Recipes

Secret Three Minute Blackcurrent Jam

This is a secret recipe according to my friend Jane, whose mother died refusing to divulge it. I, however, found it in an old recipe book. When I gave Jane the recipe she was strangely disappointed, as you are if someone shows you how to do a magic trick.

Take 2 pounds of blackcurrants and prick each one with a pin. (In fact, it is probably all right to just stab away at them for a while in a bowl with a fork.) Put them in a bowl and mix with 3 pounds of granulated sugar. Cover the bowl with cling film and leave overnight.

Empty the bowl into a large saucepan and bring slowly to the boil, carefully dissolving the sugar. Then boil for Three Minutes only, yes, No More Than This. Trust me.

Pot after 30 minutes and after stirring the to mix up the fruit, and cover in the usual way. I need to warn you that this is one seriously excellent jam and it disappears very quickly. If fact one American guest asked me Do you ship this jam? and as I had only one jar left the answer was sadly no. It is really worth growing hoards of blackcurrant bushes just to make this jam.

Bridget’s Porter Cake

This is my friend Bridget’s recipe for a boiled cake using Guinness. It is a lovely fruit cake, very moist and moorish and well worth keeping for special guests, or for a big Irish Sunday tea, to follow the ham and tomatoes and home-made bread.

½ pound butter or margarine
½ pound soft brown sugar
1¼ pounds mixed fruit
1 pound plain flour
3 eggs
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
2 teaspoons of mixed spice
½ pint Guinness

Melt the butter, sugar and stout in a saucepan and add the fruit. Simmer for 5 minutes then cool. Add the flour, bicarb, spices and eggs and mix very well. Pour into a 2 pound loaf tin, well-greased, and bake at 180 degrees centigrade, or 350 degrees F or Gas Mark 4 for about 1½ hours, until the cake is firm and shrinks back from the edges of the tin.

Bridget says that sometimes eggs are larger than other times and need more flour. She also says that you can have lemon peel or cherries if you want with the mixed fruit, just as long as it is 1¼ pounds in total.

Four Seed Bread

I like to think of this bread as the Staff of Life because it is beautifully balanced nutritionally, amazingly tasty and, once cooked, freezes beautifully. You could live on this alone with fruit and vegetables. Or just alone! In one 1 oz slice there is 89 kCal, 3g protein, 3g fat, 13g carbohydrate and 2g fibre. I do realise that I am mixing Imperial and metric measures here – blame it on my age!

This makes three loaves, two 2 pound loaves and 1 round loaf.

3 pounds strong organic white flour, or a mixture of white and brown depending how you like your bread
2 sachets dried yeast
1 ¼ pints hand hot/warm water
2 oz poppy seeds
2 oz sesame seeds
2 oz sunflower seeds
2 oz pumpkin seeds
¼ pint sunflower oil
2 tsp salt

Put ¾ pint hot/warm water in a jug with 1 tsp sugar and 2 sachets yeast. Leave to froth.

Add to ½ pint warm water, mix and then mix in enough flour to make a batter. Leave for ½ hour covered in a warm place in a big bowl.

Add the four seeds, salt and oil and mix very well. Then start adding the flour to make a good dough, smooth and elastic. Knead well for 5-7 minutes in a floured board and keep adding flour until the dough is perfect. (For me perfect bread dough feels just like kneading warm human flesh, smooth and just gently yielding.)

Put back in the bowl and keep in a warm place for 1 hour to double in size, covered with a damp cloth.

Knock back and knead again for 2-3 minutes. Then put into the greased loaf tins or make rolls/round loaves/plaits - anything that appeals.

Put back into the warm place for another ½ hour with the damp cloth to cover.

Make sure the oven is very hot and put the bread into the hot oven (425/232/Gas Mark 8) for 15 minutes and then turn down to 350/180/Gas mark 4 for about 35 minutes until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. Rolls will take 15 minutes in the hot oven and then about 10-15 minutes in the cooler oven depending on size.
Cool on a rack if you can wait that long.

For a change you could make this with some chopped rosemary and lightly cooked onion for eating with soup. Or with some sun-dried tomatoes and basil for serving with a summer salad – lovely! Add the extra ingredients when you add the seeds.

Gooseberry and Redcurrant Jelly

Here is my recipe diary entry from Sunday 24th June 2001. It shows how very useful it is to have lots of fruit bushes. A good new jelly bag has now managed to replace the pillowcases you will be glad to know!

Today we picked the gooseberries and it was a lovely crop – 5 pounds already from one bush.

I froze four ½ pound bags, made a crumble with some and added 2 ½ pounds of gooseberries to 1 ½ pounds of redcurrants with 1 ½ pints of water and boiled for ½ - ¾ hour and am now straining the juice for jelly through a pillowcase into the big glass bowl. I have upended the kitchen stool and tied the pillowcase to the legs with the bowl in the bottom. The juice is running through very well. More later.

Today (Monday) I boiled the juice, which made 1¾ pints after dripping through the pillowcase all night, with 1 ¾ pints of sugar and made 3 pots of jelly. Very wasteful of fruit but a beautiful colour and very clear. It only needed 10-12 minutes of boiling time to reach a set.

Tip: never squeeze the jelly bag,( also sometimes known as a pillowcase!) – it makes the preserve very cloudy. Just be patient and watch it drip. You can also liquidise the fruit that is left with honey and orange juice – it makes a good topping for ice-cream.

Damson and Apple Jelly

Here is another jelly recipe in a diary entry, which I have included because of its reference to the new jelly bag.

Take three pounds of damsons and six pounds of apples and boil together with four pints of water for one hour. You only need to chop the apples roughly. Then measure the juice after dripping it for twelve hours, and to each 1 pint of juice add 1 pound of sugar. Boil until setting point is reached and pot and cover in the usual way. Delicious and a good way of using apples when there is a bumper crop, which there usually is with this lovely apple tree of ours.

I bought a new big jelly bag today (20 July 03) with a plastic edge and it came down too low into the bowl when suspended from the legs of the kitchen stool. The juice was dripping all over the shop.

Fred was brilliant and got a piece of MDF, cut a hole smaller than the bag’s diameter and put it on top of the upturned legs. The jelly bag sat beautifully upright on the top and dripped brilliantly into the biscuit jar (the only thing that was the right shape - empty of course). Excellent – good old Fred!

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©Content: Sue Oxley
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