Katharine Lee’s job routinely drives her up a tree, but you will hear no complaints on her part.
The resident of Denver’s Congress Park neighborhood is the proprietor of Modern Gingham Preserves, a small, boutique operation that turns local fruit — much of it foraged — into lip-smacking jams that are sold online and at selected retail outlets.
So being up a tree is literally a regular part of her summer workday.
There she was on a recent July morning, working her way up a sour cherry tree in the backyard of a neighbor who had given her permission to lug over a ladder and bucket to relieve the limbs of the brilliant red fruit.
Lee stood beneath the low-hanging branches burdened with cherries. “These are perfect,” she said. Her voice carried a trace of awe.
Lee started canning at home in 1999, inspired by the farmers markets she frequented while living in Montreal with her husband. Trained in neuroscience — she has a doctorate in the subject — she was teaching at McGill University.
“I was bowled over by the fresh produce at the markets, and how people bought big bags of fruit to take home and put up,” she said.
About 2½ years ago, Lee decided to leave the amateur ranks and turn pro. Her business’ name derives from the old method of putting bright gingham cloth over the mouths of fruit jars to protect the paraffin wax seal, which is no longer used by most canners, Lee included.
She turns out the jars by the hundreds at a commercial kitchen in northeast Denver. She rents space there, sharing the array of kitchens with other boutique vendors and caterers who need access to professional equipment.
But it all begins with the fruit. “A good cherry tree can give you 60 pounds of fruit,” Lee said. “And a few apple trees can give you 200 pounds in a good year.”
The amount of fruit a tree yields in a given year can be hit or miss, depending on such factors as late frosts and blistering temperatures. “Two years ago was a crazy, amazing, beautiful year,” she said. “Last year was a terrible year.”
Lee marvels at the variety of microclimates found in Denver that affect how and when a tree produces. A spot along Josephine Street harbors some dwarf cherries that, surrounded by heat-radiating blacktop, produce fruit as early as mid-June in some years.
Lee has one employee at the commercial kitchen to help with the prepping of the cherries — including pitting them with a vintage, hand-cranked machine that attaches to a countertop — and the boiling-water baths used to process and seal the jars.
Occasionally, her two young sons accompany her on fruit-picking missions. When she spots a likely tree, many of them in residential neighborhoods, she will knock on the owner’s door and ask if they are willing to let her pick. Lee makes a point of giving them a few jars of the finished product in exchange for their largesse.
She has found all manner of fruit trees in her jam-packed travels. She has concocted jams with plums, rhubarb, sweet cherries, apples, quince, currants, pears, white peaches, poblano peppers, raspberries and strawberries. She once stumbled across a kumquat tree.
Sometimes she augments her own picking with commercial fruit, including Granata Farms, Cure Organic Farm and Ollin Farms.
“I’ve done jams with almost every fruit that grows on the Front Range,” she said. “Now I’m looking for blackberries.”
Picking fruit is not easy. It strains the neck and shoulders, and on hot days the shade of the tree provides only so much relief.
“It gives me enormous respect for the people who pick our food,” Lee said. “It’s hard work. People talk about the high price of food but when you think about how labor-intensive it is, someone is getting underpaid.”
On the morning she harvested cherries in a neighbor’s yard, Lee picked about two gallons in 30 minutes. She had yet to step on the ladder. Hands on hips, she surveyed the tree. “Oh my God, I feel like I’ve hardly made a dent,” she said.
That was a Friday. Not long after dawn on Monday, she was at her commercial space converting the fruit into jam.
It was a morning-long session where she was assisted by Juaquin Lopez, who helped her with everything: pitting the fruit, cooking it, meticulously loading the jars and slipping them into 20-jar racks for immersion into a hot-water bath.
When feeding the cherries into a hand-cranked stone pitter, a device that has evolved little from its invention in the 19th century, she used two bowls to make sure all the juice was saved, not just the fruit pulp.
“When you pick fruit yourself, you feel like every component is so precious you don’t want to waste a bit of it,” she said.
Lee generally puts her fruit up in 8-ounce and 4-ounce jars. This year, she introduced a 2-ounce jar for sale as wedding favors and the like. A 32-ounce jar is available for commercial clients. The Curtis Club and Acorn restaurants in Denver use her products.
Stores carrying Modern Gingham jams include BIN 1884 Cheese Bar, Mondo Market and Savory Spice Shops in Denver, Cured in Boulder, Nellybelle General Store in Evergreen, and People’s Market in Wheat Ridge. Lee also sells and ships online at moderngingham.com.
Lee’s jams tend to be a bit juicier than those of national-scale manufacturers you might find in the supermarket aisles. She likes that consistency, since it allows cooks to more easily incorporate her products into sauces and vinaigrettes.
Her jams are also less sweet; she figures she uses 50-70 percent less sugar.
It is a sign of respect for what she has harvested.
“I like my jams to taste like the fruit,” she said. “To me, the fruit you preserve should taste like the fruit you pick.
William Porter: 303-954-1877, wporter@ denverpost.com or twitter.com/williamporterdp
