Hedge jelly

Summer’s coming to an end, which means lots of good things in the garden :-) So, yesterday, we used the first crab apples from our new little tree (two years old now) to make hedge jelly. This is a nice little recipe that we found in Bob Flowerdew’s Complete Fruit Book. What’s especially nice is that it emphasises foraging for the ingredients.

You need:
1 quantity elderberries
2 quantities crab apples
4 quantities haws (the berries of the hawthorn)
(Anne gathered about 700g haws, so we based our recipe on that amount.)

Wash the fruit, removing elderberries from their twigs with a fork, removing twigs from haws and chopping crab apples. Place all in a pan and just cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer until soft (we left them for a couple of hours). Strain off the juice. “Proper” cookbooks will tell you not to squeeze the fruit but that’s for the purists. It gets you the clearest jelly but loses more of the fruit. Once the juice has strained, weight it and add the same amount of sugar (we had 920g juice so added 920g sugar). Bring it back to the boil and boil until it sets (I like a temperature of about 104 degrees C, which gives a nice soft jelly), then pour into clean, sterile jars. We got over 4 pounds of jelly from this quantity – a small but worthwhile amount, and really quite quick to make!

Added to the glutney we made last week, we’re well under way. And our pear tree still has a huge crop on it – plenty of pear jams this year!

pax et bonum

Article posted at 09:13am on 07 September 2006
Category: Food, Life, General