Just jamming

I CAN smell apples, plums and sweet onions, bubbling on the stove. Damsons and sugar are boiling in a pan. Clean, warm, glass jars sit in a line, waiting to be filled. For one, fleeting moment it is as if I have stepped back in time, and I am in my grandmother’s kitchen.

At Rosebud Farm, looking out across the dramatic swoops and folds of the Dales, in the middle of the tiny village of Healey, near Masham, a small team of local women, and one man, are busy capturing the heady aromas and intense flavours of late summer and autumn, plucked from branches and brambles, often right on their doorstep.

Rosebud Preserves may produce 2,000 jars of jams, chutneys and jellies every day. But their methods and ingredients are just the same as those my granny used in her tiny kitchen more than 40 years ago. Like her, they’re filling jars with the essence of summer sunshine. No one is more delighted than Rosebud founder Elspeth Biltoft that the traditional English pastime of jam making appears to be making a comeback. Waitrose has reported a boom in sales of jam making ingredients, with plums up 140 per cent and preserving sugar up 181 per cent. And Lakeland has sold more than 500,000 jam jars – an increase of 40 per cent on last year.

ELSPETH, 59, first started her preserves business, based in three stone barns, which date back to 1830, in the late Eighties because she was so disappointed by the poor quality of mass-produced, overly- set, low-fruit content products in supermarkets. She wanted to prove her bold, gutsy home-made jams and jellies, made without artificial additives or ingredients, could be produced successfully commercially.

Far from hitting her sales, the recent boom in jam making has coincided with more interest in goodquality, properly-sourced quintessentially English products like hers. “It doesn’t worry me, not in the least, I encourage it. There is a return to austerity and more people are collecting food for free.

Making preserves at home feels right,” she says. Elspeth isn’t precious about her recipes – in fact, she wants to spread the word about just how good homemade jams are. Having started out with eight basic products, including marmalade, mint jelly and cucumber pickle, which she made with her mother as a child, she has gone on to develop a range of 50 sweet and savoury preserves including onion marmalades and exotic Malay pickles.

And now she is passing on her wisdom and experience to others, as a part-time lecturer at the School of Artisan Food, in Welbeck, East Midlands, which aims to revive and maintain traditional methods of cookery.

“I’m striving for perfection,” she says. “I cook from the heart. I want people to open the jar and know how passionate I am about what I do.”

In true artisan style, Rosebud preserves are made by hand and in small batches, with as many ingredients as possible bought and gathered locally. Elspeth and her staff still pick wild fruit and flowers from surrounding hedgerows. They use crab apples and rowan berries to make fruit jellies and aromatic elderflower into jam.

Gooseberries, which are topped and tailed by hand, come from a walled garden ten miles away. Rosebud uses fresh, locally-grown herbs, damsons from a long-established orchard in Cumbria and beetroot and rhubarb from Yorkshire.

Elspeth refuses to use pectin for fast sets: “It is not something you would use in the home, you don’t want to be running out to the chemist’s for acidity regulators or thickeners, nothing like that. Boiling points and ph levels are about as technical as I get. We create products that taste as you would make at home, using only natural setting processes.”

She points to a jar of apple jelly: “I have a love affair with jellies. It’s a little miracle to see the beauty and clarity of a jelly that has come from apple, plum or quince. To produce a set product from fruit, with no added setting agents, that is what we are about.”

Elspeth’s rural childhood in Richmond fired her passion for the countryside and fresh, local produce. “Dad was a great walker. He had such a profound effect on what I believe in. I used to go for miles on his shoulders and we’d pick wild watercress from the becks and collect lapwing eggs to eat with salad, unthinkable now. We gathered mushrooms in autumn. Dad grew everything. We had damsons and plums and apples. I was making jellies from rose hips and crab apples with Mum from a very early age. It was all food for free.”

Having trained as a fashion designer, Elspeth was at home with her three young children when she and her husband, a marine engineer, decided they would go into business together making and selling preserves. In true family tradition, she made the most of the natural ingredients on her doorstep and cooked their first small batches of jams and chutneys in 1989, which they sold at local agricultural shows and craft fairs.

After she and her husband divorced, she concentrated on speciality food shops and delis and has always refused to sell to supermarkets: “I wanted to improve the quality of the product, give it a new image, one that would look as good in Harrods as it would in Dean & DeLuca in New York,” she says.

TODAY, Rosebud’s award-winning products are sought by everyone from Terence Conran to Harvey Nichols. They are sold by Liberty of London and Neal’s Yard Dairy. A large number of stately homes, the Black Sheep Brewery and Theakstons are just some of the leading names Rosebud produces jams for. Twenty five per cent of what they make now is sold in the States and Rosebud is also becoming increasingly popular in Japan.

The business has grown steadily, with the barns updated to include a large, state-of-the-art kitchen with dry storage area, a walk-in refrigeration room and a huge deep freeze. Kitchen supervisor Brenda, 54, who used to farm next door and started working with Elspeth 21 years ago, has seen some dramatic changes as the workload has increased.

A huge whiteboard on the kitchen wall now lists what has to be made each day, with reminders to get cracking on products where stocks are running low. There are quite a few ‘needed-now’ asterisks and five red stars next to those orders which are particularly urgent. It’s a forbidding task. The old Yorkshire chutney I smelled when I arrived, which is brimming with plums, apples, onion, spices and dried seasonal fruit, has been cooking since 7am and is stirred every 15 minutes. Brenda checks the damson jam for set: “It looks nice and glassy, glazed. It looks rich,” she says approvingly. If it’s not perfect, she explains, it won’t go out.

Lettie, a 15-year-old work experience student, is busy scrubbing oranges for marmalade in the food preparation area where all the fruit is manually peeled and cored. Every one of the 14-strong team I come across appears to share Elspeth’s passion for the product.

“Every new batch of fruit or whatever else comes in always gets the once over,” says Elspeth. “When we introduce new products all the staff get involved. And we always come up with a unanimous decision. You don’t need to have teams of Rick Steins and Delia Smiths judging fine food. Everyone has that ability.”

I may not be a top chef, nor an expert jam maker like my gran, but I can tell that the Rosebud products I taste are bursting with fruit, in fact, they reek of it. Unlike over-set, oversugared, factory-made jams, they have a rich, natural colour and a loose, sticky set that doesn’t cloy.

Before I leave, Elspeth encourages me to get out and pick some food for free for myself: “You are not just gathering you are also observing things around you, respecting them. You see birds flying over. You come across parasol mushrooms and notice a massive influx of red admiral butterflies. It’s a wonderful world.”

And she urges me to make something for myself: “Everyone should make an autumn chutney, full of Bramley apples, onions, plums and green tomatoes.” ■ Rosebud Preserves, tel: 01765- 689174; rosebudpreserves.co.uk