Haskap berry jam from Prince Edward Island. Passion fruit jam from Paris. Lingonberry jam from Sweden. Quince peach cinnamon compote from London. During our travels, we’ve been gifted or purchased small jars of jam when we come across something unique or different than what we have easy access to in New York. And for the longest time, we barely touched any of the jars since pre-pandemic, we rarely bought bread at home, and even if we did, I’d need to store it, sliced, in our freezer because we were never home enough to eat it all before it went bad. Then once the pandemic began, we started going through all the jars, one by one. And finally, we had our last smear of haskap jam (TOTALLY OBSESSED; I’ve looked into mail ordering it from PEI) from the same company), and Chris got concerned and immediately started thinking about buying raspberry jam. So he went off to Trader Joe’s, picked up a jar of raspberry jam, and on a weekend we had it on toast…. and realized immediately how cloyingly sweet it was, like TOO SWEET, like we were just eating sugar with a sprinkle of fruit in it.

This is what happens when you become so accustomed to having jams that are made in small batches, by small businesses who are interested in showing you the real flavors of fruit, rather than the mass produced, bulk packaged commercial jams that people in today’s fast moving society just readily accept as “normal.”

A couple weeks later, Chris made us do a detour to the Greenmarket in Union Square to get a small batch jar of Beth’s jam. We’ll see if it’s any less sweet than this Trader Joe’s raspberry jam.