I come forward with this confession as a serious cook and without irony – because, well, it’s about time someone did. After decades of pretzel and marshmallow-strewn degradation, Jell-O (and its plain old unbranded sibling, gelatin) has served out its term as a culinary punch line. Let’s give the Rodney Dangerfield of desserts some respect.

Now seems like as good a time as any to start: Another August is well upon us, and thermometers around the country are finally nudging their way above 90 degrees. No one wants to soak through a T-shirt standing over a hot stove. Freezers are full of ice cream and Popsicles already, and the long days of late summer are prime time for a little cool-cooking experimentation. Not to mention, recession-minded penny pinchers: compared with single-origin chocolates or pistachio-saffron cakes, gelatin is both pretty and pretty easy on the wallet (At my local Met Food, a box of Jell-O retails for $1.09; Knox unflavored gelatin is $1.59. Pistachios are $7 for 10 ounces.)

I know: The specter of dozens and dozens of odiferous cafeteria lunches, countless cheerless hospital trays, and towering potluck salads of ectoplasmic lime Jell-O and mayonnaise is a hard one to shake. In the modern American cook’s imagination, Jell-O is inextricably linked to the Technicolor convenience foods and culinary disasters of atomic-era housewifery (allow me to present the Gallery of Regrettable Food). But Jell-O, and certainly gelatin, have been a part of the cook’s arsenal for much, much longer than 50 years, and rearview mirrors are notoriously distorting. Examples of sophisticated gelatin dishes can be found in some of our earliest cookbooks, and they were served with honor at the courts of Napoleon and the Medicis. Even more recently, one of my favorite kitchen references, the Women’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery, a 12-volume guide published in 1966 that featured such esteemed contributors as James Beard and Nika Hazelton, devoted almost a dozen reverent pages to the subject, right between gâteaux and génoise. Its recipes include both the sweet and the savory – from a seafood cocktail salad (glazed with fresh tomato gelatin) to a lemon, fruit and white-wine jelly. Jell-O can be cool and seductive, a playful spectacle, and the ultimate culinary blank slate. Where’s the horror in that?

Indeed the story of Jell-O, like so many other classic American sagas, is a fable of inspiration, invention and fall from grace. For most of their history, gelatins (or jellies, as dishes made with gelatin are known) were strictly aristocratic fare. Their esteem was a reflection, in part at least, of the intense labor required to produce them. Just how hard was it? It helps to begin with some science: Gelatin is simply a hydrocolloid protein that can be extracted from animal collagen in tissue and bones. (Ever wonder what gives great homemade stocks their velvety feel? Yep, it’s gelatin.) High-quality gelatin is both odorless and flavorless; the proteins swell in contact with liquid, dissolve in warm water, and form a firm jelly when cooled. (Cooks today can create vegetarian jellies by substituting agar, a gelatin made from red seaweed, for one derived from animal bones.) But before the development and widespread availability of powdered gelatin, cooks had to collect bones and remove the gelatin themselves. Carolyn Wyman, the author of “JELL-O: A Biography,” describes the whole gory process, thusly:

First, you had to get two calves feet – scald them, take off the hair, slit them in two, and extract the fat from between the claws. Then you had to boil them, remove the scum, and boil them again for as long as six or seven hours – before straining, letting the product cool, skimming the fat, boiling once more, adding the shells and whites of five eggs [to pick up impurities], skimming again, and straining twice through a jelly bag that you would have had to make yourself [there being no Kmart].

Not exactly appetizing. Should it be any surprise that jellies were most beloved by those who could afford to foist the task of preparation on an army of hired help?

Nearly any liquid can be jellied, from fresh juices to meaty broths to spirits and wines – though a handful of raw fruits, including pineapple, papaya, figs, ginger and kiwis, contain an enzyme known as bromelain, which inhibits gelatin from properly setting. (That enzyme is destroyed during cooking and preserving, though, which is why you still see many Jell-O fruit salads studded with Dole pineapple chunks.) As early as the 17th century, chefs were creating dramatic, layered or “ribboned” jellies as dining table centerpieces – but during the Victorian era, with the invention of elaborate, architectural jelly molds, the art of gelatin cookery reached its rococo peak. Many dishes were as practical as they were beautiful. Gelatin was a popular method of preservation before refrigeration became routine, as a jelly encasement could cut off oxygen to food, inhibiting the proliferation of bacteria. In French fine cooking, jellied foodstuffs never fell out of fashion; to this day gelées and savory aspics are celebrated on their own and as a part of iconic dishes, such as pâté en croûte (in which a layer of gelatin and fat insulates the forcemeat terrine from its pastry shell). In Southeast Asia, almond milk Jell-O topped with sliced melon or lychee remains a warm-weather staple; and in Mexico and South America, no market or stall is complete without a refrigerator case chock-full of fruity, creamy or coconutty jellies.

Ultimately, though, like so many other tales, the story of gelatin cookery underwent a drastic reimagining on American shores. The first U.S. patent for a powdered gelatin dessert was taken out in 1845 by none other than Peter Cooper, inventor of the steam locomotive. But Jell-O as we know it today – in all its artificial glory – wasn’t introduced until 1897, when Pearle Wait, a carpenter and part-time patent-medicine tinkerer from LeRoy, N.Y., developed a powdered gelatin with coloring and flavorings already added and marketed it as the world’s first packaged dessert mix. His wife christened it Jell-O. The ads declared: “Just Add Water!” and “Works Like Magic!” The 20th century, and the future of food, had arrived.

Inexpensive and brash, over the next hundred years Jell-O democratized dessert in America – and was transformed from a novelty treat available in only four flavors (strawberry, raspberry, lemon and orange) into a kaleidoscopic, multinational corporate culinary and cultural behemoth. “It might be more American than apple pie,” says Lynne Belluscio, the director of the Jell-O Museum in LeRoy, N.Y. Because it was simple enough for a harried housewife to throw together after picking up Junior from school, yet versatile enough to spiff up when there was company to impress, Jell-O soon became a symbol of postwar suburbia at its most sweet and stifling. But – like a maraschino cherry suspended in a scoop of lime gelatin – that reputation has hardly budged since.

Sure, there have been sporadic revivals and reinventions. Show me a high school graduate who hasn’t slurped down a brain-melting shot of grain alcohol and blue Jell-O from a Dixie cup, and I’ll show you a Mormon. More than a decade ago, the world-class chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten surprised diners at his flagship four-star New York City restaurant, Jean-Georges, by serving a chocolate and raspberry Napoleon with strawberry Jell-O and vanilla ice cream. Then the aughts ushered in the era of the kitchen laboratory, and chefs on the vanguard of the global “molecular gastronomy” movement, including Spain’s Ferran Adrià, Chicago’s Grant Achatz, and New York’s Wylie Dufresne, began playing with gelatin and agar to create whimsical dishes like fried mayonnaise nuggets and beef short ribs swaddled in thin, translucent blankets of jellied Guinness.

Britain has Bompass & Parr, two self-proclaimed “jelly mongers,” whose work includes “bespoke” jelly molds in the shape of Madrid’s Barajas airport, glow-in-the-dark Jell-O, and even Jell-O wedding and funeral towers in the same silhouettes as traditional cakes. And just last month, the Gowanus Studio Space in downtown Brooklyn, N.Y., hosted a Jell-O mold design competition that resulted in feats of artistry and engineering such as jelly jewels and an all-Jell-O hamburger and fries. What’s been missing, though, are creative Jell-O dishes that go beyond nostalgia and kitsch and celebrate the quotidian versatility of the ingredient itself; modern food for every day, created for and by home cooks. Think about it: Cupcakes used to be strictly the stuff of fourth-grade classrooms – now they’re a billion-dollar boutique business. A Jell-O revolution could be unleashed with only a smidgen of that star treatment.

Given its processed, dyed and powdered past, perhaps the most revolutionary approach a cook can take with Jell-O is to start simple and fresh. Invest in a box of unflavored gelatin and a few cups of fruit, and snip a few sprigs from your garden. I came home from an afternoon of berry picking yesterday with a dozen pounds of blueberries, and my window box is spilling over with lemon verbena. Add a simple sugar syrup, a squeeze of lemon, an envelope of Knox – heat, stir, chill, and there’s the evening’s sweet ending. And once you let gelatin’s irreverent nature be your muse, it only gets easier. For instance, maybe you’re sick of tomato and mozzarella salads? Me too. So I’m already eyeing my tomato plants and planning an eye-popping savory terrine of homemade basil-infused Jell-O and meaty slices of late summer beefsteaks.

“When it comes right down to it, gelatin is just fun to play with,” says H. Alexander Talbott, one of the chefs and mad geniuses behind the blog Ideas in Food. “Food doesn’t always have life and texture – but when you slurp gelatin through your teeth, you can feel it moving. It has a force.” That’s right. So, Jell-O warriors, go forth and cook. It is in your power to vanquish the empire of mayonnaise and the mini-marshmallow. And may that force be with you.

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RECIPES

Summer Blueberry Cream Pie

Serves 6-8

A tart and voluptuous summer dessert – without a marshmallow in sight.

1½ cup fresh blueberries
3 eggs
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup sugar
Seeds of 1 vanilla pod, or, 1½ teaspoon real vanilla extract
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
½ cup cold water
1 cup heavy cream, whipped
1 deep-dish 9-inch pie crust, prebaked

1. Place berries in a medium bowl; crush slightly with the back of a spoon to bruise them and release some of their juices; set aside.
2. In a separate bowl, beat eggs with salt until thick, then gradually beat in sugar and vanilla.
3. Soften gelatin in a small bowl of cold water, then add a bit of hot water and stir until the crystals are fully dissolved. Allow it to cool, then stir into egg mixture. Fold in cream and chill until mix begins to firm up. Then, fold in berries. Spoon the finished berry-cream into the pie crust, and chill until set. Decorate with additional whipped cream and a scattering of blueberries.

Adapted from the Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery (Fawcett Publications, 1966)

Iced Coffee “Gumdrops”

Makes two dozen 1-inch cubes

American food anthropologists Jane and Michael Stern attribute the origins of this dish to Durgin Park, a dining landmark in downtown Boston – and, indeed, its straightforward simplicity does smack of Yankee thrift. (Think of it as iced coffee, only solid!) But, in fact, versions of coffee jelly are popular around the globe, most notably in Southeast Asia and Japan. If you like your coffee black, go ahead and eat these unadorned – but beware, they’re strong. Otherwise, try them topped with a dollop of fresh whipped cream, or – my favorite – a drizzle of coconut milk.

4 cups coffee
1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar (depending on your desired level of sweetness)
2 envelopes unflavored gelatin

In a small saucepan, bring the coffee to a boil. Once it is simmering, whisk in the sugar and gelatin. Stir until they are completely dissolved. Turn off heat and let sit for 5 minutes. Pour the coffee mixture in a shallow pan. Refrigerate for 3 hours or until firm.

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Share your great Jell-O recipes on Open Salon. Be sure to tag your post “jell-o recipe”.

For years, accepted wisdom has held that it was a transition to meat eating that prompted human evolution — which makes Wrangham’s hypothesis a radical departure. Yet, the more he tested his theory, the more he found the science to back it up: Cooked food is universally easier to process and more nutritionally dense than raw food, which means adopting a cooked diet would have given man a biological advantage. The energy he once spent consuming and digesting raw food could be diverted to other physiological functions, leading to the development of bigger bodies and brains. And Wrangham’s “cooking hypothesis” not only explains the physical changes that humans underwent but also the social ones: Cooking created a sexual division of labor that informs our ideas of gender, love, family and marriage even to this day. “Humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows adapted to eating grass, or fleas to sucking blood,” Wrangham concludes. “And the results pervade our lives, from our bodies to our minds. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.”

Salon spoke with Wrangham, 60, by telephone from his research station in Uganda, about the dangers of strictly raw-food diets, why women are the ones who cook and the tricky business of calorie counting.

For years scientists have suggested that the making of tools, and then using tools for hunting and meat-eating, were factors that prompted the evolution of man as we know him. You push that theory farther to say that it was not eating meat, but cooking it and eating it, that’s responsible for the transformation. How did you make that leap?

In the very beginning, I wasn’t even thinking about human evolution. In fact, the basic idea came to me after long days of following chimpanzees, when — because I was hungry, and sometimes I didn’t take my food with me — I tried to eat what they ate. I assumed that since I was a member of a species that was so closely related to chimps — different only in terms of bodies and brains — I would be able to eat anything that they could. But in actuality, though I could force it down, I quickly realized that I could not eat enough of what they ate to satisfy my hunger.

That started me subconsciously wondering about the question of food’s role in human evolution. But it wasn’t until some years later — when I was sitting in front of my fireplace one night, thinking how nice and comforting a fire is, and how long ago back it would have been that our ancestors had been doing the same thing — that I went further back in time in my mind, and realized it was very difficult to imagine our ancestors having fire and not cooking. And from there, I began to find it very hard to imagine any creature with the basic human shape surviving on raw food.

Still, when I started my research, I was amazed to discover how little investigation had been done into the nutritional and biological aspects of cooking. In particular, I was amazed by how many people thought that humans could live perfectly well on raw food.

Yes, you do quite a convincing job of arguing that a purely raw diet cannot sustain an active human. Do you believe that we have evolved to a point where a raw diet is fundamentally against our biology?

Yes, I suppose I do. If I hesitate, it is because I certainly recognize that raw foodists who live in an urban area of a well-to-do nation can make it work, so it’s not that much against our biology. But I do feel very confident now that going off into the wild and living like a hunter-gatherer on raw food is not possible. People who switch to a raw diet report feeling constant hunger and lose large amounts of weight, even when they are careful to take in at least the nutritionally suggested number of calories a day for an adult. Basically, all the studies show that over the long term, a strictly raw diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply for our bodies. In other words, raw foodism is against our biology in a state of nature.

How do you respond to raw foodists who say a raw diet makes them feel healthier than they ever have before?

My response is that under modern conditions, living in places where you have money and grocery stores that make a super abundance of high-class domesticated foods accessible, I think it probably can be a healthy way of eating. Don’t get me wrong: I have tremendous admiration for raw food devotees because it is a very hard life to resist the temptations of cooked food, and they must build their whole life around it. And of course, because they build their lives around it, they are very, very committed to the idea that it is a valuable diet. That makes them feel some resentment toward me, I guess. But the irony is that these days, very often, cooked food can be unhealthy, too. The most obvious way is that people eat too much of it.

But raw foodism seems like a pretty extreme response to the problem of obesity, doesn’t it? And from what I can tell, most people don’t eat raw food just to lose weight — there seems to be a philosophical element to it, an idea that as though by choosing a raw diet, they can get back to a pure state.

Yes, of course, raw foodists argue quite strongly that it is our natural diet. My response to them is to say that yes it is, in a way. But it was natural 2 million years ago, not a few thousand years ago.

You write that cooked foods give our bodies more energy than raw foods. Can you explain that, because it seems somewhat counterintuitive. Even when you’re not adding anything — oils or fats — the caloric value goes up?

It’s really very simple. Cooking doesn’t change the actual number of calories in food — meaning that, if you take two portions of raw vegetable or animal product and cook one of them, when you blow it up in a bomb calorimeter and compare the two, you’d get the same number of calories. But there are two big things that cooking does. One is that it increases the proportion of the nutrients that our bodies digest, and from the data I reviewed — for instance, in the case of egg protein it goes from 50 percent to 90 percent — it looks as though that effect can make an enormous difference. And the second thing it does is that cooking reduces the costs we pay to digest our food.

So, eating cooked food conserves our energy?

That’s right. We all fall asleep after a heavy meal, but if you eat a large meal of raw food, you’ll fall asleep faster, because your body is working harder. More oxygen will be leaving your peripheral tissues and going to your intestinal organs.

Basically, cooking makes the food we eat more nutritionally efficient?

Yes. And that’s why in my last chapter, I take on the issue of our food labeling system. When you treat food through processing or grinding, you’re not actually creating more calories — so technically, the food labeling system we have now is correct. But, if we want to be realistic about the caloric value we actually get from a food, we need to modify our labels to reflect more subtle measurements — something like: “This item has been given a level 2 processing, which has increased its nutritional value by 50 percent.”

You argue that cooking not only shaped our bodies, but it also shaped our households and our most basic ideas of gender. How so?

Well, without language, we can’t be absolutely sure about what happened right in the beginning. But with what knowledge we have, I do think that cooking has this huge impact on households and our system of gender as we see it today — and I’ve been trying to figure out where my thinking on this began. I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the idea that cooking basically produces a lump of food — yet unlike any other primate, we humans have an extraordinary degree of respect for women who make it. Other men — bachelors, children — almost never take food from them. And the more I thought about this, I concluded that it looked to me like a system in which women cook for their husbands to earn the social protections that only men can give them through their membership in the male community.

So the concept of marriage began fundamentally not as about power or sex, but food?

Yes, though that would mean that women always do the cooking, and when I first started down this path, I wasn’t at all sure that was the case. So, I went to the anthropological literature, and sure enough, I found reports of societies where men did the cooking. But then I dug into it more carefully — and I discovered that, in the cases where the anthropologists claimed the men had done the cooking, the scientists had been wrong. In every single society women cook for men. And, what’s more fascinating, in many societies you can really say that food or domestic promiscuity is far more serious than sexual promiscuity. In other words, it’s more of a breach of social convention for a woman to feed the wrong man than it is for her to have sex with him.

Why do you think societies have evolved that way?

Because it is, and has always been, so critical for a man to be able to know that someone is going to give him a meal in the evening – because this enables him to spend the whole day doing what he wants — doing, as it were, manly things. It’s very clear from the literature on small-scale societies – and probably true even in our society today – that bachelors have a very hard time of it. They are thin, they are looked down upon by married men, they deeply desire to have a wife in order to be able to join the ranks of the elders. The problem that bachelors face is that they have to spend time during the day not simply doing things that will bring them glory — like hunting — but making sure they have a way of feeding themselves in the evening. And it uses up a lot of energy and time to take care of yourself.

A lot of my book has been challenging to people, but because the male-female relationship is so central to the way we think about humans, and because for so long people have tended to think about pair bonding as being about mating competition and choice of a sexual partner, this in particular has been quite a difficult theory for people to chew over.

Does that mean that, evolutionarily, men should focus on finding a wife who can cook instead of a beauty?

Yes, essentially. I know that from our perspective in the West, where we tend to focus even more than other societies on questions of sexual morality, it’s rather an immoral suggestion that I’m making — basically that men set themselves up with wives in order to have the freedom to be men, as it were — and then go ahead and design their sexual strategy from that point on.

Now, in modern Western societies, that strategy is usually to stay with one’s wife — but not always, as we know! From the woman’s point of view, the wife wants the security of knowing that she has her husband to protect her from the scrounging “others.” It’s not a notion of a love relationship. That’s less common and more nakedly economic in many societies than in our own.

Haven’t we evolved an emotional attachment to cooked food as well as a physical one? It didn’t occur to me until I was reading your book, but raw foods have little scent — yet the sense of smell is one of our most powerful senses. And elemental smells like warm vanilla or baked apples or grilled meat — all cooked foods — are ones that humans seem to respond to positively and universally across age and culture and place.

Absolutely, and as Proust says, smells definitely have an immense effect on our memory and our biology. But it’s a complex question. When I was working on the book, I tested apes on a diet of cooked food, and they liked it spontaneously. You can understand why: The physical characteristics of cooked food have commonalities with other foods that are good for them in the wild. But the smells of cooked food are not like anything you’d find in the wild. They’re really totally different — though I admit I have no chemical data to support that. So, you might think that we have adapted to appreciating and enjoying cooked food as a result of our evolutionary history of exposure to it. But, in that case, other animals should not be adapted to like the smell of cooked food. And we simply have no data to reflect that at the moment.

Did your your studies change the way you thought about the way we should be eating?

Not really. I’d like people to be aware of how easy it is to overeat in today’s world. But personally I’ve always been on a quasi-Mediterranean diet: lots of vegetables, some oil, not too much of anything and not much red meat. I don’t think this experience changed the way I choose to eat, though frankly, if I had the courage, I might try a raw diet for a bit — just to see how it is.

You haven’t ever gone on a completely raw diet?

No, I haven’t. It just seems such a social inconvenience. But maybe that’s just an excuse.

Yes, the sandwich was delicious, and given the quantity of said jam in my cupboard, I’ll probably have one for lunch today, too. But I never meant to be the Daniel Boulud of the PB&J. No, like pretty much everyone else who ties on an apron now and again, I’d been hearing the buzz about how the combination of growing food consciousness, urban homesteading, rising unemployment and the diving economy was spurring a canning renaissance. And indeed, for months it seemed as though a glossy new book or stylish blog appeared on the scene every day, bursting with tempting chutneys and conserves, and eager to tutor the uninitiated in the art of food preservation. Then summer arrived, with its parade of seductive fruits and veggies, and on Facebook, my friends’ updates began including portraits of their rhubarb pickles. I left my secure staff job as an editor in order to write more, and suddenly had the leisure hours and dwindling bank account to prove it. I thought: I’m handy! I’m hungry! I’m broke! So, I joined the club. I hurried to my farmers market, and plunked down $16 for two perfect quarts of wild strawberries. Hours evaporated as I trolled the Web for the just-right recipe. And when, on the proud morning I stirred up my first batch of jam, I gazed on each jewel-colored jar and saw an act of thrift, a gesture of do-it-myself get-up-and-go, a symbolic high-five to all the generations of women before me who wasted not.

But now, a few weeks of sticky counters and countless Ball jars later, I see that I may have gotten just a teensy bit caught up in the romance of it all. Because the truth no one tells you is that while canning and pickling and curing your own (locally grown, organic) food may be many things — rewarding, sustainable, health-conscious, creative and challenging, even — one thing it ain’t is cheap.

OK, maybe it’s not that simple. In fact, before the angry hordes descend, allow me to hedge a bit. Sure, putting up food can be a budget-conscious choice. It definitely used to be, when everyone and their grandmother (literally) had a half-acre plot out back, bursting with bumper crops every August. This, I imagine, is why in many older canning texts, including the bible of food preservation — the “Ball Blue Book of Preservation” (currently sold out on Amazon, natch) — the recipe yields sometimes stretch into the dozens of pints. But today, the desire and ability to pick, pickle and distribute a bushel of kirby cukes in a single day presumes either a boatload of brine-crazy friends or an amount of both garden and pantry real estate of which I can only daydream. And let’s not forget the ultimate unrenewable resource: time. These days, even if you’re not a city dweller short on arable acreage, if you’ve got a full-time job, or a kid, or even just a needy cat, you’re probably tight on the hours it would take to plant, nurture, weed and water a small homestead. So maybe you find time to head to a pick-your-own farm. But mostly you march over to the Greenmarket and lay down your greenbacks. And you buy the books, and the jars, and the spices, and the salt. Making beef jerky? Gotta be grass fed, of course. Yes, there are a million worse ways you could spend your money. Maybe you’re OK with having a $20 jar of homemade maraschino cherries. (I am.) I’m just saying, people: It adds up.

Who wants to talk about that, though — and forfeit the Everyman satisfaction that comes along with trotting out maple syrup from your own tap and homemade salt-cured bacon at your next brunch? This isn’t the first time suburban and urban cooks have latched onto old-timey kitchen ways to fire their domestic fantasies; indeed, anyone unsure about shelling out for the latest crop of preserving cookbooks might want to check used bookstores for some classics from the ’70s and early ’80s, during the last wave of DIY-food publishing — titles like Jean Anderson’s “Green Thumb Preserving Guide,” “Fancy Pantry” by Helen Witty, “Stillroom Cookery” by Grace Firth, and the enormous back-to-the-land lifestyle manual Carla Emery’s “Old Fashioned Recipe Book.” (A note of caution: The USDA revised the canning guidelines in the early ’90s, so make sure to reference its most recent guidelines when using books published prior to that year.) But don’t be disappointed when you open them and find newsprint pages and “Little House on the Prairie”-style ink illustrations instead of glossy photos and artsy fonts. Back then canning was hippy, not haute.

So how’d we get back here? It can’t just be the recession, dummy — because the DIY-food craze started years ago, when everyone was still stinking rich and oblivious. In fact, the whole DIY scene seemed to gain ground just when everyone needed new, hipper, cooler creative things to spend their money on. Cases in point: the “everybody knit your own socks out of $30 skeins of mohair” trend and the “sew your own purse out of vintage bark cloth” trend. The DIY-grub trend, like a slightly more practical younger sibling, has been nurtured by years on a steady diet of hipster, locavore, get-your-hands-dirty, foodie propaganda — articles like “Yes, You Can” and “My Empire of Dirt,” New York magazine’s 2007 memoir of brownstoner homesteading, and at restaurants like Dan Barber’s farm-to-table mecca, Blue Hill Stone Barns. It’s been boosted by books like the agriculture-chic River Cottage series (one of which features a helpful chapter on caring for a shotgun) by British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and the recently released “Farm City,” Novella Carpenter‘s charming chronicle of her life as a farmer in downtown Oakland, Calif. And, of course, we’ve eaten it up. The figureheads of the DIY food movement are lovable oddball heroes, doing hard work, with delicious consequences. Who wouldn’t want to be them a little?

But, here comes the bubble burst: These people are also professionals. As in, giving the rest of us something to fantasize about is what they do for a living. They can justify the time and the expense and the maddening everything of it all because it is the central project of their lives, at least for right now. What the rest of us are is hobbyists. As in: We noodle around on the guitar, we knit scarfs, and on Saturday mornings, we wander the farmers market and amuse and entertain ourselves by deciding whether today we will make carrot or okra pickles. We choose our little comforts and we sell the leftovers in adorable vintage jars with handmade labels and vintage calico-cloth lids on Etsy. 

That’s why, in my opinion, the best new guides to food preservation are “Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It” by Karen Solomon (Ten Speed Press, 2009) and “Well Preserved,” by Eugenia Bone (Clarkson Potter, 2009): two beautiful books that embrace today’s canning craze for what it really is — a small, sustainable luxury and a craft — and take into account the fact that fig jam, while delicious, is not actually a dinner. Instead, like embroidery, they present preserved foods as lovely accents that need a foundation garment (or, in this case, foundation recipes) to give them shape. To that end, Bone (the daughter of acclaimed Italian food writer Ed Giobbi, and an urbanite who nonetheless has been “putting up” small stashes of seasonal food in her New York City apartment her entire adult life) chooses to limit her book’s focus to a few dozen “master recipes” — like spiced apples, green olive tapenade, smoked chicken breast, and olive-packed tuna — which she then adapts in a trio of heartier forms, such as a warm potato and tuna salad or a spiced apple strudel or a thin-crusted pizza layered with mozzarella and tapenade. The genius of her approach is in the connections it makes and the new possibilities it presents with ingredients one might otherwise take for granted. But budget-minded cooks who read closely will see that Bone, who admits to walking to the Greenmarket repeating the mantra “I will not overbuy, I will not overbuy,” doesn’t so much set out to save money by preserving, as to make sure that the splurges she does allow herself don’t go to waste wilting in the fridge.

Similarly, Karen Solomon, who now lives in San Francisco but grew up in Massachusetts “eating Miracle Whip and drinking diet Shasta,” doesn’t hide her skepticism about the links the media has tried to draw between the surge of interest in food preservation and the economy. She says the main reason she wrote “Jam It” was that she “was always looking for a kind of Girl Scout Manual for the kitchen.” And it’s easy to see that playful, unself-conscious ethos reflected in her book — as though each “cooking project,” whether marshmallows, mayonnaise or homemade Pop-Tarts — might come with a mail-order merit badge, to be awarded upon completion. For Solomon, the connection of cooking to the larger craft culture is clear. “I’ve done collage, I’m a knitter, and all of those things are fun — but, really, how many hats can you give away?” she says with a laugh. “At least when you’re putting up food, the results are edible and shareable and storable. But is it a money saver? Not really. Basically, I care what I eat, and I think, like a lot of people, I just wanted to get creative in a new way.” Solomon’s book takes an iconoclastic approach from other preserving books on the market, focusing on easy condiments like spicy mustard and mayonnaise and quick refrigerator pickles, like a tart Thai cucumber salad and a garlic- and ginger-doused Korean kimchee, which don’t require the time or equipment commitment of recipes that call for preserving jars in a boiling water bath. Come to think of it, they’d be perfect for a lazy lunch after a morning at the Greenmarket.

Still, maybe the trend watchers haven’t gotten everything wrong. Maybe the latest craze for canning (or any kind of craft, for that matter) is connected to the economic crash — but just not in the bottom-line way it’s easy to assume. Maybe for the downsized and jobless, the appeal of all this preserving and pickling and curing is not that it’s a money-saver but rather that it’s a time-spender. In my new freelance life, I pass more hours in my pajamas than I’d care to admit, and have succumbed to the allure of procrastination in the shape of a canning kettle. But there’s also no denying the satisfaction that comes with holding one of those hot little jars in your hand, imagining the pop of the lid and the bright memory of summer months from now. Amid whatever other uncertainties the day brings, it is a little moment that rings of the physical and the nourishing, the productive and reassuringly tangible. That story pitch I spent three hours writing this morning? I may never hear from the editor. But a jar of apricot butter? That I can hold in my hand. That I can swallow.

****

Worth Every Penny Cherry-Almond Conserves

Yields about 6 half-pints

Adapted from “Well Preserved” by Eugenia Bone (Clarkson Potter, 2009)

Conserves are jams that are made from a combination of stewed, sugared fruit and ground nuts. In “Well Preserved,” Bone features a simple recipe for Concord grape and walnut conserves, which she uses as a tart filling and an accompaniment to cheese. But I like a little kick of booze, am allergic to walnuts, and was too impatient to wait for September, when Concord grapes are in season. This midsummer adaptation, I hope, tweaks Bone’s ingredients but preserves the essence. For detailed canning safety instructions, see the USDA Guide to Home Canning.

8 cups of sweet cherries, pitted

5 1/2 cups of sugar

1/2 cup brandy

3 tablespoons of orange zest

2 cups unsalted almonds, semi-crushed

1. Prepare 6 half-pint jars and their bands for packing by scalding them in a large kettle of boiling water. Set pieces aside to dry on a clean towel.

2. Place the cherries and sugar in a heavy pot over medium heat; add 1/2 cup water. As the mixture heats, gently mash the cherries with a potato masher or the side of a wooden spoon, to help them break down. Monitor the pot, stirring to prevent burning, until the sugar dissolves completely. Cook for 15 minutes, until the cherries are dark and glossy and have begun to fall apart.

3. Add orange zest to the pot; simmer for 20 minutes, or until the mixture has thickened. Add the brandy and almonds, then continue cooking for 5 more minutes.

4. Pour the conserve into clean, dry jars, allowing 1/2 inch of space between the mixture and the rim. Wipe any excess conserve from the rims, and screw on the jar lids.

5. Process the sealed jars in a large pot of water fitted with a rack at the bottom. (The jars should be covered by at least 3 inches of water.) Bring to a boil; then allow to simmer for 30 minutes. Turn off the heat, carefully remove the jars, invert them, and allow them to cool upside down on the counter for 5 hours. (As the jars cool, you should hear the popping sound of the vacuum seal as it sets.) Store in a cool, dark place and refrigerate after opening.