Rowan Berries.

[Janne]

Garlic has become common there since WW2, not in the trad cuisine.
Grows easily, gives a lot of flavor. Spices were absent basically between 39 and late 40's.

What does it take to keep a warlock away?
A broom? A dish cloth?

 

[Toddy]

Ah, not quite.....Rowans won't grow in the presense of evil....so folks planted Rowans.....and so did/do ladies who might just have a lot of traditional knowledge.
Since everyone knows that the tree won't grow near evil, the lady can't be evil....iimmc
Got to be better than being douked and drowned in the pond or immolated, no ?

It's so ingrained that when I asked someone if he knew anything about diseases of Rowan, the reply was, "Apart from chronic witch, no".

 

[Janne]

Aha!
The witches planted the Rowan all around their abodes, then spread the rumour that "Rowan keeps witches away" so they could do their business in peace!
( how is that for an explanation )

Nobody suspected that old lady was in fact whizzing away on her broom to hook up with Mr Belzebub each night!!! RowanTinder!

 

[Winnet]

I will never look at the Rowan at the bottom of my garden in the same light again.

G

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk

 

[Janne]

Check if your partner walks well away from it...........



( sometimes I think my wife would!)

 

[Toddy]

There are lots of rhymes for teaching children about the various trees, etc.,

The Elder tree is the Bour tree in Scots,

Bour tree, bour tree
Crookit wrung,
Flower and fruit baith sae sweet,
Ne'er trust a stick beneath your feet.

The Elder often grows crookit, it creates bowers (the origin of the name) and the branches are kind of brittle and climbing one often breaks it with a crack.
Folks had to 'ask the hag' in the tree (the jelly ear fungus grows widely on Elders, so the tree has ears to listen) before they took flowers or fruit or a branch or so for kindling.
Kind of superstition, if you fell, well you hadn't asked courteously enough.

But in comes a faith that cannot thole anything that smacks of 'paganism', and the tree that was once seen as a virtual pharmacopeia of herbal medicine becomes an evil thing.
The rhyme changes and the tree becomes the tree used for the crucifixion....except the Elder doesn't grow in the middle east and the ears weren't those of the ones cut off the folks who didn't follow the same faith, and were nailed to the tree, either.
The rhyme changes and it becomes,

Bourtree, bourtree, crooked rung,
Never straight, and never strong;
Ever bush and never tree,
Since our Lord was nailed to ye!

The very useful fomes fomentaria fungus, the stuff used to make clothing pieces, as well as being an excellent fire carrying tinder, kind of gets the same treatment.

If you char the fungus, it'll take a spark even from quartz.
Thing is though, if you get a glowing ember into the centre of the underside of the fomes, you can literally carry fire in it. I've had one quietly glowing away and slowly burning out for nearly four hours, and you can pick it up in your hands to carry it safely.
But it looks like a horse's hoof growing out from the trees. Now that didn't suit a faith that thought anything of that ilk to be pagan and superstitious, so it becomes the Devil's toenail/hoofnail and something to be avoided instead of thought well of.
After all, everyone knows toadstools and fungus are poisonous and pagan, don't they ?

As cheugh as Auld Nick who burns forever,
Roast it black and they'll burn thegither.

Aye, indeed, nowt so queer as folks, or ancient propaganda.

M

 

[crosslandkelly]

First try at Rowan berry Apple and Rosemary jelly underway.
I don't think I'll poop in a sprig though.

 

[Toddy]

Should end up a really jewel like reddish/amber colour. It's good stuff

 

[crosslandkelly]

Straining nicely.

 

[crosslandkelly]

Should the juice be clear? It looks quite cloudy.

 

[Janne]

Cloudy. The cloth is coarse.

To get crystal clear juice you need to add various agents and enzymes. Juice producers do.

It looks fantastic, have you thought which meat o pair it with?
Rabbit/hare or maybe Pheasant should be incredible!

 

[crosslandkelly]

Cloudy. The cloth is coarse.

To get crystal clear juice you need to add various agents and enzymes. Juice producers do.

It looks fantastic, have you thought which meat o pair it with?
Rabbit/hare or maybe Pheasant should be incredible!

I'll have to wait and see how it turns out. I may try straining the juice once more, through a finer filter.

 

[Toddy]

A decent old fashioned jeely bag will strain it clear. Apples are hard to strain clear and shiny, but patience wins the game on it. If you have the patience for it, you could try straining it again through a bit of boiled (so the fibres close us) cloth. Don't squeeze, regardless of how tempting it is to hurry things along.

You might find that taking the skimmings when it's boiling really helps clear the jelly too. It will change colour as it boils, and will darken down with more red showing.

M

 

[Janne]

I have a straining bag made from very fine fibred cloth, I think it is silk. Used to belong to mother. Takes forever for the juice to drip through .Clogs up. Produces an almost clear juice. The other bag she gave me is cotton, and that leaves a cloudy juice.

The cloudiness is fibers I guess, so good for us!

I have made juice for preserves and jellies using local fruit. The only thing that does not work is Banana. Mango is tricky too.

 

[Robson Valley]

The cloudiness is commonly a result of suspended starch grains and proteins.
In home-brew, hobby wine making shops, you can buy an additive to clear all that away.
HOWEVER, the taste changes a lot as well. Same goes for the effective filter pad stacks.

 

[Toddy]

Unless you're competing in the W.R.I. of W.G. type of show, cloudy jelly won't really matter in the long run. I just like to make as good a job of it as I can, so I clear the juice and I'm careful with the skimming. At the end of the day it'll taste the same

I have a boiled wool jelly bag. Sounds awful but it's a felted woollen cloth bag and it strains so cleanly that it's supposed to be safe even to use for rosehips.
I'm reluctant to use it for rosehips though, because if I got it wrong those blasted wee hairs end up fragmented and they'd end up in everything I strained thereafter.
I haven't seen one of this type for sale in years though. They're either nylon or cotton now, and really nowhere near so good.
Felted wool isn't quite waterproof, and it's just enough not waterproof to let the juice slowly drip through. It won't do it in a couple of hours like the cotton bags will, it needs hung up and left at least overnight. The juice is clean and shiny though and makes beautiful jelly, even from apples.

Old books, like this one on Google do mention the old felt bags though.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...ECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q="Felt jelly bag "&f=false

 

[Janne]

What do you do with the rose hips?

Our family have only ever dried them, then crushed, and made a tisane from.
In Norway a traditional jam is Rose hip jam. Vitamin C rich.

Interesting with Wool felt cloth. Brilliant idea.

of course you can not buy it, like a lot of very useful kitchen tools and equipment it has gone the way of the Dodo...

I was very happy to find a fat separating ladle in a charity shop in Norway.

 

[Woody girl]

Coffee filters work too I'm told but as I don't drink coffee I couldn't say for sure. If you have some it might be worth trying for the second filtering to get it clearer.

 

[Toddy]

Rosehip syrup was a wartime staple here. It provided much needed VitaminC in a land that doesn't grow citrus fruits.
Strangely the further north a fruiting plant, like rasps or blackcurrants or rosehips, grow, the higher the levels of VitaminC.
Rosehips grow well here, and as a hedgerow fruit they were gathered by the ton for the ladies of the women's guilds to make the syrup.
The problem is that you can't heat it very much or you destroy the Vitamin C, and those blasted wee hairs.

Even straining three times through cleaned and boiled modern jelly bags, I could see the little hairs in the juice.
So now I'm a pain about it and I pick the big rosehips and peel them, or scoop out the seeds with a sharpened mustard spoon. It seems wasteful but no hairs to cause any harm.

A few years ago I was given a length of vintage cream coloured high quality pure wool flannel. It was used originally to make pram coats for babies. I am so tempted to use it to make decent jelly bags. Babies don't wear wool flannel pram coats and hats anymore, and there's not enough to make much else from this piece. It would make a superb straining bag or two, and I could just keep one for rosehips. It would felt beautifully with the boil wash that the bags get.
I think wool jelly bags have gone the way of the brass jelly pans, and no one's making them now. The brass jelly pans leached miniscule amounts of copper into the jams and jellies and that copper helped prevent mould growing. Now most folks use maslin pans of either aluminium (though those took a nosedive when aluminium was associated with Alzeheimer's) or stainless steel. I bought one of the enamelled ones from Kilner, but the enamel isn't ideal, the jam sticks to it Stainless steel with a sandwiched base work well though.

M

 

[Janne]

Those hairs gave us boys hours of fun!
A tiny pinch on somebody’s collar, or inside the underpants in the changing room........

I think all boys, and most girls of my age experienced that.

All good fun!
Today I guess it would be classified as bullying or a criminal act, and various authorities starting with the Principal would be involved!

I have in fact seen a Rosehip syrup in Norway too, but never tried.
Rare though. Specialist health shops.

Blackcurrent grows well in the Arctic. Full of Vit C. People say it is due to the long daylights.
I have red, white and black currant around my house there, plus rhubarb ( very sheltered position)
I use fish carcasses as fertilizer.