A treacherous herb

01 Sunday May 2022

Posted by Sophie James in Gardening, Recipe, Uncategorized

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Allotment, Early morning, Herbs, Ladybirds, Recipe, Rosemary

5.30am. Unable to get back to sleep (it’s light, birds howling/something howling, not sure if it’s a bird/lots of waking up noises in the undergrowth outside) so I get dressed and cycle to the allotment. I know because of the lowering sky I’ll be alone. So I am not surprised by the emptiness, no cars, just the slowly falling mass of rubbish, like an installation that the council are reducing, like a toppling cake. The first and last time, we’ve been warned. My mood matches the air, sky, temperature. Stormy, flat, tearful. I hack away at the rosemary bush which is so overgrown the weight of it is flattening the flowers and hanks of it cover the path, so that every time I pass it grips me in its resiny hands. I’ve decided it needs to be tamed, as do I. It’s something to do at 5.30am.

S from a few plots over waves in a sheepish manner, and disappears inside his poly tunnel. I lop off more wizened rosemary hands and arms. A young robin, its breast still tufty and slightly marbled hops near me, then hops on to one of the hacked off rosemary branches and watches me. I love the smell but even more it’s the silvery needles, deep green and surprisingly soft. I feel bad cutting it all off and it looks like an awful haircut, like the ones I used to give myself as a child, serrated fringes and lopsided ends, the hairdresser startled and silent, trying to figure it all out.

Monty Don says you should replace old rosemary bushes after a while as they grow so rangy and chaotic but I love the fact this rosemary has grown into a gnarled tree, like a mulberry or a wisteria, its knitted branches hiding couch grass, convolvulus, marjoram, a little posy of forgotten geraniums. I rip up the grass by the roots and start to clear the area feeling both decisive and desolate because it is neater but less interesting, less organic. The sides of the rosemary still hang over the path, long silver fingers, arms outstretched. It takes me two hours by which time K arrives on his bike.

While I am working I imagine that one day I will have to give this plot up. We will move. We are already planning it, we can’t afford to buy in this area, don’t want to; no sea, no massive skies etc. It is not just the rosemary bush, which I bought from a nursery as a small plant, and which has grown into itself, it is the DNA of the place, which is now mine. It feels unthinkable to let it go. I wonder if it will be like the moment when you move from a house, the paintings lifted, the sofa and all the stuff gone and revealed is the dead space, no longer yours. Will it be like that at plot 10? I wonder. The quince tree, the mulberry, the dwarf apple tree. The rows of dusty gooseberries, the sorrel I grow pretty much for the compost heap. I am there in little filaments, bits of me everywhere. Even, or especially, the ground, which for six years I have fed, over fed, burdened with compost, manure, comfrey. It’s probably exhausted by me.

K approaches with a small pot filled with strawberries and upends them into a bag for me. I’ve already had a couple of my own, dipped in the watering can for a quick clean. But these are bigger and better than mine. We have a laugh about the fact that I can’t give him anything in return except piles of rosemary which he wouldn’t know what to do with. Actually, if we could cook outside, if we could make a fire (we can’t), we could dip a branch of rosemary into olive oil and brush some fish with it.

It’s easy to overdo it. The oil from the leaves can overpower. Elizabeth David called it a treacherous herb. And she doesn’t like eating the spikes. And she thinks too much of it can kill the taste of meat. Oh well. They take as cuttings very easily, and I have a line of them growing in pots in the greenhouse. I think I needed it, the oil on my hands, the strength of the smell in the air, the scale of the branches, and it was good to find space and the robin enjoyed it too. It walked up and down the new-made path, and found the different levels interesting. On my way out of the allotment I passed C in his plot who was admiring a ladybird and I had one accidentally in the side pocket of my bag which I handed over because he said he was collecting them for their beneficial effects on his broad beans. It crawled from my hand to his. He walked off with my ladybird. My allotted time over, I leave. Generally better than before.

Alys Fowler on how to take softwood cuttings of rosemary and other perennials here. I have written about lamb and rosemary and apple and rosemary cake and there is also elsewhere on the blog a recipe for labneh with lemon zest and rosemary. There is a very good rosemary and chocolate brownie recipe by Ben Tish here.

Greenery & cold blue sky

05 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Christmas, England, Food, Herbs, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories, Travel, Yoghurt

I can’t have any more trifle. Is it me or is everything around this time of year yellow? Cauliflower cheese, the aforementioned trifle with its layers of custard and cream and small pillows of sponge soaked in a harrowing and unnamed alcohol. Potatoes, parsnips, pavlova, wheels of varicosely veined cheese, the sweating clay mantle of marzipan draped over a now moribund Christmas cake (thank you, Alan Partridge, for reviving the word ‘moribund’).

I would kill for something green and empty of any tracklements or gravy. Something, as a young friend said recently, ‘farmier’. So it is in search of the farmy – still showing signs of its former life in a field, a bit on the grubby side – that I am featuring horseradish and chives, and beetroot with the tops still on. Admittedly, horseradish is on the spectrum of yellow, but far from viscous, it is cleansing, almost brutal in its sinus clearing properties.

This has been our first English Christmas for four years. I had forgotten what happens; we have had no one there at all, just echoing voices down the phone and talking heads via Skype, that instrument of torture, all smoke and mirrors. Then, all of a sudden, here we all are, sitting in the same overheated room for five and a half days eating individually wrapped chocolates housing an unfamiliar nut combination. Watching films incessantly, grazing like cattle, and forgetting, consciously, all the people who have nothing, and saying that next year we will volunteer for a homeless charity, to try to counteract the obscenity of all the waste. And then watching another film.

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But these have been the highlights: travelling across the country afforded us sweeping views; rivers running red with iron in Somerset, an orange-bibbed pheasant launching itself into the air like a kite, faraway hills lush and dramatic with greenery and cold blue skies, and then the lashing rain that pitter-pattered on our skylight windows at night and came down in zig zags during the day. Frosty exteriors and meltingly warm central heating. Watching my dad play in his jazz band in a pub called The Valiant Soldier and meeting by chance a writer I’ve loved reading in The New Yorker, and admiring her shoes (Tessa Hadley).

Dancing with mum in the kitchen, my uncle playing the ukulele. Pretending to be Pina Bausch. Sharing christmas cake recipes; to ice or not to ice? Feeling for the first time in a long time that I am a version of something familiar, not exotic or an anomaly. My accent no longer ‘adorable’. I am no longer adorable! It’s exhausting, and I’m relieved.

Horseradish (below, mine) is a member of the crucifer family, along with radishes, turnips and mustard and looks like a rather disgusting parsnip. Unpeeled it smells of nothing, but once it is nude, it will make you weep copiously. Open a window. It is best treated in the same way that mustard is – it loves roast beef, glazed ham and sausages – really any fatty meats do well. Fatty, oily fish do too. In fact, I have had so many versions of this beetroot-horseradish-fatty fish-or-meat dish in recent months that I may well be verging on the unseasonal.

Grow your own horseradish with caution; it’s rampant and self-seeds and ‘wants to be’ highly invasive. If you find the root with the leaves still attached you can use them as a salad ingredient, or throw them into a saucepan with a glass of water and boil quickly, treating them as greens, though the leaves of my horseradish are always ravaged and ragged by the time the root is ready and go straight on the compost.

As for chives (Allium schoenoprasum), they add a lovely fresh, oniony grass-like taste – no surprise that they belong to the same family as the onion, leek, garlic and shallot. They have a natural affinity with anything creamy and/or with a nursery blandness such as eggs. Snip them with scissors rather than chop them with a knife. I see them growing ‘wild’ often though I suspect that it may just be a very vigorous, cultivated herb in someone’s abandoned hedge.

Horseradish & chive dressing with roasted beetroot

Adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The Guardian

About 500g small beets
4 garlic cloves, unpeeled but bashed
1 large sprig fresh thyme (optional)
1 bay leaf (optional)
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
A glug of olive oil

For the dressing
200ml thick yoghurt (Greek is good)
Large squeeze of lemon juice & one garlic clove peeled, bashed and chopped
3 heaped tbsp freshly grated horseradish (more if you’ve got a cold)
A small handful of finely chopped chives, plus more to finish

To serve
4 smoked mackerel fillets or scrambled eggs or an omelette
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oven to 200C/390F/gas mark 6. Scrub the beets, but leave them whole, then place on a large piece of foil. Scatter with the garlic, thyme leaves, bay leaf and some salt and pepper, then dribble with oil. Scrunch up the foil to make a sealed parcel, place it on a baking tray and put in the oven. Roast until tender – about 45 minutes for small ones. The beetroots are cooked when a knife slips easily into the flesh. Leave to cool, then top and tail them, and remove the skin. Cut into wedges and place in a large bowl.

Whisk together all the dressing ingredients and season. Divide the beetroots between four plates and dollop the horseradish in the vicinity. Scatter on some more chives, season to taste and serve with lemon wedges and/or some scrambled eggs and/or mackerel fillets.

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

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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.

Crema Catalana plus fennel

12 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Fruit, Herbs, Ingredients, Nature, Patience Gray, Recipes, Spain, Stories

These are wild fennel flowers. They are even sweeter and more fragrant than the fronds, but their pollen flies everywhere, so if you’re thinking of picking some for their prettiness alone you might want to be aware of ‘pollen dandruff’. We picked off the little flower heads and munched away in the car. It was amazing how sweet they were.

Traditionally, the flowers are immersed in white wine vinegar, which is then used to enhance the flavour of capers. I didn’t think capers needed enhancing, but apparently they do. I did in fact thread a flower head through the neck of a bottle of fairly standard white wine vinegar. Apart from the excitement of doing this successfully which made me think of ships in bottles, the vinegar was gorgeous: thinly acid but full of glorious sweet fennel, and as the days passed it took on a deeper, throatier quality. I wanted to pass this on, because it really makes a difference to a salad dressing if you use it.

Fennel pollen

This recipe is from Catalonia where they call it Crema Cremada, which means ‘burnt cream’. Everywhere else, it is called Crema Catalana, which tells you everything you need to know about the Catalan personality. It is a simple custard infused with lemon zest and, in this version, fennel. If you don’t have access to wild fennel, use fennel seeds – all the recipes I have read do. Not everyone will like this custard, because it has such a polarizing taste. Normally I wouldn’t suggest a recipe that has this effect, because I think food should be democratic and unstuffy. But here I think that you should carry on regardless. Because it really is quite special, and once tried it is difficult not to fall in love.

I tried to describe the unique flavour of wild fennel in my post on the fronds. The most dominant element is licorice, and the flowers bring this to the fore. But while the commercial seeds have something of the night about them (the Michael Howard of the seed world) with a tarry, smoky, malt-like quality, the flowers (and the wild seeds too) are fresh, sweet almost to the point of sharpness and totally alive in the mouth. They taste wild, in fact. I think that is why milk is such a good vehicle here. Creaminess brings out the softness and sweetness and chilling dulls any lingering edge. You can go one step further and make ice cream, which is also lovely.

Crema Catalana with candied kumquats

In a month or so, the mellow yellow starbursts at the top of the fennel plant will be full of the seeds, housed in pods, to be taken home, dried and stripped. I suppose, given that I live in a city and that many of us now do, it is an experience in wonder to be reconnected to old practices and traditions like this. I am aware, though, that this recipe comes perilously close to what my old acting teacher used to call the ‘crumbling pigs’ arseholes’ school of cooking, by which she meant a certain kind of fey, precious approach to food, using inaccessible or pretentious ingredients. I was thinking of calling this post Crumbling Pigs’ Arseholes in her honour, but thought better of it.

Crema Catalana

Adapted from Patience Gray, Honey From A Weed

If you really hate the idea of fennel, infuse the milk with a cinnamon stick instead – this is also traditional.

1 litre of whole, full cream milk

2 tbs cornflour

1 lemon, the peel cut into 1 or 2 long strips

4 egg yolks

4 tbs sugar

1 tbs crushed fennel seeds, 5g fennel flowers or 1/2 tsp of fennel pollen

In a cup dissolve the cornflour in 4 tbs of cold milk (the cornflour will prevent the eggs from curdling). Heat the rest of the milk in a large pan with the lemon peel and the fennel until it just begins to boil. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for at least 30 minutes. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar to a thick, pale cream. Then beat in the cornflour mixture. Gently reheat the milk and beat in a ladleful. Now slowly strain the rest of the infused milk into the egg/cornflour mixture. Pour this back into the pan and heat slowly, stirring continuously with a wooden spoon until the custard thickens to coat the back of it. Let it cool, stirring occasionally to prevent a skin from forming. Then pour into 6 clay ramekins or one large clay pot and chill for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. I served mine with some candied kumquats, a nice combination.

The Burnt Version

You sprinkle sugar over the chilled custard and heat it to a bubbling crisp. Traditionally, a salamander is used here – this is an iron disc that is heated until white-hot and then held over the sugar. The sugar caramelizes evenly without warming the custard. This is what I have always loved: the starkness of contrast in heat and cold. A grill/broiler will work too but you need to make sure the dishes you are using can withstand the heat, and there won’t be the same hot/cold differential. Or use a blowtorch.

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Deep Purple

04 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Aromatherapy, Fruit, Herbs, Ingredients, Nature, Recipes, Stories, Travel

We recently went to a lavender festival in an area called, confusingly, Cherry Valley. No cherries as such, but a billowing sea of lavender instead, made all the more surreal by its position in a vast, merciless desert, with windswept plains filled with tumbleweed and signs advertising pleasant and welcoming mortuaries. The air was different too. Gone was the hot, dry wind that smelt vaguely burnt in nearby Palm Springs. There was coolness and an endless waft of fresh lavender here, so different to dried, which makes me think of scones and English B&Bs and ‘granny’s pants’. By this I mean stored, clean pants from another era, washed with old soap and perhaps not dried fully, so, though clean, there is a suggestion of staleness.

A fresh sprig of lavender – or should I say ear because to me it has the same corn-like structure – is quite different. Camphorous, sultry and direct. It smells more like it looks: purple and lusty. It is known as a sedative, mainly, something you apply to yourself or a pillow to aid sleep, but according to the talk we attended, it is more of a balancing herb, bringing you back from the brink, settling you back into the centre of things. There were many other things growing, thriving in this oasis – thickets of tea tree, and a long avenue of broad-necked olive trees amongst them. But you couldn’t escape the lavender. We waded through it, running our fingers through the brittle stalks, letting them whip back against our thighs, crumbling the flowers between finger and thumb, enjoying their spiky scent and tight whorls of colour. We found a stall selling lamb kebabs and sat rather drunkenly in the sweet fug of lavender and smoky meat.
The night before we’d decided to visit a casino nearby. We walked in and I had to walk back out again. Noise, made up of music and machines merging like screaming sirens in vague counterpoint, cigarette smoke, cold, piped air, and the look of glassy appetite on the faces of the gamblers all combined to remind me why zombies are still such a resonant force in our culture. Nothing about it made sense to me. And there are no windows, and no clocks inside the place, so you lose any sense of where you are. Who you are, even. More tawdry still is the fact that the casino is built on an Indian reservation, a result of the deal made between Indian tribes and the federal government that allows the Native Americans ‘tribal sovereignty’. It feels, to me at least, like a bit of a crap deal.

So we needed the lavender the next day. I was wondering, looking around, if the same people at the casino the night before were here in this place. It was possible: there were lots of benign-looking elderly ladies at the casino, perched on stools, resting their sticks against the machines, handbags at the ready. And here they were too, with their cameras and grandchildren. I’m not sure how you could do that – how you could square that world with this one. Or how we can ignore the world beneath both, when the land belonged to the Native Americans, before cultivation and agriculture, and every tree, plant and herb was theirs.

Tea tree

Lavender is an odd one to cook with – bitter or rather ‘faded’ has been my experience so far. Lavender honey works beautifully, of course, and there are Provencal dishes that use it imaginatively and to good effect: traditionally, it’s cooked with rabbit. I understand the theory that it works best if treated like rosemary and thyme. But I’d still rather cook with the last two, and keep the lavender as an essential oil, where it feels fresh and alive – the closest to rolling a torn sprig in my hand and letting the smell climb into my limbic system. Ken from The Garum Factory suggested I go the lavender-infused olive oil route and add a few drops over a dish (in this instance melon and Serrano ham) and he was right. The lavender is gentle and warm, and definitely in the background, with just a hint of floral. No granny’s pants here.

From the aromatherapist at the festival, I learnt the simplest technique for using the essential oil: add a few drops to a base of water and use it as a room and body spray. It is beautifully simple and effective. I’ve been dousing my sheets with it and myself (it is, along with tea tree, a clear oil and doesn’t stain fabric. You can also apply it neat to the skin). Also great for getting rid of any ‘untoward’ smells in the house. Recipes below.

Lavender Spray

Fill a clean spray bottle with 4 ounces of pure distilled water (or tap water)

Pour 6 drops of lavender essential oil directly into the spray bottle

Tightly close the bottle and shake vigorously to combine

Be sure to shake it before each use, as the water and essential oils tend to separate

Lavender-infused olive oil, melon and Serrano ham

Adapted from Skye Gyngell, My Favourite Ingredients

English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia and Munstead) is commonly used for cooking

250ml (1 cup) of extra virgin olive oil

1 lemon

2 sprigs of fresh lavender

Pare the lemon zest in long strips using a vegetable peeler, and place it in a small pan along with the sprigs of lavender. Pour over the olive oil and warm gently to body temperature (around 99F) for ten minutes so the lemon and lavender can release their aromas. If you want a more pronounced lemon flavour, add the zest of 2-3 lemons. Remove from the heat and let stand for 30 minutes. Use on the day of making or within 24 hours. If using with the melon and ham, dribble over the cold fruit (which should be lightly salted) and serve with a scattering of lavender buds or flowers if you like.

“Mercury owns the herb; and it carries his effects very potently. Lavender is of special good use for all the griefs and pains of the head and brain that proceed of a cold cause, as the apoplexy, falling-sickness, the dropsy, or sluggish malady, cramps, convulsions, palsies, and often faintings. Two spoonfuls of the distilled water of the flowers taken, helps them that have lost their voice, as also the tremblings and passions of the heart, and faintings and swooning, not only being drank, but applied to the temples, or nostrils to be smelled unto; but it is not safe to use it where the body is replete with blood and humours, because of the hot and subtile spirits wherewith it is possessed.”

Nicholas Culpeper, Complete Herbal (1653)

A field of fennel

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 22 Comments

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Cookbook, Food, Herbs, Ingredients, Italy, Los Angeles, Recipes, Stories, Walking

A couple of days ago I went for a walk in Lake Hollywood, my usual amble in the morning. It is a flat, paved trail that loops round the lake – not actually a lake at all but a reservoir surrounded by a forbidding high wire fence – and was prepared to be unamazed by it. There have been a few interesting sightings in the past (Mila and Ashton swanning past, Valene from Knots Landing ‘jogging,’ an eagle having a bath), but I was not in the mood. I wanted to walk until my legs ached, with my head down.

There was no sun to speak of, but a heavy haze, and the occasional patch of vague brightness trying to push through. Two ducks sat in the muck, pecking at some iridescent greenery. After a while, one stopped pecking and just stood there. Come on, you’ve had your fun, it seemed to say. So I moved on. I sat on a grassy bank to rest my legs for a bit and watched a family of coyotes tumble down the side of the hill, stopping to bite each other’s ears and roll around. They appeared one at a time, looked up and down the trail, and loped across to a hole in the fence, slipping through to the other side where the water was.

Up ahead there was a hole for me too, an unusual clearing where normally there is a closed gate. I walked through and up the hill and was surrounded by an oasis of wild flowers, bees, butterflies and wild fennel. I sat down on a stone mound.

Wild fennel is difficult to photograph. From afar it is just a sea of green feathers, a strange network of tentacles, a web. Up close it is too fine and long and wavy. You can never get it all in. So in the end I rolled a few in my hand and took in the smell. I was expecting licorice, the tarry, sticky sweets from childhood, but not lemon, rubber, grass, aniseed, hay, manure, mint, cough mixture and ferns.

Even as I walked past, this strange concoction spilled out. Wild fennel is a herb (or edible weed depending on who you read), and grows abundantly around the Mediterranean, and in Mediterranean climates such as southern California. It is easily confused with fennel the bulb, which has the same curly fronds up top, but is used principally for the fresh, clean chunkiness of its base. The herb, all frilly leaf, is used a lot in southern Italian cooking, particularly Sicilian, where they like to stuff the finocchio selvatico in their sardines, and the seeds in their sausages.

Umbel beginnings

It felt like a real find, this place. There was no one else around, and though I could hear the voices of walkers on the main path, I was hidden from view. It is an economical landscape, because it is so dry. Looking only for lushness, meadows, and nodding snowdrops – Englishness – it’s easy to miss everything else. This field was gold, the dull, dry gold of old grass. Everything was matted, tufted and coarse with occasional bolts of bright colour from thistles. I had to give up the decision to be unmoved. The sun finally came out and I went and sat on the bridge and watched the turtles sunbathing at the lake’s edge.

Fennel grows often in the most unprepossessing places: wastelands, car parks and even in the street. It propagates like mad, and is considered something of a pest here and a fire hazard. Don’t pick it where there is a good chance a dog (or person) has peed on it. The spring and early summer is when you get the fresh green shoots, the wavy fronds, that are used for stuffing into fish and strewing over fava beans and ricotta, risotto, and as a base for pesto.

The simplest treatment is to boil them until tender and serve with olive oil and lemon juice. The autumn is when you get the seeds. This is when the fronds die back and you get the dried, burnt-looking stalks. However mangled they look, the plants will be full of seed clusters. They look like little umbrellas (hence the name Umbelliferae, the family to which fennel belongs). You can pick off the ‘umbels’, separate the seeds from the pods and dry them. They last forever.

After eating fennel pretty exhaustively all week, this recipe makes the most sense to me, gustatorially (I’m not sure that’s a word). It’s a classic pairing of fava beans (broad beans in England) and ricotta with wild fennel fronds. Use the bushy stalks of bulb fennel in its place, or some mint, or whatever takes your fancy. You could use peas as well as, or instead of, fava beans.

Fava beans, ricotta and wild fennel

Adapted from Matthew Fort, Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons

Serves 4

1 small onion

1 bunch of wild fennel

4 big handfuls of fava beans

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Ricotta or feta

When fava beans are older, husk them and pinch off their skins to reveal the bright green pods beneath – boiling them for 3 minutes will help shuck off their coats, if need be. Heat a glug of olive oil in a pan. Slice the onion finely and chop the fennel into small bits. Wilt them for a couple of minutes and then add the beans. Cook very gently for about 15 minutes. Add a little water if the beans are drying out before becoming tender. Serve with ricotta, or feta if you prefer a bit of salty sharpness. This is lovely served alongside some prosciutto crudo.

Roasted squash

24 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 2 Comments

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Food, Herbs, Ingredients, Recipes, Spices, Stories, Travel

I could live on this. I’m already perilously close to overkill. I have it for breakfast with an omelette, on its own at lunch. It slumps in a devil-may-care way next to all sorts of meat and fish. It’s so over me. I’m praying it goes out of season soon, or suddenly becomes unavailable, so I can kick the habit. The fact that butternut squash is good for you is all the more confusing. Sweet, plump, comforting and the kind of neon orange I haven’t seen since my 1976 flares took my parents’ breath away, it heralds the start of the cooler months, climaxing on Thanksgiving in November.

I don’t think I was properly aware of squash before I came to America, in the sense of the entire ‘family’ of vegetables. In England, we have courgettes and marrows, and of course pumpkins. But here in California there is summer squash and winter squash, and so many sub-genres in between I could really do with a manual. In a nutshell, summer squash has a thinner skin, is tender and glossy (think courgettes) and winter squash, the butternut for example, is firm with a thick, tough rind.

The thing butternut squash most loves is ham. Boiled, then roasted, basted and then glazed with a treacly syrup. Both are sweet and soft, rich and caramelized, chunky and substantial. Interestingly, squash is not particularly starchy, so though it eats like a sweet potato, it has none of the fibrous load.

On our first Thanksgiving* as a couple in LA, three years ago, we had somehow missed all the invitations to join in with other families celebrating, and found ourselves a deux. We bought a ham from Trader Joe’s and some squash, and proceeded to have ourselves a party. Not having this tradition in England, it was hard to tap into the spirit. My only previous Thanksgiving reference had been the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles, where Steve Martin’s character struggles to get home in time, with podgy irritant John Candy tagging along. My favourite line is when the two of them are sharing a bed, and Steve Martin says: “Those aren’t pillows”. It is a funny film, tinged with sadness, and I loved John Candy’s shower curtain ring salesman. I can never remember if they do make it back in time, but I was left with a memory of those awful, corporate hotel rooms, piles of snow, and men screaming in car parks.

That ham gave me terrible wind. Afterwards, we went for a walk in Runyon Canyon and watched people working out. There were families – shoals of them – walking off their feast, laughing and shouting to one another. We sat on a bench and looked out at the sea of buildings below and beyond, everything indistinguishable. I think we realized then that it was tantamount to missing Christmas. The timing was off, but the squash was good. I am still giving thanks for it.

Roasted Squash

Adapted from Jamie Oliver, Jamie’s Italy

1 large butternut squash

1 dried red chilli

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

A large handful of sage leaves

1 stick of cinnamon

Olive oil

Preheat your oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Halve the butternut squash, remove and reserve the seeds, then cut the squash into slices or chunks with the skin left on. Using a pestle and mortar, or a metal bowl with a rolling-pin, bash up the dried red chilli with a good pinch of salt. Add the whole sage leaves, the cinnamon and enough olive oil to loosen the mixture, and rub the whole lot over the squash pieces, so they are well covered.

Place the squash in one layer (this is important) in a roasting tray and season lightly with salt and pepper. Sprinkle over the seeds, cover tightly with tin foil and bake for 30 minutes, or until the skin of the squash is soft, then remove the foil and cook for another 15 minutes until the squash is golden and crisp. Remove the cinnamon and tuck in.

*Thanksgiving takes place on the fourth Thursday of November in the US. You could say it’s the original harvest festival, started by the pilgrims and puritans emigrating from England in the early 17th century, and assisted by the Wampanoag Native Americans who provided seeds and fish.

Crème caramel

15 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

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Dessert, Food, Herbs, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories

Spoonable and consoling crème caramel. It’s been around forever it seems. Always a restaurant staple, but rarely made at home, or at least never by me. I think I’ve always been rather intimidated by it – dark caramel running down satiny slopes of custard seemed too fancy, too much the work of a pro. Even the texture is perfectly constructed; the sultry amber syrup has just enough bitterness to stop the whole thing feeling babyish. And yet, this is surprisingly straightforward to make and downright lovely.

On the custard continuum, it’s at the lean end, with crème brûlée (of shattered sugar fame) at the other, and pot de crème somewhere in the middle. Traditionally, whole milk and whole eggs are used which helps it hold its shape, out there on its own. It also gives it that just-set texture. These days, egg yolks or cream are often added in the quest for velvet tenderness. My first attempt without either reminded me of a Mini Milk (the only ice lolly I was ever allowed because it cost 10p); no bad thing but I wanted something a bit more grown-up, so this recipe has extra yolks.

The pudding’s complexity comes from the way the caramel ‘lining’ is absorbed by the custard over the time they spend together in the fridge and sitting on the counter top, which is why crème caramel is at its best eaten at room temperature. Cold dulls our perception of taste, and this is where you want liquid warmth, not the foggy chill of ice cream.

A vanilla bean is a traditional steeping ingredient here, but this custard also takes kindly to being infused with herbs, flowers and spices. On my first outing, I steeped rose petals in the milk mixture for about an hour, and the result was delicate and subtle. Some finely chopped rosemary on my second attempt gave it more body, with an earthy, faintly medicinal quality. Orange zest was just right; warm and fragrant, without taking away from the pudding’s beautiful simplicity, while pulling it back from mere sweetness. I include it here.

Orange crème caramel/Crème renversée à l’orange

Adapted from Simon Hopkinson, Roast Chicken and Other Stories

2 cups (500ml) of creamy milk

Finely grated zest of 1 large orange (2 if you want more intensity)

⅓ cup (80g) of sugar

2 whole eggs

4 egg yolks

Generous ⅓ cup (100g) of sugar to make the caramel

Method

Pour the milk into a pan and add ⅓ cup (80g) of sugar with the orange zest. Bring to the boil, then remove it from the heat and leave to infuse for at least an hour. Put the whole eggs and egg yolks in a bowl and whisk lightly. Bring the orange milk up to a simmer, then temper the eggs by pouring in half a cup of the milk at a time, so they don’t scramble. Mix together, but don’t allow the eggs and milk mixture to become too frothy. Strain this through a fine sieve to remove all the zest, pressing down to extract as much of the flavour as possible. Put to one side and heat the oven to 300F.

Now for the caramel. Put the generous ⅓ cup (100g) of sugar into a pan and add enough water to cover (you don’t have to be precise about how much). Heat gently until the sugar has dissolved and then boil hard. Watch as it turns from transparent to light gold to reddish brown; don’t do anything else while this is happening as you don’t want it pale and insipid, but you don’t want black sugar either. It moves from one to the other with startling speed. As soon as you think it’s ready, pour into six ramekins, swirling it so that it covers the base and some of the sides. It will harden quickly, so act fast and don’t talk to anyone. When it’s set, put each ramekin into a roasting dish, and from there gently pour the custard mixture into each mould. Now pour enough hot tap water into the roasting dish so that it goes most of the way up the sides of the moulds (about two-thirds), cover the dish with foil, and bake for about 40 minutes.

Don’t have the heat too high, or boil the water as the custard will curdle. They’re ready when there’s still a small liquid centre, which will firm up after you remove them from the oven. Take them out and keep them in the roasting tin on the counter for 30 minutes, then refrigerate, covered, for about 5 hours or overnight. Let them come to room temperature, if you can. It also makes them easier to turn out. To serve, run a thin knife round the edges of each ramekin to loosen, put a plate over the top and flip over.

Some steeping ideas: 3 sprigs of thyme or a sprig of rosemary, rose petals from 2 untreated rose heads, the zest of a whole orange, lemon or lime, ¼ cup of fresh lemon verbena, lemon balm or lavender, ¾ cup of toasted nuts, such as almonds or hazelnuts, or 2 teaspoons of toasted cardamom seeds. The amount of time you infuse these ingredients in the milk mixture will depend on how intensely you want the flavour to come through.

A word about thyme

08 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

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Cooking, Dessert, Herbs, Ingredients, Mediterranean, Recipes

Of all the herbs, I find thyme the most satisfying and the least temperamental to grow. Native to the Mediterranean where it grows wild, it loves neglect, drought and miserly earth – the more woeful the better – as well as a fair whack of sun and heat. It suits the confinement of a terracotta pot, just make sure it’s thoroughly parched before watering; it hates wet feet. One of my favourite pastimes is running my fingers through each knotty cascade and getting a headful of that bracing, lemon-and-fresh-grass aroma. Then there is the taste; pummeled with lemon zest and roasted with garlic and tomatoes, or deposited into the cavities of lamb and chicken, it can be slow to release its flavour but when it does, woody, herbal, charcoal notes can lift a pedestrian offering and make it sing.

Thyme is a herb that loves to be steeped and infused with citrus, lending an aromatic depth to dishes. In desserts, I find it tempers the sugars and brings out the other, less sweet, elements. It works particularly well in this way with figs and stone fruit, such as apricots and peaches. Flecked through a cake it can get lost, so a good bruising beforehand will encourage the release of essential oils. On the other hand, too much thyme and too leisurely a steep in custard (for use in ice cream or a flan) and it’s like drinking cough mixture.

March is a good time to talk about herbs. Even in Southern California, where it’s reported that the amount of uninterrupted blue sky is commensurate with the number of people in therapy (a lot), this is the month when LA can have a frosty face. Traditionally, March has always been known as the famine time; the Irish used to call it “the grey blast of spring.” Any stored fruit had more or less expired by this point, so the cook was dependent on fresh new shoots from herbs to awaken tired dishes. Conveniently grown near the kitchen door, it meant a single hand could slip out, grab what herb it needed and then beat a retreat, away from glowering skies.

The time to plant is now. Young shoots will lack the pungency of a mature thyme that has been baked by the sun; slow cooking helps give the older plant a milder presence while introducing younger leaves near the end of cooking preserves the delicacy. Aside from Thymus Vulgaris – otherwise known as common or English thyme – lemon thyme (T. Citrodius) is the one used most often in cooking; it has a softer, less searing flavour and does well in shortbread and as a final flourish. Orange balsam, caraway and Sicily, with its celery scented leaves, are among the hardiest with the most concentrated perfume, while the creeping coconut thyme has a more fugitive scent and is not considered culinary at all, though I’ve used it if there’s nothing else (I can’t say it tastes much of coconut).

The lemon cake with thyme recipe, made with almonds and a swipe of flour, is fragrantly moist with just a breath of savoury to it, thyme once again bringing up the rear, adding warmth, depth and a much-needed bit of rough.

Mushrooms with thyme on toast

I can think of no lovelier start to the day than this: earthy mushrooms, woody thyme and razor-sharp lemon zest all collapsing into a fragrant heap over a heft of hot, buttered toast. Some crushed garlic is a lovely, warming addition, as is brown butter. Although it looks in some senses ‘wrong’, brown butter (or beurre noisette) adds a toasty, nutty dimension; you simply heat the butter gently until the milk solids on the bottom of the pan turn a dark, chocolatey brown, then add the rest of your ingredients. If you want to make a concession to health, olive oil is a good alternative here.

One of Jane Grigson’s luxurious ideas is to bake the mushrooms in the oven with clotted cream, but I think we’ll leave that for another day.

Serves 2

8 smallish mushrooms or 4 large field mushrooms (Morels appear in spring, as do ‘Hedgehogs’, if you want to go foraging)

1 tbs butter

1 clove of garlic, crushed

1 heaped tbs of thyme leaves stripped from the stem

1 tsp lemon zest (or finely chopped preserved lemon)

Bruise the leaves of the thyme with the lemon zest and garlic in a pestle and mortar, or in a bowl with a wooden spoon. Add a few grinds of salt and pepper. Brown the butter, lower the heat and add the thyme mixture along with the roughly chopped mushrooms, that have been wiped clean, not washed. Cook over a medium heat until the mushrooms are wilting and have started to brown. The trick is to keep things moist, so add a tablespoon of water if you need to. If you want your mushrooms to have something of the damp, forest-like interior about them, keep them in a bag in the fridge for a day or so before cooking. As to toast, I will leave it up to you. Tradition dictates white and thick and toasted within an inch of its life (it will go soggy soon after the mushrooms have arrived) but it’s hard to go wildly wrong with this classic.

Lemon drizzly

06 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

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Almonds, Baking, Cake, Dessert, Food, Herbs, Ingredients, Lemons, Recipes

I’m aware I might be going overdrawn on my ‘lemon’ account with this recipe, but this really is sublime. It also works equally well with limes, if you want something more piercing. In either case, the loaf cake is made doubly moist, first with the addition of ground almonds and then with the soaking it gets from the lemon/lime syrup. It keeps for ages.

I used thyme here too; it is one of those shrubby herbs you can be quite flagrant with, unlike sage or rosemary. Whenever I’ve been tentative, it looks as though a couple of green flies have fallen into the mixture and need fishing out. It should look deliberate, so be generous. Thyme adds a resinous, woodland warmth, and tempers the sweetness. It goes particularly well with lemon; both are part of the Mediterranean palate, and with some light roughing up over heat, the smell can quickly conjure up memories of scorched earth, sea air and the sigh of singed, crackling wood over flame. Needless to say, you can leave it out.

This cake is based on a Nigel Slater recipe, a food writer with the soul of a gardener in my view. I decided on the thinnest layer of lemon icing on top; it has never felt too much and it makes the cake less gooey to handle. Anyway, that’s my excuse. Candied lemons are a good standby.

Lemon loaf cake

Adapted from Nigel Slater, Crumbs of Comfort, The Observer

At the risk of appearing slightly hysterical, this is the best lemon loaf cake I’ve ever eaten/made. It is simplicity itself and yet tastes quite amazing. People will think you’re professionally trained.

For the cake:

200g butter, softened

200g caster sugar

3 large free range eggs at room temperature

80g plain flour (rice flour works well here too)

100g ground almonds

2 teaspoons of thyme leaves (optional)

Grated zest of 1 whole lemon (reserve the juice for the syrup)

Half a teaspoon of baking powder

Pinch of salt

1 loaf tin (8″ x 5″)

For the syrup:

4 tbsp sugar

Juice of 1 large lemon (see above)

For the candied lemons (optional)

3 lemons, thinly sliced

100g caster sugar

100ml water

Pre-heat the oven to 350F/175C. Butter and line the loaf tin with baking parchment. Sift the baking powder, salt and flour together. Cream the butter and sugar till they are pale and fluffy. Gradually beat in the eggs, alternating with the flour mixture to stop it curdling. Grate the lemon zest and mash it with the thyme leaves, if using, in a pestle and mortar or with the base of a jar; tearing the leaves helps release their essential oils. Or just add the lemon zest to the cake mixture, along with the ground almonds. Fold the mixture into the lined tin and bake for approximately 40 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

While the cake is baking, dissolve the sugar in the lemon juice over a low heat – taste as you go and add more sugar if need be. Remove from the heat and steep for 20 minutes. When the cake comes out of the oven, pierce it all over with a skewer and pour over the syrup. Allow to cool.

If you want to go a bit ‘Elvis’ with it, as I did, add a thin shell of lemon icing on top of the tacky-dry syrup; wet 6 heaped tablespoons of sifted icing sugar with 2 generous tablespoons of lemon juice and spread over the cake, letting it drip down the sides. Keep the cake wrapped tightly in foil for a few days to moisten if you can.

For the candied lemons, bring a pan of water to the boil and blanch the sliced lemons by putting them in the boiling water for five minutes. Drain and set aside. In another pan, bring the sugar and water to the boil, add the lemons and simmer for about 10-15 minutes, or until the white pith turns translucent. The lemon slices will go sticky and shiny. Allow them to cool on greaseproof paper. Store in an airtight container, or place on top of the cake for a pleasant finish. They’re quite chewy.

Optional extra: Add crushed cardamom from 1½ tbsp green cardamom pods (put the seeds in a pestle and mortar and crush to a coarse powder) to the butter/sugar before creaming. I think it gives the cake a slightly mystical, smoky flavour. Shout out to Good Things to Eat by (my cousin) Lucas Hollweg for this lovely addition to a lemon cake.