In Soviet Estonia, you didn’t go to the supermarket and come home with fresh fruit and berries. You could buy fruit and berries in the market, when they were in season. But mostly you got them in your grandmother’s garden. Everybody had grandmothers, and all grandmothers had gardens with fruit trees and berry bushes. Because even in Soviet Estonia people wanted fruit, and that was about the only way to get any.

Fresh fruit doesn’t keep all year, so most of it was preserved as jams and squashes, or in syrup.

Jam was for everyday use. On bread, porridge and pancakes; stirred into water to make a drink; in crumbles and cakes. Fruit in syrup was dessert. Raspberries in syrup (vaarikakompott) were my favourite.

During berry season, I think my mother and grandmother were nearly always either picking fruit, cleaning fruit, or cooking it into jam. There were often jam jars cooling in the kitchen of grandma’s cottage.

Most of my childhood’s jams were made of fruits that Swedes know about, even if they don’t grow them much. Quince jam is an exception; I don’t think most people here know that quinces exist or that the fruit are edible. Aronia berries are another oddity. They’re tart and astringent when raw, just like quinces, and sloe for that matter. But they make a great squash, and aronia and apple jam is lovely.

Jam was stored in glass jars. There were no preservatives available (apart from sugar) so it was important to thoroughly sterilize the jars and lids, and then close them so they were airtight.

The simplest kind of lids were made of blue rubber. I’m no expert but I don’t think those were very good.

There were glass lids that had to be fastened with a special kind of clamp. You put the clamp across the lid, and then you twisted the clamp so that its ends gripped the lid to the jar. There were ridges on the lid that pushed the clamp tighter the more you twisted it.

Later a third, fancier kind of lid became available – single-use metal lids. A special tool was used to tighten those. This kind of lid is still used, apparently. I’ve never seen them in Sweden, but googling in Estonian brought up stores that sell them.

I have no photos of any of these things. But I found this photo of raspberries in syrup, made in Estonia, with the right kind of lids on the jars. Click to visit the original Estonian blog post.