Relishing the past

Photos by Donna Campbell

The company started in the forties, but my first taste of Braswell’s Preserves came at my grandmother Stella’s red Formica table in the 1960s in Atlanta. In early summer, the low-slung morning sun would pour through the pines in the front yard and enter the kitchen at eye level through the bank of windows over her enamel sink and drainboard. The pale yellow walls glowed with the promise of breakfast.

Most days Stella had already started a pot of beans or greens to boil in the stove’s deep well for lunch. Only then did slim slices of bacon for me and thick, streak-o-lean for my grandfather begin hissing and popping in the iron skillet. Stella tended to burn the bacon, but her scrambled eggs were perfect.

Braswell Pear Preserves, set out to accompany the Sunbeam bread that was already in the toaster, would also glow on the table when the sun struck it. Grandaddy, ready in his work pants and gardening shirt, would saucer and blow on his first cup of coffee, too hot from the stovetop percolator.

Braswell’s was a taste I never forgot. Recently on book tour in Georgia, Donna Campbell and I got close enough to company headquarters in downtown Statesboro, Georgia, to pay a visit. A personable young woman named Claire greeted us in the modest lobby of the sprawling plant that’s only a couple of blocks from the center of town and about 55 miles northwest of Savannah.

Claire directs incoming calls and recommends her favorite flavors to walk-in visitors who must immediately contend with racks and racks of distinctive glass jars that hold jellies, jams, and preserves along with newer products including fruit butters, marmalades, mustards, relishes, salad dressings, seafood and steak sauces, “Good and Evil Pickles,” and artisan honeys. The display fills the lobby and extends into an adjacent room. We took our time filling two cardboard boxes of jars to take home and sample.

Statesboro is also not far from Vidalia, Georgia, home of the state’s signature sweet onion. It was late March and we’d observed them, row upon row, the dark green stalks rising from white bulb clusters that seemed to hover on the raised soil.

Blueberries are also big in Georgia these days, a crop now more prodigious than peaches by far, and the bushes on the blueberry farms we passed were just beginning to show some pink at their twiggy tips. Braswell’s sources as much product locally as possible, including blueberries from Alma, Georgia. They are also the number one seller of pepper jelly in the country.

In 1946 a young G.I. named Albert Braswell came home after World War II and started his business in the family kitchen with local pears and his mother’s recipe for preserves. Soon an army buddy in California sent Albert a shipment of white Kadota figs, and before long he was selling jars of pears and fig preserves from the back of his truck.

When I opened the Braswell’s fig preserves back home in North Carolina, they smelled exactly as I remembered from childhood, but now I recognized the scent as something reminiscent of downtown Durham in the 1980s--the unmistakable sweet molasses scent of cured tobacco. I know it sounds strange, but that’s the closest description I can muster. There were no pear preserves to bring home from Braswell’s. They had been out of stock for well over a year, Claire said, but they promised there would be more later in the season.

Left: The pop top on the fancy packaging features a small, peel back label that says “Pull to open.” Underneath, a small hole drilled in the metal top opens the airtight seal on the preserves allowing the cap to be released easily without using an opener. Right: Cherry Berry on an English muffin.

Today the A.M. Braswell Jr. Food Company, Inc., manufactures some 500 different SKUs--short for Stock Keeping Units—with each product line marked with its own distinctive barcode. Made in small batches and packed in reusable glass, Braswell’s products sometimes carry other brand names in what is known in the trade as “a white label”—products made for other brokers and retail companies. As we pondered so many choices on the lobby shelves, Claire called our attention to her new favorite, “Cherry Berry Preserves,” made from tart Montmorency cherries and “perfectly ripe strawberries,” as the label explains.

Claire and Jonathan in the lobby of Braswell’s plant

Claire’s co-worker Jonathan Childree from sales soon emerged from the back of the plant to greet us. His favorite, he told us straightaway, is the artichoke relish, which is a staple at his family’s table. “When I was growing up, if you sat down to Sunday dinner and there were no blackeyed peas and rice with artichoke relish on top, something was wrong,” he said. When Jonathan’s grandmother passed away several years back, and they cleaned out the pantry in her house, the family found jars of Braswell’s from the 1970s stowed away just in case. (This signature relish is made from Jerusalem artichokes, easily grown in the South.)

One of Braswell’s most notable features has always been their packaging. The company took the idea of reusable jars far beyond the industry standard. As far back as the 1920s, larger food producers began offering spreadable products in glass jars that could eventually become juice glasses. It was a marketing gambit that added value and drew extra attention to the products on the grocery shelf. Kraft, for example, was known for a time for its large, decoratively painted tumblers that could double as collectible drinking glasses. (In the 1960s, my grandmother Stella sometimes served me and my cousins apple or orange juice out of Flintstone glasses that had once held Welch’s grape jelly.)

Braswell’s Old Fashioned glasses

For some years, however, Braswell’s has been offering more sophisticated glassware made from proprietary molds. We bought Sweet Potato Butter and Meyer Lemon Blood Orange Pepper Jelly in the company’s trademark Old Fashioned glassware, which is heavy-bottomed and features an elegant swirl that imitates cut crystal. (The glass would not look out of place on a silver tray next to a decanter of brown spirits.)

Preserves, including the traditional fig—still made with white Kadotas—and the new Balsamic Sweet Onion Jam come in taller, 15 ounce highball glasses with a heavy bottom and the same signature swirl around the glass. Smaller quantities of some preserves come in footed glassware that suggests a short wine goblet, while Braswell’s salad dressings come in reusable carafes. The company was Earth friendly before the concept was so named. Jonathan explained that the glass company making their wares has recently ceased production, so they are evolving into new packaging.

The wine goblet glasses

What we had ultimately come for however was the memory associated with certain tastes, and Braswell’s does not disappoint. Their Vidalia Onion® Summer Tomato Dressing has the closest flavor to the compote Stella made and canned herself from my grandfather’s tomato crop. The Vidalia Onion® Peppercorn Dressing is, to my taste, the best cole slaw dressing off any grocery shelf—naturally sweet with the tiny crunch of poppyseed in every mouthful. And there are so many newer products to try—a Cherry Balsamic Grilling Sauce, a Miso Sesame Scallion Vinaigrette, Red Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette, and a whole collection of seafood sauces.

The company is now run by a team of four—Vinny, Andy, Stuart, and Frank, the stepson of the founder, Mr. Albert. The company is “one of the largest producers of specialty preserves, dressings, and condiments,” says their catalog. The back cover of this sales piece confidently pictures their reusable carafes filled with summer flowers in water and jelly glasses filled only with water—all waiting atop an antique table set with two mismatched chairs and ready for diners to bring their meal to share on a rustic dock by a lake.

That image is just right: old meets new in happy combinations at Braswell’s. I can’t wait to try the Truffle Mustard, the Mango Salsa for Flounder, and the Cranberry Bourbon Jalapeno Jam that’s still in the box we brought back to North Carolina.  Obviously, Braswell’s canvas and palette of flavors have been expanded dramatically. The jar of Cherry Berry from Statesboro is already down to the last spoonful in the fridge.

For more on Braswell’s visit: www.braswells.com

Food Pilgrim Georgann Eubanks’s book, The Month of Their Ripening: North Carolina Heritage Foods Through the Year, is out in paperback from UNC Press along with her newest, Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction. For more information or a signed copy, visit wild south.net