It's the jam and jelly-making season in Southern Ontario and the whole atmosphere is refreshingly redolent with strawberries, raspberries, cherries, sweet and sour.  You simply can't avoid the excitement of making your own delicious  preserves.

Preserving to many people conjures up nostalgic visions of country kitchens full of bubbling pans of fruity jam or gleaming jars of crunchy pickles. Whilst nowadays preserving is no longer a matter of survival, it is still practiced enthusiastically by a significant number of the population in Ontario and I thought I'd join in.

So I grabbed a copy of a book on sale in the supermarket called 'Bernardin Guide to Home Preserving' and started to dig out my British texts. Here is a sample of the rather heavy-handed instructions throughout the guide:

"Logic and attention to detail are essential to all successful cooking endeavours. Home canning is no different. Shortcuts easily compromise quality and food safety when preserving food at home. it is always safer and far more prudent to use ONLY those methods recommended by established food authorities that use the equipment, jars, lids and ingredients that match those you are using today." (and we are selling!)

They make sure to add their Bernardin Liquid Pectin as an essential ingredient to 95% of the recipes. I was so struck by this blatant commercialism that it reminded me to look up an article I'd read in May 07 in the Economist about how allergies develop.

Tanja Cirkovic-Velickovic and her colleagues at the University of Belgrade, in Serbia have found that pectin is forming a gel in the stomach during digestion and that this is hampering the destruction of allergens. (allergy-stimulating chemicals)

So if you enjoy a piece of fruit pie and you are susceptible to allergies then you ought to think twice before putting anything made with pectin in your mouth. Pectin is a naturally occuring carbohydrate in fruit - it's the man-made varieties that are added to 'gel' the fruit - where the natural food is processed - "Much like those used to extract sugar from beets or cane." (Bernardin) that I bet you should be worried about.

For me, I'm going to use the "long boil" method of preserving fruit and avoid any added pectins except for lemon juice because after all who needs another allergy? 

Technical Note:

In technical terms the object of preserving is to slow down or stop the inevitable process of decay inherent in all organic matter, whether it is caused by bacteria, yeasts, moulds, enzymes, oxidation or dehydration. Got that? lol

In fact to increase the shelf-life of products, manufacturers have been stuffing our food with so many preservatives such that the Institute of Anubis (Embalmers) announced some time ago that corpses are 'lasting' five times longer then fifty years ago!