Simmering Jams at the Edge of the Forest

seemed to be dry, use a petit knife to remove the stems and damaged parts, then halve or quarter the large ones and put them in a bowl.
Then measure the weight of the strawberries, excluding the weight of the bowl.

I used to use granulated sugar or white sugar.
Granulated sugar gave a clean taste and color, while white sugar gave a rich sweetness.
At the usual supermarket, granulated sugar was pricey, so I used mostly white sugar.
And white sugar went on special sale now and then!

The amount of sugar should be exactly half the weight of the strawberries.

I thought this might seem like a lot to some people.
Who? Who said you had to go easy on the sweetness if it was homemade? Jam was a preserved food.
If you reduced the sugar, you wouldn’t be able to preserve it.

In fact, I’d even made it with sugar down to 30% of the strawberries.
It was nice to be able to taste the fruit directly, but I had to store it in the refrigerator before opening the package and ended up using a lot at one time, so I went back to the original one the next season.

I figured if you were worried about calories, you could adjust it with the amount of sugar.
If it was not sweet enough, I ended up using a lot, so I’m more satisfied with “a little of something sweet”, I guess.
You could add it to tea instead of sugar, and it went well with yogurt.
Yeah, that was good.

So, definitely half as much sugar as strawberries.
This was an ironclad rule.

Put the strawberries and sugar in a bowl, cover it with a lid to keep out dust, and leave it for a while.
If it was not a hot day and you were not worried about spoilage, you could leave it overnight.
The water from the strawberries should moisten the sugar before you started to cook.
If your pan was made of enamel or stainless steel, you could melt the sugar and strawberries in the pan from the beginning and heat it directly.

The one that Lady Adelaide brought for the jam had a calm gold color and looked like a copper pot… The kind of copper I’d always wanted.
I didn’t know about metals in this world, but in my mind, this was a copper pot.
I was already grinning.
What a wonderful life, using a copper pot to make jam from strawberries picked in the field behind the house.
But copper rusted easily, so I only used it for boiling.

I was never interested in the stylish slow life, but… It’s just not very realistic, is it? I thought you had to be a very generous person in many ways to do that.
The fields and kitchens were as beautiful as ornaments, and I felt like I was lying when I said that.

Real life in the countryside was much earthier, and human relationships were troublesome.
On the back porch were not sneakers but boots with mud stains stuck to them.
Real farmers were really busy and didn’t like to do anything time-consuming, so their houses were full of convenience goods and plastic products.
For detergent, the priority was to remove dirt rather than to be eco-friendly.
That was the kind of real life I knew… Well, the world seemed to be small, but it was big, so there were probably people who practice a stylish slow life.

Even in this world, farmers and handmade products didn’t seem to be very popular.
That was what Adelaide talked about when she said, “We’re too far behind,” and “We don’t have any useful magic tools”.

Well, it seemed that Lady Adelaide and this house were in the early Showa period or pre-war period in Japan, or something like that.
There was no rice cooker, no microwave or electric kettle.
There was a hand pump for water, electric lighting, a septic tank for toilets, but not a broom for cleaning.
And the ladies of this village were a bit too much for me…And they seemed to shy away.
Isn’t that fine? No personal problems.

I didn’t have a rice cooker to begin with.
Because I just couldn’t get the rice to taste good in the small rice cooker my brother had given me.
The rice cookers that cooked well were for family use and were surprisingly expensive.
I couldn’t cook for myself every day anyway, so I cooked in a pot.
It was delicious, rice cooked in a pot.
If you excluded the soaking time, you could eat it in about 20 minutes.

I was attached to my grandmother when I was little, so I was used to cleaning with an old-fashioned brush and rag.
Okay, this one was clear.

In fact, I didn’t have any confidence that I could use a magic tool with no magic power.
They said it was made for everyone, but I couldn’t handle it if something went wrong, I never could.

So, I was able to get used to it quickly.
I thought I was probably much faster than the young girls in this world, partly because of the way Lady Adelaide taught me.
I didn’t mind mud or bugs… Oh, I’m so sorry to say that I was not very cute.
That was why I was alone – it was okay.
Phew.

I put the bowl of jam in the kitchen’s corner and prepared lunch.
Lady Adelaide ate a hearty breakfast and dinner, but a very light lunch.
It was like a German cold plate.
Bread, cheese or fruit, and a drink.
Sometimes there was not even bread.

In the beginning, she was very careful with me and had a solid lunch, but when she found out I wasn’t like that to begin with, she relaxed.
If you pushed yourself too hard, living together will ruin you, especially your lifestyle.
I didn’t really care that much about lunch either, I had a lot of things I wanted to do during the day and a lot of things I needed to do.

So, I laid out a lunch that didn’t even need to be cooked and made a cup of tea.
I rang the bell and called Lady Adelaide, we smiled at each other, and clasped our hands together, saying, “Thank you for the food”.