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In fact, they are both still amazed at their success. They run their gourmet food company the way they cook for each other every night at home. Jim is a short order cook. He’ll see what’s in the fridge and then run out to the market to grab what’s fresh. Jonathan labors over it. He writes out a menu, finds recipes from magazines, and dirties every pot and pan they own. It’s not so much about helping as it is sitting at the kitchen island watching the other cook and tasting what he comes up with. What they consistently come up with for the business venture is a fresh take on New England favorites.

The fragrance from Stonewall Kitchen’s famous Roasted Garlic Onion Jam hits you between the eyes as you open the lid. Its sweet taste with a hint of balsamic vinegar leaves you with a pleasantly surprised look on your face, as it did theirs. It was a complete mistake. Early on in their beach house kitchen, Jim was stirring a pot of roasted garlic barbeque sauce while talking on the phone with his mother. He didn’t pay attention and it reduced too much. With an hour and a half before the farmers market and nothing else to sell, they decided that if they threw sugar and pectin in, it would sort of look like jam and they could at least try and sell it. At New York City’s Fancy Food Show that July, that accident won best jam.

A few years back, both men gave up actually making the jams and started focusing on Stonewall the brand, each in their own way: Jonathan as Creative Director/President and Jim as the self-taught Company Photographer/Vice President. They are nothing if not prolific with wholesale, website, and catalog sales, plus seven east coast stores, all filled to the brim with choices of their tasty wares, as well as English Burleigh Ware ironstone. A casual perusal through the catalog is enough to make your waistline expand two sizes: Coffee Caramel Sauce, White Nectarine Jam, Wild Maine Blueberry Jam, Red Hot Pepper Jam, Fresh Lemon Curd, Wasabi Horseradish Cream Sauce, Pink Grapefruit Marmalade, and a Country Catsup that is so thick and tomatoey it should replace every bottle of Heinz on the planet. In conjunction with Kathy Gunst, former culinary editor of Food & Wine, they’ve written two cookbooks, Stonewall Kitchen Harvest: Celebrating the Bounty of the Seasons and Stonewall Kitchen Favorites: Delicious Recipes to Share with Family and Friends Every Day. On their own they wrote The Stonewall Kitchen Cookbook: Favorite Pantry Recipes. Just last year, they teamed up with Ina Garten to produce the Barefoot Contessa Pantry line of specialty foods based on her top-selling cookbooks. Their flagship store in York houses their kitchen where all the jams are made, offices, and a café restaurant where you can savor a lobster BLT knowing that the buttery bite of Maine lobster dancing in your mouth was delivered by the local high school football coach who owns a lobster company and hires his football team to pick the meat for Stonewall Café.

Jim and Jon didn’t grow up in a kitchen learning generations of secrets from their New England grandmothers. They were both raised in large Massachusetts families, Jon summering in Cape Neddick, Maine with his Irish mom and five siblings at a campground the family still uses, and Jim taking over the family cooking at a young age after growing up on his mother’s Nova Scotia salt cod and liver and onions.

They met through mutual friends at an open mic night at a bohemian coffee house in Portsmouth, began chatting, and at Jonathan’s request started a year-long romance.

“I’m ten years younger than Jim. He was actually my third grade teacher. I’m kidding!” Jonathan says with a laugh that shows just how stubborn he can be about getting what he wants. They marked the date on a calendar and a year later, they moved in together.

After that year together, both had incurred a lot of debt. Jon was working happily in a greenhouse tending his love of horticulture and Jim was waiting tables at night and at printing houses during the day after the 80’s housing market crash ended his construction firm. One day Jon brought to the greenhouse some jams and vinegars that he had made from his garden, and one of his co-workers mentioned an opening at the Portsmouth Seacoast Growers Association Farmers Market. There were only 15 vendors, and usually someone had to get sick or die to get a coveted space. They jumped on it.

They had ten minutes to come up with a name and fill out the forms. Jim recalls that they were sitting at the kitchen table in their Cape Cod beach house. “We jotted down a list of everything we thought of. ‘Jim and Jon’s Jams and Jellies’ was one of the options. We would not be here if we went with that. It was March, and it was snowing, and there was a stone wall right outside the kitchen window. This old stone wall with a little spattering of snow—I thought it would make a great graphic.” They wrote it on the form and in 1991 Stonewall Kitchen was born.

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