Despite problems with county and state fairs struggling to remain solvent in recent years, the old-fashioned practice of entering baked or preserved foods to compete against those of your peers remains popular, and I’m glad to see it.

It’s easy enough to find a wealth of delicious preserves for sale, but home preserving is still a valued skill, and good cooks still enjoy pitting their efforts against one another. Eating those delectable homemade strawberry preserves and fresh whole-grain bread is immensely satisfying, hearing others praise them even more so. But seeing them awarded a ribbon at the fair is pretty gratifying, too.

For that matter, it’s fun to enter even if you don’t win. Just viewing the range of entries is fascinating. There are so many variations on what seem like such simple items.

Preserving is more or less a straightforward process. The results, however, are not. This can be frustrating and fascinating.

There are more variations on simple, ordinary strawberry jam, for example, than you can shake a stick at, even when you exclude all the delicious combinations: strawberry rhubarb jam, strawberry lemon marmalade, strawberry raspberry jam, and so on.

Take just two to four ingredients — strawberries, sugar, lemon juice and pectin — and you’ll still get an astonishing variety. Strawberries and sugar, cooked down; strawberries, sugar and lemon juice, cooked down; jam with pectin, jam with homemade apple pectin — and each will have a slightly, and maybe greatly, different color, flavor and texture.

Why is one jar a clear, glowing red, perfectly studded with rich berries, while one is attractive, but not quite as delicious, and another somewhat muddied, and a fourth separated into sticky pulp and clear jelly? Why has one jelled while another can only be called strawberry syrup?

It’s straightforward the same way bread baking is straightforward. Do this and this and this, and you will — usually — get such and such result, true. And sometimes, that’s all we ask.

But the results, while similar, won’t be identical.

Cooking is an act of chemistry. Fruit variety, age, ripeness and pectin content of the berries and the jam-making method all make a difference.

So does the weather. Plenty of warm sun, and the berries will most likely be sweetly delectable. Too little, and they may be sour. Too much rain and they will taste watery. Hail on green berries may leave little brown spots on the ripened fruit. Fortunately, it’s often possible to make good jam even from less than perfect berries.

The flavor and texture may be slightly different depending on whether you leave the berries whole or halved or mash them, let them macerate in the sugar for several hours or proceed immediately. It also depends on whether you boil them briefly with pectin, simmer them down for hours using only their natural pectin content, or alternate macerating with brief boiling periods, or some other alternative.

All of that adds up to a rather fascinating competition, as well as a potentially maddening and addictive hobby. You could, if you were so inclined, spend weeks studying the making of strawberry jam, only to emerge blinking at the end, with 10,000 jars of jam, and the belated memory that the raspberries are still to come.

And the plums. Oh, and the tart cherries, which make terrific jam, and in October the apples will ripen and apple butter is too lovely to skip. If you’re not careful, you will have to start forcing jam on all your friends, because all of your cupboards are full.
Happy preserving.

Nicole Montesano covers McMinnville city government for the News-Register. She is a vegetarian who likes to eat, cook and garden.