Whether they make it themselves or just enjoy it with breakfast, people can be passionate about their favourite jam, jelly or marmalade.

Award-winning jam-maker Sarah B. Hood looks at the history of these sweet treats from simple fruit preserves to staple commodities, gifts for royalty, global brands, wartime comforts and valued delicacies. She traces connections between sweet preserves and the Temperance movement, the Crusades, the prevention of scurvy, medieval banquets, Georgian dinner parties, Scottish breakfasts, Joan of Arc and the adoption of tea-drinking in Europe. She explores the birth of unique local specialties and treasured regional customs, the rise and fall of international marmalade mavens, the mobilisation of volunteer preserve-makers on a grand scale and a jam-factory revolution.