While I was walking with my girlfriend on Sunday, we noticed a lovely stand of blackthorn on public land. Today, I went back there to gather some sloes and try out recipes. I had two in mind.
The first is an antiscorbutic mustard from the Oeconomia ruralis et domestica by Johannes Coler, a North German clergyman who collected enormous amounts of facts for his influential householding book.
In many places, they also preserve them around Michaelmas after the frost has struck them and they have turned soft. You take mustard and grind it with vinegar, and when it has been ground very fine, you put the ground mustard into a new pot and add the sloes whole. Let it stand thus for fourteen days, and then when you eat dried meat, fried pickled herring, ham, or other things from which you usually get scurvy, eat it along with them from a small condiment bowl (Commentichen). This helps, next God, that scurvy will leave you alone and it is good to eat.
Obviously it is not that late in the year yet, but I have a freezer, and the likelihood of frost in October is vanishingly low these days anyway. So I took the sloes, washed them, and popped them into the freezer quickly. The mustard, too, was made in the most basic manner by processing yellow mustardseed with white wine vinegar and a bit of salt. It is intensely sharp and sour, and may actually go well with the fruity acidity of the sloes. I combined the two and look forward to seeing what will happen, but I think I will be storing it in the refrigerator because I am a coward when it comes to wild fermentation.
The other is a rather cryptic instruction in the fifteenth-century manuscript Cgm 384-I. It is listed among recipes for compost, vegetables and fruit stored with acidic sauces.
9 Sloe Compost
Sloe compost: take wine and honey in equal amounts and boil it. Then take sloes, well-prepared, and lay them into this (when it is) cold. You may also stick pears and medlars with spices. Take as much as you wish to serve each time, that way the spices retain their power and goodness.
This is interesting, but hard to parse. Does it mean that the sloes must be combined with medlars and pears, or just may be? Preserving fruit stuck with spices is a technique found in other manuscripts, after all, and the sloes could simply be a flavour-bearing accompaniment to the much larger spiced fruit. Clearly, the sloes do not have spices stuck into them, though, and it would be quite impractical given how small they are. Or is this an instruction for preserving sloes, and the author thinks it is like that for medlars and pears? Or possibly simply a merging of two recipes that were originally separate? And what does “well-prepared” imply? It is hard to say.
I decided to try and find out what the liquid would do to the sloes kept in it. That might answer whether it makes sense to do this with sloes alone at all, or whether the other fruit are necessary. If I find medlars or pears, I might try the other way as well – there is a second stand of blackthorn, and I still have wine left over.
The process in both cases is very simple, and the question what happens next. I will put the jars into my fridge and wait to find out.