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Semi-derelict

17 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by Sophie James in Garden, Travel, Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

France, Fruit, Gardens, Nigel Slater, Patience Gray, Pre-Pandemic holidays, Recipes, Stories

She stood on the doorstep with a carton of blackcurrants, the top decorated with the pungent leaves. English but so long in France that she was a bit like Jane Birkin; she had a way of speaking English that sounded translated. She was an illustrator and had bought the house semi-derelict with her French husband and turned this annexe into a one up one down house for paying guests. I found it hard to warm to her, but I recognise it now as jealousy. The garden was ramshackle but loved and beautiful to me for that reason, with ducks and their ducklings skittering about, while various cats lounged on the vegetable beds. He – the husband – was a fanatical gardener and barely spoke. As if it was all too much, or he’d gone feral here, with the woodland at the bottom of the garden and the stream, and the birds he was protecting. Don’t go near that tree, he said, because they’re nesting. He was French and so his insouciance was more acceptable, don’t ask me why. They were both not exactly host material.

Over the years, I have listened to/read the same story told through various lenses, but the words are the same; rambling, derelict, remote, dusty plain, our hideaway, our tumble-down cottage, our house (well, one of our houses), we couldn’t find the front door for the brambles, didn’t even know there was a swimming pool, it wasn’t on the spec, rotting floorboards.

Often they wonder if it is worth it, because of the upkeep. And travel more difficult now. We are so lucky, they always say. And I think, yes you are. To be in France or elsewhere in the seventies or eighties when property was cheap, and you had a few extra bob. Then you held on to it, improved it, gradually the area became more sought after. These accretions are often slow and subtle.

The pioneer spirit looks different now, more calculated, and documented up the wazoo. I wonder if we could ever return to the relative innocence of Patience Gray in Honey from a Weed (‘I was able to light a fire, start the pot with its contents cooking, plunge into the sea at mid-day and by the time I had swum across the bay and back, lunch was ready and the fire a heap of ashes’.) or Elizabeth David brushing the fish with branches of rosemary dipped in olive oil. My own mother bought a three storey house in southern Spain for £2,000, now long gone. All the walls sloped, and swallows nested in the rafters. We had no glass in the windows only shutters. We would get lifts to places in the back of the post mistress’s van or occasionally the back of a tractor. What I remember was how unrelaxing it was. Hard work. We were dusty, tired, often bored, but our skin shone from the olive oil, sunshine and mountain air. Also: the coffee, the tomatoes, the smell of the bakery with its tough brown loaves. The way bits of wall came off on your clothes.

I suppose my mum’s place too was semi-derelict, or as one guest called it – in the days when strangers responded to an ad in Loot and were sent the keys – ‘your hovel’.


The punnet of blackcurrants are swiftly deployed. And I am left with the tale – that they zoned in on this area of unflashy northern France, their demands were few; a bus stop so their daughter could get to school on her own, relative ease of access to a town, a garden to grow vegetables. Then they got to work, quietly and slowly until they built a life.

The blackcurrants are washed and not dealt with in any way, the ‘beard’ still intact. Then they are gently heated on the hob, with the tiniest splash of water along with the sugar. They are cooked when the skins split, and then you eat them like that with ice cream, yoghurt etc. Or once cooked you can push them through a sieve to get a purée. They still retain their tartness, despite sugar, and always arrive in the same way; offered in an old ice cream carton, from a muddy hand, or a repurposed punnet. Some currants will still be attached to the stalks, leaves will be amongst them, the colour reminiscent of beetles. Or ink. Or soot. They are not glossy. I tend to eat them raw as I work my way round the allotment.


Blackcurrant compote (to add to meringue and cream or rice pudding or ice cream). Adapted from Nigel Slater, Tender Volume 2.

300g blackcurrants, 3 tbs caster sugar (or to taste), a shake of water (2 tbs)

Wash blackcurrants, pull from their stalks if necessary, put them in a stainless steel saucepan, with the sugar, water and bring gently to boil. As soon as they start to burst and the juice turns purple, remove from heat and set aside. Leave to cool, then chill.

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Battered Blossoms

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Cooking, Food, Ingredients, Italy, Marcella Hazan, Patience Gray, Recipes, Rome, Stories, Summer

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I just think these are lovely. Lovely looking, creamy, blossomy, with echoes of the courgette itself. A welter of these, piled high on a plate, having been plunged and fried in batter is the way. And eaten alone. That’s how I remember them when I lived in Rome as a student. This was the early nineties and even my pajamas had shoulder pads. Everyone had a cleavage and shoals of men followed me (and every other young woman in the area) home, loitered and then dispersed to find other prey. I remember these blossoms in their crisp casings were handy at parties – you could walk around with one, and a napkin would quickly blot up any lingering grease. Either that or it could double as lip gloss.

Everyone of my age in Italy lived at home and remained there in their childhood bedrooms doted on by housekeepers until they found someone to marry. No one left home to go to university, except I was at the university of Rome and needed a place to stay, so I lived in the garden flat of an Italian family in Parioli, a swish, hilly enclave.

The flat was actually a garage with a bed in it and a small toilet. I remember a window but not much light entered the place and I often woke up at midday or even later, muddled and confused and late for class. I taught English as a foreign language on the side, but this was tricky if still asleep. The dampness and general humidity both in the flat and in Rome in deep summer gave me what is known commonly as il colpo della strega (translated as ‘the witch’s blow’), a lower back paralysis eased almost immediately by plunging into a hot bath.

I remember stepping over Marcello Mastroianni who was sitting on my doorstep, having a break from filming, and thinking that I should probably stop and say something, but I was more concerned about getting to the bakery in time to get my bread rolls. Mantovani rolls were thinly crusty on the outside with a warm belly of bread beneath; they were sweet and soft, and I would often walk along eating them bare from their paper bag – they needed absolutely no accompaniment. The same applies to these battered blossoms. Eat them bare, preferably walking, and find a skyline or seascape to stare at, or even a wall, and feel their grassy tentacles dissolve on your tongue. Actually, some soft airy bread might work alongside: ungreased and ripped open with savage fingers.

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Though these flowers look fragile and papery, they are in fact rich, and a few can make you feel quite woozy. The idea of the batter, known in Italian as la pastella, is to do justice to the delicacy and brightness of the flavour, and so the cleanest, plainest sort is required. I used only flour and water, and a pinch of salt.

If you want an upgrade, you could follow Patience Gray’s instruction in Honey from a Weed, and add an egg yolk, a tablespoon of grappa and just enough water to the flour to make ‘not too liquid a batter’. The egg white is also incorporated just before making the plunge. I have never got to this recipe, because I have found the original batter to be exactly as it should be. You could use elderflowers instead of the courgette blossoms.

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Courgette blossoms fried in batter

Adapted from Marcella Hazan, The Classic Italian Cookbook

12-14 courgette blossoms

Vegetable oil, enough to come 18mm (¾ inch) up the sides of a frying pan/skillet

Flour-and-water batter ( see below)

Sea salt

Put 250ml (scant ½ pint) of water in a bowl and sift 80g (2¾ oz) of plain flour over it, beating all the while. By the end, the batter will have the consistency of double/heavy cream. Leave to rest while you get on with the courgette blossoms.

Wash the blossoms quickly and tenderly under cold running water and dry them gently on kitchen paper (this is not essential if you know where they’ve been). Snip off the stem and the little hook-like leaves at the base of the blossom. Slit the blossom open on one side (imagine you’re reading a book) without dividing it. Remove the little orange bulb within, otherwise known as the pistil.

Heat the oil over a high heat. When it is very hot (drip the minutest drop of batter into the hot oil and see it shrivel up instantly to gauge readiness) dip the blossoms quickly in and out of the batter and slip them into the frying pan. It is important to get the blossoms as open and as flat as possible, otherwise clumps of uncooked batter get secreted in the grooves. When they are golden brown on one side flip them over to cook on the other side. Transfer to kitchen paper to drain, sprinkle with sea salt and eat quickly, while still hot and crisp.

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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

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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

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 kumquats

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.

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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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