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A treacherous herb

01 Sunday May 2022

Posted by Sophie James in Gardening, Recipe, Uncategorized

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

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.

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Black and blue

30 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Mûrée

Adapted from Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book

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

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

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

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Paul’s cod

27 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Cooking, England, Fish, Food, Ingredients, Lemons, Recipe, Sea, Stories, Sussex

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‘Local cod’ said the sign outside Paul’s Plaice, the only fishmonger left in Seaford, and then you go through the little chain-mail curtain into a shop that smells of the sea.

Paul works alongside his brother and I’ve never worked out which one is actually Paul, although it’s been explained to me enough times. Perhaps my brain has discounted it because it needs to stay alert for ‘novelties’ such as an oncoming car or a mountain lion. Apparently this is what the brain does, it has this discounting mechanism which I read about in Where’d you go Bernadette. I have also discounted the sea which roars all through the day and night outside my window. Every day it lies there, a different colour, doing something slightly different with itself. Occasionally it catches me and I notice it – a thin pencil line on the horizon or a big mushroom cloud of rain the same gunmetal grey as the waves, gulls flapping over a fishing boat like washing on a line, something suddenly surfacing – a snout? – and then going under. Then I forget.

Back in Paul’s Plaice, I notice a box of tiny fish as small as matchsticks with the name Smelt written above, which I think sounds rather Dickensian. They’re baby whitebait, according to ‘Paul’. They look too small to taste of anything, too fragile, almost pre-fish. They also have local plaice and cod, and everything is from the nearby fishery. They’re caught trawler style, because netting taints the fish with all the seaweed that gets caught up with it. What about line-caught, I ask him. ‘That’s just a bloke standing there with a fishing rod’, he says. ‘I can get it for you but it’s really expensive.’ I know from past experience that my mother has got mackerel for free by walking past a full bucket at just the right time, but obviously this takes a certain louche opportunism that is beneath Paul, who I can only describe as ‘bubbly’ though I know that makes him sound like an Avon lady.

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I cooked the cod and let me tell you it was so flipping good I went out and bought another three pieces, and ‘Paul’  thrust a whole handful of parsley into the bag for good measure. It was meaty yet tender, and chunks dissolved, not actually like butter, but with a gentle yielding buttery quality. I baked the cod in one of those parchment parcels, where it steams but also seals without drying out. You want the cod to somehow give itself to you, each layer opening, each cavity glistening, the smell of lemon and salt and heat and herbs, pale discs of pearly white, soft and supple. I think I’ll stop now.

Cod in a bag

With advice from Paul

Serves two

2 pieces of cod fillet, cut from the thick end (3 cm/1½ inches thick)

Olive oil & a small pat of butter

Lemon juice and the rind of 1 lemon

Sea salt

Fresh parsley (about four healthy sprigs)

Parchment paper

Butcher’s twine

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Arrange 2 sheets of parchment paper on a baking tray about double the size of each cod fillet. In the centre of the sheet put the cod and add what you like: here I added a pat of butter, some fennel fronds, a little glug of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon juice, the lemon rind cut thickly and some sea salt. But you can add anything; bay leaves, thyme, chillies, garlic, thinly sliced potatoes etc. Pull the corners of the parchment paper together and twist shut.  Secure with some butcher’s twine. Slide the tray into the oven and bake for about 15-20 minutes. Open the bag to check it’s done and sprinkle the insides with chopped parsley.

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Small Crumbs of Comfort

17 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Cornwall, Cream, Cream tea, Dessert, Devon, Food, Homesickness, Ingredients, Jam, Recipe

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This is my version of the ‘cream tea’. A faint echo, at least. The English cream tea consists of warmed scones (and in our family it was always ‘scon’ and not ‘scoan’, but each to their ‘oan’), a tranche of clotted cream, yellowing and puffy in its ramekin with the merest hint of a crust, and an avalanche of strawberry jam (does it have to be strawberry? I think it does). There was always a debate about whether it should be scone/cream/jam or scone/jam/cream. I believed in the former because I didn’t want the cream to be too sullied.

Cream tea was always some sort of reward, recompense for having waited hours for the wrong bus, or walked too many miles in the wrong direction. Then spying a tea room, we would go in. And they were always remarkably similar: too small with little dolls’ chairs and spindly tables and one harried, red-faced waitress in a tabard that could best be described as ‘snug’.

And despite the heat, the sun that shines merrily on high and the hummingbirds that drill their way through our garden like tiny helicopters, this is more comforting than ice cream, or a cooling fruit salad. Scones it must be, with a dollop of tangy cream and some syrupy, balsamic strawberry jam. I need some Englishness, some rural Devon and Cornwall. My family lost someone very special this week, a Cornish rose. This is all I can do, where I am; bake something comforting and sit and think of her. And they better have a bloody good cream tea where she’s going, or there’ll be questions asked.

The scone

There are debates about the perfect scone that I have neither the time nor the inclination to go into here. Obviously height is always nice because you want everything to look as if it’s just toppling over and the only way to save it is to cram it into your mouth in one go. To achieve this billowing effect, a combination of raising agents is needed (bicarb and cream of tartar) and an extra-fine flour, such as Italian 00, if you can get your hands on it. And work the mixture as little as possible; the more you knead, the denser and flatter the results. Once baked, the light and fluffy interior should act as a delightful contrast to the crunchy shell.

And it really needs to be eaten straight from the oven, so that the cold cream clashes with the warmth of the scone and the jam starts to liquefy. Some people like butter and jam here and not cream. But my belief is, given that you’ll only eat this once or twice a year at the most, you might as well go the whole hog.

A scone for a cream tea

Adapted from Rachel Allen, Bake

500g (1lb 2 oz) light Italian 00 flour or plain flour

1 rounded tsp bicarbonate of soda/baking soda

2 rounded tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp sea salt

125g (4½ oz) unsalted butter, cubed

25g (1 oz) caster/superfine sugar)

1 egg, beaten

275ml (9 fl oz) buttermilk or milk, plus extra for egg wash

To make buttermilk, add 1 tbs lemon juice to the milk and let it sit for 5 minutes

100g (3½ oz) sultanas or raisins (optional)

6cm (2½ in) cutter

Preheat the oven to 220C/425F. Sift the flour, bicarb, cream of tartar and salt into a large bowl. Using your fingers, rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add the sugar and raisins/sultanas (if using) and mix well. Set aside about a third of the beaten egg and combine the rest with the buttermilk, then add to the flour mixture and mix very briefly to combine. It will be a very moist dough.

Place on a lightly floured surface and knead ever so slightly to bring together, then press or roll out to a thickness of 2cm (3/4 in). Using the cutter, cut out approximately 12 scones and put them on a floury baking tray. Add about a teaspoon or so of buttermilk to the remainder of the beaten egg to make an egg wash. Brush the scones with the egg wash and bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes or until golden brown on top. Eat as soon as possible. These also freeze well, and can be eaten within the month.

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Clotted cream

I didn’t make my own clotted cream (!!!?) which is the richest and most luxurious cream of all. Made originally from Jersey milk (the Jersey breed, from the Channel islands, is known for the high butterfat content of its milk), it cooks in a basin in a shallow pan of water, simmering for a few hours, until the cream rises to the top and forms a bubbly crust – the so-called clots. If you can’t get hold if it, crème fraîche works very well and brings a pleasing sourness. I love what Nigel Slater has to say about cream in its various incarnations. Read on at your peril.

The Jam

This jam might be the best way of using up the ‘monster’ strawberries currently doing the rounds here. Year-round strawbs have long been emblematic of LA farmers’ markets, which can be off-putting, particularly when you see miles and miles of them, big as tomatoes and hollow as a drum. But March and April in our area is on average the closest the berries get to peaking. Gaviota are lovely but incredibly sweet and best eaten straight from the punnet. Seascape have more acidity and complexity and make a more interesting jam. Recipe to follow.

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