Damson Gin
by Cab DavidsonIngredients
Damsons
Gin
Sugar
Instructions
If you pick your damsons early in the season, before any frost, prick each one with a needle before putting them into a jar. Cover with gin, seal the jar and leave them for a fortnight.
After this time the gin should be dark coloured and the damsons fully soaked with it. Pour the gin off into a bottle and stopper it tightly. Now pour enough sugar on to the gin soaked damsons just to coat them (don't cover them - use roughly a third to a half of the weight of sugar to the initial weight of damsons used) and shake the jar. Come back every day and shake it again, until the sugar has dissolved and the damsons have wrinkled a little. Pour the syrup thus produced into the gin, shake well, and enjoy. Carefully.
Megs comments
The same legionary (Maximus Bendicus, we were close, for a while) who taught me the Thyatian mushroom recipe expressed delight one evening when he spotted damson trees laden with heavy purple fruit. They're a small, sour, intensely flavoured plum that's common in the hedgerows of Norwold, but he insisted that they're originally from Hule. I doubt that's true. We took my brother out picking them and I remember Maximus staring open mouthed as he pulled off great handfulls of plums.
While you do not need the finest gin for this, you should avoid the cheaper varieties brewed up in the bathtubs of backstreet hucksters. The exquisite flavour of the damson will overwhelm harsh notes of a relatively poor gin, but will not save you from blindness.