Photography by Keiko Oikawa
As summer turns to autumn and the evenings regain a refreshing coolness, forget food shopping in the car and the supermarket. Pull on your wellies and find a well laden fruit-filled hedge. The back roads and footpaths of East Anglia are renowned for their lush hedgerows and they in turn are often full of juicy morsels packed with vitamins and good for the soul. One of the nicest early autumn fruits is the small yellow wild plum. In a good year, it is sometimes possible to pick several kilos off one tree.
The fruit, typically about as big as the tip of your thumb, turn a translucent apricot colour when ripe – and are deliciously sweet. A very simple preparation is to wash the plums and then stew them on a medium heat, adding brown sugar to taste. Once the fruit have disintegrated, strain off the skins and stones (mashing the pulp through a large metal sieve) and leave to cool. The sweet plum sauce is delicious with yoghurt, ice cream or crème fraiche. Another use is to slit each fruit when raw and drop the them into a kilner jar, adding 1lb of brown or white sugar for each 1lb of plums as well as a litre of vodka - metric always tastes better when mixed with imperial measures !
Another good candidate for a winter warmer is the wild pear. These fruit were once common, but are now quite rare. Specialist nurseries such as Botanica near Wickham Market stock young plants. They flower well and make a great addition to a large garden or field strip hedge. If you can find a mature tree, wash and quarter the fruit, and then use them to flavour alcohol as for the wild plum recipe. Owing to their size, you may need to use large sealable glass jars instead of the original bottles. When you do get round to bottling them – ideally after 3 to 6 months - carefully strain the mixture through a piece of fine muslin or cotton cloth in order to separate off the pulp. In the absence of wild pears, garden pears are an excellent substitute.
One of the finest wild fruits that you can find in the autumn is undoubtedly the blackberry or bramble. The best hedge – or patch of open access heathland – will be about a third blackberry brambles mixed with sloes, crab apples, elderberries, wild plums and bullaces. This gives several months of rich pickings as the different fruits start to ripen. Always take care to leave plenty of produce on the trees and bushes – these autumn fruits are essential fare for the wildlife with which we share the countryside, allowing them to stockpile and fatten for the colder winter months. And find a good reference book or instructed foraging course to check on your identification.
Blackberries have a sublime flavour when stewed with sugar, again 1lb for 1lb. For jam, add lemon juice to encourage setting. The taste of home made blackberry jam on hot buttered brown bread or fresh toast is truly one of life’s seasonal treats – and a great way to round off an outdoor weekend spent foraging with friends or family.
Jason Gathorne-Hardy is a farmer, artist and food adventurer based at his sheep farm near Saxmundham – also home to his home brand Alde Valley Lamb™The Alde Valley Food Adventures™ – a rolling programme of events that celebrate food, farming, landscape and the arts. Some of his work can be seen at Milsoms in Kesgrave, Ipswich. He is also Patron of The Bario & Kelabit Highlands Food & Cultural Festival in Central Borneo.
To celebrate the 2008 Aldeburgh Food & Drink Festival his farm is hosting a two week Open Farm event (19 September – 4 October) with the theme Amazing Grazing in the Alde Valley: A Celebration of Sheep and Livestock Farming as well as the Festival Feast on Sat 20 September 2008.
