Sometimes the best food isn’t the crop you’ve spent all summer growing: it’s the free food you forage from the hedgerows.
There has been an big tree at the end of our road for years. It’s tall and shady, and it crops very heavily with juicy yellow fruits. Until today we had no idea what it was, but as we came out into the front this evening we saw a woman picking the fruits and putting them into a bag, so I took the opportunity to ask.
Turns out it’s a greengage tree.
Greengages can be eaten as they are, or cooked into jam in much the same way as damsons and plums, so we gave her a bit of time at the tree on her own, and when she had gone we came back with our ladder to pick the higher fruits. In all, we got a bucket full, and we’ve barely touched what’s there.
Weighing it up when we got back home, it tipped the scales at 4.1kg. An impressive haul indeed.
The only trouble is, if you want to freeze them you have to remove the stones or else they can turn bitter. Same goes for making jam.
So we spent tonight cutting the stones out of them in front of the TV. It was a sticky and time-consuming job, but once you got into a bit of a rhythm it wasn’t so bad, and we did all but the last 500g in under an hour. Those last few fruits we’ll eat as a fruit, rather than a jam.
All in all, it’s rather satisfying to have found, prepared and preserved some fruits that have cost us nothing at all, but which will – when made into jam – give us a happy reminder of summer all winter long.
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I’m over whelmed with greengages out here in France – they call them Reine Claude here), so was looking for recipes when I found your site.
I do wonder from your photo whether they are greengages as mine, just now ready for picking, are greener. I think yours may be a plum variety called mirabelle out here – much yellower when ripe and just as sweet. The greengage starts to go darker as it ripens.
I have been told by a neighbour that they make lovely ‘champagne’ type wine – thats the recipe I’m looking for as well as any others. So far I’ve made jam and bottled them.
From your picture it looks to me as though you have Mirabelle plums rather than Greengages. The reason I think this is because we have what we thought was a Greengage tree which we are now fairly sure is a Mirabelle plum tree. This year we picked around 40KGs, ate quite a lot, gave a way many more, turned some into jam, and bottled some in white rum and sugar syrup.
If you Google Mirabelles you will find pictures identical to yours as well as some interesting recipes, especially a few good ones in French.
Also of interest is that 80% of the world-wide production of Mirabelles is from a couple of regions in France.
You might be right. We were told that these were greengages, and tried some and they tasted like greengages, but a couple of weeks on we have found what looks like an inexhaustible supply of them elsewhere in the neighbourhood, among an orchard of plum trees, with fruits of all colours. Now, with a few more weeks of ripening, they do taste like plums, so we will probably turn them into jam.