life | style
Amber Beard
Aspirations of a Domestic
Goddess
We all harbour aspirations to be the perfect homemaker, where everything is just so. The napkins are hand sewn and match the tablecloth, the food is straight from garden to plate, the garden itself is an immaculate landscaped gloriousness with bounty on every branch, the children are a picture of fair haired angelicness and dressed in smocks and we ourselves waft about in long skirts with casually caught back hair and probably wear straw trilbys and carry trugs. We have a pantry (yes you have to have one in this utopian scenario) its full shelves groaning with homemade cakes, biscuits, pies and preserves and like Laura in The Little House on the Prairie, our children won’t go hungry during those harsh winter months.
The reality of course is rather different. If you’re lucky there might be enough kitchen roll left to act as napkins. Tablecloth? Tablecloth??? The garden is a sunburnt wasteland of a few sad tomatoes and too many nettles, the children are grubby and slumped in front of the telly because it’s raining and we are harassed in jeans and yesterday’s t-shirt with toothpaste stains and a hole under the arm. But all is not lost and in the pantry department we can shine – yes really we can with a small amount of effort and a modest helping of resulting smuggery. Jam and chutney are pretty easy to make and are great for using up all those windfalls, gluts, things lurking at the bottom of the fridge and endless buckets of blackberries that the children have picked and you will see the delighted faces of your friends and family as you foist your home pickled and preserved jars of obscure delights on them for Christmas with jaunty material covers and handwritten seasonal labels…
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www.styleofwight.co.uk
‘I have very fond memories of my mother making blackberry jelly with a
broom handle suspended between two chairs and the steady drip of the jelly bag as it discharged its purple
loveliness to sustain us during the winter.’
I have very fond memories of my mother making blackberry jelly with a broom handle suspended between two chairs and the steady drip of the jelly bag as it discharged its purple loveliness to sustain us during the winter (she also made a batch once of the most alcoholic elderberry cordials ever but that’s a whole other story – suffi ce to say we children slept well that Christmas) until we were sick of it on our toast. I have been a lifelong jam maker myself and a couple of years ago decided that the mechanics of jelly should be brought into the 21st century and so rigged myself up a tripod affair which stood on the kitchen table and to which the jelly bag was attached with a series of pegs. I placed a bowl underneath the tripod, stewed the blackberries and set about extracting the juice via my new contraption. Everything was going swimmingly until the very last spoonful which I put into what was admittedly a slightly overloaded jelly bag.
To say it looked as though someone had been murdered in the kitchen is no exaggeration. With a resounding splash the pegs gave way and the jelly bag plopped from a fair height into the bowl which was by now pretty full of juice. I was covered from head to foot in juice. The kitchen, including the ceiling, was covered in juice. And the husband who heard my howl of dismay laughed for a good ten minutes until he realised that redecoration would be the only solution.
All disasters aside (yes there was also the time it all turned to toffee) preserving is a therapeutic and rewarding pursuit and there’s nothing nicer than opening a jar of summer in the depths of January. However, just make sure the pegs are securely attached!
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