Mermelada

At the Friday farmer's market in Esteli, crowded onto the La Garnacha table along with artisan cheese and locally-harvested honey, are an assortment of jams: papaya and pineapple, mango, guayaba, and rose of jamaica. These jams are made by a women's cooperative in the tiny community of Potrerillos, a good 3-mile walk from San Nicolas.

For months our friend Pedro has been asking us to come visit his house and learn how to make jam with his wife and the two other women involved in the cooperative. This last weekend, it finally worked out.

On Saturday morning, we hiked through hills that are just beginning to be green with the start of the rainy season. In a landscape where there are no houses in sight and the tiny white dots you see perched on distant mountains are really cows, you don't necessarily expect to hear church music and aleluya Jesuses blaring brokenly in the distance. But since jumbo sound systems and TV made it to the campo of Nicaragua, anything and everything has become possible.

By the time we got to Pedro's house, the jam-making women had already started chopping. Pedro's wife is a younger woman whose birthing of two children in the past four years has apparently had no long-term effect on her tiny figure. The other two women in the cooperative are Pedro's sister, who lives in the same house and another friend of theirs who lives in a different but equally remote community.

These three women formed this cooperative two years ago when a Swiss expat, Lisu, taught them how to make jam. Since then, they've been getting together to make jam almost twice a month. They make jam with whatever fruits are in season and sell the little jars to La Garnacha for 35 cordobas, or $1.35 each.

Like so many other women in this area, none of these three has a formal job. Instead, they spend their days with the full-time work of caring for their children, cooking, doing laundry, and cleaning the house while the men in their family work in the fields. So for these women, as well as being a good excuse to spend time with female friends, making jam is also a way of earning their own income.

While the women showed me how to chop the pineapple and papaya into tiny, pea-sized pieces, Davie took on the task of entertaining Pedro's four-year-old son Engel, who wanted us to take a picture of every item in his house. (It's probably not every day that he gets a chance to impress gringos). They fed us a yummy lunch of beans, avocado, and chia lemonade and we watched the world cup.

While we chopped and stirred, the women told us about their families. Pedro's sister told me that she had grown up and lived in that very spot all her life, although the house was built more recently. When it came time to cook the jam, they whipped out their gas stove, which they use exclusively to make the jam. All the rest of their food they cook over a wood fire in a separate room, but the smoke from the fire gives the jam a bad taste.

When we walked home to San Nicolas later that afternoon, it was with two jars of pineapple-papaya jam and the recipe to make it. Here it is.

Papaya-Pineapple Jam

1 papaya (not completely ripe)

1 Hawaiian pineapple

¼ cup of lime juice

1 orange peal – only use the white part

sugar

Peal the papaya and pineapple, making sure to remove all of the spiky bits of the pineapple. Dice the papaya and pineapple into really small, pea-sized pieces, discarding the seeds and removing the tougher inner core of the pineapple. Mix the diced pieces together and add the lime juice. At this point, weigh the fruit and note how many pounds it is. Shave off the white part of one orange peal and wrap and tie this in two tea bags. (This serves as pectin, a gelling agent).

Divide the papaya-pineapple mixture equally into two pots (or if you have a huge pot, you could probably just use that) and throw an orange peal bag into each pot. Cook over a stove, without a lid. Once it's hot, you'll gradually start adding the sugar. To figure out how much sugar to use, multiply the weight of the fruit mixture by 0.8 and use that many pounds of sugar. Gradually add the sugar, stirring as you do.

Cook for 45 minutes. A foam will start to develop on the top; skim this off and remove it. Then cook for another 20 or 30 minutes. Pour the still-hot jam into sterilized glass jars right away, filling them up to the top and sealing them with the lid.