Perhaps you remember my whining about a French recipe filled with numbers and measurements I didn’t understand. The hilarity continued when I couldn’t get the tomato jam to gel no matter what I did. Minstrel Boy offered suggestion after suggestion, but nothing worked until I dumped envelopes of unflavored gelatin into the tomato goo, turning the goo into sweet aspic. You would not believe how tasty that is melted over meat, but it isn’t tomato jam.

Anyoo, turns out in the last year I learned enough to not only read the French recipe, I learned how to read between the lines. Recipes are often missing steps. That’s not supposed to happen, but it does. In the case of the French recipe, the cook was skillful enough to make a good jam, but not a good enough writer to put down every step. In this case, the missing step involved the food mill. Nothing mysterious about it: using the food mill in the way it’s customarily used. In the meantime, the syrup caramelized and the jam thickened. Look at these pretty jars!

The technique was so successful I tried it with tomatillos, reconstituted dried orange peel and ras el-Hanout.