Welcome to Rob's Preserves, the home of beautiful preserve-making. This is my story.


I've been making them now for longer than I can remember. Sometimes it goes wrong but often it goes right & results in a little bit of heaven in a jar.
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​I am fortunate enough to  live in the Cotswolds in south-west England, an area that runs through the five English counties of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire & Worcestershire. It is also an area of quintessential English villages of honey-coloured stone with splendid, lively market towns and some of the country’s greatest palaces, castles and country houses together with the country markets and farm shops.
















Let's go back in time, however...













Back in the early to mid-1960s, my late grandmother would fill her country pantry with all kinds of home-made jams, preserves, chutneys and many bottles of home-made country wines. Much of it was brought out at the big Christmases we used to enjoy as a family (and I even got to try small samples of it way before I should have done).
 
My late grandfather was a wonderful gardener with a garage that smelt of linseed oil and creosote - an early sensory delight to me as a child. Something happened to me many years after they both sadly passed on - I had no interest in their culinary or gardening pastimes at the time but now feel something has been passed on to me from them in some way or another (I remain open-minded as to how this happened). Gardening and preserve-making are two of my favourite things to do (I have also been known to cycle, walk a dog, appear as a background extra in tv productions, drink beer, trace obscure branches of my family history and build things in Lego but that's for another day).