Locals prepare for El Paso County Fair

On a Sunday in late June, John Elam strode into his garden in Black Forest, gallon bucket in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other. He approached his rhubarb plants, whose crunchy pink stalks and rubbery green leaves rose three feet in the air, thriving in the hot summer sun.

He was ready to harvest.

“You’re crossing into a new world,” he said.

This particular Sunday was rhubarb jelly making day, an annual summer ritual for the 66-year-old Elam, since he moved to Black Forest in 1991. Elam harvests his rhubarb plants, then often spends hours over the stove transforming them into four sweet delicacies — three types of rhubarb jelly and a rhubarb conserve.

And Elam is a champion — for the past three or four years, his jellies have won first or second prize at the El Paso County Fair (his titles stretch back further than he can remember, and the county fair was unable to provide records). In 2009, his conserve took first place at the Colorado State Fair in Pueblo.

Elam plans to enter his jellies in the county fair this year, which begins Saturday. (Click here for a fair schedule). If he wins the “miscellaneous preserves” division again, he can take his goods to the state fair in late August.

When they bought their house, Elam and his wife, Virginia, found 80 rhubarb plants on the property. In his native Houston, Elam grew up with his grandfather’s rhubarb plants, and acquired a taste for the surprisingly bitter, celery-like plant.

“When I was a kid down on Grandpa’s farm — down in Texas — we’d go down there, grab some (rhubarb), and take it up to the house,” Elam recalled. “Grandma would give us a bowl of sugar, that was snack.”

While dipping a raw stalk of rhubarb in sugar is a good way to sweeten the sour taste, for his jellies, Elam boils eight cups of freshly chopped rhubarb with nearly 7 1/2 cups of sugar. By now, Elam has perfected his jelly-making routine. After harvesting the rhubarb and running it through a food processor, Elam dumped the stalks into a pot filled with sugar. As the rhubarb cooks, the sugar draws out the rhubarb juice, and after a while it turns to a thick liquid.

“Ok, we have to get this to a roaring boil,” he explained.  To prevent the hot sugar from damaging his glass-topped stove, Elam set the pot to boil on an outdoor gas-burner attached to his grill. “I’d rather do this in the house, but if I get this on my wife’s stove top, she’ll kill me,” he joked.

Elam likes to keep busy. As a kid, he ran a lawn-mowing business, and went on to spend 20 years in the military, six as a flight mechanic in Vietnam. In 1983, Elam became a local postman. After 21 years, he retired to become a home-chef, expert wood-worker and handyman.

“When he retired, he pretty much took over,” said Virginia Elam, who was born and raised in the Springs. John Elam swiftly claimed the kitchen from his wife who, he said, is an excellent pie-baker.

When his kitchen began to feel too small for his growing repertoire, Elam remodeled and expanded it.  To his chagrin, his wife wouldn’t let him put in a gas stove, because she dislikes the smell. “That’s just one of the fantasies I have in life — a gas stove.” Elam does wood-working in his studio, where he displays some shelves and toys that also won prizes at the county fair.

Elam inherited his mother’s treasured cookbook, the Woman’s Home Companion from 1944, a worn tome that he has pieced together with duct tape. His mother also passed on some valuable advice to her only son: “‘Boy, you wanna eat, you best stay in the kitchen and learn how to cook,’” Elam recalled his mother telling him.  “‘You don’t know if you’re gonna marry a woman who can’t boil water.’”

As Elam stirred the bubbling pot of sugar and rhubarb, he talked about his zucchini plants, which he cooks with butter and garlic and puts on a salad, and he raved about a collard green recipe with peas. “These are all homemade recipes. This ain’t something that comes out of no cook book,” he said.

One of his best meals, he said, are grilled pork chops, which he marinates in his homemade plum preserves. “Now, that’s good eating,” he laughed. “That’s a one-skillet meal.”

Elam has perfected his jellies through trial and error. Each year at the county fair he learns more about what the judges expect.

“The first time, we were somewhat demoralized by the thrashing we took from the judge,” he recalled. “It’s opening the jar, and seeing how it tastes, but there are a whole lot of other things that go into it besides that.”

El Paso County Fair judges require that all jelly products be labeled properly, with the contestant’s name, the method they used to jar (Elam uses the “hot bath” method), and the altitude at which the products were jarred. “The judges at the fair are pretty strict. You can’t blow no smoke up ‘em,” Elam said. Nothing gets past the judges — even things like an undesirable sticky jar rim.

After Elam put the boiled sugar-rhubarb mixture into sterilized jars, he carefully wiped off the rims to make sure that each would be spotless when opened at the fair.

Elam likes all of his jellies — strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry-rhubarb, and plain rhubarb — equally well. But: “I’m really partial to that conserve.” Elam found the conserve recipe in his mother’s cookbook — he has the page memorized, 882, and follows it exactly. A conserve, he explained, is a jelly mixed with walnuts or pecans that often contains pineapple, lemon juice and orange juice.

Conserve competition at the county fair can be fierce, Elam said. “It’s not just rhubarb you are up against, it’s all types of conserve. I don’t know the competition and I don’t want to know them.”

At the end of the jelly-making process, Elam is often left with a heap of unused rhubarb, but he never lets it go to waste. Elam also makes what he calls “a mean rhubarb wine,” which he lets ferment for four months in a multi-gallon bucket in his kitchen. He still has a bottle from 1992. “That stuff from 1992 will knock your shorts off,” he said. And the pile of rhubarb left from his June harvest?

“I hope I can turn this into candy,” he said.