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Hawthorn Jelly
Select red haws, pick over, stem, wash, and drain. Add 1 cup of water to each pound of fruit and cook until it is a pulp. Pour into a jelly bag and let drain all night. Measure liquid, heat to boiling point quickly, boil 4-5 minutes, and stir in a pint of heated sugar for each pint of juice. Continue boiling until it jells, about 20 minutes, and pour into glasses.
Montana: Bitter Root-the root itself is more useful than the sweet-scented flower, for that's the stuff from which early Indians made an edible starch that was their staff of life. It's also good for brewing your own private stock bitters, after any old-fashioned recipe.
Montana got its nickname "Stub Toe" from constantly stumbling over these bitter roots.
Nebraska: Goldenrod-Cachoo! Skip it!
Nevada: Sagebrush-sagebrush is not only the State's flower, but its official nickname. Because of that spicy tang in the air, all Nevadans are as nicely flavored with sage as Thanksgiving turkeys. And when in need of a snack to restore their alkaline balance, all they have to do is lick the sage-flavored alkaki dust off their hairy wrists.
New Hampshire: Purple lilac-too pretty to eat.
New Jersey: Violet-remember the old song, "Every morn I eat thee, violets." See Illinois, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. New Mexico: Yucca-you can use your own ingenuity in using yucca. See Washington.
New York: Rose-pickled rosebuds: pick an apronful of rosebuds, pop them into an earthen pipkin, and fill it up with the best white wine vinegar and sugar.
Many picnickers prefer pickled rosebuds to either capers or pickled nasturtiums with their dingle-doos. They're also used by food fadists in a tangy herbal mixture with rosemary, cowslip and violet buds added.
Rose petal water, too, is as appropriate as orange flower water for flower salads.
North Carolina: Oxeye Daisy-make an appetizing daisy chain and feed it to your Shetland pony.
North Dakota: Wild Prairie Rose-some cook books run as wild with roses as the Vicomte's (see Iowa). Florence White's fragrant little book, "Flowers as Food," give these uses for rose petals:
Vinegar of Roses Rose-petal and Cherry Salad Conserve of Roses, Boiled Conserve of Roses, Unboiled Conserve of Roses, in the Italian Manner Conserve of Roses, Violets, Cowslips or Marigolds Rose Preserves To Make Lozenges of Red Roses Rose Petals with Cherry Tart-"Before putting the crust over a cherry tart, scatter rose-petals over the cherries, then cover and bake."
And on this inexhaustible subject, the great chef Soyer passes the buck back to Apicius, the first cook book writer, two thousand years ago:
A straightforward high-pectin jelly, since haws are rich in both pectin and acid. The only real decisions are how long to boil and how you seal the finished jars.
- What a haw isThe fruit of hawthorn (Crataegus species), ripening dull to deep red in autumn. Pick fully coloured, firm fruit; overripe haws are mealy and give a muddy juice. Be certain of the identification before picking, as several unrelated shrubs carry red berries at the same season.
- Leave the seeds wholeHawthorn stones are reported to contain cyanogenic compounds, as apple pips do. Cooking the fruit and straining the pulp through a bag, as here, leaves them intact; do not mill, crush or blend the seeds to extract more juice.
- "A pint of sugar"The recipe measures sugar by volume against juice, not by weight. A US pint of granulated sugar is about 14 oz (400 g). The recipe calls for the sugar to be heated before it goes in, which keeps the boiling juice from dropping off the boil.
- The jelly bagA doubled square of muslin or a fine cotton flour sack in a colander does the job. Let it drip overnight without squeezing; pressing the bag clouds the jelly, which is the whole reason for the long drain.
- Judge by temperature, not the clock"About 20 minutes" varies with the width of your pan. Jelly sets at 220°F (104°C) at sea level, or when a spoonful sheets off the edge in a curtain rather than dripping. Haws are pectin-rich and often reach the set well before twenty minutes; overboiling gives a dark, gummy jelly.
- SealingPeriod recipes finished jelly glasses with a disc of melted paraffin, which is no longer recommended. Use hot sterilised half-pint jars with two-piece lids and a five-minute boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldRoughly 3 lb of haws with 3 cups of water yields around 3 to 4 cups of juice, which with an equal volume of sugar makes a good deal more finished jelly than that. Expect a clear rose-amber jelly with a mild, faintly apple-like flavour, best with cold meat or strong cheese rather than on toast.
Hawthorn is the may tree of English hedgerows, and haw jelly belongs to the long tradition of hedge-picking that treated wayside fruit as free food: rowan, crab apple, sloe, elderberry, haw. The fruit is too dry and seedy to eat out of hand, but it is loaded with pectin and acid, exactly the two things a jelly wants, so it was worth the labour of gathering quarts of pea-sized berries. Its appearance here, in a chapter on eating blossoms, reflects a strain of mid-century American outdoor cookery that mixed genuine foraging instruction with state-flower whimsy and antiquarian borrowings from earlier English books. Hawthorn also carries a long folk-medical reputation as a heart remedy, a use still found in herbal commerce, though that is separate from its kitchen life as a jelly fruit.