The Late-Summer Larder: Putting the Season By with Children
By late summer the garden is asking a different question than it did in June. The work has shifted from eating what is ripe to keeping it. The berries are at their heaviest and the herbs at their fullest, and all of it is about to end.
The larder is how the North has always answered that ending; you put the season by in jars and bundles, and the freezer drawer, and you eat the light again in the dark.
Children belong in this work. Storing teaches what spending does not: that abundance is a season, not a given, and that a summer can be saved. Here is what to keep, and roughly how.
Jam
The old larder rule is equal weight, a kilo of fruit to a kilo of sugar, cooked slowly until a little holds its shape on a cold spoon. Blueberry, blackcurrant, raspberry, whatever the bushes gave too much of. A child can stir, and watch the colour deepen, and learn that a jar sealed warm in August is a small letter sent forward to February.
Keep the jars somewhere dark and cool, and they hold through the winter unopened. Once opened, the fridge, and a clean spoon each time. A film of mould means the jar has had its season; let it go.
Cordial
Steep the fruit with sugar and a little lemon; leave it overnight, then strain and bottle. Blackcurrant runs deep and tart; raspberry is gentler. A spoonful in winter water tastes like the exact week it was made.
A child can hold the funnel while the cordial goes into bottles, and learn that liquid summer takes a steady hand. Keep the bottles in a dark cupboard, and once opened, the fridge. Most cordials hold for a few months unopened, longer if the bottles were properly sealed.
Dried herbs
Cut mint, thyme, and dill before they flower over, tie them into small bundles, and hang them somewhere dark and airy. In a week, they crumble between the fingers. Children can tie the string and name each smell with their eyes shut.
Once they crumble, store the herbs in small jars away from light. A year is the usual limit before the smell fades; the children will tell you when a jar has gone quiet.
Frozen berries
The simplest keeping of all. Spread blueberries and lingonberries on a tray so they freeze loose, then pour them into bags without cooking or sugar. Summer paused.
Children can help fill the bags and learn that the freezer is its own kind of larder. Frozen this way, the berries keep for the better part of a year, tucked at the back where the cold is steadiest.
A few pressed keepsakes
Not everything kept is eaten. Press the last cornflowers and buttercups between sheets of paper, somewhere flat and forgotten, for the months when the meadow is only a memory. A pressed flower is its own kind of preserve, kept for the eye instead of the tongue.
By the first cold week, the kitchen smells of nothing in particular again. The jars stand in their row. The herbs hang stiff and grey-green. Somewhere in a drawer, the berries wait, and a cornflower lies flat between two sheets of paper, holding its blue. The summer is not gone. It is only kept.
What to do with what you keep
Jam goes on bread at breakfast, or is stirred into warm porridge on the darkest mornings. Cordial turns sparkling water into something a child will ask for twice. Dried herbs go into the soup pot through winter, a pinch at a time. Frozen berries need no thawing for porridge or pancakes, only a few extra minutes in the pan. The cornflower keeps nothing but its colour, pressed into the front of a winter notebook. As autumn deepens, see the autumn larder.
The current Seasonal PlayBook is a companion for exactly this point in the year. View →
