and jarred.

For beginners, my mom recommends using pectin for jellies. Jellies are a little harder to set than jams because they’re made from fruit juice rather than the whole fruit, which makes achieving the correct consistency trickier (and frustrating!). Jams, on the other hand, include the fruit pulp, giving them a thicker texture without relying as much on pectin. For an easier first attempt, she suggests using a packet of liquid pectin per batch, to make life easier.

Mixing the Jellies

Add juice (beach plum or rosehip) and sugar to the pot, and wait for the mixture to come to a boil. After the mixture reaches a full rolling boil (when you stir and the boil doesn’t lower) — add the pectin — bring the mixture back up to a full rolling boil, and for one full minute, stir non-stop. 

Setting Your Jellies

When you raise the wooden spoon to the light and turn it once in the air (giving it a chance to cool slightly) you should be able to determine whether the jelly has thickened, depending on how it drips down. A loose jelly will drip like water, where a setting jelly will mostly stick to the spoon, or collect into larger, slower drops. 

In order to determine whether the jelly is ready to set, spoon a little bit of the mixture onto a cold plate or shallow bowl, and wait a few minutes. If the mixture sets as it cools, the jelly is ready. If it remains liquid after it cools, continue stirring until another spoon trial appears to set.

For More Adventurous Jelly-Makers 

If you don’t want to use pre-prepared pectin, you can add some fruits with natural pectins to your dose.

Add citrus:

• Add some lemon juice or lemon peels (even if using pre-prepared pectins)
• Orange juice or orange peels

Use underripe fruit:

• A quarter to a third of your fruits should be underripe. especially for rosehips that are very ripe. Because rosehips don’t have a ton of natural pectin when ripe, adding some underripe fruit helps the jelly set, especially if you’re not using liquid pectins. 
• Beach plums have a little more natural pectin, so half a cup of green beach plums will help with consistency.

Add other high-pectin fruits (optional):

• Apples with the core and peels
• Quince, cut up

These are added to the mixture while boiling the fruit (for juice, before adding the sugar) and remove them once the jelly is done. 

Notes on yield:

• If using pectin, your yield will be higher. A batch with pectin will produce more jars than a batch without, because less juice boils off and more jelly sets. 

Sterilizing Jars, Heat Processing, and Canning

1. To jar jams and jellies, the jars must be clean and completely dry. If your jars are wet, you can dry them in the microwave or in the oven. 

2. There are two main ways to sterilize jars:

• Run the jars through the sanitization cycle of your dishwasher and use them immediately once dry
• If you don’t have a dishwasher, wash the jars by hand and then set them in the oven or microwave (for smaller batches) until hot and dry. 

3. Right before jarring, boil the inner rubber-lined disk of the cap, which goes directly onto the jam. This softens the rubber slightly so it will seal properly. After boiling, place the disks on a paper towel to dry.

4. Wipe the rims of the jars carefully, place the disks on top, and screw on the rings. Then, place them back in warm water to can them. Bring the water to a boil. Boiling times vary by sea level; on Nantucket, at sea level, 5 minutes is usually good. 

5. Set the jars out overnight to cool. Their lids should eventually “pop” to show they are properly sealed and shelf-stable. 

Tips and Notes: 

• The jar rims must be clean before screwing the lid on. If the jars aren’t wiped around the rim, you may risk the jam not sealing properly, not being shelf-stable, and molding.
• When you place the jars back in the water to be canned, make sure the water is warm not cold! Hot jars in cold water = not good.
• Jars are properly canned if you can press the thin metal circle at the top of the lid, and it doesn’t move or pop. 
• Jam or jelly doesn’t necessarily have to be double-boiled. This is only if you want them to be shelf-stable. Since they have high sugar content, unprocessed jars will still last for a couple weeks in the refrigerator, or can be eaten immediately without canning.