Recipes to make your own home-made Jams, Jellies, Preserves, Marmalades, Sauces, Pickles & Chutneys

Val Harrison making marmalade at home
We’ve been making jams, chutneys and preserves at home for thirty years and our reasons for doing so are as valid today as when we started. We know the ingredients and they taste better than shop bought.Ā
For some time we’ve run the Allotment Garden web site and have already published many of our of recipes on there as well as in our books. As part of our low cost living strategy we’ve not only grown our own food, but have preserved it as well.
Why make your own preserves?
In an age when most things are available straight off the supermarket shelf at a low price, you may wonder why it is worth the bother of making your own. After all, you can pick up a jar of jam or pickle easily enough in any supermarket.
Well, just try and pick up a jar of chilli jam that adds both bite and sweetness to a cheese sandwich or lemon & mustard seed chutney to accompany grilled fish. Or pick up a jar of jam and take a look at the ingredients. What are stabilisers anyway?
The more you do for yourself, the more you control your food and what goes into your and your children’s bodies.
Sometimes the cheapest jam or marmalade in the shops is actually lower in cost than you can make it for yourself. If you check the ingredients label, you will see why. Simply they use cheap ingredients more, substitute cheap for more expensive ingredients. Always compare your home-made produce with the best in the shop.
In the summer, a happy day’s blackberry picking will soon be turned into pounds of fantastic jam. Food for Free!
There’s no better time to go shopping than just after Christmas when the shops are stuck with unsold goodies. We pick up some great bargains on oranges, clementines etc and turn them into marmalade.
Home made preserves make the perfect gift – in fact our family and friends look quite disappointed if they get a shop bought present instead of our home made jam or chutney.
Making fruit jams actually goes back as far as Roman times – although they used honey instead of sugar. Without our modern knowledge of bacteria and sterilisation, preserves were a tricky business to get right but nowadays it’s easy to make really tasty high-quality preserves at home.