Damson Jam

Damsons are not patient fruit. They arrive in late September, hang heavily on the trees through October, and then they're gone. Miss the window and you wait another year. The market decides.

They're the wrong fruit for almost everything except jam. Too sour to eat raw, too small to bother stoning properly, with skins that pucker your mouth and stones that cling to the flesh like they mean it. But cooked down with sugar, something quietly miraculous happens. The sourness becomes depth. The astringency becomes complexity. The colour deepens from bright purple to a glossy, almost-black ruby that looks like wine in the jar. There is no jam in the British calendar quite like it.

I make this every year when the damsons come in, usually on a Saturday morning when the kitchen is cold and the rain is doing whatever it does in late October. The whole house smells of stewed fruit and warm sugar for half a day, and by the evening there are six jars lined up on the side, still warm to the touch, the colour of winter evenings. I wrote it down in the notebook the first time I made it: damsons, sugar, water, patience. That was twenty-odd years ago and I haven't changed a thing.

A spoonful on toast in the dead of January is one of the more useful things you can do with an October afternoon. We're only making jam, but we're also making sure that something of this autumn lasts.