This is a foodish bookish Landing post today, as I have been a-foraging and have just started this year’s batch of elderflower cordial. I have previously featured a couple of foraging books on Landing Tales, Food for Free by Richard Mabey (1972, 1992) and Wild and Free by Cyril and Kit Ó Céirín (1978, 2013). Thane Prince’s Jams & Chutneys: Preserving the Harvest (2008), which I have also mentioned before, is not a foraging book as such; many recipes here you could make from your garden produce. Over the years, I have tried several of the recipes, in particular making preserves from foraged ingredients such as elderflowers (and berries), rowan, blackberries, rosehips and windfall apples. I have even occasionally actually bought fruit to try out a particular recipe, though I think food for free is much more rewarding. Sadly, there is no foraging for lemons, so if I want to make curd, I have to buy lemons!
There is quite a lot of domestic history within the pages of this cookbook as I have tucked in stray recipes that have never made it into my main recipe folder (and that’s a whole other issue). Some loose leaves are scanned from library books or recipes downloaded from favorite websites; others culled from magazines in the same way that my mom would have done. Naturally the pages of the book have acquired more than a few sticky marks during our preserving experiments, with a couple of pages here and there becoming a bit too fondly attached to each other. Some recipes sport annotations where we have tweaked ingredients/methods or scaled down large quantities. I can also find notes on where to buy citric acid or liquid pectin lest we forget such vital information.
Any recipes tried out by the testing committee have the year jotted down alongside; by now some pages have had a long line of dates added. Time certainly does fly; raspberry jam has been part of our repertoire on and off since 2018 and in later years we have made it with our homegrown fruit. I can see that we first made elderflower cordial in 2014 and have continued to do so most years since. I have already jotted down ‘2025’ in the list.
Now, I think I will go and give my cordial another stir, before getting the elderflower bottles and labels ready.
