Courtyard

Finally, the 2006 cherry harvest and three-day processing marathon is complete!

It’s very English to talk about the weather but I was up at 6am this morning to make jam because standing over a boiling hot vat of steamy/scalding fruit is no fun at midday when it’s 30+ degrees. We’re forecast for 35-39 degrees for the next 5 days and it did make me think how strange then that just a few short weeks ago the very tree that yielded up a monster 15kg harvest looked like this. Climate change a go-go.

So, back to the fruit. We yielded a touch over 30Kg this year, a significant improvement over last year and it’s clear that the results of our tree management and pruning is paying off. I’m guessing that all of the wood ash from our wood burning stove that was applied to the tree roots as a fertilizer during the winter has helped improve the vigour and crop this year. All the other fruit trees look to be bearing similarly improved crops.

We’ve notched up so far :-

• 1 Litre Sour cherry gin
• 1 Litre Sweet cherry gin
• A dozen jars of black-cherry jam. Tasted and approved on a buttery slab of sourdough pain-aux-noix for elevenses!
• 17 Jars of ‘Cerises en Aigre-Douce‘ (recipe below)
• A dozen jars of pickled sour cherries
• About 20 litres of stoned sweet cherries in a light syrup. For excellent twin-peaks double-r diner damn fine cherry pie.
• a few litres of homemade yoghurt with cherries.. simple and amazing.
  

..plus assorted trays full of stoned and cooked cherries for the freezer – can be blizted down for coulis, used in ice-cream or some tantalising autumnal dish involving magret de canard and thyme with lashings of dauphinoise spuds – yum!

So, recipe time. We’ve made so many of these as they are simply the very best added value use you can put cherries to. A hat tip for the recipe to Floyd on France, infact if it wasnt for Floyd on France there most likely wouldn’t be a Fod in France.

Cerises en Aigre Douce:-

Wash and pick over a couple Kg of cherries, they must be perfect.

Add some cloves, bayleaves, black peppercorns, whole allspice and a small piece of cinnamon to one litre of red wine vinegar. Boil for five mins (leaving a window open!) and then let it cool completely.

While the vinegar cools, pick over the cherries, any blemished/imperfect ones will go into your jam pile. This bit is fiddly… trim each stalk to 6mm. If you’re doing 12Kg of cherries you should probably open a bottle of Corbierres at this point. Not for the cherries you understand, but for the soul.

Fill all the jars you can muster with the washed, trimmed fruit and then lightly sprinkle a tablespoon or so of sugar into each jar. Top up with the cool spiced vinegar.

Leave for two days and then empty out all the vinegar into a big stock pot, reboil and cool, refill the jars. Top up each jar if necessary with a splash of ‘fresh’ unspiced vinegar ensuring that the fruit is well packed and submerged.

Now, all you have to do is wait. Really, wait a long time. Probably best to wait until the Autumn, you certainly don’t want to eat them inside of six weeks. They’re worth the wait and are the most perfect little nibble for an aperitif and they’re great to cook with. Sweet, slightly spicy, slightly tart they’re awesome with any cold meats and the double bonus is that the strong cherry flavoured red wine vinegar makes an excellent dressing with walnut oil for a salad of Chevre-chaud with rocket, but that’s a recipe for another day.

Now, I know that it seems like a long time to hang around so here’s some I prepared in 2005.

– Adrian