I have started processing our apples.
Over the last couple of weeks we have had several donations of apples, amounting in quantity to a small crate. At one time in our lives this would not have been a problem at all, but we have downsized a lot over the last ten years, and now there is the difficulty that I don’t have any really huge pans any more.
At one time I made regular use of a cauldron, and of an enormous pan with a spout, but I don’t have room to store colossal ironmongery now that I am in a modern kitchen, and have to make do with standard sizes.
This slows everything down quite a lot, because I can only boil a couple of gallons of fruit pulp at a time. I think I have got enough to do about eight gallons, which should supply us with jam and chutney and fruit jellies for the next year.
I had time to do two gallons today
I am too lazy to peel apples these days, so I just chopped them and chucked them in the pan, including the cores. When they had boiled I strained the lot through a muslin cloth and left it dripping over the mixing bowl. Tomorrow, if I get time, I can make jelly with the liquid and save the pulp for chutney and jam. I will run it through the liquidiser first, and then add chopped fruit for jam, and onions and chillis for the chutney.
I threw in several jars of bottled fruit that we have discovered in a dark corner of Mark’s shed.
We grew this fruit in France when we lived there. We used to eat a lot of puddings at that time, because of working hard. We ate apple pies and crumbles and cakes and jellies, all served with jugs of thick jersey cream from the tiresome opinionated cow.
Anything we couldn’t eat in its season I bottled for later, which is a complicated process involving burning your fingers more often than is desirable. Obviously I didn’t bottle the cream. I made that into salty butter, or rich ice cream with a dozen yellow eggs at a time.
If we ate anything like those quantities of food now we would quickly become very round indeed, because we don’t do anywhere near as much exercise. We salted hams and made pates with bits of pigs that you don’t want to hear about. We had walnuts and hazel nuts and chestnuts and rabbit, and honey and fresh corn on the cob and asparagus.
When we came back to England we brought our stored food with us, but didn’t use it straight away and so Mark stored it in a box in the shed.
This means that I have got an unexpected cache of cherries and peaches and pears and apricots as well as the donated apples, so I am mixing it all together and we will have Novelty Chutney.
It has all survived, even though it is ten years old, and is as sweet and sharp as the day I first fought the hornets for it all.
We did have hornets at our French house. In fact we had a nest of them in the gap between our bedroom ceiling and the loft floor. Mark climbed a ladder and killed them all one hot summer, when we started to get frightened for the children. I was stung by one that I had not been expecting to find inside the pear I had just picked, and I can tell you that it hurt a jolly lot. I had to sleep with my hand in a bowl of cold water.
It is nice to have rediscovered our stores, like coming across forgotten treasure. There is not a lot left, but there is sweet corn, bottled minutes after picking, which is how it is best, and chestnuts which we might have for Christmas. Then of course there is the fruit, and thrown in a pan with a crate full of apples it will make splendid jam for next year.
The picture is the crate of apples after I had taken enough out for today’s activities. Those are for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
