September is the month when we New England gardeners are busy filling the larder. I'm not sure what that nice old-fashioned word means, but in my case I've been filling the freezer. I froze a pile of peppers, gobs of green beans and a small batch of broccoli. I didn't make any spaghetti sauce as my tomato crop was pathetic, but with Hank's help, we froze 26 packages of corn scraped from the cobs of seventy sweet ears! We don't need to freeze anywhere near as much as we did when we were a family of five, but the corn is so melt-in-your-mouth good, we can't get enough of it.
Once all the produce from the vegetable garden was finished, it was time to make jelly. With all the rain we've had, the raspberry crop was terrible and I was unable to make the dozens of jars of raspberry jam I usually put up each summer. Never mind. My favorite jelly is elderberry, one you can't find in the store, so I trudged up the hill to fill my baskets with those lovely whirls of tiny black berries.
Elderberry bushes are common in New England, growing along the back roads, beside old barns and abandoned outbuildings, in fence rows and swamp edges. They're far easier to spot in July when their creamy white clusters of flowers are as conspicuous as waving handkerchiefs, but a keen eye will spy the fat black bunches of berries drooping from their spindly bushes in September.
We are fortunate to have close to half a dozen bushes on the property, but when I walked up to the cow pasture to start picking, I found they'd grown so tall I couldn't reach the berries. The brittle branches of elderberry bushes break if you try to bend them. I went back to the house and drove the truck back up so I could stand on its bed to fill my baskets.
Once I'd picked enough, I tackled the messy part, stripping the berries from their stems. This is done with a gentle rolling motion of the thumb to pull off the berries. You may get a few stems along with the berries at first, but you'll soon get the knack. It takes more than an hour to get four or five quarts of berries, a pretty boring job. Find a friend who'd also like to make elderberry jelly so you can chat while you work. Don't do this job on a day you've been invited out to dinner unless you want your purple fingers to provide conversation over cocktails.
I suspect that nowadays folks strain their fruit by just lining a colander with cheesecloth, but I'm still using a jelly bag clothespinned to the old iron stand my grandmother and mother used. I let it drip overnight, and since I can picture my mother's look of disapproval, I NEVER squeeze the jelly bag!
Elderberries contain zero pectin, so they won't jell unless you add commercial pectin. The first batch I made years ago was only fit to pour over vanilla icecream. I won't bore you with the proportions as there are always recipes included in packages of commercial pectin, just add one word of caution. A "full rolling boil" quadruples the size of your syrup, and if you have two quarts of sugared juice in a six quart pot, you'll have one purple mess all over the stove. Use a BIG pot.
As I was putting my jars of elderberry in the cold cellar, I noticed that I had only one jar of mint jelly on the shelf. Since we have sheep, we have lamb often, and use a lot of mint jelly. You know that old saying - Apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without the squeeze. Well, our old saying is - A leg of lamb without the mint is like a wink without the glint. That's not very good, but better than Hank's suggestion - is like a navel without the lint.
We have tons of mint in the lower pasture. Fortunately we no longer have a ram, but I can still remember how precarious the job of picking mint was in the old days. I once had to climb an apple tree to escape the charged greeting from Soccer, the ram we had that year. I remained perched on a limb 'til the kids got home from school and lured Soccer over to the fence with grain so I could get down.
For some funny? reason sheep don't like mint, so there's always plenty to make jelly. I picked a huge bouquet, then stripped the leaves, churned them up in the blender with water, strained the result, added some green food coloring, and made a dozen baby food jars full of jelly. Once they were put down in the cold cellar, I went to take a picture of some elderberries. Much to my horror, I discovered that Rumple, who still thinks she's a puppy, had found my camera on the front porch and chewed it into an irreparable piece of equipment.
Drawing today's pen and ink illustration took me far longer than writing today's column, but was more fun than filling the larder.
