Rhubarb and Ginger Jam

Forced rhubarb arrives in February when nothing else is happening. The garden is still bare, the markets are still mostly root vegetables and stored apples, and then suddenly there it is on the stall: long, slim, electric-pink stems that look almost too vivid to be real. They've been grown in the dark in Yorkshire sheds, by candlelight, and they taste of spring before spring has any right to be thinking about itself. I buy more than I need every time.

This is what I do with them first. A jar or two of jam, made on a Saturday morning when the rain is doing whatever rain does in February and the kitchen wants a project. The rhubarb sits overnight with sugar and ginger, drawing out its own juice, and the next morning you cook the whole lot down into something pink and sharp and warming. The smell while it boils is one of the better smells of the year. It's the first sign in the kitchen that the seasons are turning, even when the garden hasn't quite caught up.

Ginger is the right partner for rhubarb. I don't really know why, but I've stopped questioning it. The fresh ginger gives heat, the stem ginger gives sweetness and that slightly perfumed warmth, and the two of them together stop the rhubarb from being merely tart. A jar of this on a piece of toast in March, when winter still hasn't quite let go, will tell you more about the season than any forecast.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first year I made it: "Rhubarb. Ginger. February. Worth the morning." I've made it every year since.