Annie Smithers is the owner and chef of du Fermier in Trentham, and food editor at The Saturday Paper. Her latest book is Kitchen Sentimental. We are so lucky to have her beautiful jam on the menu and retail shelves of our Prahran shop.
Jam. A sweet, sticky thread, often red, that seems to inexorably tether my cooking life to the seasons. The gleaming copper jam pans sit high on a shelf in the restaurant, glinting at me as I make my morning coffee, reminding me that as summer ripens, so does the fruit in the orchard.
It was over a decade into my cooking career that I first made jam. One could say that it came with the job, or in this case, the lease. I had rented a tiny little cafe on a lavender farm just outside of Daylesford and there were a couple of conditions to the arrangement. One was that I always had to offer lavender scones with jam and cream; two was that I needed to make a small range of jams for retail sale. Having never paid any attention to either of these items in my cooking career, but being young and bolshy, I accepted these conditions wholeheartedly. The scones were easy, as the lease also came with an exceptional scone recipe. The jam was a slightly steeper learning curve.
