Sloe and Steady

This is not a recipe, more of a reminder that if you wish to have sloe gin in your Christmas cocktail cabinet this year, your time is short. We were lucky this year, arriving in France just as the sloe season was coming to an end and managing to gather those the starlings had left behind, just enough for a litre (which arguably is enough. There is something enjoyably cough syrupy about sloe gin which I favour essentially from Advent to Epiphany and eschew the rest of the year round. If you are still drinking sloe gin at Michaelmas, I wish you joy of it. It is not for me).

For the pedants among you (and I suspect that you are out there), you may enjoy to know that the sloe is a drupe rather than a berry, the fruit of the blackthorn bush.

I believe there are numerous methods which will advise that you prick each of your sloes with a needle prior to macerating and steeping. If you are going the full fig this should be done with a thorn taken from the blackthorn itself, and never with a metal fork unless the fork is made of silver – the consequences of inappropriate tool use with regards to sloes has not yet been made clear to me. I am sure this is sound advice, both culinarily and folklorically, however, I am lazy and shiftless and my sloes remain unpricked. I trust they will eventually give up their essence of currant and hedgerow despite themselves.

Method:

Take as many sloes as will half fill the bottle you are using. Wash them thoroughly (I discovered a small caterpillar at the last moment. Horrible) and add to your bottle. Add a goodly amount of white caster sugar to the bottle, around a quarter of the weight of your sloes. Let them macerate for a day or two before filling the bottle to the brim with gin. Use your instincts here as to the kind of gin. You do not want it to be capable of cleaning a drain or whitening your teeth. Likewise, anyone caught using Tanqueray export or similar to make sloe gin can, I believe, be jailed under UK law. Turn the bottle once a day for the first two weeks, then once a week for two to three months. The gin can then be filtered and decanted, ready to sit, jewel like, on your drinks trolley.