Well, they weren’t really. Victoria’s, that is. They were Esther’s plums. Esther is my colleague who has this crazy thing called a garden (she doesn’t live in Amsterdam) and in that garden is a plum tree. Once upon a time, she brought her own body weight in plums to the office and said, ‘Vicky – take them away. I am all plummed out.’
So I called Mr Foodie and consulted him about making jam, and he consulted Mrs Beeton (who, for those of you who didn’t grow up in middle-class suburban England under the ministries of a certain age of parent, wrote a book called The Book of Household Management Comprising Information for the Mistress, which is pretty much the antithesis of everything I believe about women and domesticity, but I will admit, she does know a thing or two about jam…). And then I took my biggest saucepan and obscene quantities of sugar and the aforementioned mountain of plums, and I boiled and boiled and did things with thermometers and saucers. And frankly I had no idea how to tell when the nuclear fruit cauldron was ready, so at some point I gave up, only to realise that I didn’t have any jam jars. And the jam was actually more of a preserve, being rather looser in consistency than proper jam, but no matter… I’m sure Mrs B would’ve been proud. Or maybe just scandalised that I wasn’t married.
But the point I’m trying to get to in all of this (and frankly you deserve a present if you’ve read this far) is that I now have three jars of Victoria’s Plum Preserve to give away. And you – oh you lucky, lucky readers – can win one. There are a few ways you can do this:
- Leave a comment on this post
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- Bribe me with food