Why Honey?

“The blossom has two fruits” phrase started floating around my head in 2012. I was deep in product development for what would become V Smiley Preserves and searching for a way to explain the connection between fruit growing and honey production.

V Smiley Preserves is a pure expression of fruit production, honeybee life and honey harvest. Nothing explains the link between fruit preserves and honeybees like an afternoon in 2012, standing in the Tonnemaker Family Orchard in Royal City, Washington, Aprium trees flush with blooms. The only sound in the orchard was honeybees, millions of them, working the fruit blossoms. Just a few months later, I picked up boxes of those apriums from Tonnemaker’s stand in Seattle and combined them with strawberries and blackberry honey from the previous blackberry season.

In Washington, where so many berries are grown in the Skagit Valley just north of Seattle, blackberry honey became the primary honey with which I cooked and preserved. Blackberry honey has a fruity, sweet, almost sugary flavor and tasted a long way away from the classic honey flavor that comes from honeybees interacting primarily with clover blossoms. I didn’t want that clover flavor because at the time I was still in the process of shaking free from this idea that honey is “too strong a flavor for preserves”. That’s an idea you read over and over in most preserving books and while I was 90% ready to defy the jam book authors and teachers, I still felt a responsibility to find a honey that was as local and neutral tasting as I could so that the fruit remained the star of the preserve.

My expectations for honey had to change when I moved V Smiley Preserves to Vermont. Here, there is almost no single-varietal or single-source honey (ie, no alfalfa honey or japanese knotweed honey). Instead, it’s “wildflower honey”. There is one, occasionally two, extractions a year and the extracted honey varies wildly year to year in both quantity and taste, all depending on environmental factors. One year is dry and the bee forage lean as flowers bloom and wither fast. Deep rooted alfalfa and japanese knotweed, which is planted along river banks here, can sometimes come through and provide enough forage for a decent crop during a dry year. Clover, Basswood, and Goldenrod figure prominently in Vermont honey.

From 2016-2020 I purchased treatment free honey from Kirk Webster. It was an honor to work with this honey. Kirk is well known and it was a point of pride to make preserves sweetened with his honey. In 2020, his honey harvest was tiny, not nearly enough to make it through til August 2021. And the price went up for the second time in two years. Together, these factors meant V Smiley Preserves had to find a new honey supplier.

I make jam with honey because I love its taste. Honey is under-represented in preserves. In cookbooks, we read that honey disrupts jam’s clarity of flavor or that honey is a flavor usable like a spice. Here’s the thing. Sugar has a taste too, but it’s a taste we’re so used to that we don’t notice its flavor anymore. Honey is a powerful preservative and sweetener that comes from near-by and is intrinsically linked to the fruit-growing process. Conceptually, I like that as a pollinator the honeybee provides everything we need to make fruit preserves.

This dreamy concept of fruit and aromatics grown nearby and then preserved with honey from down the road reached the apex of its potential when V Smiley Preserves moved to Vermont and I started working with Kirk Webster’s honey. This year, forced to find a new honey supplier, I was adamant that our main honey supply continue coming from Vermont, Vermont fields and Vermont bees. French Hill Apiaries is a 100% Vermont based apiary. The bees do not travel up and down the Northeast coast, which is the case for most large scale operations. The world of beekeeping is wildly complex. I love that V Smiley Preserves gets to live on the periphery of this agri-culture, making food with Vermont fruit and Vermont honey.