Mulberries

30 Friday Sep 2022

Tags

Autumn, Childhood, Divorce, Fruit, London, Stories

It was late summer, and this was a jar of mulberries we couldn’t open, in an old house that once stood in front of the River Ouse in Seaford. The house was loaned to us for reasons of my mum’s 80th birthday party. In the garden was a spectacularly craggy mulberry tree that had to be held up under the arms – like an elderly person over potentially hazardous terrain. Huge sagging branches, mammoth trunk and mulberries now long gone, potted up in syrup in a jar with suction so intense it resisted every implement we could put to it. So I put it back in the cupboard along with jars of homemade jam. The cupboard made me envious – summer all potted, preserved, labelled, suctioned closed. No entry.

Because I was once in another house as a child, equally but differently imposing, where there was a mulberry tree, I know that there is nothing like them. There is nothing else out there that can touch a bowl of bleeding mulberries – my small hands covered in scarlet juice. Red jelly (probably strawberry) with mulberries suspended magically. And white ice cream (yes it was white). There was a partially blind poodle who we expected tricks from, which looking back was unkind, except I was about six and didn’t know any better. Round and round she’d pirouette for me, her dull white head of curls and milky eyes following my dancing hand as I conducted her and wore her out.

The poodle lived in a posh flat along with a family of four in Chelsea – Elm Park Gardens – with a communal garden out the back. Black railings kept out the riff raff. I was sent there to live with them while my parents – back in Devon – ‘finalised’ their divorce. I remember not understanding this; why was this necessary? I went to school locally – Bousfield Primary, still there with a Beatrix Potter blue plaque – and endured the weekly humiliation of doing PE in my vest and pants. I spent a considerable amount of time truanting in the toilet.

Nothing was as it should be: the mother of the family, Christina, wore high-heeled slippers with feathers that tickled your toes, bit her nails to the quick, had fierce black hair and a decisive temper and smoked properly. Not like my mother who smoked socially, with wine or in distress. Christina was a rampaging smoker and a hitter.

As if to herald my new urban status I was fitted with a grey coat and velvet collar and each morning had Oil of Ulay cream – pink and obscenely perfumed – slathered on my face, which gave me scales like an alligator. Christina was married to a man called Frank Weir, who was a clarinettist and a band leader. I adored him and threw myself into his arms whenever he walked through the door and folded myself into the gap he made for me in his armchair when he’d settled down to watch television. They had two daughters and it was the younger of the two who sat with me under the mulberry tree where we played with dolls. Just to say, Christina died young, and Frank followed a year or two later, and the two girls were sent to live with an aunt up in Worcester.

I’m not sure still what I feel about being sent away like this, except I remember my first bodily awareness of what it means to be homesick. The silence of the top bunk. What else…Christina’s nubby fingers holding the mulberries, the deep scarlet and the perfumed sweetness of them and the soft suck of the jelly prised from the bowl.

Mulberries, just so you know, come around late summer, early autumn and there is no point seeing if you can buy them, please don’t go to a bearded grocer in Hoxton. They must be pilfered. It might be a bit of a wait, or you can buy a small mulberry tree from a nursery now and grow your own. I have one planted in my allotment and I’ve had my first small rash of berries this year. Elizabeth David put mulberries in her summer pudding: cook them lightly with sugar until the juices flow and use good bread. But Jane Grigson believes – in her fruit book – that the best way to eat mulberries is with cream, completely unadorned. Her compote sounds nice, though. And if you can get hold of a branch of someone else’s tree, stick it in the ground, it will grow.

Windfallen

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Autumn, Food, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories

Because we have to admit to winter. And that this is the last of the homegrown fruit: apples. The rest is Lidl’s. And dour farmers’ markets. Swede, turnips, parsnips. I’m quite looking forward to digging in winter, actually. I was speaking to one of my allotment neighbours and he said it was wonderful; digging in the cold, the harsh flat wind coming at them and going home to a warm house, skin flushed, muscles stretched. Cold brittle days with blue sky can be miraculous. Particularly if you’re working physically and you have a good pair of gloves.

But back to apples. And cake and tea and windfalls. Around about now there are apples on the ground, left to rot. Often there are holes in them, rusted, old holes that you know have housed a maggot. Or some other creature possibly still alive.

At the allotment, there are trees heaving with apples, and most of them are on the ground now, unpicked. But you’re not allowed to take them because being caught taking other people’s produce even though it’s on the ground, half-eaten, cloven in two and that horrible defeated colour of yellow – it’s a crime, punishable by immediate eviction. I’ve already been shouted at by Mike, the allotment manager for “resting my chicken wire” against the over-flowing community bin, so I’m sensitive to the small print of communal living. I don’t want to be evicted or ejected. It’s a delicate thing, belonging.

Paul, my twinkly allotment neighbour, smiled at me with his eyes when I told him this, about not picking. “But we do though”, he said under his breath, like a Dickens character. It was exciting. But then I thought – they’ve been here a while, six years. They know the code. I hear them laughing with Mike under their canopy of grapes, I see Mike’s large ankles sticking out at the bottom, so I know he’s sitting down. It’s a tribal thing. Or maybe it’s because I’m a woman who enjoys reading and growing sorrel.

On my way back from the allotment a few days ago, there was a tree and it had spewed its load on to the pavement in front of me. Cooking apples, hulking things, spilling everywhere. The front door of the house was open and builders wandered in and out. In the drive was a skip. Inside the drive were even more apples. I picked up a few on the pavement and chucked them into my bike’s basket. I edged inside the drive as a builder wandered out. I was trespassing now. “Excuse me but do you think I could pick up some of the windfall apples?” I asked. “Of course”, he said. “You can take the whole tree if you like”. He smiled and walked back inside. It was as if I’d asked him if I could possibly eat the rotting vegetation that was languishing at his feet.

The cake – apple and rosemary with a glug of olive oil – is perfect for a cold day, good with a cup of tea, and all you need for tired muscles, frayed nerves and for sensitive types.

Apple and rosemary olive oil cake

Adapted from Lili Vanilli’s Sweet Tooth

It’s a bit misleading to call this an olive oil cake because there are 2 tbs of it in total and there is also butter. I’m simply lifting the title from the book, and it sounds nice. And it tastes very nice too, sumptuous, appley and damp; I have made it exclusively with almonds on a few occasions, and on every other occasion gone 50/50 with flour/almonds or hazelnuts. I put more apples in than the recipe asked for (240g) and I would suggest you go even further. I’ve had dry apple cake before and it tastes pointless.

Scant 100g plain white flour

Scant 100g ground almonds

1/3 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

1/3 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp baking powder

85g unsalted butter

85g light muscovado sugar, plus extra for dusting

2 eggs

2 tbsp olive oil

300g peeled, cored and diced Bramley cooking apples or sharp eaters or a combo

½ – 1 tsp fresh rosemary, finely chopped

2 – 3 Bramley (or other apple) slices

1-2 fresh rosemary sprigs to decorate

Grease and line a 23cm round cake tin (I used tin foil though I know you shouldn’t – it was fine). Preheat the oven to 180C fan assisted/350F. Whisk together the flours, spices and baking powder to ensure they are all well mixed. Set aside.

Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy – about 4 minutes. Beat in the eggs, then add the oil and beat to incorporate. Mix in the diced apple and chopped rosemary, then fold in the dry ingredients.

Put this into the prepared cake tin, level the edges and lay the slices of apple on top however you like. Coat the surface of the cake with a fine dusting of brown sugar. Dip the sprigs of rosemary into cold water, dust with brown sugar, then press into the top of the cake.

Bake for about 30 – 35 minutes or until firm in the centre and an uncooked spaghetti stick or skewer of some kind comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin for ten minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely, or serve warm.

Still life

13 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Not food

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Autumn, England, Fruit, Home, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Stories, Travel

These are pears that have fallen from the tree, next door to where we are staying in Chiswick, west London. It is a temporary stop-gap and we are house sitting and cat sitting a rather somnolent cross-eyed cat, an amazing shade of fawn. In fact everything in the house is on the fawn continuum so sometimes it’s hard to spot her. She is also the same colour as the envelopes that arrive from Hounslow council. Anyway, we have been enjoying the pears, that are apparently diseased. At the end of the street is a mulberry tree, which has just been cut back but earlier in the week the pavement was festooned with them, little car crashes all over the place, splats of pink, ruby spillages. We were keen to walk around them so as not to tramp mulberry stains through the house and spoil the general atmosphere of hotel calm. Which at the moment suits our mood, when normally we would be cradling the fruit in our hands and covering ourselves in the never-ever vanishing juice. Because when could you ever resist a mulberry? Never.

Although I have been posting from England regularly since I started blogging, it was as an LA resident. I would always eventually board a plane back to LA, full up on Bach’s Rescue Remedy pastilles and sodden with days of fraught tears. This time, however, I am writing as a resident of England, because we have moved from LA and are now back on English soil. My blog posts will lack, I imagine, some of the emotional freight they once had – nostalgia for crisps and autumn, the love of a good walk etc – and I will be a bit more, well, down to earth, maybe, but hopefully not prosaic. We will be returning to LA regularly so I’m sure I’ll have some interesting tales to tell from immigration, and the warm and caring LA drivers and those women with faces that look as if they’re made of brown candle wax.

In the meantime, I have turned the beam of my affection to those things that are difficult to find here – the type of sun and light in LA, which is almost a hard blue, all angles, and then driving, the thing that tormented me more than anything else; okay, I miss the grid system in LA. I miss grids. I miss driving in a straight line for hours at a time with no pedestrians, no people to ruin it, finding Say You Love Me on the CD player with my fingers (Fleetwood Mac Greatest Hits, track 11) tracing it like Braille in case the driver in front suddenly decided not to bother with indicating. And of course I miss our neighbours, who cordially and kindly took my cakes, sometimes as many as two a day (when things were really bad) and who became our friends, and then finally our family. And all the lovely people who scooped us up and fed us and listened to my various diatribes (“Cats need to be free to express their natural instincts!” “I’m European, I refuse to wear a bra”).

Sometimes I just miss the right turn out of the garage, the car tipping down the hill into the first sun of the morning, like a massive fruit in the sky, knowing it wouldn’t change, and being endlessly surprised by it. Here I’m not so much surprised as bemused by the amount of grown men in tailored suits eating Wotsits. Wealth, that’s a surprise, particularly here in London – it makes me want to go up to the chestnut-haired glossy mares drinking lattes in Chiswick House and ask how they did it, and could I have a look at their bank statements? I don’t remember London ever being so untouchably rich (reading John Lanchester on the subject helps).

So in that sense, I’m a foreigner, but in every other way, I’m home. ‘Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence’, Philip Larkin wrote. So no LA, no mad people, no Jessica Biel or citrus to beguile you with, but plenty of pears, cats, mulberries, unpacking and, when in London, extortion. It’ll be an interesting few months, thank you for following me.

Black and blue

30 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Afternoon tea, Autumn, Cafes, England, Ingredients, Jam, Jane Grigson, Recipe, Sussex

Yesterday we went walking and found these blackberries, the red picked as an enticement to the black ones to gel. I made a rather flouncy-sounding mûrée with them – a kind of jam but without the staggering amount of sugar. ‘Serve it tepid with a grainy cake,’ is Jane Grigson’s rather dowdy instruction, though I found the marriage of mûrée and yoghurt far more appealing. You can keep the jam in the fridge and be none the wiser. There are umpteen blackberry recipes around, and so it is easy to feel overpowered and then give up, eat them in a desultory way and stain your breathable ‘windproof’ pockets into the bargain. Your hands will also look as if they have been attacked by a feral dog.

But this, I have discovered, is part of the joy. Because there are also windfall apples to be scooped up. And elderberries and rosehips in the hedges, and some sweet little weedy chamomile that we picked and a couple of plump and bruised-looking figs. All foraged or nicked depending on who you ask.

This is what happens when you leave the Metropolis; things can get a bit wild. On Sunday, we took a path that was familiar to us, walking from Berwick church, in East Sussex, stopping to admire the clear windows and the stillness inside and the murals by Vanessa Bell, the sculptural bird bath, and then into fields of corn, the wind looping around us and whipping the trees into a frenzy (‘I hate trees. They’re so noisy!’ I once heard a woman say to her friend on the bus). This bit we knew, but then the trail we normally took was overgrown, with watery mud underfoot and a dead crow, and then a scratchy tunnel of blackberries. We picked the purple bulbous ones and tied them up handkerchief-style in the left over clingfilm from mum’s sandwich. The rest were burrowed deep into pockets, leeching out like blood onto our hands.

And then suddenly there was no more trail and no stile. It was odd, as if it had just disappeared or we had remembered it wrongly, which we hadn’t. And then came the rain, big splodges of it, and we stood there with instant wet feet, socks like sopping flannels and wondered what to do, repeatedly going up to the barbed wire fence as if it would become something else. Finally we climbed over it, our trousers and socks snagging on the wires, sparking rivulets of blood and a torrent of swearing, and then we traipsed over the Downs to Alfriston to a warm and steamy tea room, and I felt like a character in a Barbara Pym novel – Connie Aspinal to my mother’s Edith Liversidge on our way to bag a curate – our wet things hurled in front of the cake counter so that the nice young waitress had a job getting to the Millionaire’s shortbread.

Then as we went from oolong to rooibos back to English breakfast, from two scones to one and then realised we couldn’t actually pay because we had brought the wrong debit card, the nice young waitress gave up trying to haul us in, became herself, and told us about her horrible time at school, her love of drama and English literature, being bullied for years and now being friends with her tormentors. And then we paid with something (my Oyster card) and ran headlong into the bus that had already left its stop but was the very last one and if we missed it I think we would have drowned each other. I didn’t have my ticket because it had disintegrated in the rain but the driver simply nodded me to a seat and we trundled over the Downs back to Seaford completely exhausted. And people think LA is wild.

La Mûrée

Adapted from Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book

I can imagine this swirled through Bircher muesli. It is delicious with cream as a kind of fool or as the fruit component in a crostata. Honestly, I never measure anything but throw it all in and hope for the best, but the measurements are here for safety (and because sometimes mine tastes like papier mache if I’m a bit free form with the flour)

1 lb (½ kg) of blackberries
Sugar to taste (Jane Grigson uses 250g/1 cup)
Juice of half a lemon
25g flour (¼ cup)

Rinse the blackberries if necessary. Put them in a pan with the sugar, the juice of the lemon and the flour. Stir for a few minutes until cooked, over a slow heat. The juices will start to run and the fruit will cook down, though it’s nice if the berries retain some of their shape. Leave to cool and then store in the fridge.

Ripe

23 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Cooking, Dessert, Fruit, Ingredients, Los Angeles, Recipes, Spices, Stories, Sussex, Unbuyables

Steaming pineapples and musky roses. Damp, heady and sweet. A bit like a fruit and veg shop. That’s the best I can do when it comes to describing the strange perfume of quinces. Warm and wet? Sultry. They smell like perfume. I’m at a loss.

This is also what happens when I’m asked (and this happens a lot) “how do you find LA?” I haven’t yet found it, I want to say. I’m still at a loss. Sometimes words are tricky and some things are hard to grasp. There’s no ‘it’, there’s no graspable thing. The quince is yellow when ripe and is almost waxy, and it smells definitely of pineapples. It is hard in the hand – there’s no give in it, unlike a pear which it resembles. A pear with a big bum. You can’t eat it raw unless you like having bloody stumps instead of teeth. You have to wait for the fruit to become bletted, which means soft to the point of decay, if you want to eat it like that. The quince needs to be cooked, and then there’s the smell (see above). It’s probably what is known as an acquired taste.

LA is dry and hot and sunny most of the year. Sometimes it rains and then it buckets down and no one knows how to drive when the road is wet so they crash. There is no centre, but lots of grids. So if you get lost, then you just take the next left and go backwards. It is a maze of suns. Everyone wears sunglasses all the time, even at night. It is a city of endless fragments where you are unlikely ever to bump into anyone you know. If you want to get lost, it’s a good place to be.

There is a huge botanical garden, The Huntington, with a library attached that has the first edition of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. Oskar Schindler lived above a dry cleaners in Beverly Hills for a while. David Hockney learned to drive in LA (and drove all the way to Las Vegas after his test, because he didn’t know how to get off the freeway), as did I. The smell of wild fennel is strong, and I would say it is a place of colour. It is rarely damp.

I found these quinces in a bag on someone’s front lawn on the outskirts of Seaford. Previously there have only been apples there, so discovering quinces was very exciting. I hope it was okay for me to take them. I took all the other things they left out, and nobody said anything. You are unlikely to find local quinces in the shops. Along with mulberries, you’re better off befriending someone with a tree and a glut and a kind heart. It is worth it.

One of the many spectacular things about quinces is the way they turn a deep rosy gold during cooking, which makes them rather dramatic and a bit serious-seeming. Good for dinner parties, or just on your own, slumped over a book. This compote is lovely served with yoghurt, cream or ice cream. Good as a sorbet too, or puréed for a tart.

Compote of quinces and allspice

Inspired by Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, originally from Audiger’s La Maison Reglée, 1692

Allspice isn’t, as I once thought, a combination of ‘all the spices’. The name was coined around 1621 by the English, who likened its aroma and taste to a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Allspice (Pimenta officinalis) comes from a tropical tree native to America, also cultivated in the West Indies and Jamaica. The berries – as seen below – are often tied in muslin and used in the making of preserves and pickles. The flavour, like the quince, is elusive, and works well here.

6 quinces (or thereabouts)

Sugar or honey to taste

3-4 Whole allspice berries

Cut up two quinces – use windfalls for this, as it doesn’t matter what they look like – and put them, peel, core and all into a pan. Cover generously with water. Also peel neatly the four remaining quinces. Add these peelings to the pan, and then the cores as you cut them into quarters. The cores are very tough, so pare gradually away otherwise you’re left with shards and splinters of quince.

Prevent the pieces from discolouring by dropping them into a bowl of lightly salted water. Boil up the pan of quince ‘debris’, and stew lightly until it begins to turn a rich amber. Not red as many suggest – you’ll be waiting forever for that. Now strain off the glowing juice, add sugar or honey* to taste, and bring slowly to simmering point, stirring every now and then. In this syrup, cook the quince pieces along with the allspice berries, until the fruit is tender. Serve with something white and cool.

Allspice berries

Other recipes with quince:

Quince paste with Manchego

*I have not used honey in the making of this recipe so far, though it was used traditionally, before the advent of sugar. However, you may need to experiment with the strength and sweetness, as honey behaves differently to sugar in the cooking process.

The short life of pears

12 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Cooking, Dessert, Fruit, Ingredients, Lucas Hollweg, Recipes, Somerset, Spices, Stories

img_1879-2

There was a pear tree outside the window in Watchet. Conference pears that suited the palette of the place. Seaford was grey – pewter grey, oyster grey, pinky grey after the sunset. And Watchet was the full spectrum of brown. Deep russet, rust, coral red, the sand on the beach brown like earth, the red earth in the fields slack with rain, giving us all ‘ginger boots’ (dad’s phrase). High iron deposits in the soil, that’s what.

And even though there were tons of apples – in fact so many no one knew what to do with them all – pears were what we ate. And I love pears. I’d rather eat a pear than an apple. No peeling required. The juice is more forthcoming in a pear, the softness a surprise.

I was allowed to pick the pears, as many as I wanted. A lot had fallen on the ground, and were in the process of rotting back into the earth. It was the perfect time for them, almost to the day – ‘the tradition is to pick them on or soon after 1 November and then watch them as they come to perfection’ according to R.H.L Gunyon – and it was lovely to see how many sizes they came in, unlike the Stepford Wives versions I’m so used to seeing at the supermarket.

They were all hard, but this is normal. They should be picked firm and allowed to ripen at home. A ripe pear yields slightly around the stem, but doesn’t split or feel squashy. I ate pears two ways during my stay in West Somerset. The ones I picked I didn’t eat until five days later. I was unconvinced they would work out, but I kept them in my bag, ready.

The first pears I encountered were cooked; they were buttered, sugared, salted, spiced with ginger and cardamom, and phenomenally rich. It was hard to talk about them during or even after eating. My cousin Becky cooked them, following Lucas, her brother’s recipe. Made in the Aga, with crates of apples out the back. I remembered how Lucas used to read cookery books as a child in this house, and now here we were eating his gingery pears, reading them as we were eating them, his limpid prose coming from the shiny page. There are ten minutes in the life of a perfect pear, he wrote. Best get on then, as they say down this way.

On my last day, I picked more pears from the tree, and put them in my bag. None of them felt ready to eat. Even the ones from my first day felt disappointingly robust. Dad drove me to the train station. Another cancelled train. What is it with me and trains? The cancellation this time was due to the existence of ‘disruptive passengers’. We got back in the car. It was two hours until the next one and we were both hungry. It was pouring with rain and now it was cold; proper weather at last.

We ate smoked mackerel and pears while listening to a radio programme about drug overdoses. The pears were perfect. The mackerel was greasy – the savoury to the pear’s sweet. We wiped our hands on an old towel. And because we had two hours, we talked about our memories of things past.

Strange what being in a stationary car will do. I almost missed the next train. The conversation felt too short and suddenly I was out in the driving rain, just in time for the 7.05, the hems of my trousers slopping about in muddy pools. No more pears now, but I’m glad for both lovely meals. Pears cooked, pears raw. Short-lived and perfect.

Caramel pears with ginger and cardamom

Recipe by Lucas Hollweg, originally in Waitrose Kitchen, October, 2013

Pears in cooking often need a little something – another fruit or spice. Lemon juice is good, because it also helps to arrest the pear’s discolouration after peeling. Pears and apples, pears and quinces, pears and greengages, pears and cheese, pears and bay etc. Here Lucas uses cardamom and ginger to spectacular effect – a pudding that tastes of the coming winter. Don’t be shy of the salt.

Serves 4-6

50g unsalted butter

75g dark brown sugar

75g granulated sugar

¼ tsp sea salt flakes

1½ tsp ground ginger

12 green cardamom pods

4 medium pears, peeled and halved

Preheat the oven to 200C/392F. Put the butter in a saucepan with both kinds of sugar, the sea salt and ground ginger. Using a sharp knife, slit open the cardamom pods and shake out the dark seeds from inside. Chop them with a knife (or grind them lightly in a pestle and mortar) and add to the butter and sugar. Warm over a gentle heat until the butter and sugar have melted together.

Pour into the bottom of a roasting tin or ovenproof frying pan that’s just large enough to fit the pear halves in a single layer. Arrange the pears on top of the sauce, cut side down. Place in the oven for 20 minutes, then carefully turn the pears over, basting with some of the hot sauce, and return to the oven for 20 minutes more. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 5 minutes. Serve with some of the sugary juices spooned over the top and a glug of double cream.

Cry loud the pears of anguish

Parisian street sellers, 13^th century

Damp & Soulful

21 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Baking, Cake, Chocolate, England, Gluten-free, Ingredients, Nuts, Recipes, Stories, Sussex

This is an autumn cake – damp and soulful and lovely with a few late mulberries or some cooked and treacly damsons, as small as olives now. This might also be the time to get out some prunes and soak them in Armagnac (you could lob some into the cake itself). Nuts instead of flour here, which makes it gluten-free. I made the mistake the first time round of putting two tablespoons of spelt in, which was unnecessary and also catastrophic. The 2 tbs were my undoing. I made it for a party and no one would touch it. It was as if I’d announced that there was cat food in it. Instead of flour I now add cocoa powder, and everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. Except of course there’s sugar and butter and nuts and chocolate.

“Do you do anything gluten-free?” the lady asked. She was the carer for a much older lady who she’d just seated with difficulty at a nearby table. Rain drummed on the windows. I was sitting right by the till. It was a lovely cafe, full of rare teas and little glass milk bottles and ironic tea cosies. My head was next to the tips jar. My head was ‘tips jar adjacent’ as they say, and I could have lain it down directly on the counter and had a nap were it not for the pneumatic espresso machine and screaming milk being banged out on to waiting coffees nearby. When did milk become so loud?

The waitress had to shout above the roar of the foam, “Plum and polenta!” She pointed to some sandy mounds under a glass dome. The lady looked at them blankly and then back at the waitress. “You don’t do anything like a baked potato?” There was a moment between them where they both seemed at a loss. “Coq au Vin?” the waitress said eventually. “Is that gluten-free?” “Yes.”

It struck me that the term ‘gluten-free’ had got in the way of this exchange. As if this was what you had to say these days, in these sorts of places. I don’t know why this made me feel sad. I felt sorry for the baked potato. And I’m not sure I want to live in a gluten-free world. I love flourless cakes – cakes made with nuts, for example – because their flourlessness is often germane to the cake’s identity: they were born flourless. But a baked potato isn’t any more gluten-free than my trousers. It was a baked potato first. This is a cake first (or torte…). Enjoy it. I hope there will always be a place for it in our post gluten world.

Chocolate and hazelnut torte

Adapted from and inspired by Emma Gardner’s beautiful blog, Poires au Chocolat

This cake is rather drum-like in appearance, and has less of the fallen soufflé effect common in the flourless. However, its surface does eventually crack reassuringly. I have no idea how the cold-eggs-straight-from-the-fridge idea works, but the proof is in the eating. Keep the cake wrapped in greaseproof paper for up to three days, if you can, to let the flavours develop and deepen. It gets better.

75g whole hazelnuts

2 tbs cocoa powder

170g good dark chocolate (60 – 70% cocoa solids) broken into chunks

140g unsalted butter, slightly softened

150g light brown sugar

Big pinch of fine sea salt

4 large cold eggs (from the fridge)

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Lightly butter an 8″ springform or loose-based tin and line with baking parchment.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Lightly butter an 8″ springform or loose-based tin. Place the hazelnuts on a small tray in the oven and toast for a few minutes until they start to smell and darken slightly. If they have skins, rub as much as you can off with a tea towel. Put into a food processor with the flour and blast until they are finely ground. – See more at: http://www.poiresauchocolat.net/2012/11/chocolate-hazelnut-torte-with-smoked.html#sthash.3zwFHVRy.dpuf Place the hazelnuts on a baking sheet and bake for about 15 minutes or until nuts are brown and fragrant and the skins are starting to peel away from the nuts. Remove from oven and place the nuts in a clean dish towel. Roll up the towel and let the nuts ‘steam’ for about five minutes and then rub the nuts to remove the skins. Let cool.

Put the hazelnuts on a baking sheet and bake for about 10-15 minutes or until the nuts are brown and fragrant and the skins are starting to peel away. Keep an eye on them – they burn easily. Remove from the oven and put the nuts in a clean tea towel. Roll up the towel and let the nuts ‘steam’ for about five minutes and then rub the nuts to remove the skins. Think of someone you hate. Let them cool.

To make the ground hazelnuts: once the hazelnuts have completely cooled, throw them in a food processor, along with the cocoa, and process until they are finely ground. Alternatively, put them in a coffee grinder and do them in batches.

Put a heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Add the chocolate pieces and let them melt without stirring. When they look as though they’re almost there, take the bowl off the heat, stir, and add the hopefully rather soft butter, the sugar and salt. Whisk until it’s all of uniform smoothness. It will have lightened a little.

Add the first egg, beat until incorporated, then add the next, and keep going until all four eggs are in and then add the vanilla extract. Whip the mixture on high for 1-2 minutes until it’s stiff and becoming paler. Add the ground hazelnuts and cocoa powder and fold in. Scoop into the pan and level out. Bake for 28-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of the cake brings out a few sticky crumbs.

Cool completely in the pan on a wire rack. It will rise and then fall gradually, leaving a higher rim of cake around the sides and there will also be some cracking. Wrap in foil or greaseproof paper for up to three days before eating. The flavours become more wickedly intense with time.

70g whole hazelnuts
30g plain flour
170g dark chocolate (I used 85%)
140g unsalted butter, slightly softened
150g light brown sugar
big pinch of fine sea salt
4 large cold eggs (from the fridge)
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch of smoked sea salt flakesPreheat the oven to 180C/350F. Lightly butter an 8″ springform or loose-based tin. Place the hazelnuts on a small tray in the oven and toast for a few minutes until they start to smell and darken slightly. If they have skins, rub as much as you can off with a tea towel. Put into a food processor with the flour and blast until they are finely ground.Place a mixer bowl (or another bowl if using a hand mixer) over a pan of barely simmering water. Chop the chocolate up and tip into the bowl. Stir occasionally as it melts. Meanwhile weigh out the brown sugar and salt and cut the butter into cubes – it should be starting to soften, not squishy. When the chocolate has nearly melted, take it off the heat and stir until it’s smooth. Place on the mixer (with the whisk attached) and add the sugar, salt and butter. Whisk on medium until the ingredients have fully combined and the mixture has lightened a little. Scrape the sides down then add the first egg. Whip until combined, then add the next egg. Repeat until they’re all combined then add the vanilla and whip for 1-2 minutes on high until stiff and pale.Add the ground hazelnuts and fold in. Scoop into the pan and level out. Sprinkle the smoked sea salt over the top. Bake for 28-35 minutes – a tester should still bring up a few sticky crumbs. Place on a wire rack and leave to cool fully in the tin. Wrap in kitchen foil and leave for at least one day and up to three before serving. Lovely with a big spoonful of whipped cream or crème fraîche.
– See more at: http://www.poiresauchocolat.net/2012/11/chocolate-hazelnut-torte-with-smoked.html#sthash.nKxGe4qV.dpuf

70g whole hazelnuts
30g plain flour
170g dark chocolate (I used 85%)
140g unsalted butter, slightly softened
150g light brown sugar
big pinch of fine sea salt
4 large cold eggs (from the fridge)
1 tsp vanilla extract – See more at: http://www.poiresauchocolat.net/2012/11/chocolate-hazelnut-torte-with-smoked.html#sthash.nKxGe4qV.dpuf

Chocolate Hazelnut Torte with Smoked Salt
(adapted from Alice Medrich’s Sinfully Easy Delicious Desserts)70g whole hazelnuts
30g plain flour
170g dark chocolate (I used 85%)
140g unsalted butter, slightly softened
150g light brown sugar
big pinch of fine sea salt
4 large cold eggs (from the fridge)
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch of smoked sea salt flakesPreheat the oven to 180C/350F. Lightly butter an 8″ springform or loose-based tin. Place the hazelnuts on a small tray in the oven and toast for a few minutes until they start to smell and darken slightly. If they have skins, rub as much as you can off with a tea towel. Put into a food processor with the flour and blast until they are finely ground.Place a mixer bowl (or another bowl if using a hand mixer) over a pan of barely simmering water. Chop the chocolate up and tip into the bowl. Stir occasionally as it melts. Meanwhile weigh out the brown sugar and salt and cut the butter into cubes – it should be starting to soften, not squishy. When the chocolate has nearly melted, take it off the heat and stir until it’s smooth. Place on the mixer (with the whisk attached) and add the sugar, salt and butter. Whisk on medium until the ingredients have fully combined and the mixture has lightened a little. Scrape the sides down then add the first egg. Whip until combined, then add the next egg. Repeat until they’re all combined then add the vanilla and whip for 1-2 minutes on high until stiff and pale.Add the ground hazelnuts and fold in. Scoop into the pan and level out. Sprinkle the smoked sea salt over the top. Bake for 28-35 minutes – a tester should still bring up a few sticky crumbs. Place on a wire rack and leave to cool fully in the tin. Wrap in kitchen foil and leave for at least one day and up to three before serving. Lovely with a big spoonful of whipped cream or crème fraîche.(Serves 10-12) – See more at: http://www.poiresauchocolat.net/2012/11/chocolate-hazelnut-torte-with-smoked.html#sthash.nKxGe4qV.dpuf

The cake about to be baked

A bowl of mulberries

Some other flourless cakes in my repertoire

Lemon and almond cake

Bitter chocolate olive oil cake

Chocolate marmalade slump cake

Chocolate Hazelnut Torte with Smoked Salt
(adapted from Alice Medrich’s Sinfully Easy Delicious Desserts)70g whole hazelnuts
30g plain flour
170g dark chocolate (I used 85%)
140g unsalted butter, slightly softened
150g light brown sugar
big pinch of fine sea salt
4 large cold eggs (from the fridge)
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch of smoked sea salt flakesPreheat the oven to 180C/350F. Lightly butter an 8″ springform or loose-based tin. Place the hazelnuts on a small tray in the oven and toast for a few minutes until they start to smell and darken slightly. If they have skins, rub as much as you can off with a tea towel. Put into a food processor with the flour and blast until they are finely ground.Place a mixer bowl (or another bowl if using a hand mixer) over a pan of barely simmering water. Chop the chocolate up and tip into the bowl. Stir occasionally as it melts. Meanwhile weigh out the brown sugar and salt and cut the butter into cubes – it should be starting to soften, not squishy. When the chocolate has nearly melted, take it off the heat and stir until it’s smooth. Place on the mixer (with the whisk attached) and add the sugar, salt and butter. Whisk on medium until the ingredients have fully combined and the mixture has lightened a little. Scrape the sides down then add the first egg. Whip until combined, then add the next egg. Repeat until they’re all combined then add the vanilla and whip for 1-2 minutes on high until stiff and pale.Add the ground hazelnuts and fold in. Scoop into the pan and level out. Sprinkle the smoked sea salt over the top. Bake for 28-35 minutes – a tester should still bring up a few sticky crumbs. Place on a wire rack and leave to cool fully in the tin. Wrap in kitchen foil and leave for at least one day and up to three before serving. Lovely with a big spoonful of whipped cream or crème fraîche.(Serves 10-12)
– See more at: http://www.poiresauchocolat.net/2012/11/chocolate-hazelnut-torte-with-smoked.html#sthash.CDp8X22X.dpuf

Cousin of the herring

09 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Cooking, Fish, Herbs, Ingredients, Recipes, Sea, Stories, Sussex

030

I’m amazed by how much people know. Forget books and recipes. People just know things here in this corner of East Sussex. Like a silkworm’s food of choice is the white mulberry tree, and birds like eating elderberries; they take them back to their nests and drop the seeds, which is why you get elderberry bushes growing out of the guttering. I know now about sea frets and the right time for mackerel (July, August) and that sprats, the little pewter fish we eat most nights, are also known as the cousin of the herring. That there is sea beet and sea buckthorn and sea kale there for the picking, all along this coastline. And spinach frothing over the headland.

The people I was speaking to make no claims for themselves as cooks. They might have a garden, and they go for long walks. They live by the sea. It’s a casual knowledge, worn lightly. And there I am, drowning in books, wading through endless crumble toppings, and swotting up on the history of the damson.

The sea is mesmerizing here. The East Sussex coast is one long, flat sweep of iron-grey sea with the odd boat, often trailed by gulls. There is a yellow and white ferry that crosses the channel daily to Dieppe and back again, moving soundlessly through our view, from window to window. At night there is the solitary light from the fishermen, either on the beach with their rods or in the middle of the now-black water. In the morning we go swimming before breakfast, before full consciousness, and the water is cold and flat. I’ve never seen such flat water. After LA, it’s bizarre that I can just walk in. I don’t actually bother to put a swimming costume on, but wade into it in my night gear. And the sea at that time is grey-green, with fish that swim away from your feet like tiny strokes of ink.

This is the time for sprats, just small enough to grill a shoal of them and they take the simplest treatment: rock salt and lemon. In mackerel season, the sprats and the whitebait throw themselves out of the water to escape being eaten, and the gulls, while the fish are briefly airborne, take little nips out of their flesh. Either way they’re doomed. It seems an exercise in pure pathos; escaping one tyranny, to be ensnared by another. Often you see the little fish flying above the sea’s surface, skittering over it like birds.

I played around with beheading my sprats as you can see from the different presentations here; however, I do think it’s a shame to waste any part of such a small fish. Delia Smith gives a handy tip down below for gutting if that’s the way you want to go, but again I’m not sure this is necessary. There is something delectable about guzzling a sprat whole and crisp and silvery, down in one.

“First make a small incision behind a gill of each fish and gently squeeze the belly up towards the head to eject the gut, but try to keep the head intact. Rinse the fish well and dry off any excess moisture with kitchen paper before tossing in the seasoned flour.”

Grilled sprats

Heavily adapted from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course

Sprats are very cheap to buy, so they are an economical fish, as well as often being very fresh, and sublime grilled or deep-fried. I think they need to be as crisp as possible – you want them to rustle on the plate – so tossing them in flour is recommended. Whitebait (baby sprats) tend to come frozen, but are equally good, and like the same treatment.

Serves 2 people

1lb sprats (450g)

seasoned flour

Olive oil or groundnut oil

A few sprigs of thyme

salt

lemon

Scatter the thyme on a baking tray. Lay the fish (already floured and lightly salted – see above) on top, burying the thyme as much as possible so it doesn’t scorch. Fleck with some oil and grill for about five minutes, flipping them over halfway through to crisp them up on both sides. They will be brown and quite hard to the touch by the end. You want them to rustle. Serve with a quarter of lemon. Also nice with a mustard and vinegar dressing. Good also for breakfast. Add a bit of salt at the end.

Sussex apple cake

02 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Cake, Dessert, Food, Fruit, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories, Sussex

The sign read: “recent windfalls – ‘cookers’ – please help yourselves”. There was another sign next to it that said ‘eaters’. Cookers and eaters – two types of apple, one sour, bulky and big-shouldered, good really for cooking, where it goes to mush, the other sweeter, smaller – one to have in the hand. Although the sweet apple wasn’t particularly sweet; sharp, dry as bark on its dappled outside, but a brisk, juicy interior. When juiced later, the froth was brown, leading to a startling pink beneath.

There was not much wind to speak of that day. The air seemed suspended, with swifts carousing through little channels above us, their wings like black darts. Actually their wings were like wings, the kind you draw as a child – two V shapes. We listed with our enormous load, my plastic pockets crammed. Blackberries now liquidized were dripping like blood down my arm. And all this before lunch, which happened at three. Rather like Christmas day, without the presents.

We went into a cafe which specializes in china teacups and ladies. It is very English; everyone feels undeserving. The lady next door to us was alone. She ordered tea and apple cake. It is the kind of place where you are so close to your neighbours that you need to make a decision early on about whether to include them in your life for that brief window of time. But this was unnecessary because there was a flurry of misunderstandings, panic ensued, as the apple cake was off – and then suddenly back on – the menu. Almost no apple cake – not really a story. No tragedy there. Except it gave the lovely young waitresses (gap year) a chance to flounce around a bit, and have a laugh with each other. For the lady to show off her cool and calm persona. After the apple cake arrived, and her fork had made its incision, she produced a mobile phone and began a quiet, very civilized conversation with someone unknown (probably male) on the other end. She was very organized, I could see.

This is what I don’t have in LA: the chance to watch people at such close quarters. To notice things, like a certain kind of hair-clip, a cardigan, skin tone, imagining the man on the other end of the line. Watching a thought alight on a face. And aren’t English people interesting? We are so swathed in layers, submerged in stories that become more and more intricate with the telling. I am always surprised by English people, I think that’s it.

We waited at the bus stop, next to a couple eating ice cream. They shuffled up to let us in on the bench. I watched a man opposite with his dog, a scruffy thing, his tail wagging, his tongue out, looking around and occasionally up at his master. Two horses clip-clopped by. We got on the bus, a small Noddy bus, green and miniature, our coats bulging obscenely with our apple stash. We were deposited back to Seaford. I made the cake.

This is Mark Hix’s lovely regional apple cake made with cider and honey. In his case, the region is Somerset – mine is a Sussex story. You can use whatever local apples come your way – choose cookers, such as the Bramley, or sharp eaters at a pinch. A sweet dessert apple would be missing the point here.

Sussex apple cake

From Mark Hix, on Baking

I once ‘hilariously’ used cider vinegar instead of cider, by mistake. I thought it would destroy the cake but actually the flavours were enhanced by it, though it did make me think of fish and chips. If you’re unsure, stick to the original recipe. Also, don’t be put off by the sheer amount of apples required here. It really does make a difference. Dry apple cake isn’t fun.

Makes 1 x 24cm cake

170g unsalted butter, softened

170g soft brown sugar

3 medium eggs, room temperature, lightly beaten

1 heaped tbs of honey

240g self-raising flour, sifted

1 tsp mixed spice

600-700g cooking apples, peeled, cored and cut into smallish chunks

80ml cider

Prepare a loose-bottomed 24cm x 6-8cm deep cake tin by greasing it if it’s non-stick, or lining the base with buttered greaseproof paper if not. Pre-heat the oven to 160C/320F. Cream the butter and sugar together in a bowl until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the eggs with the honey. Gently fold in the flour and mixed spice then stir in the cider and apples. Transfer to the cake tin and bake for 1 and a 1/4 hours, or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes our clean. Cool in the tin; serve warm on its own or with thick cream. Clotted cream would be stupendous here.

Other apple recipes to try:

Apple and rosemary cake

Lucas’s apple and sultana cake

Apple fritters

Hedgerow crumble

Rum & Raisin

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Alcohol, Autumn, Dessert, Food, Fruit, Ice cream, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories, Travel

The last of the bewildering hot weather. Nights where one cotton sheet feels like being shrouded in carpet. Talking alone brings on the vapours, sweat beading on our foreheads as we nod sagely at someone we’re not listening to. Everyone drives like Vin Diesel, ramping up the volume on their car stereos, burning rubber as they overtake me on blind corners, tyres squealing like guinea pigs. And all I can think is how rude they’re being. That’s my version of a riot. Because I can’t complain. Because I’m English, and that’s all we do, while saying that we can’t do it. “I can’t complain” is our watchword. And I have been drawn to this detail of Englishness recently, perhaps because it’s so absent in LA.

Our English guests never complain either. We dance around each other in pained politeness. It must be akin to observing some ancient ritual – like conversational Morris dancing – with no one able to say exactly what the problem is, or even if there is a problem. “Do you have a parrot?” our English guest asked me today. “Er, no. Why?” “No, no, it’s fine. I just thought I heard a parrot at around five o’clock this morning.” I knew what it was because it had woken us too. “It was a coyote.” “Really?” “Yes, they live in the hills here and when they’ve killed a deer, they make a kind of ‘yipping’ sound. They do it with car alarms and fire engines as well.” “Oh right.” We all imagined a decapitated deer. “Great, well, see you around then! Thanks for breakfast.” “Don’t worry, it’s really safe here. They very rarely come down into the complex.” As I said this I remembered the coyote in the hallway and the mountain lion up by the tennis courts. They tranquillized it and carried it off somewhere. I wish I’d just said: “Yes, we have a parrot. We’ll kill it for you.”

I can’t imagine this conversation between Americans. I still don’t know what it was really about, but I felt in strange harmony with it. I’m leaving soon for England and it helped me get into the rhythm of things again. It was nice to talk to someone from Eastbourne, knowing that in a few days I will be walking the Downs, talking about the weather, bemoaning the end of summer, arms folded against the wind.

I would be happy if there were only five flavours of ice cream in the world: vanilla, chocolate, hazelnut, pistachio and rum & raisin. And raspberry ripple as a bonus flavour (for nostalgia purposes). But no cookie dough, rocky road or banoffee pie. And ‘sugar free’ vanilla – what’s that? Rum and raisin is a classic, and much underrated in my opinion. I know there are people who don’t like alcohol in sweets, but we will forge ahead regardless.

And this ice cream also lends itself to subtle doctoring: round and treacly Flame raisins, seeded Muscat raisins (sticky and crunchy and used traditionally in old bread recipes), meaty, soft, pale gold raisins (above) and Thompson seedless down below, still with their tails on, drowned in a saucer of rum – they are all so Californian, dried from the grape by our endless sun, and yet weirdly invisible, except for a few market stalls with their lumpen quarry. But I never gravitate there. Does one ever crave a raisin? But plumped up juicily in some searing alcohol and it’s quite a different matter. You could substitute the rum for sherry, if you like, and go for Pedro Ximénez if it’s available. This is a very ‘raisiny’ sherry, treacly and intense and good for a grown up ice cream such as this.

Rum & Raisin Ice Cream

Adapted from Ice Cream! by Pippa Cuthbert & Lindsay Cameron Wilson

The soft brown sugar creates a darker, more complex flavour, but you can use caster sugar instead if you like. Sherry works well in place of rum.

100g (¾ cup) raisins

100ml (½ cup) dark rum or sherry

300ml (1¼ cups) whole milk

4 large egg yolks

100g (¾ cup) soft brown sugar

200ml (scant 1 cup) heavy/double cream

Put the raisins and 75ml (¼ cup) of the rum or sherry in a bowl and set aside to soak overnight or until the raisins have absorbed almost all the liquid.

Heat the milk and cream in a heavy-bottomed saucepan to near-boiling point, then remove from the heat. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together, using an electric whisk, until thick and pale. Loosen the egg with some of the milk/cream mixture, then pour the eggs and sugar back into the saucepan. Stir well to mix everything properly and then return to a low heat. Stir until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. Remove from the heat, pour into a bowl and place over iced water to cool. You will need to stir it from time to time to avoid the custard developing a skin.

When the mixture is completely cold, churn in an ice cream maker, adding the remaining rum/sherry and all the raisins towards the end of churning. The raisins have a tendency to sink to the bottom before the ice cream can harden and suspend them, so you may want to give it a stir after half an hour or so in the freezer to distribute the raisins more evenly. Serve with a glass of either rum or sherry, or just pour it straight over the ice cream.

Other recipes with raisins:

Banana and raisin bread

Sticky toffee pudding