The end of the haw jelly

BH got to the end of the haw jelly made last September (and noticed at reference 1) this morning, having gamely worked her way through getting on for two jars of the stuff. By the end she had become quite proficient at getting it out - although there has been some talk of deploying the jam thermometer next time around as an aid to correct setting.

That is to say an elderly brass thermometer from B. H. Zeal of London, probably the same people as at reference 2. Probably acquired by FIL from a jumble sale in Exminster. Not part of the jam making tradition in my side of the family. But hanging on the wall in the study, above my late younger brother's reproduction of the 'Rokeby Venus'.

I had thought that the thing had never been used, but a little diligence reveals that it has, nearly ten years ago now. See reference 3.

Thinking now of how jam scours out the copper pans one used to make the stuff in, one wonders whether the thermometer would emerge all bright and shiny up to the line of immersion - with all the grot nicely dissolved in one's jam?

PS: diligence involved searching the archived Word files, one for each month of blogging. The Windows search facility used to be very smooth, but it has now taking to pausing on words it has perhaps not thought about before, in this case 'zeal'. So File Explorer says that it not responding and goes quiet. One closes it down by clicking on the 'x' top right, which it does, after a pause of a few seconds. Reopen File Explorer a few more seconds after that, ask for 'zeal' again and all seems to be well. All in all, not very satisfactory, particularly given that this particular folder contains less than 200 files and less than half a gigabyte of data. Although to be fair, a small miracle that it does it at all, given what was available say twenty years ago.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/haw-jelly.html.

Reference 2: https://www.zeal.co.uk/. Another of those web addresses which becomes a long advertising banner if you let the Microsoft copy & paste defaults apply. Cursory inspection suggests that our particular thermometer appears to have been delisted. On the up side, I could buy a thermometer especially designed for use in tobacco barns. An export business to Africa? Can't see us exporting this sort of thing to the US.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/10/wimmin.html.