Strawberry Jam

There's a week in June, sometimes two if you're lucky, when the strawberries at the market arrive in trays still warm from the field and smelling of nothing else. Not the pale, hard things you can get all year. The proper ones. Small, deep red right through, fragrant before you've even lifted the punnet. That's the week for jam. Miss it and you wait another year.

I make this every June without fail. A kilo of strawberries, a bag of jam sugar, the juice of a lemon, and an afternoon that doesn't need to be anywhere. The kitchen smells of warm fruit and hot sugar for an hour, and at the end of it there are four jars on the worktop catching the light like stained glass. A few go in the cupboard for winter. One goes to a neighbour. One gets opened the next morning on hot toast with cold butter, which is, for my money, one of the better reasons to be alive in summer.

This isn't difficult. Jam-making has acquired a reputation for being fussy and technical, and it isn't. The only thing you need to learn is the wrinkle test, and the saucer will teach you that in about ten seconds. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract. The fruit will tell you what it needs.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first June I made it: "Strawberries. Sugar. Lemon. Eight minutes hard. The saucer knows." Twenty years on, I haven't found anything to add.