The realisation that I might have a bit of a problem came about unexpectedly during a conversation with our son. “You remember” – he said – “that preserve you made with brined aubergines a couple of weeks ago?” Frankly I didn’t remember; not even the faintest glimmer of a memory shuffled into my mind. Alcoholics have this kind of experience, I believe. Evenings or weeks disappear and they have no idea where they went except people they thought were friends start crossing the road to avoid them and they find a hideously large till receipt for a club they didn’t know they’d ever visited.
Madame corrected my forgetfulness immediately. “Of course you did!” she said – “The thing with the aubergines”. Hm. That wasn’t much help. So we (or rather she) hunted around for ten minutes looking for the evidence which eventually we found in one of the cupboards; at which point the memory cleared like a Cornish sea mist and I knew what everybody had been talking about. “Oh that one ” I said, hoping to cover my shameful lapse. But it was too late, and the realisation that I have a problem, not just with pickling but with jams, preserves, ferments, sauces, ketchups, chutneys, marmalades and bottled fruits flooded into my consciousness.
I rang our son back and told him I’d found it, which relieved him of the possibility that he’d dreamed a whole conversation with me, and I said that I thought I might be overdoing it on the preserving front. “Good” he said – “I’ll always eat the spares”. Not on this scale, I thought to myself; but it’s comforting to know that I’ve got one fan outside the flat.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. I have a memory of a huge crop of blackberries that I harvested with Madame when we were young (we’ve been together for a very long time), and I’ve written here before at the resulting blackberry chutney that was so full of pips you could have used it for scouring burnt saucepans. Many people would have given up preserving at that point and taken up something sensible like fretwork or morris dancing, but I had been bitten by the thrill of making food last beyond the green and hairy stage. And so every cupboard in the flat has its complement of stowaways, and the overflow is stored in cardboard boxes awaiting the arrival of the next great famine, or a no deal brexit – whichever comes first.
Whether any of this frantic preserving activity has any purpose is a moot point. This thought crossed my mind when we had to move a redcurrant bush in the fruit cage. Every year we pick twice as many currants as we could ever eat and rather than just giving the surplus away I make stuff with it which involves the expense of fuel, sugar and jars. I must also confess to being slightly obsessive about jars too and the thought of having produce in a medley of different sized pots would keep me awake at night. My antidote to industrial preserves has to look as uniform as a supermarket display, and yes – I probably do need (more) counselling. Rationally, it would be better to dig up the surplus redcurrant bush and plant something different but then my obsessive thrift kicks in and ……..
Madame has not left me over my pickling peccadillos, but I notice the cold looks when the boxes invade her studio. The best I can do is limit the production levels on the allotment to meet our needs plus sharing a smaller surplus with anyone who needs some.
Today’s contribution to the pickle mountain was a single bottle of fermented chilli relish – absolutely heavenly, ‘though I say it myself! But my insight is timely. Once again, I over-ordered on the garlic, but I’m going to lop two of the three blackberry plants off the list before I send the next order off, and we’re going to have that conversation about the seed order. The solution to my woes is to control my impulses, but my nemesis won’t be an old girlfriend or a new shirt. It’ll be a £2.00 seed packet or a fabulous new recipe for hot smoked and pickled raspberries.
