Summer is over, the weather is cooler, and I'm inside more, and cooking more. I'm cleaning out flower beds and putting away lawn furniture, repotting plants to move inside for the winter, so I think about such things...... I was reminded of something the other day along the lines of cooking and I share it with you here.
Sand plums grow along the banks of creeks and the river, she told me one time. She would manage to get her hands on them, cook them up and with enough sugar make a really tasty, pretty, jelly.
As she got older sand plum jelly was about the only kind of jelly she ever had; she never bought jelly, are you kidding. She gave it as gifts, and we girls always received a jar to take home with us, or she delivered it herself upon visits. Sometimes she would make grape/sand plum jelly, or strawberry/sand plum, occasionally there would be apple/sand plum, or if we were lucky raspberry/sand plum if she could find the raspberries on sale. Sand plums became her “go to” fruit for jelly, and she had it on hand all the time. I remember actually wishing one time upon a visit that she would keep something other than sand plum jelly in the house just once and awhile. Don’t get me wrong, it was good, and the pretty reddish color made it more than appetizing, but it was always sand plum.
I tasted it, yes, tasted good, I shook it, jiggled it, it was fine, and as I spooned it onto the toast it hit me—this was the last jar of my mother’s sand plum jelly I would ever have.
Yes, I started to cry—funny the realizations that will bring you to tears—but I did. I told Sam about his Great-Grandma and her love for sand plum jelly. I told him about how she loved to cook. How she loved us through her cooking, how she would have loved to sit and watch him eat, and I gave him his first bite of toast with sand plum jelly and waited……… He inhaled it; and the next bite, and the one after that. Mother would have loved it.
recipe available and photo of sand plums courteously of http://www.heritagerecipes.com/
