The French Garden Blog

WE’RE JAMMIN’

It’s that time of year. The blog has taken second place, our fingers are stained purple, we are scratched to the elbows and the stock of jam jars is beginning to look thin. We are making jam, jelly, fruit vinegar and freezing the rest. What do you do with so much fruit when it all arrives at once?

The first of the glut this year (it does vary) are the red currants. I think I dealt with them fairly smoothly and made about 10 kilos of redcurrant jelly. This is one of the absolute annual staples in our household and has to be made every year. We grow a variety of redcurrant called Jonkeer Van Tets. It is very hardy, beautiful to look at and is extremely easy to reproduce from cuttings.  Years ago when we had our fruit farm we grew a hedge of Jonkeer Van Tets from prunings taken in the winter. The currants hanging in their little bunches look like extravagant ear-rings. We bought a couple of plants when we moved here and now have  about 8. Red currants do well in our soil and climate, but not as well as the white currants (yet to be harvested). They also make a fab jelly – not as red as redcurrant, but a lovely sort of dark rose colour. This year, however, I am going to make a Nigel Slater style fruit compote with them and freeze it.
Second up were the strawberries – we haven’t got very many as we thinned our plants dramatically last winter, giving a lot of runners to friends and planting those we kept in a new bed. The original parent plants were dispatched to the compost heap. Plants only tend to last about three years before needing to be re-juvenated.  From May onwards we get a steady stream of strawberries to add to salads, eat with cereal for breakfast or, quite simply, eat. I have frozen some to make ice cream with later in the year but have made no jam this year.

Next we have had cherries – slower to ripen than I expected and not a brilliant crop in 2012. These are frozen in ‘Cherry and Berry Compote’ (a handy home invention which is very forgiving as to what you can put into it) and made into fruit vinegar. We also froze some whole cherries but did not bottle any this year. There weren’t really enough of sufficient quality. Bottling always makes me nervous and I restrict it to a small range of fruit – I include tomatoes in this definition – because vegetables proper do not have enough acidity in them to make it a foolproof process in my view.

Then the gooseberries and blackcurrants. They have been exceptional. We grow Wellington XXX blackcurrants and they have been best ever – I think because of the rain we have had – and Whinhams Industry gooseberries. These turn a beautiful dark red and are sweet. They both make superb jam and set really easily. I have also made cassis and blackcurrant vinegar. Fruit vinegars are excellent as a salad dressing with Cherry being my favourite. Blackcurrant is an experiment this year and already I have left it to macerate too long so goodness knows how it will turn out. And, of course, gooseberries and blackcurrants both go in the Cherry and Berry Compote.

Plums are now on the horizon…..we grow mirabelles and prune d’ente the fabulous plum which makes the prunes Lot et Garonne is world famous for. We are also about to get our first ever crop of greengages (Reine Claude). Plus nectarines, apricots – but no peaches, we never succeed with these. After that figs, pears,apples, crab apples…then the nuts. And I haven’t started with vegetables. Blogging is an endangered sport at the moment. There simply isn’t time.

RECIPE FOR FRUIT VINEGAR:

Macerate one pound of fruit (cherries, raspberries, blackcurrants (?) etc) in one pint of white wine vinegar. Leave in a glass or china bowl, covered with a cloth, for 3 – 5 days, stirring regularly. Then strain through muslin and add 8 oz of sugar to every pint of the resulting liquid. Bring to the boil slowly, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Boil for 10 minutes then pour into a sterilized hot bottle and seal. I find it keeps all year.