For those of you who aren’t sure, greengages are a variety of dessert plum with a taste somewhere between bitter and sweet. Green in colour and small in size, greengages are the quintessential cooking plum – though they are also enjoyable in their unadulterated form. Simply roast or reduce them with a sprinkling of sugar and they’ll work equally well in chutney, cake, puddings or a greengage tart.
Damsons are probably the perfect fruit to feature on this blog as the British climate means they grow in abundance each year. However, despite the relative profusion of this small plum people tend not to pick them, perhaps because they are less versatile than the average plum. As such, damsons are particularly easy to find outdoors, but are also incredibly cheap to buy. So, what are you waiting for? Get making your very own Damson Jelly.
I thought I’d continue in the same vein as my last post and bring you yet another delicious recipe with which to use your lovely juicy plums. This will be the last of the plum themed posts for now though, as although we had a very large amount of plums we only actually made muffins and chutney – 11 jars of the stuff. I think the next summer fruit recipe I’ll tackle will be Blackberry jam, but I need to find time to go out and pick them first.
Alright, alright, these aren’t wild plums, but they were picked out in the open as I mentioned in my last post, from plum trees hanging over the walls of other people’s gardens. At the weekend my girlfriend and I saw two such trees, one just around the corner from her house and another on a walk we went on which took us past Chequers – a residence of the Prime Minister. From two small branches of each tree we managed to alight more than 4 kilograms of plums, this seems quite a lot to pick from someone else’s tree, but they were already slightly over-ripe and there was no sign of them getting picked. The fact that they were slightly over-ripe made them even more alluring, especially for chutney making.