Passover is a holiday about many things: rebirth, escaping the oppressor, welcoming the stranger. And also wine. It’s a lot about wine.
If observing the holiday as prescribed, one consumes four glasses of wine during the seder meal. Of course, at a big communal table, with all that wine flowing (not to mention all the sparkling juice for those not imbibing), it can be hard to track the bottles being passed around; someone might open a fresh merlot, not realizing that there’s a half-consumed bottle of the stuff 10 folks down. Inevitably some some cabernet, some chardonnay or my personal Passover favorite, the soda-sweet Bartenura moscato, will be left partially consumed. It’s great when guests to take orphaned bottles home, but if you find you’re drowning in half empties, don’t worry. I have something for that.
So! Here is Passed Over Wine Jam. Produced shortly after Passover 2019 began in my mother-in-law’s kitchen. And finished in my mother’s kitchen, when I realized that I needed to let it boil for still longer. Thanks to the mothers!
This stovetop jam doesn’t just use up any (any!) combination of wine and sparkling juice—it’s also a great landing pot for any fruit plates that might not have been finished during dessert (always a risk when they’re competing with Passover’s finest flourless chocolate cakes).
Print
Passed Over Wine Jam
Description
A great way to use up extra wine and fruit from the Passover table!
Ingredients
- Left over wine. Any kind is fine, and it’s totally OK to mix varying types.
- Chopped fruit (optional). The fruit will give the jam more body. If you’re making this after a party and have some chopped fruit left over, that’s ideal. Berries, cantaloupe, pineapple—anything along those lines would be great. Chop it into smaller pieces to give your jam a more even feel, and to give the fruit more surface area, which will help it soften and absorb the wine faster.
- Sugar/honey/extra soda. This jam makes a great home for extra sparkling grape juice or Martinelli’s cider. Whether you add additional sweeteners, like sugar or honey is per your taste. I like my jam on the tart side.
- Corn starch. Just a little, you’ll be eyeballing it.
- Spices (optional). Cinnamon and nutmeg will give it a mulled wine type of flavor. Pepper, ginger and other spices could also add complexity.
Instructions
- Pour the wine, sparkling juice and soda into a pot.
- Add sugar, honey or something else sweet if you’d like, and make sure it dissolves.
- After the wine has boiled for a bit (and for a bit, I’m being really unscientific, you can interpret this as “whenever you feel like it), add the fruit. You could also add the fruit just after the wine starts to boil. I’m honestly not sure if it makes a difference (and if you’ve discovered a difference, please let me know!).
- Let the fruit and wine do something between boiling and simmering for a while, i.e. an hour or more. You want the fruit to really absorb the wine. In the batch pictured here, by the time it was done, I couldn’t tell which piece of fruit had been pineapple, which had been strawberry and which had been melon.
- Your house will smell great! If you want it to smell even better, this is a good time to add some spices.
- Once the mixture is clearly thickening, help it along with some cornstarch. Sprinkle and stir in a little at a time. Sprinkling is very important because lumps of cornstarch are notoriously difficult to delumpify.
- When you get to a consistency you like, you’re done! A runnier result could make a great sauce. A thicker concoction will be great on crackers. To stay on theme, I served this on matzo.
