JAM according to Daniel
(434) 825-6651
1626 Saint Annes Road
Charlottesville, VA 22901
accordingtodaniel@gmail.com

Daniel Perry makes local fruit into jams - concocting flavors like White Peach + Hibiscus, Damson + Italian Plum, and Lemon Apricot - under the label Jam According to Daniel, available at his stand in the Charlottesville City Farmers Market, the Forest Lakes Farmers Market, The Albemarle Baking Company, FEAST! and other fine retailers of local goods.

Here’s a little taste of what he had to say about jam when asked, in the fall of 2008, how he had started upon this unique career path, making jam:

“it all began in 2003 at hampshire college, the site of the largest CSA at an institution for higher learning. there was a field of free pick-your-own raspberries; not much of a field, really, just a few dozen plants in four short rows, but i learned the secret soon enough. i was invited picking by my orientation leader, Odette, who i had a giant crush on. when she invited me i was almost too nervous to accept, but i stammered out some sort of assent and followed her down to the field. when we arrived at the patch, it looked like everyone on campus had come through the field and picked a hand-full of red raspberries, so their yield is consistently very low; i was informed by Odette that half of the plants were actually bearing “peach” or “golden” raspberries, which look like underripe red raspberries when they are perfectly ripe. apparently it is a case of albino raspberries, a recessive gene that removes the color but leaves the flavor intact. since very few people knew that the albino fruit was actually ripe, i could pick a few quarts of albinos and throw my hand-full of red ones in for color. this adventure coincided nicely with my friend Dinah’s offer to teach me how to make jam, when she heard that i was going picking and had no plans for the berries. she actually made the first batch without me, using my berries and her skills, and i only got a single jar out of it. i was a little irked until i tasted it, then i tasted it, fell in love with the jam, and i’ve been hooked ever since.

“it was simple back then, just raspberries because there wasn’t another free fruit around, sometimes with mint from a patch behind my house. i dabbled in jam for a few years and i had a little family-style jam making disaster, back in 2004. a big batch of blackberry was ruined because i mixed up too much and couldn’t even stir up the sugar on the bottom, so it burned. i’m not talking about caramel, this was 5 gallons of boiling blackberries with smoke rings rising from the surface, as noisy bubbles popped and spit. my dad has probably never forgiven me for that, because he had to clean it all up, scraping burnt sugar off of the bottom of the five gallon canning pot with the edge of a teaspoon ( NOTE: this is one of the many reasons why 5 gallon enameled canning pots should NEVER be used for actually making jam, just for boiling the water that sanitizes and seals the jars).

“i came home from college in May of 2005 and spent a few weeks looking for a summer job; my mother finally found the tiny classified in the local paper: “Full-time Assistant needed for Jam Maker” and a phone number. i think my mom still has it, laminated between two pieces of clear packing tape, somewhere in the constellation of photographs that long ago obscured our entire refrigerator door. i called the number, scheduled an interview, and was instantly hired. it was a nightmare, back then, because the jam maker made bad jam. it was a disservice to the fruit, and her kitchen management skills were a disservice to her employer. i am unsure whether more fruit spoiled uncooked in her kitchen, or later, in the jar, because her jam was so oversweet and syrupy that it would sit around for a year, until it had discolored entirely, and then be thrown away. she was not a very enthusiastic jammer because she thought she was too god for jam: she had real french pastry training, she’d actually gone to culinary school up North, but she found the workplace environment and stress to be unlivable, so she’d decided to move home and get an “easy” job making jam. she taught me a number of things, though, through her own negative example: she taught me to use less sugar and cook the jam for longer, by making sugar the primary taste in every one of her flavors. she taught me to use local spray-free fruit, because she always used the cheapest fruit available, no matter how far it had traveled, and as a result her jam was always foamy…there was a consensus that the foam was “impurities” but what that meant no one knew. as the assistant, it was my job to skim the foam off of the surface of the boiling jam when it gathered around the edges. I used a tiny seive…but usually i didnt have to, because the head jam maker would put a pat of butter onto the surface of the fruit as it began to boil. this made an oil slick, as far as i could tell, and there were no bubbles, which i liked, because it was less work for me. but i began to wonder where the impurities were going, after all, because they had to go be somewhere, and what happened to the butter? it had to be in the jam, and it was not on the label, but what if an intensely lactose intolerant person were to eat it? what if it was left out for too long and the butter went rancid? such were my lofty concerns as assistant jam maker.

“enough about her…she taught me what i didn’t want in my kitchen, and now that i have one of my own, i run a much tighter ship than she ever could. in spite of her, I received a fair bit of useful instruction from her superior, the French pastry chef, although he thought jam was beneath him as well (and he was confused about why i was so attached to it).

“as a result of my time as an assistant, I set a high standard for my kitchen: i permit myself no waste, no burned batches, no spoiled fruit. i am finding good connections, with local farmers and other artisinal/experemental foodie entrepreneurs; i’m picking two or three days a week, selling at a local farmers market and a few retail outlets, and making jam almost all of the time. it’s incredible: a roller coaster of seasonal fruit, each so different from the last, but all so similar in the final estimation, as they enter the jar. every fruit takes slightly different processing, but only before it enters the pot for the first time; after that it is only a matter of boiling it, waiting, boiling the syrup, adding the fruit, and ladling it into the jars. every fruit’s flavor undergoes a transition from fresh to jammed, sometimes making it nearly unrecognizeable, and in ways that are oddly similar, through the length and breadth of the season. there’s a loss of sourness, and a rising sweetness, but i am learning that the two do not have to pass one another like ships in the night; rather, they can coexist, as in the flavors i’ve made recently with lemon zest in them. lemon apricot was the first one, and then lemon peach, lemon plum (in every variety and color imaginable), and now lemon blackberry. the taste is half-way between a marmalade and a jam, with a dynamic interplay on the tongue between the deep sweetness of the berries and the tang of the citrus. i’m very satisfied with it.”