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Page 1 of 2 A slight woman with a mop of black curls and a string of chunky red beads around her neck is holding out a tiny spoonful of orange goo for me to take. She’s just scooped it from an unlabeled glass jar—one of five she brought with her into the tea house where we’ve met—and our waiter is pretending not to notice the flagrant health code violation. She watches expectantly as it disappears into my mouth. I sit still for a moment, savoring the flavor, before I finally say, “That’s good.” This is, quite possibly, the understatement of the year. The woman is Rachel Saunders, and her orange goo just might be the best local jam you’ve never heard of.
Though she grew up next to a raspberry patch, it wasn’t until Saunders moved to the Bay Area that she started making her own jam. “I was so entranced by the fruit. There was so much bounty here,” she explains. “One day I made this jam from a cookbook. It was good, but it wasn’t me. I realized that jam could be a medium for expression, a medium onto which you can project any flavor, any texture. That intrigued me.”
What makes Saunders’s jams distinctive is her use of unusual, vaguely old-fashioned-sounding fruits like tayberries and black mulberries, and the esoteric flavor combinations. This summer, for example, she offered jars of Santa Rosa plum, strawberry, and fresh rosemary jam; apricot jam perfumed with rose water; and aprium jam with young green almonds. “I think jam is the ultimate way to eat fruit. I try to make it taste more like itself than it would fresh,” Saunders explains. It sounds like an undertaking of biblical proportions, and it’s one that Saunders has set about with fervor, incorporating herbs and flowers as well as parts of the fruit that aren’t normally eaten. She uses bergamot rind, peach tree leaves, and even the noyau, the kernel tucked inside the pit of cherries and plumcots, to impart a unique quality to her jams. “It is much more mysterious and subtle.”
It took seven years of experimenting before Saunders officially christened her jam-making enterprise, Blue Chair Fruit Company, after the homey vision she has of munching jam-slathered toast in a comfy kitchen chair. She spent that time honing her technique and building a library of flavors and ideas. “I developed hundreds of test recipes. Now I’m a painter who can paint whatever I want.” Early on, she made up jams and marmalades in her kitchen and sold them to friends and a tiny handful of San Francisco restaurants. Now they’re for sale at places like Sweet Adeline Bakeshop in Berkeley and Pizzaiolo in Oakland, where she’s been offering jam-and-toast breakfasts since March of this year.Saunders takes an über-local approach to selecting fruit. “I’m not going to use a fruit that doesn’t grow here at all. I want to showcase local fruit,” she explains. Everything she buys is organically or sustainably raised; some ingredients even grow in her own backyard. She recently planted ten rose geranium bushes in addition to lemon verbena, rosemary, and bay laurel.
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