Many summer childhood memories are tied to jam-making; iron shutters closed against the heatwave. The copper pot, too heavy to carry once it was filled with half fruit, half sugar bubbling on the stove, adding stickiness to the air.

I can track our family’s recent history from jam. The seedy fig batches our gran started to make, mostly for me, when they moved to a house with a fig tree because of our grandfather’s declining health. The blackberry jelly we made after our mother inherited her great-grand parents’ small farm. The new fruit jams my sister got when she moved to the South. The flavours that disappeared as the trees died in our childhood garden.

Jam flavours are cyclical. They depend on elements outside of our control. Jam isn’t your first option with fruits. The first thing you do is eat the fruit raw. Jam exists so fruits don’t go to waste. We only filled many jars when the tree branches nearly broke under the weight of all the cherries. The following year, and the one after, the birds might beat us to it, or the blossoms freeze. Then, there would only be enough cherries for dessert for a couple of evenings, and we’re not going to turn that into jam because jam is a lot of work.  

Making jam involves paraphernalia never used outside the season. In addition to the copper pot, there is a wooden spoon with a long handle and a slotted spoon to remove the foam that forms on top. You then dump the foam into a shallow dish, ready to have over fresh bread in the morning. That’s the best part of jam.

Making jam starts by getting the fruits. Bending over in the early morning, before the day gets too hot, to pick vine peaches off the dry soil, often half-rotten, definitely full of worms that will try to escape when you peel the fruit. Picking blackberries in hedges and getting stung by nettle. Going to the market for large platters of abricots a confiture, which are cheaper and riper than the ones for the table. Getting an unexpected basket of plums from a neighbour, which upends your plans for the day.

Then we gather at the kitchen table to prepare the fruits while watching whatever is on TV at the time. One afternoon, it’s the movie Petite Cherie which has become a family in-joke. This is a real movie, not a sugar-infused dream, but for me it only exists in the memory of that day, window open and peels piling up on top of an old newspaper as we joke about how terrible it is. 

We cut the peaches and the escaping worms. We cook blackberries, redcurrants and raspberries and crush them to get juice for jelly. We remove the pit from the cherries – but somehow, always leave a few strays. Our hands turn sticky and brown, which doesn’t matter because we do it all over again the next day.

Then, out comes the scale, to weigh exactly how much we did over the past few hours. The fruits go first into the pot already on the stove, then a mount of sugar that melts and bubbles.

Then our dad looks for jars in the cellar and we line them up on the kitchen table on top of a tea towel. Different fruits get different jars – tall and thin for jelly; large, thick ones for vine peaches, because the fruit chunks take up a lot of space.

Transferring the jam into the jars is a grown-up-only operation, with a lot of “attention tu vas te bruler” warnings that you could burn yourself. Then we wait for the jam to cool and set, stick the label – always the fruit and year, sometimes its origin – and use a small sponge, another jam-only paraphernalia, so we can apply a flimsy sheet of plastic as lid, secured with an elastic band. We often overextend and break the band, especially for the peach jars. Sometimes, our mum could cut off square pieces of fabric for a fancier cover, and we would bring them to people who invited us to dinner.   

Then the jars disappear on the bottom shelves of the dining room cupboard, not to be seen until winter, because until then we have fresh fruit to eat. Our dad keeps an Excel spreadsheet to manage jam stock.

Making jam is a seasonal ritual which memory I cherish, especially now I don’t make it anymore. But it’s also incredibly mundane. A lot of it is boring and effort-intensive. It’s an ill-advised thing to do in summer, when it’s already hot and brewing fruits for hours adds to it. I can write about it with rose-tinted nostalgia, but at the time, I probably would have rather been reading.

So, I’m puzzled by the romanticisation of jam-making, especially from Americans. Olivia Pope telling Fitz that in a different life, they live in Vermont, he’s not president and she makes jam in Scandal. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s raspberry spread. All the trad wives.

As The Little One messaged me (which inspired me to write this), these people have clearly not made enough jams in their lives. And as she also pointed out, it’s always red fruit – possibly because berry jams are much easier to make than stone fruits. It’s degree zero of cooking while feeling like you’re making something for yourself and your loved ones. It’s part of this idea of returning to a false golden age where most people couldn’t afford sugar anyway.

This desire for jam-making has little to do with actual jam. It’s jam as a shorthand for having time to make it and the space for an orchard to grow bushes and trees. Olivia Pope doesn’t want to make jam; she doesn’t actually want to chase worms across the kitchen table. She wants to be in love with a man who isn’t married to another woman. No amount of jam can give her that.