Crema Catalana plus fennel

12 Friday Jul 2013

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Dessert, Fruit, Herbs, Ingredients, Nature, 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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Quince Paste with Manchego

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Cookbook, Dessert, Food, Fruit, Honey, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Spain, Stories, Travel

My first ever quinces. My first ever quince paste, or membrillo. It didn’t go the deep red I had been reading about, and hoping for, no matter how long I cooked it, but rather a dark, rosy gold. In Mexico it is seen as candy, and it candies as you cook it. It feels and looks like a humongous boiled sweet, the way it wraps itself around your wooden spoon. Gradually, it solidifies, becomes harder to manage and your forearm sweats and reddens. I felt like one of those glass blowers by the end, with roasted arms. And then you must unwrap it, flatten it into a block and cool it on a baking sheet, smoothing it out with wet hands. It’s a tough little thing, and you need to prize it off in cubes. Some suggest burying it in sugar and cinnamon. I was interested in the Spanish version, where you serve it with Manchego, a chalky sheep’s cheese, which you dribble either with honey or olive oil. What I love about Manchego is the crystalline quality when it dissolves on the tongue – there is sharpness, it is intense, but crumbly, frail, reminiscent of ragged, yellowing parchment.

Quinces when they are cooking are startlingly honeyed and musky, almost ‘heavy’ smelling, but it is also an astringent fruit and you are left with traces of acid long after the sugar has gone. The best paste is a reminder of the fruit’s essence. Thin slices of Manchego, a hunk of bread, a few jellied sheets of membrillo – a tapa we would get for free en route to our house in Spain, and a bar stop demanded by the driver, Pepe el taxista. If you bought a drink, you’d get the food for free. Amazing if you think about it, and I doubt it still exists in quite the same way now.

I remember patatas a lo pobre – poor man’s potatoes – served in terracotta dishes, cakes of sweet onion tortilla and chunks of melting lamb. It was just enough to stave off hunger, and the alcohol would make everything nice and blurry. A lot of people died on that mountain road. No barriers, alcohol, a few stray goats. Everything was crumbling and dry. On average, a person a year from the village careered off the mountain side to their death, and travellers were picked off with horrible ease. But I always remember the food first, and only later the slow, lurching ascent into the clouds.

Quinces (cydonia oblongata) were the original ingredient in marmalade; the word marmelo is in fact the Portuguese word for quince. It wasn’t until 1790 that oranges were used, and all marmalade recipes before then were based on quinces, even in England. These days they are considered too tart, dry and tannic to eat raw (blame the advent of sugarcane). Cooked is the only way to eat them, unless already ‘bletted’ – beyond ripe and softened by decay.

They flummox people. What are they, exactly? For many years, they were thought to be a relative of the pear, and though most pears are grown on quince rootstock, they are not pears and will not hybridise with them. They are a separate species, full of mythology, and loved by preserve-makers and food enthusiasts. They are hard, yellowy green, blocky, thick-set. Imagine a great aunt with a plinth-like bosom called Enid. Anyway, they are very exciting to cook with because they transform, becoming glassy and gorgeous and they work well with fatty meats. I bought my pineapple quinces from Mud Creek Ranch at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market.

Quince paste with Manchego

Adapted from Sam and Sam Clark, Moro – The Cookbook

2kg (4lb) quinces

300ml (1¼ cups) water

Sugar

Lemon juice

Remove the down on the quinces, wash them and cut them up. Put the fruit into a heavy pan with the water. Bring to the boil, and then simmer until tender. Strain off any excess water and push the quinces through a sieve, removing pips and core as you go. This can take some time. Weigh the purée and measure out an equal quantity of sugar, though I often stop at the full amount, wanting some of the fruit’s acidity to shine. Place both the sugar and the fruit purée in the same (but washed) pan. Return to the stove, and heat gently until the sugar has completely dissolved. Now raise the heat and let the mixture bubble, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon (wear an oven glove to protect your hand). It is ready when it starts to come away from the sides of the pan, attaching itself to your spoon like a thick, deep orange wand. By the end, you can hardly move your spoon through the paste. If it is too sweet for your taste, add some lemon juice at this point.

Now, remove the mixture and spread it out in a centimetre (½ inch) layer on a baking tray lined with wax/greaseproof paper. Push it out to the sides as evenly as possible. When it has cooled slightly, wet your hands and smooth it down. I dried the paste in the oven with the light on inside, overnight. Alternatively, you can switch the oven to its lowest heat for a couple of hours, or simply air dry it. It should be tacky dry and firm enough to be cut into solid pieces. There will be quite a lot of pulp left over in the sieve, which can be used as a compote for pies and tarts with a combination of pears or apples.

Traditionally, Manchego is served in thin triangles with the rind left on. The quince paste is sliced and then placed on top of the cheese, with a thread of extra virgin olive oil alongside. Honey is also lovely here if you fancy it.

The first figs

25 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Cooking, Dessert, Food, Fruit, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Spain, Stories, Travel

I never know what to make of figs. They look slightly obscene, but then purple always does (think of aubergines). They are so delicate, shaped like an engorged teardrop, with that satiny, touchy skin. Each fruit contains, not seeds, but a mass of curled-up tiny flowers that will never be. Certain things they like, I’ve noticed. Like honey, a scattering of thyme leaves, a slake of lemon juice, walnuts. I feel on safer ground when they are tarred by the heat of the oven, reduced to their buttery essence. They blister and bead – droplets of sap line the fruit’s seams. They eventually cave in, turning to jam with only the slightest provocation.

Of course if you have a fig tree, you need do nothing but tear one open and suckle, especially if it has already been warmed by the sun. Forget fruit salads, and cold of any sort. Figs are usually a late summer crop, but ‘breva’ figs* (meaning ‘first fruit of the fig tree’) are with us now. They grow on last year’s wood, a couple of months before this season’s crop ripens. They are not quite as spectacular as the ‘higo’ (second crop), not quite as burstingly succulent, less beauteous to the eye, but they are worth investigating.

I first tried breva figs when I was lost on a mountainside in southern Spain. I wasn’t particularly hungry or thirsty, but they were hanging about us as we tramped along the road and so it passed the time. I was wearing corduroy shorts – a fashion fad that lasted about a week in 1991 – and in the midday sun it was like wearing a pair of blankets. I remember the fig’s sweetness, and the way we popped each plump little confection whole into our mouths, the flesh turning into a dewy, flowery syrup. So I associate them with heat and dust, and a certain wildness of spirit.

Our house – a ‘holiday home’ bought for £2,000 in Las Alpujarras – was white and chalky and if you brushed past a wall, part of it would come off on your clothes. Swallows nested in the beams. The rats never came upstairs. They preferred the bathroom that had been built in the middle of the cellar, with a makeshift wall around it, like a turret. We had no transport so hitched lifts with the postwoman or a friendly tractor driver, or walked. Occasionally, somebody would throw fruit through our window. This was if they were unfriendly and wanted us to go away. Locals who liked us, and owned fincas in the area, came to the door and handed us their harvest directly. Tomatoes, oranges, lemons, peppers, garlic, figs, sometimes nuts, everything was saddled to the mule standing morosely in the background while they did the deed.

Children played outside our window until 2am. The afternoons were always dead while the whole village slept. Pigs were slaughtered, also outside our window, and the children continued to play under a canopy of dead pig, strung up by its hooves. But it was also easy to disappear. The village was surrounded by farmed terraces, and acequias – streams of melted snow from the Sierra Nevadas – and we dunked ourselves in whenever the heat got too much. No one was about, apart from the local shepherd and his goats, the bell around their scruffy necks sounding their arrival. We lazily picked figs and thought nothing if it.

Figs do well in southern California, having come here in the eighteenth century via Spanish missionaries, hence the name, Black Mission. I am being quite brutish, roasting them with gay abandon, but there are many applications for these treacled beauties and they hang around for ages; dolloped on ice cream, smushed through a sieve and turned into fig butter, partnered with tangy goat’s cheese, piled on hot, yeasty bread, or thrown into a bread dough or cake batter. Or simply potted up and eaten one by one like sticky, gummy candies.

Roasted figs with honey and thyme

Serves 4

I committed the cardinal sin of leaving fresh figs in the oven overnight so they looked like tarmac. They tasted divine, though, so I suggest you do the same.

12 figs (or thereabouts)

3 tbs of clear honey

Walnut-sized knob of butter

A posy of thyme (about 15 sprigs)

Juice and zest of a lemon

1 roasting pan

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C. Bruise the lemon zest and thyme leaves together using a wooden spoon or pestle and mortar. Fish out any woody stems, but don’t worry too much if some remain. Put the butter, honey, thyme leaves, lemon juice and zest in a small saucepan. Heat gently, stirring until liquid. Take off the heat and leave to infuse for about 15 minutes. Cut off the stem at the top of each fig. Cut a deep cross down into each one, then squeeze the sides to expose the flesh. Place them upright in a roasting pan. It’s fine if the pan is crowded, but each fig should be resting on the bottom. Pour over the liquid. Roast for at least half an hour, then turn the oven off and let the figs stew in their own juices. Because first-crop figs can be a hit-and-miss affair, you can be quite brazen about the roasting, and general neglect here. These are not jewels, and they taste better for the wait.

“They say that the Fig-tree, as well as the Bay-tree, is never hurt by lightning; and also if you tie a bull, be he ever so mad, to a Fig-tree, he will quickly become tame and gentle. As for such figs that come from beyond the sea, I have little to say, because I write not of exotics; yet some authors say, the eating of them makes people lousy.“

Nich. Culpeper, Gent., The English Physician Enlarged, 1653

* Also known as ‘breba’ figs.