Archive for countrytalkandtips.myfreeforum.org ........................ smallholding, crafts and country life ................................................... IN IRELAND .......................................................
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hawthorn berry edible "leather"None of the foraging type of books seemed to have a good use for this wild food until Ray Mears demonstrated making "leather" . All he did was to separate the juicy flesh from the skin and seeds then leave it in a bowl for 10 mins . It set like a very firm jelly which he then sliced and hung up to dry . Apparently it was still edible after 2 years tho' no-one mentioned what it actually tastes like ! 
He recommended using a sieve but ended up just squishing the berries in his hand .
Anyway , I have noticed the berries ripening around here so I will give it a go if I can get to them before the pigeons do this year .
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Well I finally did get around to making some last autumn and the result was pretty good -- more by luck than judgement !
I got about 10 lb of berries from a hedge I had laid so they were nice plump ones from the top of the trees . Boiled half of them , just covered with water , until the flesh was tender then pressed the mush thru a sieve to get a fairly thick liquid without bits in it . It showed no sign of setting and tasted pretty horrible so I used that liquid to boil the remaining berries and sieved again . Got a thicker liquid which still wouldn't set and tasted even worse . Stirred in a bit of honey , tipped liquid into OH's best roasting dish , put it into the range oven --- and completely forgot about it until OH wanted her tin to cook the spuds about a week later .
Bottom of tin was covered in a slightly gooey brown rubbery stuff which was stuck like the proverbial but I eventually got a spatula under one edge of it and the whole lot peeled off in one sheet . Tasted a bit unusual but not unpleasant so I cut it into squares and put it into a sealed jar -- where it all stuck together again after a couple of days . SO , I gently pulled it apart again and gave it a light dusting of iceing sugar to stop that happening , put it back into the jar .... And there it is to this very day !
It is actually quite nice now but I tend to forget about it until we have visitors , when it is amusing to see if they can guess what it is . Very few do .
Something similar was recently demonstrated on the ? BBC tv prog " Grow Your Own Drugs " ( legal ones , for medicinal rather than recreational purposes you will be pleased to hear . That is seriously misleading advertising IMHO ) . They added a chopped up globe artichoke to the berries together with a ton of sugar and , I seem to recall, something to make it set . I cannot for the life of me remember its name but it is the veggy version of the animal product which you add to milk to make rennet , if you know what that is . FWIW it is also used in marshmallows ! Anyway , they said that Hawthorn ( known as Whitethorn over here ) is very good for you if you have high cholestorol , which it apparently locks up in some way . The artichoke inhibits its production in the first place .
 If the artichoke really works I wonder why you need the Hawwthorn
Worth a try for interest but you would need an awful lot of berries ( and time ) to make more than a handful of the leather 
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Have just remembered that the setting agent itself is called rennet . The milky dessert I was thinking of is called junket . Haven't come across that for over 30 years now . Does anyone still make it ?
And can anyone recommend something to improve memory ??
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