FOOD Eve’s pudding with blackberries

HEDGEROW BOUNTY?Deliciously sweet blackberries, so abundant this year, add seasonality and nostalgia to any dessert.

This September is  blackberry bliss


Food
Redmond Cabot

There are some compensations to that terrible feeling of summer ending. ‘Blackberrying’ for one.
We are lucky in Mayo to be surrounded by hedgerow goodies, and many of us have grown up picking and cooking delicious wild things that grow around us. Seamus Heaney recalled a child’s joy of the briar’s fruit in his poem, ‘Blackberry Picking’. “At first, just one, a glossy purple clot,” he wrote, the others “red, green, as hard as a knot”. And that first miraculous black one: “Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it”.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve gone blackberrying nearly every day with my little toddler Penny, an avid consumer of all berries, homegrown or punnet (we’re talking two punnets devoured in the car seat on the way home).
There is an abundance this year, big fat juicy berries, sweetened by the summer heat wave. Every day’s crop is different, depending on the rain. We wander up the road with our buckets and pick. The idea is to return home and make jam. Sometimes Penny frets about the conflict between the jam and on-the-spot eating. “Eat now, Daddy!” she insists when we come across the best of the berries. But she needn’t worry. There are thousands out there every day, plenty left for jam.
 At home we make the jam together. The Brunette winces and hovers around the hob, worried about Penny’s enthusiasm for mashing the molten berry mix. We add apples from our trees. It’s a mini-miracle. We’ve had these apple trees for six years and, on one of them, finally, a crop!
Happy days. We cut the apples, one per pound of blackberries and throw them into the pot. The pectin in the apples helps the jam to set, their flavour complements the berries. If you don’t use apple in your recipe, I’ve been told that adding some green berries into your mix will also help with setting. I also add lemon zest. No water.
Some try to boil the fruit for as little as possible, but in the last two years I have been bubbling for longer, maybe 10 or 15 minutes. A lot depends on the water content of said berries when they go in the pot. I judge when to stop when a blob of jam firms up on a wetted side plate. My mum used equal sugar weight to fruit weight, but I have come around to using much less sugar. Penny bashes the mix with a potato masher.
So, most days now we make a few pots of jam. It’s a piecemeal but happy process, each day we get a fresh batch of berries at their best and fill the house with the glorious scent of summer crossed with autumn. The jam is bliss at breakfast on a slice of white soda bread or dolloped into a bowl of porridge.
I am not going to give a recipe for blackberry jam here because I think most people in Mayo have been making it since childhood and could teach me a few lessons!

Eve’s pudding with blackberries
Try this Eve’s pudding with blackberries for a heart-warming autumn dessert. Only thing, be prepared for the little seeds clicking among your teeth and finding temporary homes.

What you need

• 500g cooking apples
• 200g blackberries
• 80-110g sugar

Spongey topping

• 50g butter
• 50g caster sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 75g self-raising flour
• 1-2 tablespoons milk

What you do
Preheat your oven to 200 degrees. Peel, core, slice your apples and put with the blackberries in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with one tablespoon of water and the sugar. Place the lid on and stew the fruit gently until just soft and place into a buttered pudding dish. Cream the butter until soft, add the sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Gradually add the beaten egg, and beat until it’s well incorporated.
Sieve the flour (Penny’s favourite job) and fold into the butter and egg mix. Add one tablespoon of milk – a bit more if necessary – the mixture should reach a dropping consistency. Spread this mixture over the apple and blackberries.
Bake for about 25 minutes until the sponge mixture is firm to the touch. Serve warm with custard, ice cream or lightly whipped cream.

Bilberry Bonanza?
The bilberries are also out.
Small, blackish, like mini-blueberries. But I’ve never picked them and don’t see them growing in my area. I hear they’re delicious. So where can you find them? Please let me know!

­– Redmond (living@mayonews.ie)

Red Cabot is interested in food, nature and small things. He sells his food at Westport Country Markets in St Anne’s Boxing Club, James’s Street car park, Westport, every Thursday, from 8am to 1pm.