Black and blue

30 Saturday Aug 2014

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.

Frilly

20 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Cafes, Clarissa Dickson Wright, Cooking, Ingredients, Meat, Recipes, Stories

I like flowers, particularly ones you can eat. These are wild garlic leaves (along with their flowers) that I found festering in the heat and growing through the railings of a building I have often wondered about, mainly because it’s called Corsica Hall and that sounds quite grand and Corsican though I gather it’s neither. You can smell it, the wild garlic, as you approach; that oniony heat, suppurating and cleansing and sweeping everything out like a broom. In fact it looks when washed rather like a collection of spring onions, and the general taste is milder than a clove of garlic. It can get a bit lost. What to put it with? Meat. Yes, go on. A bit of animal.

I have been discussing such things with my new friend the café owner in town. Every time I go in to have a cup of tea (last one free with my loyalty card) we talk quickly and furtively about food. Scandi, she said, that’s the new thing and I said yes, because I saw a TV programme with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in which he shoved onion flowers into the crevices of a huge leg of lamb just before barbecuing it and this was in Denmark. Then she has to go away and serve people but I know in her body language that she will come back and add something. So then she tells me about infusing flowers into custard, and this is absolutely the perfect time; gorse, rosemary, broad bean, dill, fennel flowers. Our conversations are quite tense because time is of the essence and everything must be boiled down to the bare essentials. I found garlic flowers. Really? Yes, I’ll bring you some. Okay, brilliant etc. And then today, I dropped off a small stash tied together with cotton. She wasn’t there which was just as well. A waitress put them in the fridge. I was like her dealer.

I think I may have found my perfect café. There’s a man who is there every time I go, and generally he drinks coffee, but the other day he was nursing a glass of white wine at eleven o’clock in the morning, and reading the paper with exquisite slowness. And they have a mushroom man, and they line-catch their cod from the seafront. And they made their own tables. I would like their life.

Meat reminds me of Clarissa Dickson Wright who died at the weekend. She didn’t just cook a lot of meat, she believed in it, loved animal fats, found vegetarianism deeply unsettling, and was generally a force of nature of the old-fashioned kind. Her appearance on Desert Island Discs is probably my all-time favourite interview ever, particularly in the face of the withering Sue Lawley, who is clearly trying to chasten her into admitting that the food she championed was unhealthy. “I’d rather eat a cream cake than take Prozac”, she shot back, mischievous and right. Also, scholarly, fun, unruly, brave. And sorely missed.

Grilled lamb chump chops with wild garlic

With help from Nigel Slater

50g garlic leaves with bulbs and flowers if possible
Juice of half a lemon
a little olive oil
2 lamb chump chops

Lay the chops in a bowl and add the oil and lemon juice, salt and pepper, and give it all a swish so the meat is lapping it up. Chop up the garlic leaves roughly and add to the bowl. Press a few of the wild garlic bulbs & flowers into any cuts or crevices you can find in the meat. Allow this to sit at room temperature for a couple of hours if you can, moving the pieces of lamb around now and then and giving them a little knead. Alternatively, you can refrigerate overnight covered in foil.

Heat the grill to very hot (a charcoal grill is ideal but timings will vary according to how much heat you’ve harnessed. For this recipe, the assumption is you have a grill where the heat comes from above). Grill the lamb till firm and slightly charred at the edges, with as many of the leaves as possible tucked underneath. The lamb should be pink in the middle – about four minutes on each side. Serve with a few scattered flowers and left-over leaves. Lovely with new potatoes.

Snap out of it!

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Not food

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Cafes, England, Fitzrovia, Food, Guide, London, Nonfiction, Stories

Actually, I’m fine. And I’m English so it’s my job to suppress all those untoward feelings of failure and loss and give myself boils and cysts instead. And something unusual has happened: I love London! All of a sudden, the place I have hated for about 25 years, give or take a year or two in the middle, has become somewhere rather exciting and magical. I think you have to have a few seminal moments in London; something has to have happened to you there, otherwise it’s just another capital city with a lot of people and escalators. And it’s so expensive it brings tears to your eyes and I will never ever go on the London Eye ever again.

RADA happened to me fifteen years ago. I went up for the day last week and went to the same area, though this time it was to meet the lovely bloggers, Rachel from Rachel eats and Evie from Saffron Strands, and to eat at Honey & Co, the Middle Eastern café (very good cakes, a bit hectic). It’s not that Fitzrovia is particularly beautiful – it’s not Prague or anything (I’ve never been to Prague).

It’s just that when I stepped out at Warren Street tube station, there I was, back in 1997. And it’s more or less the same, minus the porn shops and O’Brien’s, an Irish café that sold the biggest and cheapest coffee and the biggest, cheapest croissants ever, and no one had any money so that was brilliant. And if we weren’t paying – it was a benevolent acting teacher wanting us to do ‘a Pret run’ – then it would be off to Pret a Manger, returning with a box of hot pastries and smouldering Mochas and little change out of a twenty.

But what’s amazing, what’s strange and unsettling is that really it’s the same. If you get out at Warren street tube station, then clearly you’re doing that because you want to go to French’s Theatre Bookshop. I did this the other day and it was still run by a man who looks as if he hates you, because he knows you’re not going to buy anything. He looks a bit like Philip Seymour Hoffman though and I think that’s why on this particular day I didn’t mind his sullenness.

I never liked this shop and still don’t. I’m not sure why; something to do with young hunger and ambition and where it all goes. Then you walk down Tottenham Court Road, unless you want to go the other way to Villandry on Great Portland Street, which is one of those glittering delis with a very posh café and people who look like they have no pores. Instead, you go down Tottenham Court road (past the Scientology shop, don’t go in) to Goodge street, which is where RADA students generally disgorge themselves from the tube station. Goodge street is an interesting street, full of little places to eat and drink and if you walk on you get to Charlotte Street, which crosses it. Charlotte street is home to the Charlotte Street Hotel, where I have taken the odd eye-wateringly expensive tea.

It’s also home to my uncle Alex Hollweg’s paintings and whenever I see them, they remind me of the wooden fruit he made in the same jauntily rich colours that sit in his sitting room. The Charlotte Street Hotel, though they serve nice nuts, deals in the kind of exclusivity and luxe that made me feel forever an outsider. I remember sitting at the bar feeling like a scruff. But I have sat at the bar, and I can say it is a fine place to be, particularly if someone else is paying. My brother for one. I remember it was an evening of convincing; him trying to convince me to do something I wasn’t sure about. Anyway, I did it and it was a disaster. But thanks for the wine.

Back then I would have bumped into people – teachers, other students, Val. (Val worked at the front desk at RADA and basically ran the entire school and I think still knows my bank details. She also knew her way round a bagel). The place was a village in the middle of the city. You couldn’t go a hundred yards without seeing someone you knew, sometimes even someone who happened to be in the area by chance, an old friend apropos of nothing. It was all so easy; I have never quite got that back, that feeling of effortless unfolding, of friendships made blithely. It was that kind of place and time. Young love. So it was all the more delicious when the three of us last week went for a walk after eating. We did the back streets and didn’t really notice anything, too wrapped up in each other and our exuberant conversation. Streets were missed, the tubes came and went, we crisscrossed London, still mithering on about Nigella and Nigel and Simon, our faux friends from the world of food. So anyway, I went back and it was good.

Made me snap out of it.