Strange Fruit // Billie Holiday (Abel Meeropol)

I went sloe picking with my mum in October. It’s a regular annual outing as the best sloes to be found are near where my grandmother and uncle live so there’s always somewhere to escape to after traipsing along hedgerows through a persistent drizzle.

The usual foraging etiquette of don’t take to much etc. didn’t used to apply with sloes. Usually there’s a lot of fruit but this year we had a shock. The wild and ragged footpath that follows the river along the floodplain at the bottom of the hills had been “rejuvenated” and a lot of the hedgerows had been hacked back beyond all recognition.

We walked for half an hour down the almost sterile grass path, now ten people wide. We got told off for not being on the footpath as we veered off to look at bushes growing along fences not officially en route. We found approximately five sloes in half an hour.

The aim of our sloe adventure was to eventually make the most delicious winter warmer of a drink; sloe gin. It is a blood red tincture that is the answer to a summer of drinking elderflower cordial; it’s sweet and has a flavour of summer fruits, a rich, dark, black-forest sweetness.

Sloes grow as the bitter fruit of the blackthorn or snag, a traditional hedgerow plant that flowers in spring and fruits in late summer and ripen through to the first frost when they’re at their least bitter. Their “least” bitter is still pretty astringent and that’s why they’re not a very commercially available fruit.

Eventually further down the path we found more sloes on branches that had escaped the pruning by being very high up. As the drizzle set in I climbed fences to reach the top fruits, filled my coat pockets and jumped down. We scrambled under barbed wire to get to the other side of the hedges. Eventually we found a tree stood out on it’s own in a cattle field, covered in the dusty blue fruit. We took all we needed and left, sure that further down there were more leftover. Passers by told us that we needed to go to another spot for the best crops but this was our patch for years and it did us proud.

The first time I made sloe gin I was about 12 and on a walking holiday somewhere near Leeds with my mum and her cousin, an accomplished rambler. We filled a 500ml water bottle with sloes on one walk and when home we followed the following imprecise recipe:

• 500ml bottle full of sloes;
  
• 1L gin;
  
• 1KG bag of sugar
• an extra 500ml bottle.
  

Method:

1. Empty sloes into collinder and give them a quick rinse then Dry lightly.
2. Prick the sloes all over and fill each bottle with an inch or two of sloes.
3. Using the funnel add sugar and shake so that the sugar runs into all the gaps between the sloes
4. Add more sloes, followed by more sugar until the sloes have been equally split between both water bottles and are surrounded by sugar. Each bottle should be approximately half full of the sloes and sugar.
5. Top up the bottles with gin and screw the lid on tight.
6. Over the following months turn the bottle upside down regularly to let the sloes swirl about and the sugar dissolve in the gin, it should mature from pink to a deep red.
7. Open at Christmas or after 3 months and enjoy.

You can strain out the sloes and decant it into a nicer bottle but there’s no harm in having a couple of sloes drop into your glass. It can be drunk neat or with lemonade, both are delicious. More precise recipes and fantastic advice about when to harvest the fruit are available from the cottage smallholder. We tried to do the freezer test but forgot to label the bottles, so we’ll save that for next year.