About

I make jam, jelly and the occasional chutney from whatever the small garden and the lanes behind it produce: a row of strawberries, two blackcurrant bushes, a gooseberry that fights back, and the hedgerow sloes, haws and hips that nobody else seems to want. The kitchen is ordinary, with one big pan, a sugar thermometer that lies by half a degree and a cupboard that fills up by October.

These pages are the batch notes. Weights, boiling times, set tests that failed, jars that lasted and jars that did not. I write them for myself so that next year’s batch is better than this year’s, and I leave them here in case they are useful to someone else with a pan.