Each Peach, Pear, Plum (preserves).

I read an article a couple of weeks ago about the "August blues" accompanied by a quote from Sylvia Plath: “the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”

Ms Plath should have spent more time foraging. The best of the summer is still very much with us. Over the past month, within a 20 minute walk of where I live in suburban London, I have found cherries, blackberries, crab apples, rose hips, plums and pears hanging heavily across narrow alleyways and scrubby paths. The primitive pleasure of taking home a pocketful of free fruit surely originates in that same part of us which loves cooking over fire.

Brambles

Blackberries

Of course I haven't picked everything I've seen - rose hip wine may be a project for next year - and I also have a serious weakness for the discounted and oversized boxes of soft fruits that August always brings to the shops. But as much as I enjoy fruit fresh or simply macerated in a dusting of sugar, there is a practical limit to the amount I can get through. So: preserving.

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Coming home with a large bag of slightly under-ripe pears, with two thirds of a metric tonne of strawberries dissolving slowly in the fridge, I decided to make jam. I peeled and chopped half the pears into small pieces, roughly sliced the strawberries, which would disintegrate in the heat; zested and juiced an orange I had handy; and added whole cardamom pods, a decent pinch of ground ginger, half a teaspoon of rosewater and some salt.

I have half-learned my lesson from previous jam-making experiments and now know to never let the mixture heat past 105 degrees, at the risk of making fruit toffee. However I forgot to weigh the fruit and just poured sugar over the top. Slightly to my surprise, it worked out. The jam has a really good consistency, and the flavour combination is sensational: the cardamom at the forefront with a lingering warmth from the ginger. The rose doesn't particularly stand out on its own, but in combination with the cardamom I was immediately reminded of the sort of sweets you get in India.

I pretty much have pickling down at this point, and I figured a chutney is just a sort of jammy pickle. I diced a couple of onions and - while they were caramelising - peeled and chopped up the leftover pears and two slightly wizened Granny Smiths. (Sidenote: do Granny Smiths look at Pink Ladies with envy? Is that why they're acidic?) I also threw in a handful of sultanas, because I really like sultanas.

As the ginger and cardamom had worked well in the jam I used them again in the chutney. The Flavour Thesaurus recommends anise and tannic partners for pear, so I also used fennel seeds, star anise and clove. After combining the fruits and spices I added sugar, salt and cider vinegar and cooked the mixture to the magic 105 degrees before bottling.

I didn't use vast amounts of sugar or vinegar so it is not particularly sweet or acidic, and the individual flavours come through well. On reflection I'm not sure I've have a pear chutney before, and the slightly grainy texture of pear worked nicely in contrast with various cheeses at a friend's houseparty.

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For this same house party I made a cake, using the same basic recipe as the walnut rose cake but substituting almonds. I topped the cake with fresh peaches I found half-price, and it was pretty delicious, although perhaps not quite as good as the walnut cake.

However I ended up with quite a lot of leftover peaches - I'd got overexcited and bought 20 so this probably shouldn't have come as a surprise - so I made a quick jam with ground ginger and vanilla. Something went a little awry here as it ended up being more like peaches in syrup than a proper jam. I suspect that the peaches - which were very overripe at this point - released more juice than I anticipated and I didn't add enough sugar to mop it up. Nonetheless it spreads well enough on bread and the combination of peaches and ginger is very good.

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I'm not going to lie: I decided to forage plums so I could entitle this blogpost "Each Peach, Pear, Plum". I've never been wild about plums. We had a Victoria plum tree in the garden when I was a little girl and perhaps my earliest memory of disappointed indignation is that of spending a great deal of time working out how to reach a perfectly ripe fruit on a high branch; only to have it fall and become bruised and unappetising. It may seem unfair to allow one bad experience to prejudice an entire subgenus but there you are.

But if you're going to eat a plum, it may as well be a Mirabelle. Christine Ferber raves about them, and there is a two week festival devoted to them every year in Metz. I had clocked several trees in the local park a couple of weeks ago, just as the fruit was yellowing. Returning yesterday I found a carpet of egg-yolk gold Mirabelles decaying into the ground, giving off a boozily floral scent. Fortunately there was enough fruit still on the trees to harvest a couple of boxes. Punnish title saved.

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I don't have a cherry-stoner and couldn't be bothered to halve the plums individually, so I decided to bottle them whole in syrup. I haven't really done this before - at least, not intentionally - so I followed the advice given here. I think it would probably have worked, but the only jar I had left after this preserving binge was an enormous Kilner I normally use to make fruit alcohols. It didn't seal properly, so I now have to think of a way to use up a heap of cinnamon spiked plums in the next couple of weeks.

On the plus side, the Kilner should therefore be back in action for mid-September. The sloes are already ripening to a tannic promise of gin.