Fruits & Relish

Everyone's favorite, dark cherries are paired with fruity merlot wine and ambrosial hints of raspberry, scented geranium, galangal root, bergamot, black pepper, cinnamon, vanilla and bay. For sheer complexity of flavors this is my most interesting product. Enjoy with pork, duck, game hens, quail, beef or lamb–deglaze your pan with some syrup and stock to make a sauce.

Serve on the plate like a pickle or chutney, or in a little bowl on the side with a spoon for the syrup, which is every bit as good as the fruit. Coat a champagne flute with syrup, fill and drop in a cherry. Great with cheese, or just spoon a few over good vanilla ice cream! Note: fruit fills the jars when raw but shrinks in processing, adding their juice to the syrup. Not pitted.

Ingredients: whole cherries, wine, sugar, vinegar, corn syrup, herbs & spices
8 oz.

This product began as a cranberry quince relish devised by my friends the quince growers. I visited them when the trees were in bloom and offered my help with their recipe, and it came out so well I wanted to make a version for myself. Since quince season was still many months off I replaced the quince with apple, then pondered a secret ingredient that could bring all the flavors together.

What I decided to use was a citrus peel I’d candied several years before, the Celebes papeda, native to the Celebes islands of Indonesia. This peculiar fruit from the Gene Lester collection can be up to a foot across, but has a peel so thick the fruit inside is nearly nonexistent. With no juice it wouldn’t make syrup or marmalade, but I couldn’t help but try to preserve the heavenly scent of its peel, redolent of jasmine, magnolia and lilac. It turned out to be the final piece of this puzzle.

Ingredients: apples, cranberries, apple juice, sugar, Meyer lemon juice, candied Celebes papeda, spices. 8 oz.

Considering their ubiquity 50 years ago it is stunning how completely Spiced Crab Apples disappeared from the American diet, a victim of the death of home canning and commercial versions with lurid red coloring and no flavor. They became a joke, then forgotten.

My farm visits are now mostly in summer and too early for apple anything. Occasionally there may be enough Duchess to eke out a pie or two. But often there will also be the Whitney crab apple limbs fringed with fruit, a reminder of the pickles my grandmother made from them. A few years back I decided I'd use them and make some.

I knew I'd have to improve on Grandma’s recipe to withstand the impossible perfection of memory. First I took out the water and added fruit juice, then some favorite spices. They came out so well my mom's made them every year since. One Farmer's Market customer was reduced to tears; "I haven't had these since my grandmother died 50 years ago!"

Here is your chance to renew old memories or make new ones. Enjoy year round with cheese or main course meats, pork, ham, turkey. For the novice: you will place them on the side of your plate and pick them up to eat them off the core as you would any apple.

Ingredients: crab apples, apple juice, sugar, cider vinegar, spices.

16 oz., 1 pt.