Last weekend I was lucky enough to find a new internet friend who was offering spare fruit from his garden trees. He turned out to have a garden full of damson, greengage, apple and fruit trees, not to mention some rather luscious blackberries.
I had hoped to pick a bag of greengages that myself and the Curse could gorge on, but it turned out there weren't many gages left. Instead I picked a kilo of damsons and about a pound of blackberries, and brought them home to process.
The blackberries are now blackberry vinegar (using this recipe) and the damsons have been made into a slightly runny spiced damson jelly.
I used the basic jelly recipe in Pam Corbin's River Cottage Preserves book, and added a chunk of cinnamon stick, some cloves and some allspice to the damsons and water as I cooked them up.
After straining through muslin overnight, I boiled up the liquid with some sugar until it was starting to set, then put it into jars. It's still not very well set but that's fine as I will probably use it mainly to add to gravy and other sauces.
1 comment:
That sounds really good! We've had to content ourselves with chilli jelly this year as our little damson tree hasn't produced any fruit - some years we get a bumper crop, so I think it mustn't have liked this year's weather.
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