Vocal Voices

Recipe courtesy of Cotswold Style Magazine

500g blackberries
1 litre of vodka
600g castor sugar
300ml water
2 cinnamon sticks
2 glass bottles

Heat the sugar and water on a low heat, until dissolved, then set aside at room temperature

Equally pour the vodka into the two sterilized bottles, and again equally share the sugar syrup and the blackberries between the two.

Place cinnamon stick in each bottle, then replace the lid and store away in a cupboard for at least two weeks to a month, shaking occasionally.

Strain the liquer through a fine muslin, before bottling up and placing back into the cupboard for a further month.

Damn. I picked no blackberries this year!

But then again, I am off alcohol for ever.

We'll see

Blackberries don't have a very strong flavour - am sure Ribena would work at least as well

On that note...bottle of Cassis at back of cupboard...may well try it out in vodka

I quite fancy this myself actually - vodka is the only spirit I can abide

Blackberry wine can be so dry it takes the skin off your teeth, but it is very 'thin' and it needs lots of fruit to give it flavour, as Di noticed. We also used to add apple juice to give it some body.

One of my mum's sisters used to make lots of different fruit wines.
Blackcurrant was apparently gorgeous, blackberry you've reminded me WM she used to add apple as well, I think it was also lower alcohol?

We lived with my grandmother till she died when I was 10; she didn't allow alcohol in the house, but aunty Dimp's fruit wines were smuggled in for Christmas. Mum and her next sister deserved them for managing to put up with my grandmother and my cousin and I

Good old aunty Dimp

Diflower wrote:One of my mum's sisters used to make lots of different fruit wines.
Blackcurrant was apparently gorgeous, blackberry you've reminded me WM she used to add apple as well,

Tea or raisins are also used to give body/tannin.

Blackcurrant's or bilberries make gorgeous wines - sort of port.

The trouble is collecting them - it can take forever, and to use dried commercial ones is as expensive as just going to a wine shop and buying a bottle of sherry/port - but DIY is much more fun.

Aunty Dimp was lovely

WM they had all the fruit; in our garden we had blackcurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants, gooseberries, strawberries, raspberries, eating and cooking apples, pears, plums, damsons, rhubarb...I think that's all Aunty Dimp had at least as much.
Next door had a massive cherry tree, so we had those too.

They were council houses, ours had a huge garden, next door not so big, but during the war had to provide their own food. It seems our side had the fruit and a lot of veg (not so much veg later on though, when I remember it), while next door had chickens and geese and apparently a couple of pigs usually on the go too
My mum was born in 1934 so most of the food she ate as a child was from their own garden - she didn't taste meat till she was 15 or so.