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 I'd never heard of Mango Jam, I've never eaten Mango Jam, and yet I longed to make Mango Jam. And what a jolly good decision it proved to be. The short-lived Alfonso season is over already for this summer, and we're now into the Pakistani ones, which are extremely good, if not quite in the stratospheric god-dwelling plane of their Indian Alfonso cousins.
On Monday I went to Drummond Street, one of my favourite secrets of London. It's a home from home really and when any us here long to go to India it's usually to Drummond Street we go. First stop is the Diwana restaurant, which serves Gujarati food. Of course the service is typical, it hasn't changed in the 28 years I've been coming here, but the food is always consistent and somehow very welcoming. There's no sop here to the English Curry which is the United Kingdom's national dish now.
Next stop is the Spice Shop next door. Entering here is entering a different world. The smell as you go through the door is identical to that of every Indian Corner Shop I've ever been in. It's as if tele-porting is already a reality: smell, close your eyes, and you're there, back home in India. It's one of those Aladdin's caves of produce. There's everything here to make Indian food, with a huge selection of dried goods especially, and just in case you want that authentic feel of being back in India, you can get the same soap here we used to buy in the bazaar in the tiny village I lived in in Punjab 10 years ago. I even found muggage seeds.
The delight of going now is obviously that it's Mango Season. As I looked at the boxes of heaven piled up it just seemed so obvious to combine the English habit of turning summer fruit into jam with this outrageously delicious fruit which is the embodiment of all that I love about the cultures of the Indian Sub-Continent.
One box of mangoes have been reserved here for immediate consumption. However, I managed to persuade the others that it was a very good use of the other three boxes to put them into jam so that we can savour the heaven of summer and the heaven of an Indian summer on the long bleak English winter's evenings ahead.
This is how I made it:
I used 18 mangoes, 8 limes, 4 lemons and 3 kg of sugar.
Slicing the mangoes vertically either side of the stone, which if it were made of rock might be a good candidate for a skimming stone competition on a millpond sea, I scooped out the flesh from the halves, and then hacked the flesh from the stone itself. Meanwhile, I put the oven on its lowest setting, and put the jam jars in, without lids, to sterilise.
I chopped the flesh into reasonable size cubes and put it immediately into the preserving pan. When all the mango flesh was ready, I added a couple of cupfuls of water and brought it to simmer. The fruit was already so soft that it wasn't really necessary to boil it for more than a few minutes. Then I added the lemon and lime juice. wrapped all the citrus peels and their pips in a piece of muslin from an old turban and put that in the preserving pan too - they help the jam to set. I let that simmer gently for about 10 minutes before adding all the sugar. As soon as the sugar was dissolved I cranked up the heat, stirring occasionally, and let it boil for 20 minutes. It's good to scoop off the scum which forms on the top and to then add a small knob of butter. Be warned: the intoxicating fragrance of the mangoes cooking is enough to lift you up into the exalted heights of ecstasy. Suddenly it smelt ready, but I still did the "wrinkle"test putting a teaspoon of jam on a saucer I'd put in the fridge, and then put the saucer back in the fridge. Yes, after a couple of minutes the jam on the saucer was set. The mango jam was ready to be put in the warm jars and have lids put on.
A proper jam funnel is a highly useful piece of kit and I thoroughly recommend it to stop the jam going all over the place. I also recommend my Grannie's tip for stopping the jam from burning by putting a silver spoon in the bottom of the preserving pan. She also only ever used Silver Spoon sugar, swearing it was the best for jam-making. I've never used anything else so I can't comment, but it works.
And finally, when the jars are cool and wiped clean, hide them at the back of the kitchen cupboard with a note in your diary for mid-November to get them out for Tea. |
