Frilly

20 Thursday Mar 2014

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

Grilled lamb chump chops with wild garlic

With help from Nigel Slater

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

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

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

Nowhere but here

08 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Food, Health, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories, Utensils

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I’ve been here three seasons; a whole autumn, one full winter, the beginnings of spring. That translates as cold, long, dark, wet and angry. Gusty gales, the inexplicable (to me) spring and neap tides, the winter solstice and the darkest night. I’ve watched too many documentaries on BBC4, and I keep bumping into people who think I’ve already left. “Haven’t you gone yet?” “Still here?” or the weirdly judging “shouldn’t you have gone by now?”. And the sun is tepid – bright and cheerful but not warm. At the moment, and this moment is long, there is nowhere but here. Here is where I have a good doctor and no bills, no frightening and incomprehensible bills that have to be explained to me in a way that makes them even more incomprehensible.

Because Obama is still sorting out his healthcare, and for now we have no insurance and to be without insurance with a chronic condition in the US is scary. And people love to tell you how scary; a medical insurance broker in LA, over the course of a two-hour conversation, cheerfully painted a picture of precise Breugal-like horror at what would befall me if I continued to live an uninsured life. One of her client’s had walked out of the door one morning and dislodged one of her eyeballs – or her retina flew off. Or anyway, something happened to her eye and she had no insurance! I probably would have followed Francis Bacon’s lead in this case and popped my eyeball back in, which I read he used to do often after a few stiff ones at the French House.

So I’m here and it’s spring and I’ve already said goodbye at least twice to everyone. I am in that strange, drained nothing-doing state. An oddity in a world where everyone works, a permanent tourist, which is not half as fun as it sounds. And I don’t want to write about leeks or rhubarb, and I have tramped through enough Sussex undergrowth to know that the ubiquitous wild garlic leaves of which everyone writes are having an off year, or simply spring is late. So anyway I started cleaning. Sponging down the insides of my mother’s cupboards, shaking out the bowls and the bits of plastic appendage and the darkly mottled casserole dishes and the 70s colander. This bit was fun, discovering what was there and had been forgotten about. There were things that have followed me from Devon up to London down to Sussex, and sometimes even before my birth; some predate Woolwich!

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The pestle and mortar originally belonged to my Australian grandmother and came from her home in Sydney. I never knew her really, but I have her postcards and letters in her kind capitals and lots of photos, and a memory of brushing her long silver hair. Now that I am apart from my things, I can see how wonderful it is to hold something like this – its weight and shape, and to imagine fingerprints and palms. The beechwood handle has come unmoored from its porcelain head. There are marks from not sure where or what all over the bodies of both mortars. The very act of pounding is to replicate what she would have done, her hands under mine; a form of conjuring. Spices, herbs, pigments and powders – I know she was a natural alchemist. Maybe, who knows, if I pound away and for long enough I’ll get healed.

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Pounding herbs and garlic in a mortar is not nearly as arduous as it looks. It is actually very efficient – the whole thing comes together within a few minutes, the addition of oil is very satisfying, and then you’ve made it yourself and probably worked through a few grudges while you were at it. You are also ‘tempering’ the ingredients, putting them back into balance; in the Middle Ages, honey tempered vinegar, wine tempered fish and the mortar was the vessel to do it.* You are in control of things too, able to see and feel when particles become slosh (as it were).

The Catalan sauce romesco is still made in this way; peppers, nuts, oil, vinegar, bread and garlic are pounded into heady oblivion. As is pesto, skorthalia, the garlicky sauce from Greece, tahini, the Turkish classic tarator made with walnuts and stale white bread and Catalan picada, made with parsley and almonds (below).

It’s better to give approximations when it comes to pounding, because this is where feel is paramount, and it’s good to taste as you go; you can always add more of something. Add oil in very small increments to begin and then increase. I like herb/garlic sauces to have texture, with nuggets of this or that. If you don’t, pound on.

My version of a Catalan picada
1 small handful of blanched almonds (about 20)
1-2 garlic cloves peeled & a pinch of sea salt
4 big glugs of extra virgin olive oil
One big handful of roughly chopped flat-leaf parsley
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Crush the garlic with a good pinch of salt in a mortar until you have a smooth paste. Now add the almonds and keep pounding until amalgamated. Now add the parsley to the mortar, a small bit at a time, and pound until incorporated. Add the olive oil, trickling it in slowly and stir well before adding the lemon juice (add the juice after the oil otherwise it’ll turn the parsley brown). Lovely stirred into a fish casserole or simply served alongside mackerel or clams, sprats, lightly steamed veg or chicken, or stirred into salted yoghurt – really anything.

*Consider The Fork, a history of how we cook and eat by Bee Wilson, is a fascinating book and goes into some detail on the history of the pestle and mortar, if you wanted to read on…

Unbearably smug

06 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Breakfast, Citrus, England, Ingredients, Marmalade, Recipes, Stories

The last of the Sevilles and I barely registered their presence. Here and gone and not really that baggy or grim-looking. Not ugly enough. Normally I’m halted by the sheer filth. But these were tight little things; tidy orange globes with a few grimy seams. All a bit middle class. Still, I couldn’t resist. Because when all else fails, you’ve got a kitchen smelling like an orange grove for twenty-four hours. And then potted up, you’ve got jars of warm pellucid brightness: Seville orange marmalade. And then you can spend the rest of the year being unbearably smug, perhaps handing jars out to people (‘it’s probably awful, yes, I made it, not sure what it tastes like, I didn’t bother measuring, oh god I never buy pectin, it’s all in the pips and pith!’). We are a violently humble people.

And we don’t do it like the French, who on the whole have far more sex than we do. My French friend Monique literally throws beetroot at me in the street. There is no preamble at all. And because it’s straight from her allotment, there is a fair amount of clag attached. She unearths atrocious-looking, gorgeous-tasting stuff and shares it with a bewildered, Gallic shrug, as if to say: what am I going to do with all this incessant greenery?

There are no strings attached to her generosity. And because English is not her first language, there is no hidden meaning in her conversation. There are no barbs or subtle slights. No crowing. We are great crowers. And because I have been here a fair while this time round, I have noticed this as one notices the way ivy creeps into brickwork and destabilizes it. You are demolished slowly, gently, by stealth.

The clue is no questions. No interest in who you are or what you’re doing, as if your being interesting is somehow a threat. It must be something to do with being islanders, being victors and colonizers. We are guilty and proud and a bit defensive at the same time. All of this is in the marmalade, by the way: that bitter candy and burnt orange aroma, taut, thick rind against umber jelly, the sticky tributaries of syrup, the brightness in winter, the selfless preserving, the putting up, and putting up with, the sex (or lack thereof). We put it all in there. Possibly why Seville orange marmalade is such a complex preserve; because we are.

Seville Orange Marmalade

Adapted from Delia Smith, Complete Cookery Course

There are versions of this elsewhere on the blog – I would say this is the definitive Delia, and my favourite so far. It’s lovely on its own on a piece of toast, an oatcake, anything, or dropped into some cake batter (gingerbread is a natural bedfellow as is anything chocolate). And in case you are put off by the intricacies of making your own marmalade, just so you know there are no intricacies: I have been making very good marmalade for years with nothing but a big saucepan and a clean handkerchief (for the pips and pith). It’s a bit long-winded, that’s all. Always worth it.

2lb (900g) Seville oranges
1 lemon
4 pints (2.25 litres) water
4lb (1.8kg) granulated sugar (you could make some of this light muscovado)

Six 1lb (450g) jars, a square of gauze/muslin or a clean handkerchief or a new pair of tan tights/stockings, string and a saucer.

Begin by squeezing the juice from the oranges and the lemon into the pan you’ll be using. Remove all the pith and pips as you go and place them on a square of muslin laid over a bowl; the pips and pith contain the pectin which will enable your marmalade to set. Now cut the peel into shreds and add it to the juice – as fine or as thick as you like, but the thicker it is, the longer it will take to soften. When you’re done, add the water to the juice and peel, tie up the muslin to form a small bag – make sure nothing will escape – and add that too. Leave in a cool place overnight.

The next day, tie the muslin bag to the handle so that it bobs like a cork in the liquid (but doesn’t touch the bottom). Now is the time to put a saucer in the freezer so you can begin testing later. Bring the liquid gently to the boil and then lower the heat and simmer. It is ready when the peel is completely soft – you can test a piece by pressing it between your finger and thumb. This can take anything from 35 minutes to an hour and a half; be aware that once sugar meets rind, it will no longer soften.

When the peel is ready, lift out the muslin bag and leave it on a plate until it’s cool enough to handle. Pour the sugar into the pan and stir over a very low heat until it has dissolved. You may want to hold back on the full amount of sugar and go for a slightly tarter taste. When there are no crystals left, increase the heat and bring the marmalade to a rolling boil. Now squeeze every last bit of the jelly-like pectin that oozes from the muslin bag into the pan. Every little helps here, so be vigilant. Skim off any froth or scum that comes to the surface and leave the marmalade at a fast boil for 15 minutes. Now put a tablespoon of it on one of the cold saucers and let it cool in the fridge. If when you push the marmalade with your finger the mixture crinkles like a furrowed brow, then you have a ‘set’.

Keep testing at 10 minute intervals until it has reached setting consistency. The mixture will start to look more amber and treacly – there is a trick here which is to watch as droplets of the marmalade leave a spoon. When it’s ready, there will be one single droplet; one of the myriad ways of knowing it’s set. Leave the marmalade to settle for about 20 minutes otherwise all the peel will float to the top of the jar. Wash and dry your jars and warm them in a moderate oven – this will sterilize them. Ladle the marmalade into the jars and seal immediately. Label when completely cold.

Power of two

27 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Baking, Biscuits, Chocolate, Food, Hospital, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories, Sussex

I can’t get excited about root vegetables. Pressure-cooked parsnips and celeriac and the flaccid broths I am now closely acquainted with have started to distance me from their virtues. Yes, warm, inviting, steamy, filling, healthy, earthy, beefy and sustaining etc. Worthy.

If I want something wet and warm it is to be tea; strong, lactic and the colour of a cheap suntan. The cup is important: wide, thin-lipped and bone china, something that warms the hands through. And then there is the all important dunking element: the biscuit. Not cookies, which are too soft and yielding and will flop into the tea and turn it to mush. It must be a digestive. Sandy, burnished brown, the texture of rubble. A slight saltiness. Plain as plain can be. My childhood friend, Tuppy, would layer her digestives with butter and salt, an act I found impressive – she was the first as a child to make the connection between sweet biscuit and salted dairy. Digestives and cheddar are also a winner.

Digestives are also the fulcrum of the NHS – after a short stay you will be offered a dainty red packet of two and a cup of tea. It gets your blood sugar up, gives you something to gnaw on, brings you back to life. Sitting the other day with the curtain round me in a hospital ward, after a routine though still rather rugged procedure, I ripped open the red wrapper; the two fitted into my palm like medals. I made them last as long as I could.

“Are you alright in there?” the nurse asked, suspicious at my lingering. My answer was muffled with starch and sugar. I couldn’t just have one. “Fine!” I called out. She whipped the curtain back, but I’d already eaten most of the evidence. 24 hours of not eating and nothing can prepare you for the high. Digestives are genius. And she gave me another packet to go home with. She balanced them on a tray and walked beside me like a butler.

My cousin was waiting for me looking normal and smiling with the colour of a windswept sea walk still on her cheeks. I showed her my little red packet and she was impressed. It reminded me in that moment to be grateful – to be there in the first place and to be going home. With her, with digestives.

You can dip the digestives – once cooled – in melted chocolate, and then leave them to harden on non-stick baking paper. Here I used dark chocolate but milk would also work. As you can see, they are not particularly pretty to look at, but very nice to eat, and will enrich your tea dunking activities. The unchocolated ones mimic shop-bought digestives in their sheer plainness. They are also nicely crisp and not overly sweet – you can serve them with cheese or pâté. They are very good eaten on the day but can be stored in an airtight container and enjoyed a few days later.

The term ‘digestive’ was reportedly derived from the belief that the biscuits had antacid properties due to the use of bicarbonate of soda. They were originally made with exclusively ‘brown meal’ – composed of fine bran and white flour. Because brown meal includes the germ, the flour was sweet, and perhaps because of this, digestives have also been called ‘sweetmeal’ biscuits.

Ginger and chocolate digestive biscuits

Adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The Guardian

No, he’s not paying me. I just happen to like his column. These are based on the classic River Cottage digestive, but made with the addition of ginger and dark chocolate. Both are optional, but if you do go down the ginger route, be generous with the little squares of stem ginger or the flavour and texture can get a bit lost. I used light muscovado here for the soft brown sugar. Makes 20-25.

125g wholemeal spelt flour (or plain wholemeal flour), plus extra to dust
125g medium oatmeal
75g soft brown sugar
½ tsp ground ginger
Big pinch of fine sea salt
1 tsp baking powder
125g cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
5 – 6 largish squares of stem ginger, finely chopped
A little milk (I didn’t find this necessary)
200g dark chocolate (or good milk chocolate), broken into small pieces

Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4 and line two baking trays with nonstick baking parchment. Put the flour, oatmeal, sugar, ginger, salt and baking powder in a food processor and pulse. Add the butter and pulse again until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. (Alternatively, combine the dry ingredients in a bowl, then rub in the butter with your fingertips.)

Add the stem ginger and, with the processor running, trickle in just enough milk (about 30ml) to bring the mix together into clumps. I didn’t need to add any milk in my batch, my dough was already fairly sticky, but see how you go.

Lightly dust a work surface with flour, tip out the dough and knead gently into a ball. Press into a fat disc, wrap in clingfilm and chill for 30 minutes.

Cut the dough in half. Dust one half with flour and roll it out to 3-4mm thick, dusting regularly with flour to stop it sticking. The dough is slightly sticky and crumbly, so don’t worry if it breaks up a bit; just squash it back together and re-roll. Use a 7.5cm cutter, or a glass or cup, to stamp out biscuits, and transfer these to the baking sheets with a palette knife; re-roll the offcuts to make more. Repeat with the second piece of dough (or chill for use later), then bake for 10 – 12 minutes, until golden brown at the edges and lightly coloured on top.

Remove from the oven and leave the biscuits to cool and firm up on the baking sheets, then transfer them to an airtight container or eat them all.

If you want to: melt the chocolate in a basin over a pan of simmering water. Dip in one half of each biscuit, and leave to set on a silicone mat or a sheet of nonstick baking parchment, before serving.

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.

In the street

24 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Citrus, Dessert, Friendship, Fruit, Ingredients, Italy, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories, Travel

That’s how I met her. Running from a broken down train and away from a car crash, in Newhaven of all places. The last time I made a friend this way was twenty years ago in a bakery in Venice, and my accent gave me away. It was heady, to think that’s how it can still be done, meeting in the street and suddenly you’re friends. I ran after her. I wasn’t chasing her or anything, but she just said quickly “follow me” and so I did. It was like being in Borgen.

Her stepfather was waiting for us in a car, and she had to explain quickly who I was and what was going on. I didn’t wait outside because of the freezing wind. I threw myself into the back like a labrador, and we were away. All round the houses, because of the crash. There weren’t even any buses, so if it hadn’t been for her I would have been walking along the English channel for two hours trying to avoid the dog turds. I still feel bad we completely ignored her stepfather. I slipped in a thanks everso much at the end. But it was too exciting, meeting like this. And having so much in common, we even knew people from way back. A cinematographer meeting an actress. Zero degrees of separation.

The last time it felt like no big deal. I met Charlotte in a bakery in Venice, and the next thing I know (and because of her) I’m sitting in Trieste having an interview for a place at Warwick University with the head of the Italian department and his daughter over a bowl of penne alla vodka. I remember the pinky-red sauce and the fumes of subtle alcohol, and the sheer exuberance of the conversation. Actually, he was a monologuer, one of those people who talks in order to stay alive. But in those days, it felt normal, this happenstance. Maybe all young people feel like that – somehow touched by a higher hand. I just wandered into things and it all came out alright.

This is a bit of a cheat. But it gives everyone a breather from all the stolid mince pies and Christmas pudding, and the sheer load of food consumed on the day. It twinkles and it’s orange. And it’s a chance to show off your extravagance in buying in some marrons glacés (candied chestnuts) which are bloody expensive so just one each (and completely unphotographable, sorry, they look like bunions). I like to think it’s a nod in the direction of Italy and heat and sun. I have doffed my cap in the direction of the Venetian stalwart aranci caramellizzati, which began life at the Taverna Fenice. Happy Christmas.

Salty caramel oranges with marrons glacés

Adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The Guardian

Serves 4

4 oranges

4 marrons glacés

Peel the oranges. Use a sharp knife for cutting citrus, if you want it to look pretty. Take a narrow slice off the stem and blossom ends. Cut down the sides of the orange from top to bottom, slicing away the skin and the white pith. Now cut into rounds and put into a bowl. Or, if you wish, serve each person individually.

Crumble the marrons glacés on top, then trickle the molten caramel sauce (by which I mean warm) over the cool fruit, where it will form nice ribbons. Squeeze the juice that has spilled all over the place over the top and it’s ready to go. Delicious with a glass of chilled champagne.

Salty caramel adapted from Nigella Lawson, How To Eat

Serves 4

5 tbs light muscovado

50g unsalted butter

100g golden syrup

125ml single cream

1 big pinch of sea salt flakes

Melt the sugar, butter and golden syrup in a thick-bottomed pan with the salt. When smooth and melted, let it bubble away, gently, for about 5 minutes. Then take off the heat and add the cream. Add more salt at this point if you like it lip-smacking. You can pour the sauce into a jug and serve hot, or do it in advance, refrigerate and reheat. It is truly stupendous.

One jar only

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Christmas, England, Food, Fruit, Ingredients, Jam, London, Poetry, Recipes, Stories

Horseradish and mustard seed. Apples and quinces. A dollop of something that smarts and sears is what is required now. I found the last quinces of the season where I am staying, tiny little gnarled things covered in crystalline cobwebs. Yellow turning to black and as small as tomatoes. And I found some Granny Smith apples that were bunched on a tree in someone’s front lawn. Green, luminous and numerous and unpicked. The rest of the garden was bare and suburban. But the apples were a cartoon green. Perfect and unmarked, with an almost waxy sheen.

“Excuse me, can I help you?” the voice behind us was arch and querulous. I quickly retreated my camera. We turned on our best smiles. “We were just admiring your lovely apples” I said. “Well, come on then, I’ll give you a tour. You can have some if you want.” I promised her a jar of spiced apple jam in return and she perked up. We followed her round her plot and listened to the story of how they bought the house, 40 years ago, and how before that the actress Dame Sybil Thorndike would sit in the conservatory and ‘be round the bend.’

“Won’t you come in? You haven’t eaten? You must be hollow.”

We walked into the house. It too had been untouched. Simple and spartan and her husband Colin was also both these things. Small, white-haired and dainty. He was writing Christmas cards but when we came in he looked up as if he’d been expecting us and started talking as if it was a continuation of an earlier conversation. Our hostess went off to make coffee and came back with a cafetière. She was unsure what was in it; tea or coffee. “Perhaps it’s the most revolting thing you’ve ever drunk?” She enquired smiling and I ate a soft biscuit. The songbook of the musical Cats sat on a side table.

We talked about Cornwall – they had just sold a holiday home in Looe. Very pleasant, pronounced Colin. I had spent some time in Cornwall as a child when my dad moved there. “You probably won’t have heard of the place,” I said, “because it was a tiny hamlet on the edge of Bodmin Moor called Henwood. It had a riding school.” “Oh, we know it well,” cried Colin, in his soft burr. “Do you know Ted and Mary?”

“Now tell me again – where do you live?”

Joe and I paused. He was sitting in a too-small green chair drinking tea-coffee. What do we say? Los Angeles? But we’re English, it was all too complicated. “Ormond Drive” said Joe, where we’ve been for exactly two days, house-sitting. Free-basing, I suppose you could call it, in Hampton, suburb of London, green and leafy, not really a town. A town lite, heavy with history. Colin got out his Cats songbook, and started to read from Growltiger’s Last Stand.*

His bucko mate, Grumbuskin, long since had disappeared,
For to the Bell at Hampton he had gone to wet his beard;
And his bosun, Tumblebrutus, he too had stol’n away-
In the yard behind the Lion he was prowling for his prey.

“We should really push off now. We haven’t done any shopping”, Joe said. “Oh, yes of course. We’ve ruined your morning”.

“And the apples?” Joe asked, as we stood on the threshold. We put on our winning smiles again. Colin gave us an apple each. I was expecting more of a flurry, and two seemed a paltry sum. It was enough for one jar only, which I had promised them. And they had asked us in, they knew Ted and Mary. It was Christmas. Colin had read us poetry. Time to be kind.

Spiced quince, apple and mustard jam

Adapted from Felicity Cloake, The Guardian

Like its cousin, the apple, quince makes a wonderful pairing with pork (think Christmas ham), but is good with any fatty meat. The sweet spices, and the warm hit, make this jam an especially good partner for cheddar or other hard cheese. English quinces are now all but over, unless you can find a few malingerers as I have here, but Cypriot and Turkish grocers, and Middle Eastern shops will have their luscious and bulbous imports, so there’s no excuse. Ginger can be used here instead of horseradish, or as well as.

500g ripe quinces (or a mixture of quinces and apples)

1 shallot, finely chopped

100ml cider vinegar

175g light muscovado sugar

5cm horseradish, peeled and finely grated (or ginger)

½ tsp cinnamon

1 tsp mustard seeds

2 tsp mustard powder

Peel the quinces, cut them into sixes, remove the cores, then roughly chop the flesh. Put the fruit in a pan and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, and leave to cook for half an hour until soft. Drain, then mash or blitz to a pulp in a blender.

Put the quince back in the pan with the remaining ingredients, except for the mustard seeds and powder. Cook for about 20 minutes, until thick, then take off the heat and leave to cool. Stir in the seeds and mustard powder. Decant into a sterilised jar (washed with soapy water, rinsed and then put in a hot oven for ten minutes) and refrigerate.

* Originally from Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S Eliot

Always winter

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Baking, Cake, Childhood, Chocolate, Dessert, Devon, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories

Perhaps it’s because I have been spending a lot of time in the mud, but I’m drawn very much to muscovado sugar. Dark as earth, moist, crumbly and rich with minerals, it has sizeable heft. It is always winter with muscovado. And it reminds me of the eternal cold of Devon, before central heating, and the way our small fingers stuck to the inside of the windows and having to get dressed with our foggy breath snorting out of our mouths like buffalo.

As children we only ever had muscovado and we put it in our tea, which was like drinking turf. We sprinkled it over our porridge in the mornings and the strong malt-like aniseed depth of it was not always easy to take, though it helped if there was a moat of cold milk which the muscovado sweetened to butterscotch. If muscovado is turf then molasses is tar. It was sometimes given to us ‘for nerves’ in the same way that cod liver oil was administered ‘for bones’. And I can still remember the thick gluey strings of molasses making my jaw ache, the smell strangely reminiscent of tobacco and the colour which was like Victorian yacht varnish.

I was aware that other households didn’t have such things. My school friends had white sugar that was often mistaken for salt, and a wet dab of the finger was needed to ascertain which was which. I also remember that theirs were houses filled with neatness and pullovers and tank tops knitted in luminous artificial colours.

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My friends didn’t have to be wrapped in sheets stiff with heat from the storage heater just before bedtime. They didn’t know what they were missing, because being swaddled like this so you could barely move and feeling the starchy steam rise into the room was actually very satisfying. And then we were lowered into our beds like mummies. But apart from this one thing, I really wanted to be banal and suburban and have nothing unique about me at all.

This might be why I called myself Marian, which I did for a while, thinking it was a nice, quiet name. But the black sugar was too much of a give away. It marked us out as odd and therefore vulnerable to attack. And it wasn’t used for things people understood, like chutneys, marinades and fruit cake. It spoke of the chaos underpinning everything, that we used muscovado outside of its real purpose, that we didn’t differentiate. Eventually we left, dad to Exmouth and the rest of us to Exeter and later onwards to London. It has left me with a lifelong nervousness of parochial life, of so-called ‘country living’. Those small places can be tough. But muscovado put iron in the soul and molasses helped to calm our fraying nerves.

The lowdown on muscovado

Muscovado (from the Portuguese açúcar mascavado meaning ‘separated sugar’) is also known as Barbados sugar, and is made differently to other brown sugars: instead of being white sugar to which molasses is added, it is boiled down from sugar cane juice, purified with lime juice, but then not refined any further. Muscovado is made in Barbados, in Mauritius, and in the Antique province in the Philippines, where it was one of the most prominent export commodities, from the 19th century until the late 1970s. It is nutritionally richer than other brown sugars, and retains most of the natural minerals – such as calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium and iron – inherent in sugarcane juice.

Muscovado brownies with almonds

Adapted from Claire Thomson, The Guardian, Cook, 13/2/2016

You can use whatever nut takes your fancy, but almonds always work with this recipe and you can keep the skins on. Walnuts are also lovely as are prunes. This is on the ‘weeping’ end of the brownie spectrum – crisp on the outside and damp within. My earlier brownie recipe is even more luxe. I’m terrified now looking back at those ingredients; you will probably need a defibrillator standing by, just in case. This recipe is a bit more demure. Make it gluten-free by using rice flour or a gluten-free mix instead of the standard plain. You can go the whole hog here and only use dark muscovado or light muscovado if you want to forgo the caster sugar.

125g almonds (or walnuts/softened prunes, drained and roughly chopped)

150g dark cooking chocolate (60-70% cocoa solids)

150g unsalted butter

3 eggs

100g dark muscovado sugar

100g caster sugar

100g plain flour

15g cocoa powder

1/2 tsp salt (plus a pinch to sprinkle over the baked brownie)

Lightly grease a non-stick baking tin 6 x 10 inch (15 x 24 cm) and line with baking parchment. Allow the paper to come 1 inch (2.5 cm) above the tin. Heat the oven to 350F/180C, then chop the almonds roughly, put them on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for about 5-8 minutes, keeping an eye on them as they burn easily. Use skin-on or blanched, both are fine.

While the almonds are doing their work, put chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl fitted over a pan of barely simmering water. Allow the chocolate to melt without stirring it, then remove from the heat and gently stir to smoothness.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and sugars together until the mixture is creamy and thick. Mix the melted chocolate and butter into the egg and sugar mixture.

Sift the flour and cocoa powder and salt into the chocolate mixture. Beat together until smooth. Fold in the almonds.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake on the centre shelf for 20 -25 minutes. Don’t overcook the brownie – you want it to be just firm to the touch (not scorched at all) and still gooey inside. Leave to cool for ten minutes, and then put on a sheet of parchment on a wire rack. Cut squint, so you can eat the stray bits while no one’s looking.

Ripe

23 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Cooking, Dessert, Fruit, Ingredients, Los Angeles, Recipes, Spices, Stories, Sussex, Unbuyables

Steaming pineapples and musky roses. Damp, heady and sweet. A bit like a fruit and veg shop. That’s the best I can do when it comes to describing the strange perfume of quinces. Warm and wet? Sultry. They smell like perfume. I’m at a loss.

This is also what happens when I’m asked (and this happens a lot) “how do you find LA?” I haven’t yet found it, I want to say. I’m still at a loss. Sometimes words are tricky and some things are hard to grasp. There’s no ‘it’, there’s no graspable thing. The quince is yellow when ripe and is almost waxy, and it smells definitely of pineapples. It is hard in the hand – there’s no give in it, unlike a pear which it resembles. A pear with a big bum. You can’t eat it raw unless you like having bloody stumps instead of teeth. You have to wait for the fruit to become bletted, which means soft to the point of decay, if you want to eat it like that. The quince needs to be cooked, and then there’s the smell (see above). It’s probably what is known as an acquired taste.

LA is dry and hot and sunny most of the year. Sometimes it rains and then it buckets down and no one knows how to drive when the road is wet so they crash. There is no centre, but lots of grids. So if you get lost, then you just take the next left and go backwards. It is a maze of suns. Everyone wears sunglasses all the time, even at night. It is a city of endless fragments where you are unlikely ever to bump into anyone you know. If you want to get lost, it’s a good place to be.

There is a huge botanical garden, The Huntington, with a library attached that has the first edition of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. Oskar Schindler lived above a dry cleaners in Beverly Hills for a while. David Hockney learned to drive in LA (and drove all the way to Las Vegas after his test, because he didn’t know how to get off the freeway), as did I. The smell of wild fennel is strong, and I would say it is a place of colour. It is rarely damp.

I found these quinces in a bag on someone’s front lawn on the outskirts of Seaford. Previously there have only been apples there, so discovering quinces was very exciting. I hope it was okay for me to take them. I took all the other things they left out, and nobody said anything. You are unlikely to find local quinces in the shops. Along with mulberries, you’re better off befriending someone with a tree and a glut and a kind heart. It is worth it.

One of the many spectacular things about quinces is the way they turn a deep rosy gold during cooking, which makes them rather dramatic and a bit serious-seeming. Good for dinner parties, or just on your own, slumped over a book. This compote is lovely served with yoghurt, cream or ice cream. Good as a sorbet too, or puréed for a tart.

Compote of quinces and allspice

Inspired by Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, originally from Audiger’s La Maison Reglée, 1692

Allspice isn’t, as I once thought, a combination of ‘all the spices’. The name was coined around 1621 by the English, who likened its aroma and taste to a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Allspice (Pimenta officinalis) comes from a tropical tree native to America, also cultivated in the West Indies and Jamaica. The berries – as seen below – are often tied in muslin and used in the making of preserves and pickles. The flavour, like the quince, is elusive, and works well here.

6 quinces (or thereabouts)

Sugar or honey to taste

3-4 Whole allspice berries

Cut up two quinces – use windfalls for this, as it doesn’t matter what they look like – and put them, peel, core and all into a pan. Cover generously with water. Also peel neatly the four remaining quinces. Add these peelings to the pan, and then the cores as you cut them into quarters. The cores are very tough, so pare gradually away otherwise you’re left with shards and splinters of quince.

Prevent the pieces from discolouring by dropping them into a bowl of lightly salted water. Boil up the pan of quince ‘debris’, and stew lightly until it begins to turn a rich amber. Not red as many suggest – you’ll be waiting forever for that. Now strain off the glowing juice, add sugar or honey* to taste, and bring slowly to simmering point, stirring every now and then. In this syrup, cook the quince pieces along with the allspice berries, until the fruit is tender. Serve with something white and cool.

Allspice berries

Other recipes with quince:

Quince paste with Manchego

*I have not used honey in the making of this recipe so far, though it was used traditionally, before the advent of sugar. However, you may need to experiment with the strength and sweetness, as honey behaves differently to sugar in the cooking process.

The short life of pears

12 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Cooking, Dessert, Fruit, Ingredients, Lucas Hollweg, Recipes, Somerset, Spices, Stories

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There was a pear tree outside the window in Watchet. Conference pears that suited the palette of the place. Seaford was grey – pewter grey, oyster grey, pinky grey after the sunset. And Watchet was the full spectrum of brown. Deep russet, rust, coral red, the sand on the beach brown like earth, the red earth in the fields slack with rain, giving us all ‘ginger boots’ (dad’s phrase). High iron deposits in the soil, that’s what.

And even though there were tons of apples – in fact so many no one knew what to do with them all – pears were what we ate. And I love pears. I’d rather eat a pear than an apple. No peeling required. The juice is more forthcoming in a pear, the softness a surprise.

I was allowed to pick the pears, as many as I wanted. A lot had fallen on the ground, and were in the process of rotting back into the earth. It was the perfect time for them, almost to the day – ‘the tradition is to pick them on or soon after 1 November and then watch them as they come to perfection’ according to R.H.L Gunyon – and it was lovely to see how many sizes they came in, unlike the Stepford Wives versions I’m so used to seeing at the supermarket.

They were all hard, but this is normal. They should be picked firm and allowed to ripen at home. A ripe pear yields slightly around the stem, but doesn’t split or feel squashy. I ate pears two ways during my stay in West Somerset. The ones I picked I didn’t eat until five days later. I was unconvinced they would work out, but I kept them in my bag, ready.

The first pears I encountered were cooked; they were buttered, sugared, salted, spiced with ginger and cardamom, and phenomenally rich. It was hard to talk about them during or even after eating. My cousin Becky cooked them, following Lucas, her brother’s recipe. Made in the Aga, with crates of apples out the back. I remembered how Lucas used to read cookery books as a child in this house, and now here we were eating his gingery pears, reading them as we were eating them, his limpid prose coming from the shiny page. There are ten minutes in the life of a perfect pear, he wrote. Best get on then, as they say down this way.

On my last day, I picked more pears from the tree, and put them in my bag. None of them felt ready to eat. Even the ones from my first day felt disappointingly robust. Dad drove me to the train station. Another cancelled train. What is it with me and trains? The cancellation this time was due to the existence of ‘disruptive passengers’. We got back in the car. It was two hours until the next one and we were both hungry. It was pouring with rain and now it was cold; proper weather at last.

We ate smoked mackerel and pears while listening to a radio programme about drug overdoses. The pears were perfect. The mackerel was greasy – the savoury to the pear’s sweet. We wiped our hands on an old towel. And because we had two hours, we talked about our memories of things past.

Strange what being in a stationary car will do. I almost missed the next train. The conversation felt too short and suddenly I was out in the driving rain, just in time for the 7.05, the hems of my trousers slopping about in muddy pools. No more pears now, but I’m glad for both lovely meals. Pears cooked, pears raw. Short-lived and perfect.

Caramel pears with ginger and cardamom

Recipe by Lucas Hollweg, originally in Waitrose Kitchen, October, 2013

Pears in cooking often need a little something – another fruit or spice. Lemon juice is good, because it also helps to arrest the pear’s discolouration after peeling. Pears and apples, pears and quinces, pears and greengages, pears and cheese, pears and bay etc. Here Lucas uses cardamom and ginger to spectacular effect – a pudding that tastes of the coming winter. Don’t be shy of the salt.

Serves 4-6

50g unsalted butter

75g dark brown sugar

75g granulated sugar

¼ tsp sea salt flakes

1½ tsp ground ginger

12 green cardamom pods

4 medium pears, peeled and halved

Preheat the oven to 200C/392F. Put the butter in a saucepan with both kinds of sugar, the sea salt and ground ginger. Using a sharp knife, slit open the cardamom pods and shake out the dark seeds from inside. Chop them with a knife (or grind them lightly in a pestle and mortar) and add to the butter and sugar. Warm over a gentle heat until the butter and sugar have melted together.

Pour into the bottom of a roasting tin or ovenproof frying pan that’s just large enough to fit the pear halves in a single layer. Arrange the pears on top of the sauce, cut side down. Place in the oven for 20 minutes, then carefully turn the pears over, basting with some of the hot sauce, and return to the oven for 20 minutes more. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 5 minutes. Serve with some of the sugary juices spooned over the top and a glug of double cream.

Cry loud the pears of anguish

Parisian street sellers, 13^th century