De Jamibus (i.e. "About Jams")

As some of you know, I have a very favorite brand of jam that I almost always use: Rigoni di Asiago Fior di Frutta. It's an Italian brand (as you might have guessed) with less sugar and very intense fruit flavor, with wonderful flavors like pear and black currant. Prior to Rigoni, my brand was the French St. Dalfour, which is considerably sweeter. I still check the St. Dalfour shelf from time to time to check for new and exotic flavors. I recently tried their strawberry/rhubarb--too strawberry, insufficient rhubarb, and way too sweet.

  

Then a week or so ago I came across St. Dalfour grape. Now, in this country, we have tons (tonnes) of grape jelly, which I loathe with a religious intensity. (For those who speak foreign English [😁] "jelly" in American is a hideous form of jam in which the fruit has been macerated to the point of oblivion leaving a fruit-flavored mass of soft rubber. It is popular in that most hideous of American culinary innovations, the peanut-butter & jelly--almost always grape--sandwich). So what, I asked myself, could grape jam of respectable French manufacture be? The answer is absolutely delicious! Nice bits of real grape in a not too-sweet jam and lovely fruit flavor. Merci Cinquième République! 🇫🇷 🇫🇷 🇫🇷

Whilst on the subject, let me also mention my (re)discovery of a flavor of my long-ago childhood in a family of western Slav extraction: plum butter. Happily, we live a stone's throw away from a Balkan grocery, which by their definition happily includes Slovenia and Croatia. I ran into it there and thought I'd give it a try for old time's sake if nothing else. Yummy! I DO recommend it, especially if you've never had it before. I've been getting it regularly now along with sour cherry jam--sweetened, of course, and thicker than molasses in January. Fabulous! Both these flavors can be hard to find in this country.