Does anyone use wax to seal jars of jam anymore?
When I was a child, there was a woman on our block who used to bring my mother small jars of various jams in the summertime. It was good stuff…mostly marmalade as I recall. Yet the thing that made the jars so memorable to me wasn’t what was inside, but what was on top. Under the square of calico cloth that she’d tied around the rim with twine wasn’t a stainless steel lid, but a quarter inch layer of wax, laid directly on top of the surface of the jam. I was fascinated by it, and always fought my twin sister for the privilege of being the first to break the wax layer with a spoon. That form of canning was commonplace in the first half of the 20th century, and was dying out when I was a kid in the 70’s. Nowadays you hardly see it at all, since it’s considered unsafe. The method works very much the same as the “open kettle” technique I described in my earlier post on the history of canning. Only instead of placing a lid on the jar of simmering jam, the cook would pour a small volume of
