We made Jam

My daughter brought home strawberries and raspberries from Culross Palace gardens and wanted to make jam. I haven't made jam for about 25 years. Homemade raspberry jam used to be a regular occurance, but I never finished it, and then the kids were around, and I was too busy. So .... Jam sugar was acquired and of we went using the very simple recipe on the back of the packet. My cooking thermometer was broken long ago, so setting was done by a timed method - I didn't even use the 'wrinkle' test. Fortunately it worked.

 

 

Soft fruit - 800gms

Jam sugar -1000gms

Mix, heat slowly until sugar dissolved

Bring to a rolling boil

Boil for 4 minutes.

Pour into sterilised jam jar

Cool and seal.

 

 

 

This all reminded me of olden times. In the summer we used to go picking endless blackberries, diving into thickets with buckets, my memory paints them as large and juicy, but the blackberries you see in the wild now always seem very small and tart. The kids always seem horrified when I pick them - unclean, unclean!

The other thing we did when young was winkle picking, down on the beach with buckets, bringing them back to wash multiple times to remove the grit, then boil to sell in the shop. None of us drowned, unlike the winkle pickers of recent notoriety, but then we were 'locals' and knew the tides well. The only time I almost got caught out was when walking around the harbour slightly too late on the tide and having to climb the fence into the fields to get around the edge as the path was underwater. I would have been in trouble if I'd waded and got soaked shoes, also, the sand had a nasty tendency to turn into quicksand when wet, so it might have been a bit risky.

Pagham Harbour, a nature reserve, without boats

Pagham harbour, a nature reserve and no boats, seriously disappointed William and Jenny, they wanted boats not sand and wind, but I spent hours here as a child, walking or cycling around it, watching the tide and the birds, sitting and reading. The big house near the harbour used to be owned by friends of my dads and they had a cage full of parrots, and what I thought was a monkey, but, as I remember black and white, might have been a lemur.

Life was much freer then, I wandered everywhere, on foot or bike, frequently away for hours. We played in the farmers barns, building houses from bales of straw, fed the calves, collected eggs at the stables. Sometimes I had company in the summer when the visitors where down, they were regulars and there were 2 girls I met up with every year, who had summer homes on the beach, other times of the year I mainly wandered by myself. No one thought of danger or risks, no mobile phones of course, and one came back when hungry.

 

 

 

 

 

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