Bergeron Apricot Jam from Provence at Mail Order
Dignity, democracy, and a whole lot of deliciousness!
Beautiful sandy beaches. Small, unsettled islands. A thousand years of history. A hot and sunny Mediterranean summer. Cuisine built around fresh vegetables, olive oil, herbs, and fish. If all of this sounds good, you might want to consider going to the small Provencal town of Hyères on the Côte d’Azur, where you can find all of the above and then some. Writers Edith Wharton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and others all lived there for periods of their lives. About an hour east of Marseilles and half that again to the west of Nice, Hyères is the southernmost town in France. Can’t quite get there any time soon? Me neither. Consider, then, the far easier alternative that I’ve taken advantage of: ordering a jar of the terrific heirloom apricot jam made there by the tiny artisan firm of Olbia.
Olbia was founded a few years back by Elisabeth and Jean-Eric Lavenir. Both Elisabeth and Jean-Eric have roots in the region, and before they settled in southern Provence, each had a whole career in business that involved traveling, studying, and working all over the world. In Provence, they decided to start Olbia, which features the remarkably fine fruit of the region. Olbia, to my eye, does for southern Provence what our longtime friends at American Spoon have been doing for northern Michigan for over 40 years now: finding the best-quality, tree-ripened, local fruit varieties and then, using traditional methods, converting them into small-batch preserves. Like American Spoon, Olbia’s jams have a fruit content of about 65%, double what commercial brands typically do. Fruits are harvested in the morning, made into jam in small pots a few hours later, and then bottled by the end of the day.
While all of Olbia’s jams are delicious, the apricot one has caught everyone’s attention around here. My good friend Lex Alexander, who’s been working with artisan foods for about 50 years, told me long ago that apricot is the most difficult fruit to make into a great jam. Olbia, though, have figured it out. They use heirloom Bergeron apricots, which make some of the best apricot jam anywhere. Yields of the fruit are small, but the flavor and aroma are beyond amazing. Velvety in texture and as apricotty as eating a dried apricot but with a lovely, spreadable, spoonable texture and a complex, not-too-sweet flavor. One staff member told me she’s pretty sure she could consume the whole jar with a spoon in a single sitting.
As you may have noticed, I’ve had apricots front of mind for most of the last year as I work to advance the idea that apricots are a symbol of dignity and democracy. You can read a short version of the backstory of how I landed on the apricot for this work and a longer version as well. The key came courtesy of Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. She fled her native Donbas region with her husband and young son back when Russia invaded in 2014, a few months after what became known as the Revolution of Dignity. Yakimchuk wrote a line in one of her poems that has stayed with me since I first read it:
Where no more apricots grow, Russia starts.
While I knew immediately that I did not want the autocracy of Russia’s past and present to spread, apricots sounded awesome—beautiful, natural, delicious, and the metaphorical opposite of what Russia has come to represent. Last fall, we worked with Underground Printing here in town to put our wonderful artist Ian Nagy’s illustration of an apricot on t-shirts. We donate the proceeds from shirt sales to Democracy Now! Underground prints shirts and more and more for you to order and then ships them straight to your door. We recently added a couple of great Carhartt jackets to the lineup to help you get through the colder winter months, as well as beanies and baseball hats! I have my newly arrived apricot-embroidered Carhartt jacket draped over the back of the chair behind me as I write. You can buy the Olbia Apricot Jam just for its flavor, for its symbolic significance, or, as I do, for both at the same time. Spread it on a slice of toasted Bakehouse bread, spoon it into a Cultured Butter Croissant, enjoy it with Zingerman’s handmade Cream Cheese, eat it with fresh ricotta, use it to fill blintzes or crepes, put it in a layer cake or in the apricot jam omelet I wrote about last month (scroll on down for the omelet). This jam is just totally delicious. And as you eat and share it, you’ll be spreading (pun not originally intended) the good word about dignity and democracy in a non-political, non-invasive way.
Grab a jar
