We have had our first decent harvest from our Medlar tree (Mespilus germanica ‘Nottingham’) this year: a couple of kilograms rather than just a couple of fruits. For the past couple of weeks we have been “bletting” the harvested fruits, allowing them to soften naturally, and today we baked a trayful of them with a few knobs of butter.

Delicious. The whole thing is edible apart from the seeds, which can easily be separated out in the eating, and the taste is subtly spiced without adding anything. Our next experiment is to see how the fruits store, cooked and uncooked, but the tree is definitely on its way to paying back our investment in it.