Confessions of a (former) Lab Rat

What do you do with 6 lbs cherries?

Actually, that’s quite an easy problem, compared with the years we’ve had nearly 30 lbs from the tree at the back of the garden. It’s an old tree, and I’ve put the apiary by it—partly because despite the size of the garden there’s not actually much room for beehives, and partly because the tree is covered in ivy that is mature enough to flower and give the bees an autumn feast—and most years it produced far more than we can use, or even harvest. It keeps the blackbirds fed, though.

Anyway, I went out this evening and collected a bowlful of cherries to add to the mound we’ve had in the fridge since the weekend, as well as some strawberries and raspberries and blueberries. And then I made jam from the bowl of cherries that was already in the fridge.

I sometimes wonder if I miss lab work. In a way, the kitchen is my new lab, with tried and tested protocols but also new experiments and things to try. I guess formally I am testing new hypotheses all the time, although really they all boil down to the one null hypothesis ‘this is not jaw-droppingly delicious’, that, in all modesty, I disprove all the time. Apart from that, and the mindset of changing one variable at a time (um, maybe) and writing things down (sorry, Jenny), there’s not much in the kitchen that resembles the labs I’ve worked in.

Except for cellophane.

Cellophane was, and still is, the bane of my existence.

In the lab (particularly in Cambridge) we used to preserve protein gels between sheets of cellophane. We’d get everything nice and moist (ooer), sandwich the polyacrylamide gel between two layers of cellophane, then stretch the whole thing in a wooden clamp and leave to air dry.

The first few times you did this (and randomly thereafter) something would go dreadfully wrong and you’d be left with a shattered mess of blue stripes and sadly crinkled gel. But when it did work, it was a fantastic way of preserving experimental data, and perhaps even better than drying gels down on filter paper (and probably less environmentally unfriendly, too)—especially as drying gels was no guarantee not to end up with exploded blue acrylamide messes.

Which brings me back to jam.

Sealing jam under cellophane covers is an ancient tradition that keeps nasty germs out and I hate it. When it works, it’s great. But getting it to work—stopping it curling and getting the tiny elastic band over so that there’s a skirt all the way round so that you can tighten it nicely and the whole thing doesn’t poing into a sad tangled mess—reminds me of the lab more than anything else.

But the jam is jaw-droppingly delicious, even if I do say so myself.