Hedgerow jelly from sloes, haws, hips and a handful of elderberries
The lane behind the house has about 200 metres of mixed hedge, mostly hawthorn and blackthorn with dog rose and elder in the gaps, and in the last week of September all of it is in fruit at once. I picked on the 21st with a stick to pull down the high branches and a bag over my shoulder: 900 grams of sloes, 1,100 grams of haws, 300 grams of rosehips and about 100 grams of elderberries stripped off the stalks with a fork. Two and a half hours, two scratches that bled and one encounter with a wasp.
Everything went into the big pan together with 1.8 litres of water, enough to just cover, and simmered for about an hour until the sloes had split and the haws had gone pulpy. The haws are mostly stone and take longest. I crushed the lot against the side of the pan with a potato masher and ladled it into the jelly bag over a bowl for the night. By morning there was 1.4 litres of juice, a deep purple-red from the sloes, with a faint rose smell from the hips.
Sugar at 750 grams per litre, so just over a kilogram, dissolved slowly before the boil. Haws are rich in pectin and this set fast: the saucer test wrinkled after seven minutes of hard boil at a thermometer reading of 104.5. Yield was six 340-gram jars and a small one, with a ring of pink scum skimmed off before potting.
The taste is tart and slightly tannic from the sloes, rounded by the haws, with a floral edge from the hips that I did not expect to come through. It is not sweet in the way strawberry jam is sweet. It is very good with cold roast pork, and I have already used one jar in the gravy for a Sunday lunch. The elderberries, I think, added colour and not much else.
Two warnings for anyone trying this. Rosehips are full of fine hairs that irritate the skin and throat, and they must be cooked whole and strained rather than cut, which also means the jelly bag needs a very thorough wash afterwards. And sloes are better after a frost, so if the picking is early, a night in the freezer does the same job of splitting the skins and softening the astringency.