Pink and potent
Matthew Dennison
SLOE GIN
Never gamble your pension on a food fashion. Last year sloes were everywhere. Even Waitrose sold them, handpicked at a fiver a pop, in branches from the King’s Road to East Sheen. This year, a combination of late snows and low bee numbers has made the blue-black berries of the blackthorn bush as rare as new-build luxury yachts in Reykjavik harbour. If you ask nicely, Harrods Food Halls can produce a punnet to order. Elsewhere the hedgerows are bare. But there’s a silver lining to this cloud — if there aren’t enough sloes, you can’t be expected to make sloe gin, can you?
Sloe gin is the point of sloes. Just like dear old England, it’s been around forever, staining the map pink. More than a drink, sloe gin has become a ritual, an annual penance of the middle classes as irksome and involuntary as school fees and with a similar effect on your state of mind after prolonged exposure. It suggests open fires and, pretty quickly, a complexion the colour of its dangerous glow. It belongs in a hip flask for the Boxing Day meet or strained into a decanter you’re almost certain to confuse with port or dodgy sherry. For this reason alone, it makes sense to buy the stuff. Even after several stiff ones, the label on Gordon’s or Plymouth Sloe Gin is fairly distinctive.
Like sloe gin? That’s hardly the point. I have never met anyone who enjoyed either drinking it or making it. Then autumn comes round again and, all being well, the hedges are heavy with those soft-bloomed berries the shape of children’s vitamin pills. Out come the bottles and the sugar bags.
The recipe is simple. Half-fill a largenecked bottle with one part sugar, two parts sloes, then top up with gin; store in a cool, dark place for at least two months, agitating daily at the outset, once a week thereafter. Either turn the bottle or tilt it. An elderly widower in a large country house in the North stores his evil brew beside the loo in the downstairs cloakroom to remind him to turn the bottles daily — with the inevitable result of unpleasant splashes on the labels come tasting time. One Scottish chatelaine forgot to fasten her bottle tops: a tip-and-tilter, she promptly emptied all her hard work over the unborn hyacinths she was forcing alongside. Married men are advised to bag sloe-ginmaking as their province: it’s probably preferable to other pre-Christmas kitchen tasks. It’s also quicker. Old hands will tell you that sloes mustn’t be gathered before the first frosts, but why wait till the birds have bagged the best ones? Gather early and freeze. Freezing bursts the berries’ skins and does away with the need for pricking each sloe, the kitchen version of learning to write Braille. It also renders the sloes mushy and aromatic.
Unmarried men dispatched by a zealous weekend hostess to strip the nearest blackthorn hedge, take heart. Sloe-picking has been known as a precursor to decidedly happy endings. In Apollinaire’s poem ‘The Poet Assassinated’, our hero glimpses by the roadside ‘a young woman, brunette and formed of nice curves. How charming she seemed in her short bicyclist’s skirt! And holding her bicycle in one hand, while gathering sloes with the other, she ardently fixed her great golden eyes on me.’ Quick as a flash, bitter black berries forgotten, the fruit-stained nymph is unclasping her bodice to reveal breasts ‘as sweet as the buttocks of angels’ — an occurrence, in my experience, rarer here than across the Channel. But hope springs eternal, especially when alcohol enters the equation. I discovered in Cheshire a recipe for sloe gin that includes mace, cloves and a whole host of spices. For exoticism, however, it’s probably beaten by the monk-made elixir Lea & Sandeman stocks — Ampleforth Abbey Sloe Gin. Ampleforth’s northern competitor is another Yorkshire firm, Sloe Motion; their sloe gin has won a fistful of awards and is available from stockists nationwide, including Harvey Nichols’s Foodmarket in Leeds. For good measure, they also make sloe vodka, sloe whisky and sloe chocolates. Harrods sells an organic sloe gin by Cowen’s, and Daylesford makes its own, also organic. The smart money is probably on Roxtons, the Berkshire-based company that organises bespoke shooting and fishing trips and sells its own-label sloe gin by the half-case. Berry Bros & Rudd includes it in its ‘Sporting Collection’.
This year buy your sloe gin ready-made. There’s masses of time to salve your conscience next year. Sloes have been around for ever. Archaeological evidence suggests sloe gathering was commonplace at the end of the Stone Age. Did Neolithic man turn, tip or tilt, I wonder?
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www.sloemotion.com; www.roxtons.com; www.bbr.com; www.ampleforth.org.uk; www. daylesfordorganic.com; www.cowen.co.uk
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