24th July 2010 – Toast?

I soon came to learn that the process of making jam was much the same for any of the fruits which I had the good fortune of working with that summer, namely berries and currants. Even with my limited experience, however, I was aware that something special was happening when we arrived at the Jammery that morning. An awareness that was brought on by walking into the Jammery and being absolutely convinced that I could smell toast. In actual fact, what I could smell were the fleurs de châtaigner which Goedele and I had harvested the previous day and which had been steeped in water overnight. They smelled absolutely nothing like toast, but having spent two weeks at Fontchouette eating nothing but fleurs de châtaigner honey on toast for breakfast every morning, that was what the smell reminded me of. I had a moment of being in awe of the body’s senses and how easily confused they could be. 

Having been steeped overnight and then drained to remove most of the pollen, the liquid was set to boil on the gas rings with approximately the same ratio of sugar to water weight, and a little added lemon juice for acidity. We weren’t going to be making jam this time. We were going to be making jelly; not the children’s birthday party kind, but the translucent, bit-free-jam of the redcurrant jelly ilk that we Brits traditionally ate with roast lamb. After boiling the liquid for five minutes, we added the magical ingredient, agar-agar. Crushed into a powder from a certain type of seaweed, agar-agar looked like bicarbonate of soda. It worked a little like gelatine, somehow immobilizing the mixture when heating it in a liquid and forcing it to set into a jelly. All that was needed was the smallest sprinkling per basin. Had we not added it, as indeed Xavier almost forgot to in the first batch, we would have ended up with jars full of syrup. I couldn’t imagine that fleurs de châtaigner jelly had a very wide appeal, so it came as no surprise that only two basins later we had just 65 pots ready for labelling. 

Xavier was a funny man. He was tall and very thin, even more so than his wife. I thought that he was 59, but I was never quite sure; he looked older. His skin was tanned deeply from a weather-beaten life, and his longish hair fell in gentle grey waves belonging to decades past. He didn’t often smile, but when he did it transformed his face and furrowed wrinkles into a wide grin. He made me think of Roald Dahl’s BFG. Goedele claimed that he had a nervous tic when he was stressed that made him look as if he was about to burst out laughing. She was right, but the  laughter never came. At dinner he ate little, pushing the food instead towards the WWOOFers, although he had a love of bread which must have bordered on unhealthy. He wore baggy, threadbare trousers of maroon or grubby cream with thin, long-sleeved cotton tops, which were often stained with jam or torn by brambles. I never saw him wear anything colourful.

He had a very dry sense of humour, and usually a great deal of patience. He explained things thoroughly. At times he could be slightly patronising but that was understandable: he was entrusting his livelihood to the hands of unskilled WWOOFers after all. If he decided that he wanted to know something he became obsessive, and often ended up asking the same question more than once. Thus it was that I ended up having multiple conversations about forced rhubarb; he learned that I came from the Rhubarb Triangle, where 90% of the world’s forced rhubarb was historically grown, and he had to know everything about it, several times over. His voice was quiet and he mumbled a lot when he spoke, which under normal circumstances was rarely. He was talkative only around people he knew well, or when he felt strongly about something, and he avoided big groups of people. Kelsey and Goedele couldn’t imagine having him as a father, and the next two WWOOFers would confide to me that they found him very awkward to approach, but I didn’t agree with any of them. Perhaps I saw him in a different way given as I first got to know him surrounded by his family. I felt quite an attachment to him.

Awkward or not, he was a gentleman, and always thanked us for our hard work after a morning at the Jammery. He also made it quite clear that we were there on holiday, and that we were only to work as much as we wanted to or until we tired of it.