Just stop it

20 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Uncategorized

Tags

Cooking, Devon, Food, Home, Meat, Nigel Slater, Recipes

I’ve been making stew. It’s hard to fathom why in the almost ten years since I started writing this blog I have not written about stew before. Stewed prunes don’t count. Also, pressure cooked stews don’t really count either, because you don’t have anything to do once it’s on the hob. And I have too many memories of holding the screaming pot under a cold tap, the way it all suddenly went wrong, the lid clamped shut, steam billowing into my face. I can’t do pressure cookers.

This is a French stew, one where you need to stand over it or nearby. I watched my friend Pippa (above) make it, in her kitchen the other day, under a low ceiling, in the Teign Valley, in Devon, on the western edge of Dartmoor. I could give you the postcode, but it wouldn’t conjure up the feeling. And what was that feeling? The feeling of slowness, of the juice of meat, of onions. Of chats, of being away for the first time in two years, properly away, no internet signal, no service on my phone, with friends. Friends! We didn’t watch that show, but we did watch Frasier in the mornings, as a kind of primer for the day. It made me think of Cheers, and also how sexy chinos are on a woman, particularly on Roz in Frasier, who wore them high and belted. I have forgotten to watch comedy, and it is a good idea, during these weird times to do that, and in the morning.

I grew up in Devon. East Devon; Ottery St. Mary, then Exeter. I lived in this county almost from birth until I was sixteen years old. I had an Exeter accent, which is not cute and cuddly, but rather flat and know-it-all, but also lovely in its way. You need to speak as if you are world weary, your arms crossed under a plinth-like bosom, eyes closing against the injustices of the world. I did this at 13. Where’s it to? instead of Where is it? And Bugger me, dun’ee fret? Instead of, Gosh, you’re a worrier, aren’t you?

Because stress is sort of alien here, not in Exeter so much, but out in the country, with the dense folds of trees, sessile oak mainly, and the swooping valley that opens out in front of you, and the red earth, red sand, the burbling of the river Teign and its mineral coldness, its red funghi and green coverings, the moss, the sharp stones under bare feet. No one is on time, strictly speaking. My last morning there was spent looking out over the great swathes of trees in February sunshine, and listening to Mark the builder’s radio – Aerosmith pounding into the clean high-up air, and none of it mattered. I didn’t sit there thinking, oh, if only it was still and quiet, if only it wasn’t Aerosmith. I sat thinking, it is perfect, like this. A person nearby fixing something and me with a cup of tea not thinking about the train I was about to catch.

Other optional chats I can suggest from my new store of conversational gambits: Buried or cremated? Also: are you Girl-sexy or Boy-sexy? (Are you sexy to men or women or both? It’s its own philosophy of life and needs its own blog post). And then finally – Just Stop It. Pippa told me about a woman who set herself up on a chair high on a hill at a festival and listened to people’s problems. She was not professionally trained to do this, but she was a good enough listener. People came to her with a problem and she listened and then delivered her verdict. She called it Just Stop It. The general tenor of the chat was that generally if you could just stop it, it would all be fine, whatever the ‘it’ was. The queues for this were round the block, apparently, and she was kept busy throughout the entire festival. So just stop it, stop the worrying, stop the feeling that you’re not enough. Start watching comedy in the morning, drinking cider, seeing people, at a distance if necessary. But go. Stop it and go. And maybe cut down on the peanut butter.

A simple stew

Adapted from Nigel Slater, Tender Volume 1 – and with inspiration taken from Pippa and Ralph.

I used cider instead of beer – which is what NS calls for here and Trappist beer at that – but it worked well. I added shredded Brussel sprouts too. NS recommends as the ideal accompaniment, ‘boiled potatoes as big as your fist, their edges bruised and floury.’ The inclusion of apple sauce is optional, but it works well together: ‘the point where the sharp apple sauce oozes into the onion gravy‘.

Butter, a thick slice

Stewing beef – approx 750g

Large onions – 2

Thyme – a few sprigs

Plain flour – 2 tbs (you could use cornstarch if you’re GF)

Beer or cider – 2 bottles (500ml approx)

Bay leaves – 2 or 3, torn

Redcurrant or apple jelly – 2 tbs

Apple sauce (optional)

Apples 5 or 6, the sharper the better

Butter, a walnut-sized knob

Sugar, a little to taste

Ground cinnamon, a knifepoint

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C/Gas 4. Melt the butter in a large casserole to which you have a lid. The heat should be ‘quite sprightly’. Cut the beef into four pieces, each nicely seasoned with salt and black pepper, then introduce to the sizzling butter. Let the meat colour on one side, then turn it over. Peel, halve, and thinly slice the onions while the meat browns. Once coloured, remove the meat to a plate and turn down the heat. Add the onions to the pan, with the thyme sprigs, and cook over low to medium heat until the onions are soft and golden. Stir in the flour and cook until it is the palest gold colour, then pour in the beer/cider and add the torn bay leaves. Once the sizzling has subsided and it is approaching the boiling point, return the beef and its juices to the pan and turn down the heat. Season with salt and black pepper, cover with a lid, and place in the oven. Bake for a good hour to an hour and a half. Check it once or twice.

Apple sauce, if using: Peel the apples, core them, and cut into coarse chunks. Put them into a pan with a little water and the butter and bring to a boil. Decrease the heat, cover with a lid, and let cook to a sloppy mess. However, this will only happen with cooking apples. Eating apples will retain their shape. Sweeten with a little sugar and ground cinnamon, then beat with a fork or wooden spoon until smooth (for cookers). Once the stew is done, lift the lid from the stew-pot and stir in the jelly. Check the seasoning, adding salt, pepper, and jelly as you go. Serve with the apple sauce.

Stew is unphotographable. This is the best I could do.

If you are interested, Oliver Burkeman’s bi-monthly newsletter, The Imperfectionist is really helpful for sorting stuff out. His most recent one is here.

Me alegro

29 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by Sophie James in Travel, Uncategorized

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Food, Stories

Despite how healthy this picture looks, these peppers never belonged to me. I lived next door to a storeroom and it stored things like beers and tins of things as well as mountains of red peppers and tomatoes and the like. Once, all the bottles of beer in a crate rolled down the hill on their way to the sea. I stopped them by putting my leg out and then running after them, like a parent chasing after her kamikaze child. Only one bottle got broken and the man thanked me and said that he was the owner of the bar, next to my apartment, and if I ever wanted anything I was to come in and ask for him. I remember thinking how nice that was and I was only doing what anyone would have done in the circumstances.

I found the crate of peppers incongruous, sitting there unattended. There was no one in the street but me, although in the photo there is a suggestion of human activity from the open door on the left. But at the time, there was no noise. This is the street where I lived while I was teaching last year. It is in Sitges, just outside Barcelona.

Up until then, Sitges was a place I had only heard of, and only from a man I once worked with in a delicatessen whilst as a jobbing (unemployed and depressed) actor. He was someone who subtly undermined me as I attempted to slice cured meats, who nitpicked about the way I piled sausages. He was not a very nice man and when he said his tan was attributable to a holiday in Sitges, somehow Sitges became as horrible as him. I never wanted to go there. I would go and sit in the toilet and cry and then have to re-introduce myself to whoever I was serving and weigh the pâté. I’ll never forget the awful feeling of my hands shaking over the digital scales. And his red face bearing down on me.

Also, delicatessens are a strange place to work. Things swimming in oil, the obsession with clingfilm, the smell of cold astringent objects, piles of goo. The colour brown. That weird rind on pâté. People who work in delicatessens are rarely warm – have you noticed? Because they, like the food, must remain chilled otherwise they’ll go off. Just a theory.

My very first exchange, the morning after I’d arrived, was with a waitress with black hair and a black mood who pretended not to understand the word tortilla. I thought – he is here, his spirit has contaminated this place. I never went back there even though her cafe was on the corner of my tiny pedestrian street and I passed her every day blackly sweeping up, looking as though she was still mulling over my ridiculous request. She never acknowledged me nor I her. So my first meal was spent looking at a blank space where a plate should have been and Joe drinking very good coffee.

Then I realised I had locked us out of the flat and had to call the estate agent who was hiking in the hills of Catalunya. Of course he was. He sent a sympathetic slightly cryptic message telling me not to worry and all would be well and because we had nothing else to do, we went and ate lunch – a plate of grilled sardines and patatas bravas smothered in a red sauce – made from peppers. Those red peppers are everywhere in Catalunya, a kind of culinary leitmotif.

I never saw that man from the bar again. I never went in there, preferring the open air restaurant on the pontoon over looking the sea, where the waiters fed bread to the fish. Looking over the side there would be masses of dancing fish and no bread, that’s how quick they were. The waiters were all young and friendly and prone to hand-holding; if there wasn’t a table until 3pm, I would get my hand held. That’s one of the reasons I went back, but also the food was good, with a limited menu written in chalk, always finishing with tarta de santiago, sliced as thin as paper with a rosette of cream.

The food though was not the most important thing. It was the colours of the food, the brown paper bags, the heaps of artichokes, the big orange mounds of mango, the tiny streets where my bike would fit, the sudden sweep down to the sea. The sea. I had my own bit, which had a white wind-break, a kind of fence, owned officially by the yacht club but it’s where I once left my watch (still there on my return), where I left my swimming costume hanging, where I sat and imagined the water before going in. It was near two ice cream shops. It was as ice cream always is, unless it’s Italy circa 1988. Never as good as you want it to be.

Down each of those alleyways, would appear the face, from time to time, of a student. Sometimes, we would go through the polite dance of ‘hello,’ sometimes we would feign ignorance, not see each other. Because Sitges is so small, that work seamlessly blends into all aspects of life. You are your work, and so arguments, wandering out of the sea topless, eating, walking, standing – all will be duly noted. Not going out will be too. Because Sitges is a party town, a drinkers place.

The red sauce I think is, must be, romesco? But perhaps not. In all the time I was in Sitges I never asked. Just nodded and ate it. It was lovely.

Small green plums

10 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Food, Fruit, Italy, Poetry, Stories

‘Surprise/after so long/of a love/I thought I had scattered it about the world’

This beautiful string of words is by an Italian poet called Giuseppe Ungaretti. This is one of his easier ones. We used to say it in the manner of Cilla Black: Surprise! It sounds just as good in her Liverpool trill, in fact. But funnier and less sincere. This was back in the day when we were at university and revising for our end of year exams and anything to get us through it helped. Small tables in the corners of rooms, a lot of smoking, endless tea, the sound of the put-upon mum next door playing nicely with her children in the garden. My friend Angela would wait for a sigh, followed by the sound of a paperback being closed (she had bionic hearing) before making her entrance with a cup of tea.

Apparently I was a bit of a diva about being disturbed back then, my train of thought snagged by an interruption. It all mattered so much; having to re-sit as I did, because I’d failed a paper the first time round, meant I spent the whole summer revising. But now I still have those poems etched in my memory which I am thankful for, as well as having a free higher education and a huge wealth of actual experiences that did not involve the world wide web.

I remember cheque-books (in the off licence: Who do I make it payable to? Cashier: It’s all right we’ve got a stamp. Me: (writing on the cheque) It’s Alright We’ve Got a Stamp LTD), mix-tapes, actual love letters, long afternoons spent dressing up, sitting up all night talking and walking home at dawn, cream teas. Watching as people were brought over on a plane to see relatives they’d given up for dead forty years earlier on Cilla Black’s Surprise! Surprise!

The poem above has meant different things to me at different times in my life. At the time, at 20, it meant: I am an intellectual and I write in pencil in the margins of books I can only buy in Grant & Cutler. Now I understand it to mean, what matters is here. It’s been here all along. Or, it’s behind you, in the case of these plums. After three growing seasons, I have taken on a fallow plot behind me, which has been producing little green plums, Victoria plums, pears, apples, damsons and rhubarb that no one has thought to or been allowed to help themselves to. I’m sure I could have and no one would have been any the wiser. To think these plums have been dropping silently into the long grass all this time to be eaten by wasps and foxes. Which is possibly why our resident fox has such loose bowels.

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We don’t know what they are, a gage of some sort, but they are ripe, small and soft and full of the green juice. Avoid the ones with the caterpillars in; they feed inside ripening fruits and then mid-bite you look down and see a dark brown residue – caterpillar frass (poo). This is often accompanied by a tiny maggoty thing that rears up to meet you, with a massive smile on its face. Surprise!

I met up with Angela recently and we talked about those times – my tendency to fall down stairs, our shrine to Victoria Wood, our innocence and excitement at everything. How we fell in love platonically and how no one ever talks about that. And how we used to talk relentlessly in brackets: Hello Emma (yes, you can come in but your calves have to stay outside). Our love for Joan Hickson and Charles Hawtrey and the complete works of Marvin Gaye.

And here is the poem in Italian, which I will endeavour to remember without resorting to my book:

‘Sorpresa/dopo tanto/d’un amore/credevo di averlo sparpagliato/per il mondo’

I stewed the plums: cover the base of a heavy pan with a film of water, add the (preferably stoned) plums and a little sugar/honey/maple syrup/nothing. I sprinkled on some ground ginger and star anise. Simmer until the plums collapse, about fifteen to twenty minutes. Put lid on and leave until morning and eat with yoghurt. Or pot up and refrigerate. Also lovely sieved and made into a purée.

The colour mauve

06 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by Sophie James in Garden, Uncategorized

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Edible flowers, Food, Gardening, Seasons, Summer, Thoughts

Already this is an entirely dated picture. A week in allotment time is six months in normal. The California poppies have collapsed beneath the weight of their stems, the central path has become powdery and yellowed under the harshness of the sun. Bees like mauve. So they are still feasting, swarming over the borage, the geraniums, the sweet peas and the lavender. What’s left, just, are the nasturtiums, redly hot and peppery, calendula, verbena bonariensis (I never got round to finding a replacement for my frostbitten lemon verbena, so I have mint tea instead, a few hairy leaves in some boiled water can be a virtuous start to the day).

The heat requires shade. I am growing, from a root cutting given me by an allotment friend, a grape vine which is still in its curly glossy beginnings. It went into shock at first, a state I know well. But it has recovered. The plan is to train it over a structure and then sit under it with a Pimm’s getting steadily drunk, with ice cubes. See borage flowers below for cucumber notes.

I still find that the allotment works for me. It doesn’t stop anxiety, over-thinking, self-absorption, worry, but it diverts them into small achievable tasks. And before you know it, you’re semi normal again! You’ve just had a conversation with someone! You strung a sentence together. I find that time passes and at the end I’ve been delivered into my body again, for free. Well, £70 a year is quite reasonable if the brief is: grow vegetables and some fruit and find sanity.

I cycled to the allotment on Friday to pick something for dinner, sorrel, some parsley, a few gooseberries dusty in my hand; whatever looked easy and pickable. It was early evening, a time I find ripe with difficulty (what have I achieved today? Ever? Etc). I met two children on the path, five and a half and seven years old they told me, who came with me to help me pick. The boy was barefoot. I had never met them before but we became instant friends, not sure how this happened but they trooped over to my plot to help me full of chatter and questions. Do you have any pets? The boy asked. No. Not a dog? Not a cat? No. This worried him, I could tell.

We picked some radishes and marvelled at their perfect spherical shape and hot pink colour. Do you like radishes? No, they both said. Too spicy. But they enjoyed washing them under the tap, revealing their perfect pinkness, glimmers of white beneath, the pink shorn away by bite marks. Have a nasturtium, I said, and the boy put a petal in his mouth and instantly looked aghast. What were we doing eating flowers? He stood there, face shut in some internal torment of wrongness. I can’t eat this, he said quietly, and spat it out.

He was quickly diverted by the task of separating out equal bouquets of radishes to take back to their mum. I’d forgotten how ferocious this can be, making sure it was ‘fair’. The girl had all the big ones, so a reshuffle was required. As we walked back with our stash, this happened.

Boy to me: What are you going to eat with your vegetables?

Me: I think I might have some fish.

Boy (excited): So you DO have pets?

See what I mean? Diversion. Meeting people. Radishes. Pets. Children. Barefoot. Bike.

And then I felt normal. Happy summer holidays to you all.

P.S These are borage flowers. They have the merest hint of cucumber about them. You can add them to salads and ice cubes to put in drinks if you fancy. They lack the kick and personality of nasturtiums but are very pretty.

Thanks, that’s heaps!

08 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by Sophie James in Not only food, Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Food, Gardening, Health, Illness, Nature, Nutrition, Pleasure

My allotment now has a utilitarian quality to it, the gates are metal, the fence discourages trespass. All I’ve got is oca, buried deep, and strawberries in leaf and shoots of garlic, pale and poking up. But there are moments when I experience a kind of non-being state, even now with the ground hard and the pools of ditch water; my mind stops chuntering through its list of grievances or worries. That tastes better than the vegetables. The soil under the fingernails, the body being worked, a kind of space opening up – that’s really why I do it. And because it means there’s somewhere nice to put my butter.

I am emerging from a period of intense focus/paranoia about food in general. This thankfully rarely filters through into my gardening activities. I tend to grow that which is easy and gives me most pleasure. I’m not going to start growing cauliflower because it’s hard. I will grow potatoes because they’re easy. And tomatoes too, even though I will rarely if ever eat them. But other people will, friends, family, Joe. Nightshades I ‘can’t eat’ but I’ve forgotten now why. I thought I couldn’t eat mushrooms either but apparently I can because they’re not part of the nightshade family, but I’m not going to grow mushrooms (although I could because they grow in used coffee grounds and I get tons from Waitrose).

Can you already feel the spiraling panic that this level of food-patrolling creates? It reminds me of someone I shared a flat with many years ago when I was in my second year of drama school. Let’s call her Ruth. Ruth was thin; she liked to remain within a tight band of seven to seven and a half stone ideally. Everything about her attitude towards food upset and enraged me. I spent a lot of my second year at drama school sweating. This was due to huge amounts of period (as in country not menstrual) dancing, Laban, sword fighting and eating bacon sandwiches.

Ruth lived on brown rice, cooked apples and herbal tea and prescribed to the yin and yang school of eating. “Thanks, gosh that’s heaps!” was her regular exclamation when I had left the bag in too long of one of her Yogi ‘chocolate’ tea sachets. Thanks, that’s heaps! became a kind of watchword for me. She wouldn’t even go off-piste for a party she was giving. Everyone had to eat what she was eating, which was basically an enormous bowl of apple puree. This struck me as aggressively un-fun. She also told me that she would go to friends’ houses with her own food, because she didn’t eat wheat. Can I just say now that there was actually nothing wrong with her: she chose to do this.

Of course this was entirely up to her. She was a nice Quaker and I like Quakers. But I used to cook with my coat on and feel embarrassed about buying cheese. I would offer up some reason why it was just this once, and we’d have detailed discussions about why dairy was mucus-forming.

I was actually quite lonely at the time. Although I was busy, I didn’t know anyone in the Finchley Road area and my evenings were spent shelf-stacking at Habitat and occasionally spotting Pinochet in Waitrose (he was living in a safe house nearby). I wasn’t that interested in macrobiotics and feng shui – but I could have done with a friend.

So now when I see a nutritionist to help me with the symptoms of Crohn’s disease, I am thrown back into the thanks, gosh that’s heaps! world of self-denial and food as enemy/cure. Pretty much everything health-wise you are experiencing can now be ameliorated by drinking apple cider vinegar, sucking out the bone marrow from a grass-fed carcass and cutting out nutmeg.

I would just like to say, from the perspective of someone who was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease 25 years ago, that if it was simply down to food and supplements I would have healed myself many many years ago. I am not healed. I love food: food is everything to me.

Food is pleasure, it is there always, as succour, balm. It is the most creative thing you can do in a day, other than flying on the trapeze, painting a portrait, writing a poem, or loving someone. It is what makes me feel alive. It is part of what I love about the allotment too – food is part of that moment when I stare ahead and feel the muscles settling under my skin, feel the warmth of my breath inside nylon and think ‘tea’. Opposite me is Kieran my Irish neighbour, and both he and his daughter position themselves in their chairs after a few hours hoeing and digging and eat crisps. They have a shed full of crisps. Crisps and hoeing; what a combination.

This is not to take away from Ruth and her ilk – there can be great joy in a bowl of mashed apple. But it’s not that, it’s something else. It’s that however many diets (sorry, protocols) I go on, I know that inside me is a hoeing crisp eater wanting to get out. A sweating bacon sarnie muncher. A builder’s tea drinker. I am not from Japan and I don’t want to live on seaweed. I want to embrace pleasure and eat my fill. I want to eat heaps.

Weathered

25 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by Sophie James in Uncategorized

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Food, Gardening, Growing vegetables, Operation, Spring

I seem to have a thing about shoes. Here I am at the allotment on a blissful May morning wearing shoes that are more hole than sole. It has taken me a while to get back here. I never thought it would take me this long but anyway here I am. I worked through the winter and it was just me and my allotment neighbour. There was very little to do because I’m not a fan of brassicas which tends to be the over-wintering vegetable family. I can’t quite remember what I did now; I think I walked around the perimeter edging everything which is a fantastic way to dispense rage. Having an edger slicing through the soil as if it was pizza is one of the great gardening devices and should be given out by the NHS. If in doubt, edge.

So, anyway, I had bowel surgery – ‘your op’ is how it has been renamed perhaps to make it more cuddly – so then when spring came along, I was unable to do anything except watch as weeds burgeoned, spreading over the formerly pristine and frozen bare ground. Finally, the plot became as I first found it: a wildly waving sea of green. There were no distinguishing features except huge rhubarb jazz hands, flopping ears of anemones, ragged tulips, molehills, dry and gorgeously rich. It reverted to its natural state as if I had never existed. Fair enough.

Now that I have been away, there is the temptation to do things differently. To be changed in some hard to define way that will express itself in my writing and in my day to day life, in the choices I make, the direction I go in. What I grow. There is pressure, coming I admit from me alone, that because I have ‘been through something’ – something ‘major’ – things will be different now. For a start, I’m off sugar and any kind of sweetener for the time being. This initially was hard, awful in fact because sweetness is a kind of basic primal need. I understand that carrots are sweet, but so is a slice of almond cake dripping in citrus syrup accompanied by a cup of tea, delicious and ordinary in equal measure. And I’ve never been someone who would take cheese over pudding. I wish I was a savoury person, but I have been known to stare at pictures of pudding for long silent minutes. I just gravitate there.

The truth is I’m the same but my habits have changed. And carrots are sweet. And though there is something perversely satisfying about pulling out weeds, the long slow rip of threads of a root system, the harmless throwing into the next plot of slugs and snails that I can’t bring myself to kill, the bald earth free of stuff, the wild part of the allotment that remains is really exciting. It defeats me, just looking at it. It is hoary, hairy, it slumps and rises alarmingly. Fruit bushes are hemmed in by unknown green objects. The things I have planted nearby – my dwarf mulberry tree – look genteel and a bit prim. A bit Barbara Pym.

For now I’m going to let this second half of the plot be, there’ll be a bit of binary going on. There is the right side, which has now, thanks to some elbow grease and some dainty plantings of potatoes, French climbing beans, sweet peas, a renewed herb patch become respectable and will pass muster with the allotment manager. And there is the left side, a wild and unkempt mess of weeds throttling the fruit, a prairie of long grasses, dandelion clocks and nettles and clover. I can’t yet bring myself to rip it all up. It is doing a job.

And there’s no rush. I suppose what is to be relished here, at the allotment at 8am on a Monday morning, is that there is nothing to be done. Apart from the fact that there’s a lot to do and tricky, life-defining things happen and you’ve got to seize the day and we are all so fragile when you come to think about it. I love the allotment because it makes me feel so overrated. I know I should crack on, but maybe not today. Whatever, really. My aim is to live whateverishly for a while.

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.

One year on

27 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Not food

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Food, Fruit, Nonfiction, Stories, Sussex

I started with soft fruits. My first blog post back in the UK was on red gooseberries. Lovely in their brown paper bag from the greengrocer in Seaford (in East Sussex), the man with the curly hair and always a kind word. He is also the butcher. Joe approached him as he was carrying a palette of unskinned rabbits. Are they wild? He asked. ‘Wild?’ he replied. ‘They were furious’. He sold me the red gooseberries and invited me to live in Seaford; ‘seeing as you’re here all the time’. The sea is a big draw. And the wildness all around. It’s hard to know where to start.

There’s the ferry, yellow and bulky like a child’s drawing, on its interminable route to Dieppe. Hard to believe it ever gets there. There’s the sun, the sound of the sea crashing and drawing back in the night, the fishermen’s lights illuminating the black waves. The gulls and their grey babies. Clutches of apples already visible from the train. Bramleys, but still.

People have died. People die! I still find this hard to grasp. Every time I walk past Elm Villas and get a snatch of yellow wall I remember great friends who lived there and who are now both scattered over the cliff tops that just recently were covered in pink thrift. It was the house where I learnt about Jane Grigson and how pudding could be two tubs of ice cream from the Co-op and a cup of mint tea. Now the house belongs to someone else and already the furniture strikes me as ill-advised. Their magic has gone. And their magnificent kitchen table and all their books. But mostly it’s them that I miss.

I don’t actually live here. This is my mum’s place, but it’s where I come when I need it. It’s where lots of serendipitous things have happened. The place is full of rememberers – people remember Dirk Bogarde when he lived here, they remember Winston Churchill’s school days. They know – and I do too – where Grayson Perry lives. There are a lot of closet bohemians, because we are after all within thrashing distance of London. And yet, I think you couldn’t be further away. Particularly when you hear someone pronouncing it Sea-ford. I like the cafes – there are five good ones, all worth going to.

What I have learned, one year on, is that July is curiously the end. Now that I am a gardener in the most rudimentary way I know that this bit of summer is when the inevitable decline into Autumn begins. Things are yellowing now, they bolt and go to seed the minute your back is turned. It is the season of collecting what you’ve grown (and eating other people’s apples) and watering what is still to be harvested – in my case, a profusion of beans and squash. There are apricots from English trees which you must eat immediately, or face comparisons with blissful ones from the Med or California.

One year on: I held a two day old baby, my arms numb from the sheer surprising weight of her, so I laid her on the bed and stared at her twitching mouth. In the corner of the window, in a different house in Seaford, higher up the town, was the sea. The mother, my friend, was the original recipient of that goosegog pudding. Red gooseberries that made their way underneath a terrifyingly ethereal mass of Genoese sponge.

But it all worked out in the end. She’d been born in the corner of the room and, like the party with the pudding and the wild dancing, the place was now, still, full of people, children running in and out, sudden decisions to go to the beach. I was at some point mistaken for the midwife. When the real midwife arrived, I went for the train that took me back to Clapham Junction, not wanting to lose the newborn scent (honey and yeast) and the sight of her perfect Cupid’s bow mouth. So anyway, one year on, see if you can get yourself some red gooseberries. Jane Grigson’s recipe is one I would recommend. And enjoy what’s left of summer.

Trip to Suffolk, 1974

08 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Uncategorized

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Countryside, England, Food, Stories, Suffolk, Summer, Travel

I went to Suffolk and must write it all down before I forget, although much of the information was complex and hard to follow, compelling, beautifully described, but opaque. A bit like snooker, a game I love to watch precisely because I have no idea at all what is going on. I took a lot of photos. And if you want the science of it all, I would not be remotely offended if you went elsewhere.

I will however, as Noel Coward once advised, press on. This is a field of rape, and that is Sam Fairs, the owner of the field. It is mainly past flowering now (the spectacular yellow blossoms come in mid April to the end of May), so you are looking at the seeds housed in these long green pods. The seeds are the thing – they are pressed for their oil, on site. They are cold-pressed. A bit later, we went to watch this cold-pressing and the smell was interesting; yeasty, hops-ish, reminiscent of linseed. Sam and his family also grow winter wheat, winter barley, borage, marrowfat peas, but we weren’t here for that.

We were here for the rapeseed and its oil. I had already had an introduction to Hillfarm Oils (Sam and Clare Fairs’ extra virgin cold-pressed rapeseed oil) because I had been invited some months before to a meal where everything had been cooked using it. We even had the seeds speckled over custard for pudding – chalky, black things, tasting of dust and the outside. We had rape greens too. But I was amazed mainly by the colour of the oil – yellow, as if you could melt buttercups – and the flavour which everyone tells you is nutty and that is really the only word. Rich, nutty, warm, slightly grassy and always different, because like olive trees, there will be subtle differences in flavour based on the soil, the terroir, the weather. It’s our olive oil is probably the best way to look at it, we have it here and it grows brilliantly, though pigeons can be a menace.

The objective of any plant is to reproduce. This is apparently our objective too (As Sam put it, ‘growing more of me’.) When it comes to the rape plant, the oil is there to protect the seed, so it can do that, so it can carry on, so it can throw itself about. The farmer’s job is to capture it, harness it, pressing the seed to get the oil out. The way it was described it felt tantamount to murder. But in a good way. It made me think about what I was stepping on, what I might be killing mindlessly, where I am in the scheme of things. That plants are like me.

To return to the rape fields for a minute – they are presently green and house families of foxes that you can never see. There are butterflies, bees and insects. Come harvest time, the rapeseed pods will be brown and shatteringly fragile. But for now it is an endlessly waving green sea and all I wanted to do was run headlong into the midst of it, get lost and miss lunch.

Although I’m glad I didn’t because lunch was ice cream, scotch eggs, smoked mackerel and other exceptional cold collations, all locally produced, and later from the Cakeshop Bakery focaccia made with (actually doused is the word) rapeseed oil, speckled with crunchy salt, and an amazing root cake, made with beetroot, carrots, and the oil again. It was all really delicious. We ate it sitting in the Fairs’ garden. The tree behind us housed a family of owls. There were bats living in an outbuilding nearby and house martins somewhere behind me, under the roof. The next day we even saw a murmuration of starlings as we passed round a Blythburgh piglet and the sky turned dark above us.

There are no motorways here in this part of Suffolk and no out-of-town supermarkets, no superstores. There are hardly any chains at all. The doughty and magnificent Caroline Cranbrook saw off Tesco more or less singlehandedly some years ago. So for two days it was like living in 1974, but with our modern sensibility for a flat white and the urgency for soya milk.

At the hotel, there was no internet reception – it was down for the whole evening – and we created our own murmuration, swirling around in the lobby trying to ‘find’ a signal. Until we gave up and gave in to the deliciousness of being untraceable for a whole evening and a whole night. In the morning, we talked about life before phones over scrambled eggs. What did we do? It is almost unthinkable now, a childhood with no signal, no texts, boredom, back at dusk or before dinner. What about work? People wandered off in singles or twos to take photographs or walk to Framlingham Castle, phones waving in the wind. Suddenly ten texts, endless vibrating, cheers etc.

Later we were deposited back to the station at Darsham, to the branch line taking us to Ipswich and then to London Liverpool Street where modernity, mobile phones, Boots and angry people in a hurry eating crisps awaited us. We said our goodbyes and dispersed into the melée. Tired and full of pork and cake, but happy.

Thank you to Polly at Food Safari for organising this wonderful trip.

Delight in the dish

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Cake, Cookbook, Elizabeth David, Food, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories

This is ricotta pudding from Elizabeth David’s book Is there a Nutmeg in the House? The book is blue and there is somewhere on it a picture of quinces. In a heretical gesture, I added some dark chocolate, masquerading as raisins. I’m fairly sure that ED would not have approved. She would have spoken sharply. And of my decision to throw in some feta, to substitute strained Greek yoghurt, to add honey, as I have done occasionally, she would have regarded me coolly. I would have known this was not wise from the dip in temperature in the room.

It’s no surprise to me that she’d been an actress and had come to her writing life after failure in that department. I’ve always loved her writing; the recipe here for ricotta pudding (budino di ricotta) is simple and feels quite underwritten, basic almost. There is none of the hand holding we have now in cookery books. My mother remembers her kitchen shop in Pimlico in the sixties, remembers meeting her there, and watched as ED wrapped in tissue paper a present for my grandmother, to be shipped off later to Sydney.

It was an odd time then, hard to define when you haven’t lived it, but stories abound of London in the late Fifties, then the Sixties. It was this beatnik, makeshift place of eternal, random, spontaneous parties, according to my mother. ED appeared to be the only vaguely sniffy one there. But it was nice of her to wrap my mother’s present.

There was another figurehead at the time who gets talked of – Robert Carrier. Just before I was born, my parents owned a flat in Camden Passage, close to his restaurant. I think back then, you could afford to be a bit arbitrary and eccentric about food. Because people didn’t know about ratatouille and ricotta. These things came from the Continent, which a lot of people hadn’t explored in any great depth. And there had been rationing.

My mother knew more than most only because she had done the six week boat journey from Sydney, part of the first Push that included Clive James, Barry Humphries etc. and had stopped off along the way. She stayed in a brothel in Naples. But these are not my stories to tell. All I can tell you is how the book feels to read, and how it reminds me of the people who are still around, family friends in their eighties now and nineties, and how demure and evocative they can make an omelette seem. A collection of wooden spoons are there not just for show. An aura of quiet descends in the room, there are no winking red lights, no computer leads, and I find myself becalmed.

There’s the occasional sharpness if I lose the thread of the conversation, overwhelmed by central heating in a small space. A telling off is part of the deal somewhere, sometimes by accident I might break a chair. But on the whole it’s a relief not to be modern for a while. The food is delicious, simple, frugal, effortless. There is delight in the dish.

Ricotta pudding

Adapted from Elizabeth David, Is There A Nutmeg in the House?

I prefer strained Greek or Turkish yoghurt here to nasty supermarket ricotta. If you can find fresh, or even better if you can make it yourself, it will transform the dish. Ricotta is slightly drier, less silky than strained yoghurt. Not wishing to confuse, curd cheese is also lovely. I’m not imagining you’ll be as common as me and add chocolate, but if you have some raisins and some rum or marsala it’s a lovely addition. You can use honey here as well. And ground almonds instead of flour – ED does in her other cheese-cake recipes. She’s not here to tell you off.

100g raisins (optional)

4 tbsp rum

Butter, for greasing

3 tbsp plain flour (or ground almonds)

400g fresh ricotta or strained Greek or Turkish yoghurt

Pinch of sea salt

4 eggs

6 heaped tablespoons of caster sugar (or to taste)

Nutmeg

Grated zest of 1 lemon

Soak the raisins (if using) in the rum for a few hours until plump. Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. Butter a 25cm plain cake tin or oven-proof dish of about 1.5 litre capacity. Beat the ricotta or yoghurt until smooth. Beat in 1 whole egg and the three yolks, 4 heaped tablespoons of sugar, the salt, flour/almonds, the lemon zest, and a good grating of nutmeg. Use a whisk to get rid of any lumps. Finally, stir in the raisins, along with any rum left in the bowl. Beat the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Keep beating, gradually adding the remaining sugar, until you have a thick, glossy meringue that stays in the bowl if you hold it upside down. Stir a heaped tablespoonful of the meringue into the cheese mixture to loosen it, then lightly fold in the rest, keeping as much air in the mix as you can.

Pour into the prepared tin or dish and give it a gentle shake to level the surface. Bake for about 35 – 40 minutes, or until golden and set. Leave to cool to room temperature (it will sink). Eat cold – perhaps with cream. Lovely with some sharp, honeyed rhubarb.