Fake 38

Some packaged food makes a virtue of how new it is, while some makes a virtue of how old it is, how it is just like your Mum used to make when you were a child. With my Mum being one who, as it happens, made a good deal of jam over the years.

So this jam, from Tesco's, is in the latter camp, pretending to be very 'Olde Worlde', going so far as to imitate the 'Bonne Maman' jam pots from France, the ones with the fake checkered cloth caps. The brand last noticed five years ago at reference 1.

But rather than a fake check we have a fake woodcut. A fake made by the artist doing a line drawing on his computer, after the fashion of a woodcut, the sort of thing that was commonly used to decorate books and magazines in the 1930's, and then getting it transferred from the computer to the lid of a pot of jam. No wood cutting involved anywhere along the line. But the fake serves to enhance the impression of old, playing to the carefully fostered illusion that old is good.

Which in the case of jam might be true, with the stuff we ate as a child being far superior to what is readily obtainable from supermarkets now, mainly because we put in a lot more fruit to the square inch, as it were. But we did not go to the bother of cutting out bits of checkered cloth for the lids, settling for pre-cut clear plastic discs from the kitchen department of one of the local department stores.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-rocks-of-rochester.html.

Reference 2: http://www.bonnemaman.co.uk/products. Chequering clearly visible.