jelly glass two-step

I bought a piece of nostalgia -- and I did not even know it.

Last week, I went to my favorite grocery (Hawaii) to replenish my supply of Smucker's cherry jam. Alex had none. In fact, the Smucker's shelf was empty. But he did have a couple of jars of strawberry preserves from Braswell's -- a company I had not heard of.

What interested me was the fact that it was a jar of preserves. We do not find preserves here very often. There are lots of jellies and a few jams, but preserves are as rare as Miracle Whip.

Last night I opened the jar to use in a dish I was preparing. It was not until then that I then noticed the next line on the label. "Preserved in Collectible Drinkware."

I had just purchased a jelly glass. And, just like Proust's madeleine, I was back in my mother's kitchen making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with Wonder Bread and Welch's grape jelly to be consumed in front of our 10-inch television while watching "The Flintstones" or "Howdy Doody."

Anyone who lived through the 1950s will remember kitchen cupboards stuffed with drinking glasses decorated with cartoon figures -- glasses that had once been filled with jelly. In our house, that would have been Welch's.

For some odd yet-discovered economic reason, those cheaply-purchased glasses survived more kid's parties and moving house than did the better glasses. Maybe it is a corollary of Gresham's Law.

But I never thought I would see the tradition revived here in Mexico.

As you can see, though, Braswell's has not started a retro attempt to mine our nostalgia. The glasses from Welch's looked like something you would use for a tall glass of cold milk as an accompaniment to your sandwich.

The Braswell's glass looks like something a Faulknerian grandpa would use on his front porch to down a bottle of Bourbon before writing all of his ne'er-do-well relatives out of his will. The Welch's glasses were Clarabelle the clown. This new one is as dark as a play by Tennessee Williams.

Of course, I did not buy the jar for its after-life utility. I bought it for its contents. And, I was looking forward to eating the chunky strawberry preserves inside.

Imagine my surprise when I spooned out the first portion. The contents were so smooth and stuffed with pectin that it would not have even made a decent Hostess Fruit Pie -- another treat of my youth.

The taste was OK. Not too sweet. And it was not encumbered with more than a hint of strawberry taste.

What was most disappointing is that this was a jar of strawberry jelly, not strawberry preserves. I thought this peculiarity might be some sort of regional difference. Maybe it had been manufactured in a country where the distinction between jelly and jam and preserves does not exist.

I was wrong. It was made in Georgia. In the South -- the very heartland of home-cooking where food definitions are held closer to the bosom than a glass of moonshine in a Braswell's jelly jar.

Am I unhappy with my purchase? No. The jelly is a disappointment, but I will find uses for it. What I will have, though, is a nostalgia key to another era when no one would think it improper to drink out of a glass just because it had once served another purpose.

We were free-market recyclers even before we knew the term.