Month: November 2009

This Christmas, leave Santa Claus a home made mince pie, filled with Mary Duerr’s 1881 luxury mincemeat.

The mincemeat, made to the same recipe for 128 years, is packed with cherries, roasted hazelnuts and of course a traditional measure of sherry and brandy.

The luxury mincemeat is rich and intense in flavour and is ideal for open and closed mince pies or for the more adventurous, for stuffing into baked apples with pecans and cinnamon, producing your own mincemeat strudel or Christmas mini muffins.

Keeping it in the family, today the 1881 recipe is still made by brothers Mark and Richard Duerr, the great great great grandsons of Mary Duerr.

On the jar is the simple recipe:  “Mix together the rind and juice of one lemon with 1 ¼ lb of dried mixed fruit. Add cherries and nuts, some finely chopped cooking apples and a good measure of brandy. Add a ¼ teaspoon of mixed spices followed by light brown muscavado sugar. Stir the mixture well. Cover and leave to soak up the brandy.”

Duerr’s Luxury 1881 Mincemeat is available from Sainsbury’s and priced at £1.99 for a 411g jar.

Duerr’s is stepping up in support of English fruit farmers a new premium conserve made with only English-grown strawberries, available from Waitrose.

F Duerr and Sons Ltd, the UK’s oldest remaining family owned preserves producer, scoured strawberry fields across the UK to handpick the finest, sweetest fruit that captures the English taste of summer.

100% of the strawberries selected were grown on Makins, Sturton Grange Farm in West Yorkshire. Makins grow a range of strawberries carefully selected for their excellent flavour including, Albion, Darselect, Elsanta & Sonata. Each jar of fruit packed conserve contains 227g of strawberries that have been cultivated in English soil.

The distinctive red and white jars feature a striking St George’s Cross along with all the familiar Duerr’s brand heritage messages that Duerr’s customers know and trust.

Richard Duerr, Sales and Marketing Director, comments: “Nothing evokes summer in England like the taste of a strawberry grown in our own green and pleasant land and our new conserve captures the intensity of that most quintessentially English summer fruit.

“The difference in flavour is down to the fact that we’ve used different varieties of strawberry. Typically Strawberry Jams are made with Polish Sengas which are grown specifically for the manufacturing industry. Our English Strawberry Conserve is made with three varieties which are traditionally grown for the fresh market so the flavour is closer to one consumers will recognise from their strawberries and cream”

“The major challenge which has prevented this type of product reaching the supermarket shelf in the past has been that UK strawberry farmers tend to grow for the fresh market and that’s where almost all their crop goes. We were lucky to find Makin’s who are one of the best known and biggest UK strawberry producers”

Chris Makin of Makins adds: “It’s been a tough year for English strawberry growers and it’s great to see a British producer investing in the local farming community to produce a quality fruit packed product that tastes like summer.

“I’m proud that my strawberries were selected to represent my country in this honour and I’m sure that the public will join me in raising a slice of toast to a true taste of England.”

English Strawberry Conserve is available now from Waitrose stores priced at £1.69 for a 454g jar.