Season of blackberries, apples and mellow fruitfulness

It’s been quite a year for blackberries.  Fine juicy berries tumble from every bramble bush, staining our clothes and ruining our shoes.  Even if, like me, you work on the principle of eating one berry for every two you collect for the pot, you’ll soon have more than you can realistically deal with.

Then there are apples.  Kind friends have given us fruits carefully picked from their trees, but we consider these too fine to mix with other ingredients.  When we have jellies and compotes to make, we prefer to rescue windfalls from back lanes in the village, cut away the bruises and discard the insecty bits.

This year, we have two best uses for blackberries, and for apples too.

This is a blackberry bakewell tart.  The recipe is from the wonderful Mrs. Portly, and her recipe called for raspberries.  I used blackberries instead, and my greedy family demolished the lot in a single sitting.

Blackberry bakewell slice – just out of the oven.

Much of the rest of our harvest has been used for blackberry and apple jelly.  We no longer eat jam, but the intense flavour, and rich ruby colouring of this jelly  is pure essence of blackberry, and a souvenir of late summer days in the dreary dark days of winter.  It’s really worth making a few pots.

Take equal quantities of blackberries and apples.  Roughly chop the apples, which you needn’t core or peel, and place in a pan, barely covering the fruit with water.  Bring to a simmer till the apple softens and the juices run from the berries: 10 – 15 minutes.

 

Strain the juices through a jelly bag, or through a muslin-lined sieve for several hours.  Measure the juice.  Although I usually cook in metric, at this point, I go all avoirdupois, and work exclusively in pounds and ounces and pints.  It just seems to work better for me.

 

Straining off the juices….
…which then simmer in the pan.

Return the extract to the pan with the juice of a lemon, and for every pint of juice, add a pound of granulated sugar.  Stir till the sugar has dissolved and boil rapidly till a ‘jell’ is obtained on testing. If you’re new to making jelly or jam, this article is helpful.

Our blackberry jelly will taste all the better because we had help from grandson William, aged two. He gathered berries, and hunted for windfalls.  He’s a London child, and his parents were keen for him to help with any job not available to him in a city park.

 

William goes blackberrying ….
… and hunting for windfalls.

His parents have taken a pot of jelly back to London as a souvenir, of course.

Author: margaret21

I'm retired and live in North Yorkshire, where I walk , write, volunteer and travel as often as I can.

24 thoughts on “Season of blackberries, apples and mellow fruitfulness”

  1. Blackberry and apple jelly is so good! I love the fact that (apart from the sugar, time and clothes laundering) it’s free. Thanks for the mention, I’m delighted the family enjoyed the tart so much. All the best, Linda, aka Mrs P.

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  2. All looks very tasty and it’s so good to read that you can still wander the lanes and pick blackberries without someone running after you and informing you that it’s not permitted.

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  3. We have so many blackberries in our freezer that I think a blackberry Bakewell slice will indeed be necessary 🙂 I’ve taken note of the recipe.

    We make a similar preserve called hedgerow jelly (from the River Cottage handbook, I believe); it has a base of crab apples and you add whatever hedgerow fruits you have about: blackberries, sloes, elderberries, etc.

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    1. Oh, we used to have a crab apple tree. It pains me to see them in other people’s gardens, the fruit unpicked sand finally rotting as windfalls at the onset of winter. Yes, I’ve made hedgerow jelly in the past too. But blackberry still come out top!

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  7. This is such a wonderfully autumnal post! No blackberries picked here. We had our hedges cut a few weeks ago and all the fruit disappeared. It wasn’t worth much as we’ve had quite a dry year and the berries were scrawny but I expect the birds and other wildlife would have benefited from it.

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    1. Really? Most people I know – not just locals – have found this to be a particularly good year. Ours came later than most, but there’s more than enough to go round. Poor you!

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  9. All of that looks delicious! Growing up, our family often went to local farms to harvest fruit to take home, where we cooked and baked them. We made jam. I’ve never made jelly. Today, I buy it in a jar.

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    1. Well, if you ever feel in the mood, jelly is a lot quicker than jam to make. Apart from waiting for the juice to drop out of the jelly bag that is!

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