Dad's Jelly

At our house when I was growing up, my mother did most of the cooking, although she hated it.  My father was a more adventurous cook and loved trying new things.  He'd clip recipes from Southern Living and give them to my mother, but she never made them.  She once told me that one of her regrets was that she never made a single one of those recipes.  I suggested to her that he could have made them if he wanted them so much, and that made her feel better.  

One of the things he really liked to make was jelly. When we lived in Louisiana, he would buy large cans of "dewberries"--large blackberries--from black women who picked them and sold them by the side of the road.  Whenever he would make these purchases, he would have long conversations with them about how to make things--particularly jellies, but actually any Southern cooking he wanted to find out about.

One day he came back with a large can of berries, tickled that he'd gotten a good berry recipe from the woman he'd bought them from.  The only problem was that she didn't measure things.  Her recipe started with, "Put the berries in a large pan and add a right smart amount of water to the pan."  I can remember him pondering what a "right smart" amount of water might be.  That phrase then became part of our family lexicon, which Alan and I have continued, and you can too, if desired.

One time when my parents visited me in DC, my dad found out that I had crab apple trees in the front yard, and I was throwing away the crab apples   He was appalled, and ended up gathering up buckets of them to take back to Florida to make jelly.

When I moved to Virginia, I got a lot of blackberries and called my dad for the "old family recipe" to make jelly.  He listened to my request, paused for a minute, then said, "I just use the recipe on the side of the Sure-Jell package.  So now, you know the old family recipe, too: