Ooh, this sounds fun. I make an unreasonable amount of jam and jelly like things that I just cannot consume on my own, and I have a source of tiny jars. My mum and me might collaborate, she taught me to love cooking.
I am currently making plum wine, because plum jam, plum chilli sauce, plum pie, plum everything did not reduce the amount of plums.
You are a prisoner in a room with 2 jars of jam and 2 guards. One of the jars is cherry marmalade; the other contains blueberry jam – you don’t know which is which, but the guards do know.
One of the guards always tells the truth and the other always lies. You don’t know which one is the truth-teller or the liar either. However both guards know each other.
You have to choose one of the jars, but you can only ask a single question to one of the guards.
What do you ask to find jam you want?
Once you open them, sure, but when I paid the Large Sum of Money, I have no idea what I’ll be getting. And once I open a door… well, it’s jam. Of course I’m going to eat it!
I agree! Roll with it and make it a fun thing.
A jam roll? I thought it was a jelly roll? Ah but then we have the test: it must be jam cause jelly don’t shake like that.
My brain exploded.
My brain doesn’t want to work this out yet in the morning, but this is one of those ones where you ask a guard what the other guard would say and deduce logically from there, isn’t it?
That’s … far-fetched.
A more realistic scenario would be a jam fountain where the hero is given a 3 gallon bucket and a five gallon pail and there’s some kind of time sensitive reason he needs to measure exactly 4 gallons of jam. Only then is the type of jam revealed.
You could label them with made up names like Vietnamese Yakberry and ask people what they tasted like.
You have a fox, a duck and two jars of jam and you have to cross a river in a small boat that will only carry you, one animal and one jar…
Okay, so you eat one jar of jam before you set out…
This is a trick question, since neither foxes nor ducks have opposable thumbs.
There’s no way the color thing is going to work. Depending on cultivar, ripeness, oxidation, differences in how much you heated them while canning, etc the color could be anything. There’s no one inherent exact color for “cherries” or “blueberries.”
If it’s that important that you know the flavor of what you’re gifting, either open them and let the recipient know to use them immediately, or make a pastry dish with the jam.
True, but all the cherr might be one color and all the blueberry could be another color. All we need to do is be able to separate the pile into two batches. The OP already said they were able to identify a couple of jars with citrus peel, so we have a known jar or two of the Blueberry Marmalade that we can use for our sorting. This is, of course, assuming all the jars for each flavor came from a single batch of that preserve and that the canning process was reasonable similar.
But if they’re that close visually, then it’s going to be tough. The only thing I could think of is if something glows under blacklight in one preserve vs the other, but I can’t find anything suggesting this would be the case.
OP, it would be helpful to us if you left the cherry pits in the jam next time.
I imagine an optical spectrometer would find sufficient differences to be able to differentiate the two, but trying to do makeshift spectrometry with software using digital photos as the input is probably going to be less effective than the human eye and a bright light source.
You are in a room with two jars of jam, both labeled “BLUEBERRY JAM.” You point to one of the jars and say, “Either this jar contains blueberry jam, or the other jar contains cherry marmalade.” In fact, unbeknownst to you, both jars contain cherry marmalade. Did you have knowledge of the truth of your statement?
I made a pie like that once! It taught me not to be lazy and freeze cherries before putting them (or to label them clearly). It sure did look nice, though, with all those plump round cherries!
I look at that trick as installing speed bumps to prevent gobbling. Very clever of you!
Homemade anything is meant to be savored slowly and respectfully, not chomp-swallowed as a starving hound might eat.
Cherry clafoutis is sometimes (often? usually? traditionally?) made with unpitted cherries.
You could just label it: Anny_M’s Delicious Fruit Preserve