Black Currant Jam by Carol Wallwork

Black Currant Jam

1 lb. red currants ( I used black currants)

1 lb. powdered sugar (I used cane sugar)

Heat paper towel-dried black currants & sugar in large pot, stirring constantly. 
Boil for 8 -10 minutes.  Strain black currants through a fine sieve or cheesecloth, mashing them with a wooden spoon to extract juice.
Pour into warmed canning jars.
Slide a piece of wax paper dipped in brandy, cut to size, on top of jam. 
Put on Ball jar lid, then rim. Store in cool, dark place.  Refrigerate after opening
        -Recipe from Eliza Acton - from Summer Cooking by Elizabeth David

First posted on-line July 16, 2009

It’s the start of canning season in the heartland.  On farms, in towns, even wee apartments, any locale with good soil and an agrarian state of mind the graniteware water bath canners are dusted off and dwarfing stove tops, gearing up for the most productive enterprise of summer--putting up jams, jellies, tomatoes, relishes, pickles, applesauce, etc.  It’s hot, messy work but the end product fills a home with a primeval connection to the Fertile Crescent. 

My canner has not been used in over 20 years yet we optimistically instructed movers to pack and unpack it four times since its Grand Forks, North Dakota heyday.  And what a heyday it was.  No other place we’ve lived have myriad friends routinely showed up on our doorstep in July, August and early September with five-gallon buckets filled with tomatoes, corn, squash, cucumbers, green peppers or crabapples.  All this bounty was at most 10 minutes from its field of origin.  We had our own garden vegetables and fruits, too.  Plus, we went potato gleaning in September, after the combines swept through the fields.  Imagine the calories burned just corralling all this food.  Those were the days.     

                             Summertime in the Valley
                  
Abundance, suddenly thrust upon us, reveals one of those sweet human graces:  people are hardwired not to waste good food. If the most popular summertime pastime in the Red River Valley was gardening (tied with fishing and golf ) then the second was finding donees for the flourishing veggies.  Which led naturally to a third essential job: Canning.

I’ve not canned a single jar of anything since leaving the Valley because I presumed it was simply a given that one also grew what goes into the jars, or at least know the person who did.  I can think of just two North Dakotans who still can their own produce, grown on their own farm, the Letvin’s near Kief. 

All my presumptions changed last week while savoring Elizabeth David’s Summer Cooking.  Her recipes on canning reminded me of the productive row of currant bushes that flanked our sunny deck in Grand Forks, and the quarts of berries Anna picked for us each July.  Somehow a catalyst took hold of me, reading David debate the merits of removing currant stems, or not, when suddenly I thought...why don’t I just buy black currants!

                         My homemade half pint jars of black currant jam

Bought them I did, at the Middleburg, Virginia farmer’s market.  The farmer at the table I got them at gave me convoluted lefts and rights turns, just off the Plains Road on how to get to his farm so at least the berries haven’t been shipped across country, although I suspect few currants are shipped anywhere.  Who even knows what they look like?

My new-found flexibility has paid off for I’ve rediscovered how much BETTER tasting jam is when canned in small batches.  The recipe I used is called Red Currant Jelly but mine turned out more like jam, possibly because i used cane sugar instead of powdered or my straining left much to be desired or American currants are different than English.  David mentions that English currants are inferior to the French, which have more flavor!) Whatever the distinctions the taste is nonetheless dazzling.  If my blog included a taste-testing button you’d be dashing down to Walmart to pick up your own Ball jars as I speak... 

   Carol’s Fabulously Easy Dessert!
                                           1 cup plain, nonfat yogurt
                                           1 tablespoon homemade black currant jam
                                           1 tablespoon Turbinado or any fine sugar
                                           1 teaspoon-1 tablespoon half & half
Whisk together all ingredients.  Now savor the delicate taste & intense raspberry hue!

Christmas Memoir: Naomi

Christmas Memoir: Naomi

Rebecca, her mother Naomi, & her mother Janette

Next to Easter, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are the most joyous occasions in my life.

My childhood memories of Christmas are a treasure. Everyone was on his or her best behavior. Santa Claus would NOT visit a dirty house, so my brother and I had to help our mom clean the house in the morning and the afternoon of the twenty-fourth.

We always went to Christmas Eve Candlelight Services and I remember my 3 year-old little brother trying to stay awake long enough to as he said, “Put a fire on my candle.”

I remember the church being dark, and slowly, as each person share his or her light with another, the whole church was illuminated, spreading a sense of wonder among toddlers, teenagers, adults, business people, carpenters, plumbers, physicians and elderly wise people. It was breath taking.

And as that moment was literally extinguished with the blowing out of the candles, a new sense of excitement rose. People who opened presents on Christmas Eve wanted to rush home and tear open their gifts.

Ours was an ethnically mixed family.  Dad, a Scandinavian, wanted to celebrate Christmas Eve. Mom, of British origins, wanted to wait until Christmas Day.

So they cut a deal, on the twenty-fourth, Dad made supper before church: Lutefisk and oyster stew. We got to open gifts from relatives living far away that night.

The next morning, no child was allowed out of the bedroom until Mom had checked to see if Santa Claus had visited and left some gifts. Then she and my father went to the living room as my brother and I raced out of our bedrooms, still in our pajamas, to see what Santa Claus had given us.

I think Mom and Dad had just as much fun watching our eyes and facial expressions as we kids had looking over the gifts. But we never forgot that it was a religious event and the celebration was in honor of Christ’s birth.

While Dad made the lutefisk and oyster stew, Mom made sure we lit the advent candles of joy, peace, love, hope and last, but most important, the Christ child candle.

Split Rock Lighthouse, MN Celebrates 100 years - first posted Aug. 3, 2010

The worse case of vertigo I’ve ever had was just past Split Rock Lighthouse, near Two Harbors, Minnesota.  My mom, younger brother Tony, Anna and me had walked from the lighthouse to the Lake Superior overlook parapet.  No problem.  It was the 130-foot look down a vertical slab of dark grey rock, to the jagged stone edge of the lake below that did me in.  Even now, 25 years later I can still get a knot in my stomach recalling that view. Yet it was enchanting, too.

It’s with slack-jaw amazement to discover Split Rock Lighthouse was constructed by hauling ALL the building materials UP from the lake, all “310 tons of brick, concrete, mortar, steel and wood, using a steam hoisting engine with derrick and a 60-foot boom.”  This month’s Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine shares this little gem and many more in honor of the 100th anniversary of Split Rock Lighthouse, on July 31, 2010.























When 29 ships were lost in a severe November 1905 storm the federal government stepped in, constructing a lighthouse to ensure safer shipping along the North Shore, where the taconite mining industry was just getting underway. The project cost $75,000 and came in over budget due to the remote locale without roads.  By 1916 a dock and elevated tramway replaced the derrick. “Six weeks after opening the keeper’s log reported a ‘party of visitors.’  Tourists kept coming, by boat or by footpath.  The North Shore highway opened in 1924, really increasing tourism.”  By 1936 the keeper reported 36,000 visitors.

By 1940 the lighthouse was converted from kerosene to electricity. The Fresnel lens of the light flashed for two seconds every 18 seconds.  French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel designed the lens specially for lighthouses, employing refracted glass, which uses less glass, so lighter in weight, with a longer beam.














                

1: Cross section of a Fresnel lens
2: Cross section of a conventional
plano-convex lens of equivalent power   -Wiki


Split Rock Lighthouse was retired by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1969.  It’s now operated by the Minnesota Historical Society which has spiffed up the place for the celebration.  The Light, keeper’s brick cottages and the fog horn building have taken quite a beating from one hundred years’ of Lake Superior nor’easters.  All the renovations are historically accurate, of course.

Photographs taken by Carol and my mom, Julia Mitchell, 1981, with photo prof Harley Straus’ loaned Pentax.  Slice of Lake Superior below thanks to You Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RQXehH7V0

Convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad looks around the courtroom at the beginning of his trial in Virginia Beach, Va., in this Oct. 14, 2003 file photo. (Lawrence Jackson/AP photo)

 November 2003

During his trial, the Washington Post and the Washington Times recently ran a large above-the-fold, front-page color photograph of accused 2002 Washington area sniper, John Allen Muhammad.  This photo sends mixed messages.  If a newspaper's mission is to provide the who, what where, when, and why of a news story, this particular photography blurred that mission.

The photo ran extra large, larger than most photos of individuals.  As a portrait photographer, I would certainly say it showed some of the mystery of the man, capturing a cunning of the eyes, that one can imagine he used to beguile a young impressionable companion.  But the golden background and the stillness of the subject, another antithesis of most newspaper photographs, cast a more portrait studio/hagiography quality to this image.  And therein lies confusion.

Photographs have a language.  The most basic feature, black and white vs. color, can be regarded as the particular language, i.e. Spanish or English.  The grammar is how the photographer uses the equipment.  Sports photographers usually use long telephoto lens, which compress action, making it almost more engaging than if you were at a game.  That's why a shot of a baseball pitcher aimed at the batter seems much closer than if we were stood right next to the pitcher.  Many news photographers use wide-angle lens to capture as much of the action as possible.  Portrait photographers usually use a 100mm lens because it least distorts the contours of the human face.  The nuance of photo language is more subtle, its slang, evolving meanings, humor, sarcasm, double-entendre, etc.

We expect high school senior portraits, real estate photographs, newspaper, studio portraits, art, advertising and Hollywood publicity photographs, medical and police photographs, etc., to all look a certain way, enabling us to see and process images quickly, for the average person is bombarded with hundreds of images a day, with a limited vocabulary to translate them.

My confusion with the Muhammad photograph is because it's a crossover of photographic styles.  The photograph of John Allen Muhammad on the front page that day was not a in a photo journalistic style but more a Hollywood publicity one.  

Muhammad could easily have been Denzel Washington in a publicity shot for Warner Brothers, so attractive, so warmly colored, so appealing the subject.  All qualities that are the opposite of the evidence we have about the man.

As a photographer I would have been overjoyed to capture such a stunning image in a courtroom, with everything out of my control but the camera.  The editor's job is more complex.  An editor can enhance or diminish a photograph.  Would the photo have been less objectionable if it had been on the jump page, smaller, competing with the Bloomingdales ads?

As a resident of Northern Virginia with two school aged children, I remember those three weeks in October with emotional investment.  I recall the tragic deaths and poignant biographies of so many lives cut brutally short.  I remember the road blocks, school lock-downs, fear of letting my children play outdoors, the non-stop news coverage, a trepidation to do normal things such as shopping, pumping gas, dropping our children off at school.  The police escort to my car when I visited my child's middle school.  Fear was everywhere.

The Post's glamorization of such an emotional subject was an odd thing to do.  It was a...post modern thing to do, which is the hallmark of our age, mixing things up.  Blurring things. Ever since Truman Capote's book, In Cold Blood, we have been looking at the psychopaths among us in a different light.  The Washington Post did that with Muhammad's photograph. What's the real message here?