Quick Blueberry "Jam"

In all honesty, the corn muffins in yesterday’s post are really just a delivery device for this blueberry jam.  Something about blueberry’s mellow sweetness seemed a good fit for baked goods made from cornmeal.

The northern highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum) is the most widely grown commercial blueberry native to North America.  V. corymbosum is a perennial flowering shrub of the heather family, Ericaceae.  In botanical terms, the fruit itself is a true berry: a simple, pulpy fruit with seeds and an edible pericarp, grown from a single ovary.  Domesticated V. corymbosum is a relative newcomer, have been first cultivated in the early twentieth century by the collaborative efforts of a USDA botanist, Frederick Coville, and a family cranberry farmer, Elizabeth White.  However, the conspicuous, edible fruit was well-known to native American gatherers throughout the present-day eastern United States, where V. corymbosum grows naturally.

I don’t have any experience with canning, so I was looking for a recipe that would allow me to quickly make a small quantity of refrigerated blueberry jam, or at least a sweet sauce that could pass for jam.  Jill McKeever’s Fresh Blueberry Spread fit the bill.

I started with two 6 oz. packages of Driscoll’s blueberries, which yielded just shy of three cups of fruit.  Even after washing the fruit, I had to carefully inspect them for stray stems, leaves, and flower parts.  It was a bit laborious, but thankfully I was working with a relatively small quantity of fruit.  I added about 3/4 cup of water, gently boiled for five minutes, and then let the juice strain off naturally through a thin towel for about an hour.  If, unlike me, you are a canner, the juice can be used to make blueberry syrup.

I then transferred the boiled, drained fruit back into the saucepan with about 1/4 cup of SpringTree Grade A Maple Syrup and 2 tablespoons of water.  I boiled for ten minutes, then added two teaspoons of R.W. Knudsun Just Cranberry Juice.  There are no true citrus trees native to the Americas, but cranberry juice has a comparable acidity.  I then let the mixture cool for a few minutes, stirred it well and transferred it to a couple of jelly jars.  This isn’t true canning, so the jars don’t have to be sterilized, but this means that the jam must be eaten within a few weeks.

The resulting spread is more akin to cooked blueberries in sweet sauce than a true jam, as it doesn’t have jam’s viscosity or stickiness.  However, it seems like an especially good fit for pancakes and waffles, or in this case, for spooning on warm muffins.  Northern highbush blueberries are picked during the middle of the growing season, so if you’re eating seasonally this is a good summer spread.