A wonderful, evocative smell from the kitchen at this time of year, from many kitchens, you would hope. It is the bramble jelly or jam boiling up on the stove. In spite of modern farming methods, in spite the ruthless - some would say businesslike - campaign of genocide against the blackberry, it still persists.
The particular smell that arises not far from this typewriter is compounded of the boiling up of blackberries, elderberries, sloes and the delicious crabapple John Downey. All this from a small holding, where the brambles are cut only where they would trip you up and break your neck, where the elders are disgracefully allowed to flourish, for their glorious blossoms, where the John Downey, a gift of friends, is a delight to the eye with its reds and apricot tints, and where, naturally, the blackthorn is allowed to let rip because it lights up the whole earlier part of the year with its blanket of white.
Anyway, a couple of hours picking gave a bowlful of elderberries, about three pounds of the apples, and a good two pounds of blackberries. The sloes, very big and ripe, were counted sufficient when the hands picking them had had enough wounds from the deadly thorns. Say a couple of pounds.
That's the great thing about this mixture, the cook says. You don't have to do the measuring until you have got your fruits boiled, strained through the linen. Then you put in one pound of sugar to each pint of juice. And, of course, every year the flavour is different. And the next boiling will probably have quite a different composition. Children in the past used to mark the end of September, in one part of the country anyway, by going out with the white enamel buckets they used for drawing the water from the well: A couple of hours would fill each bucket with blackberries. The hard chaws would compete for the first to return, empty the bucket in the tub in the house and go out for more. Hard chaw included the girl cousins.
Now a firm in Raheen, Limerick, Irish Wild Fruits Ltd, has gone into the market and sent to the office a small packet containing those breakfast sized little glass pots of preserves which hotels serve. They are interested in the export market.
How much of this concentration on simple, home produced fare (and this goes far beyond jams and jellies), we owe to Myrtle Allen and later to Darina! In deed to the whole Allen family.