Week 5, Day 2: In a Bit of a Jam

For the last Darwin fling of the summer at our house we took a final stop with our food time machine. After talking about how hunter-gatherers harvested food during week 2, how the cultivation of grain and the development of bread enabled people to develop stable situations during week 1, how we've come to the prosperous position of paying other people to make our food during week 3, and not quite getting to a discussion of what astronauts each in outer space during week 4, we focused this week on how food came to be preserved so we have plenty to eat even when it's not in season. All this as a backdrop to making and preserving our own blueberry jam.

The most basic and earliest known form of food preservation was drying foods in the sun. We played a game matching other methods with the agents involved and the types of food associated with those methods. There was much deliberation . . .

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. . . but finally all six campers agreed. They did great!

Some of the other methods we discussed were curing, fermentation, freezing/refrigerating, pickling, and canning. We talked about how some early American immigrants built their homes over streams for refrigeration, how Pa Ingalls of Little House on the Prairie fame built his own smokehouse out of a hollow tree, and how canning your own fruits and vegetables was common just a few generations ago. (Although canning was discovered by a French confectioner in 1790, it wasn't until after World War II that mass-produced canned fruits and vegetables became widely available to consumers, and for several years these were more expensive than the home-produced versions.) I forgot to share with the kids my experience of seeing the huge cistern at Haddon Hall in England that stored the ale allocated to every man, woman, and child in the absence of a consistently safe source of drinking water during the Middle Ages. 

Next we piled in the car and went berry picking. I was impressed that these kids could pick for 45 minutes in the hot sun before anyone said anything about wanting to go home. They were great at not only picking . . . 

. . . but also contemplating . . .

. . . and eating the blueberries.

In all we ended up with around 8 quarts of berries. Kudos to our diligent berry pickers and to our friends for letting us invade their berry farm!

Back at the ranch, kids ate lunch and launched into a serious game of Warrior. Apparently this is a kid-only, top-secret endeavor, since I was met with some serious attitude when I skulked onto the scene to snap this shot:

Somehow I eventually managed to lure them into the kitchen to transform our berries into jam. Okay, there's no "somehow" about it - I offered them each a spoonful of the first batch which I'd whipped up while they were playing. They were hooked! We separated into teams to wash, smash, and cook the berries. 

Before long we had 27 half-pints of this:

And it was tasty! We used the recipe on the low- or no-sugar pectin from Ball. Because the berries were a little tart, we added the full amount of honey recommended. The honey, together with the lemon juice, contributed to a pungent berry flavor reminiscent of a down-home blueberry pie. Absolutely delicious!

The one downside to the day was not having three of our nine campers with us, their family having left on vacation. A, D, and S - we missed you!

Notwithstanding the culinary feats of the day, when I asked my kids at bedtime what their favorite part of camp was today, they piped up right away, "Playing Warrior!" I guess there's no beating the cats.