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Ashberry or Rowan Jelly
This fruit is not often for sale, but must be gathered from the Mountain Ash. Wash the fruit thoroughly, and put it into a preserving-pan with water sufficient to cover it. Let it simmer gently until the water is red and has a bitter taste; then strain but do not squeeze the fruit. Put a pound of sugar to every pint of liquor, and boil it over a good fire until it jellies. Pour it into jars, and when cold cover with tissue paper dipped in gum water. The fruit should be gathered when it is red, but before the frost has touched it. It should be placed on the table with venison. Time to boil, about forty minutes. With an equal quantity of apples this makes a delicious jelly.
A straightforward hedgerow preserve, though the original assumes you know what a set looks like and says nothing about sterilising jars. Rowan is very low in pectin, so the apple variation at the end is worth treating as the main recipe rather than an afterthought.
- Use the apple versionRowan is generally reckoned low in pectin and can be reluctant to set, which is why the recipe ends with the equal-quantity apple suggestion. Cook the berries with roughly their weight in chopped crab apples or tart cooking apples, cores and skins included, for a jelly that sets more reliably and tastes less punishingly bitter.
- Do not eat the berries rawRaw rowan contains parasorbic acid, which is a gastric irritant. Cooking converts it to harmless sorbic acid, so the simmering step is not optional and the strained juice should not be tasted before it has boiled.
- "Do not squeeze the fruit"This is the hinge. Pressing the pulp through the cloth forces fine solids into the liquor and produces a cloudy, muddy jelly. Hang the jelly bag and let it drip, several hours or overnight, and accept a lower yield.
- Sugar ratio and set pointA pound of sugar to a pint of liquor is close to modern practice: about 450 g sugar to 570 ml juice. Rather than guessing at forty minutes, boil hard and test at 105 C on a sugar thermometer, or use the cold-saucer wrinkle test. Forty minutes of hard boiling would badly overcook a small batch.
- Preserving-panAny wide, heavy, non-reactive pan will do. Width matters more than depth, since evaporation is what drives the set; a stockpot will keep you boiling long past the point where the flavour darkens.
- Gum water and tissue paperGum water is gum arabic dissolved in water, used to glue a paper seal over the jar. Use hot, sterilised jars with two-piece or lacquered lids instead, filled to within 5 mm of the rim and sealed while the jelly is still near boiling.
- Picking timeGathering while red but before frost is the book's instruction; one reason usually given is that frosted berries soften and spoil quickly, though others hold that frost mellows the bitterness. Pick whole trusses on a dry day and strip the berries off the stalks before washing.
- Yield and servingYield depends on how much water was used and how long the bag is left to drip, so expect several 340 g jars rather than a fixed number. The recommendation to serve it with venison still holds; it suits cold game, lamb and strong cheese, and the bitterness is the point rather than a fault.
The mountain ash, or rowan, was never a market fruit, which is exactly why Cassell's opens by saying so: this belongs to the class of country preserves made from what grows in the hedge rather than what the greengrocer sells. Rowan jelly is most strongly associated with Scotland and the north of England, where it has long been the standard accompaniment to venison and other game, and the tree itself carried a heavy load of folklore as a protection against witchcraft, which is often given as the reason so many were planted beside farmhouses and churchyards. The pairing with apple in the last line reflects practical Victorian preserving knowledge rather than any theory of pectin, which was not isolated and named until the nineteenth century and not widely understood by domestic cooks until later; households simply learned that some fruits set and some did not, and that apples rescued the ones that did not.