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"Here is a pleasant 'refresher', specially suitable for the young after lawn tennis or sports on hot days, but acceptable also to their elders when exhausted by church, depressed by gardening, or exasperated by shopping."
"Take one pound of raspberries¹ to every pint best white vinegar². Let it stand for a fortnight in a covered jar in a cool larder. Then strain without pressure, and to every pint add 12 ounces white sugar³. Boil ten minutes, let cool and bottle in nice medium-sized bottles saved perhaps from some present of foreign liquers."
"A teaspoonful stirred into a tumbler of water with a lump of ice, or introduced to a very cold syphon will taste like the elixir of life on a hot day, and is as pretty as it is pleasant."
Recipe from "Kitchen Essays" by Lady Agnes Jekyll, 1922 (subsequent reprints, Persephone Classics)
¹
one pound = 450(ish) grams
²
one pint (imperial) = roughly half a litre (0.568 ml)
³
12 ounces = 340 grams
What's all this then? Well, it started with my latest acquisition...
My blackberries, eight days ago, and now:
Grow my pretties, grow! Grow like the invasive weed that you are!
See the little green dot? That's a drupelet, the first of the many individual fruits that make up a blackberry! This is my secret blackberry bush, located on Tracy Island, next to the paddock where Shergar is presently grazing. There are drupelets all over the bush so it's been well pollinated. I'll be swimming in blackberrys soon and I have a few things I want to make, such as cordial and jam, and maybe some special treats. Birds love them too so I'll be covering it up with old vineyard bird netting, but I'll leave part of it exposed for them. There'll be more on this soon, so watch this space...
