extra strong Marmite XO

[Sally]

0

Nobody makes jam like grandmas.

My granny used to make blackberry jam from the bushes in her garden, it was tangy and sweet at the same time.

I came across this while I was researching your nasty black pudding/ blood sausage.

Wild Blackberry Pie

Thank goodness for that, you're thinking. No more gross out stuff. Well, you just might be wrong. The village my family and I grew up in was situated in a rural area, with pig farms, wheat fields, frogging ponds, woods and berry bushes. Every year, in late Summer, my brother Paul and I would go picking blackberries. We'd come home late in the afternoon, and present Mum with a large basket of mushy fruit. "Make pie!" we'd say. And she did...but always the next day. It wasn't for many years that we learned the significance of the overnight wait. Flies love to lay their eggs in wild blackberries, and by late Summer these eggs have usually hatched and given way to maggots. You can't see the maggots from the outside, but they're in there, deep inside the fruit, chomping away. Mum knew this, and whenever we came home with blackberries, she'd dump them into a large bowl of water, and place a plate on top. She called it "drowning the maggots out". By the morning, the surface of the water would be bobbing with little off-white maggots, forced from the berries by fear of drowning. Mum would separate the berries from the maggots and then make pie.