Above is a bowl of Apple Jelly, a wonderful soft set, positively quivering and glistening in the bowl. (I will give you the recipe at the end of the piece)
I would call it delightful and delicious but I wouldn’t even get a look in at any jam making competition because in its manufacture I have broken two rules;
One It is cloudy, two I have used jam sugar which is enriched with pectin.

To get over the jam sugar first, this is available widely here under various brand names. Purists will tell you that it doesn’t give the same flavour as the traditional long boiling with ordinary sugar and in this I agree.
I think it makes a much better product.
Because the fruit and sugar take only four minutes boiling to set (one minute in the case of jelly) the taste of the fruit is both fresher and more pungent.
I notice that Raymond Le Blanc in The Four Seasons agrees with me in this.
Neither my mother or my mother-in-law would.

Then there is the matter of clarity.

When I was training myself to be a chef one of the tasks I gave myself was to make the perfect Consommé.
This involved making a good flavoured and coloured stock (by roasting bones and then boiling these to extract maximum flavour and then reducing this stock to further concentrate the taste)
Then, with long stove hours behind one, came the ultimate job to achieve the perfect end result: Clarification.
This action was performed with egg white or mince meat or both.
When properly done it resulted in a perfect limpid liquid which had lost most of its taste in the clarification process.
The chef’s job was then to try and reintroduce flavour with more reduction or(as was the habit of the times) copious addition of port or sherry.

I think most people can spot the moment when this process went horribly wrong.

In a slightly different, but related way, there was always a huge hoo-ha about the clarity of jellies.
This was achieved by a strange woollen bag, called a jelly bag, which looked like nothing but an oversized woollen condom.
This bag was tied on the rungs of a chair, upended over another, so the fruit juices could gradually ooze out into the waiting pot without any pressure whatsoever thereby ensuring perfect clarity-and also that most of the flavour stayed in the bag.

Me? I just pour the stuff through a sieve and push through as much of the pulp as will go, thereby getting way more flavour for the jelly.

I am delighted to report that before she died my mother was initiated into the art of making cloudy jellies by a woman’s magazine.
The food writer managed to cut through years or prejudice by inventing stuff called Bramble Scramble. this was -in essence-cloudy Blackberry Jelly.
And so a jelly by another name smelled even sweeter, my mother discarded the jelly bag and was amazed with the intensity of the flavour of the finished product.

This year, sadly for the last time as our friend Joe Moore passed away during the summer, we have an abundance of apples from Muine Beag so I decided to make some jelly.
I decided to tart up the product a little to give it a little extra flavour.

Joe Moore’s Apple Jelly

About 3 Kilos of Apples (mix eaters with cookers for best flavour)
2 Vanilla Pods
2 Cinnamon Sticks
2 Lemons
A Handful of Sloes or Blackberries (optional)
2 Lemons
Jelly Sugar to weight.

Quarter the apples and discard any rotten bits but leave in the skins and the cores.
Cover these with water in a large pot, add the cinnamon and the vanilla and bring to the boil,add the sloes (these are mainly for colour)
Boil well until the apples are soft and have yielded most of their flavour.
Line a large sieve with a tea towel and sieve the mixture through this into a bowl.
(The advantage of the tea towel is that you can squeeze out the pulp in the end thus getting maximum yield and flavour-and cloud!.)

Add the juice of the two lemons and measure this carefully, extract and keep the vanilla pods from the pulp.
In a large pot (give space for a big bubble up) pour in the juice and add a kilo of the sugar (or a portion of same) to exactly match the amount of juice.
Stirring to dissolve the sugar bring this up to a rolling boil and then boil it so for a measured minute.
Pour into pots (cut up the vanilla pod and put a slice of this into each one for posh and extra flavour).

This is excellent with toast in the mornings, with cream on scones, or served with pork or lamb or indeed turkey!