The Cottage Smallholder

I am going to try drying some of mine out in my dehydrator this year.  Years ago I dried a batch on a shelf above an Aga. I laid a muslin cloth above it as it was a solid fuel stove & therefore rather dusty. It worked perfectly. 

I think I was following directions from this book by Hilary Spurling 

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It is a fascinating cookery book from the seventeenth century. The recipes have been researched & put into modern terms by the writer/historian Hilary Spurling so you get both the old & the new versions to compare; she tested all the recipes. It is a wonderful insight into food & life in a grand country house many years ago. 

Val, those quince moulds in the Ivan Day link are stunning but so are your photos....the colour of your jelly in the jars is just mouth watering. My quinces are still ripening in the bowl, not long before I can start cooking them up.

Mmmmmm !!!!     

I have used Ivan Days's website before and have made up some of the drinks on there- Hippocras was one ( very hard to get all the fine particles filtered out- but very nice product) also some of the other alcoholic drink recipes. These were made for a series of internal talks I did for some of my now ex-colleagues showing how the world has changed over the years and what we think is normal now, was very different then due to scarcity of ingredients e.g the spices that were horrendously expensive, yet we pick them off the supermarket shelf now without thinking.

M