And don’t trust Grandma. Or the Amish.
This evening my wife strongly hinted that I ought to replace the broken jar of black raspberry jam that was the focus on my just-prior post. No fool I, I immediately got on-task.
So this is my second attempt to buy her some black raspberry jam, as a Christmas present.
This time I looked at every black raspberry jam offered on Amazon.
After my nth jar of jam, I came to a firm conclusion:
The folksier the name, the lousier the product.
Grandma’s Old-Fashioned Amish® homemade black raspberry jam.
You typically can’t find black raspberry jam at the grocery store. The berries themselves are small and fragile. That makes it an expensive crop to grow, per pound, compared to other berries. As a result, black raspberry jam is typically priced at several multiples of (e.g.) strawberry jam. And I guess that’s a non-starter for the grocery store shelf. Which is why I’m ordering it off Amazon.
But not all jams are created equal. They are some combination of fruit, sugar, water, pectin, and maybe an acidifier like lemon juice. And sometimes other stuff. Some are primarily fruit, with just enough of the other ingredients to sweeten it, hold it together, and keep it from spoiling. Others are closer to berry-flavor sugar.
All I wanted, in my first cut, was to restrict this to jams for which black raspberries were the first-listed ingredient. Ideally, I’d like jams where they were the majority ingredient, but unlike some European labeling, U.S. labeling law does not reveal percentages. The U.S. simply requires that ingredients be listed in order of weight. So I’ll settle for jams where sugar and water are listed after the berries.
(That’s assuming I could actually find the ingredients listed somewhere on-line. It was surprisingly common to find jams listed on Amazon, but never showing the legally-required list of ingredients.)
So here’s a little quiz. Based on the look of the jar, which of these do you think have the berries as the first-listed ingredient?
Source: Amazon.
The trick is to toss out anything that says “Grandma”, “Amish”, or “Homemade/Homestyle”. Those are all the lower-quality jams where sugar outweighs berries.
We all know that none of these were actually made by Grandma, at home. (Then sold in huge quantity on Amazon.) The fact that the makers felt compelled to call them “Grandma’s Homemade” should have been a clue that they were compensating for something.
But as for the Amish, this is not to imply that the Amish make bad jam. The issue is that “Amish” isn’t trademarked. Anybody can make anything, anywhere, and label it “Amish.” In fact, the last product (Kauffman’s) is made in Bird-in-Hand, PA, and so plausibly actually is Amish- (or maybe Mennonite-) made. It just doesn’t try to sell the product based on that association.
Anyway, the ones with black raspberries as the first-listed ingredient are below. Only for the two French ones (Chantaine, St. Dalfour — really, the same company) can you tell that black raspberries make up 51 percent of what’s in the jar. For the rest, all you know is that there’s more black raspberry than there is of any one other ingredient.
Conclusion
Never eat at a place called mom’s. And never buy jam made by Grandma.
