John Jeremiah Sullivan on What We Can Preserve

Via Longreads, here is John Jeremiah Sullivan, a writer I would read on anything, unspooling a patient narrative about delicious jam, a subject I would read nearly anything about. It starts with the two priests (“His name was Fallis, pronounced like ‘phallus.’ The doctor who delivered and circumcised me was called Hymen.”) and three fruits that came with his childhood house, and ends with a friend who returns him to this history:

Jellies were “temperamental,” [Kevin] wrote. They were like young sopranos singing arias: you had to sit there hoping they wouldn’t crack. Especially if you didn’t use the commercial pectin, which he avoided, preferring to rely on the fruits themselves for their natural supply. But working that way it was “easy to end up with syrup — that’s a failure.” He made jams, jellies, and other concoctions out of beach plums, cardoons, cushaw, damsons, eggs, elderberries, fennel, horseradish, huckleberries, limettas, medlars, mulberries, and nasturtium pods. He preserved quince: under the guidance of Oregon pickle-jam guru Linda Ziedrich, he made a syrup of quince, not a disaster-accident syrup but a deliberate one, flavored with rose geranium.

It’s a beautiful essay down to the end: “What’s old doesn’t need to be old-fashioned. It gets reborn. And with patience and skill you can capture it. You can arrest it.” [Medium/Lucky Peach]