Windfallen

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Tags

Allotment, Autumn, Food, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories

Because we have to admit to winter. And that this is the last of the homegrown fruit: apples. The rest is Lidl’s. And dour farmers’ markets. Swede, turnips, parsnips. I’m quite looking forward to digging in winter, actually. I was speaking to one of my allotment neighbours and he said it was wonderful; digging in the cold, the harsh flat wind coming at them and going home to a warm house, skin flushed, muscles stretched. Cold brittle days with blue sky can be miraculous. Particularly if you’re working physically and you have a good pair of gloves.

But back to apples. And cake and tea and windfalls. Around about now there are apples on the ground, left to rot. Often there are holes in them, rusted, old holes that you know have housed a maggot. Or some other creature possibly still alive.

At the allotment, there are trees heaving with apples, and most of them are on the ground now, unpicked. But you’re not allowed to take them because being caught taking other people’s produce even though it’s on the ground, half-eaten, cloven in two and that horrible defeated colour of yellow – it’s a crime, punishable by immediate eviction. I’ve already been shouted at by Mike, the allotment manager for “resting my chicken wire” against the over-flowing community bin, so I’m sensitive to the small print of communal living. I don’t want to be evicted or ejected. It’s a delicate thing, belonging.

Paul, my twinkly allotment neighbour, smiled at me with his eyes when I told him this, about not picking. “But we do though”, he said under his breath, like a Dickens character. It was exciting. But then I thought – they’ve been here a while, six years. They know the code. I hear them laughing with Mike under their canopy of grapes, I see Mike’s large ankles sticking out at the bottom, so I know he’s sitting down. It’s a tribal thing. Or maybe it’s because I’m a woman who enjoys reading and growing sorrel.

On my way back from the allotment a few days ago, there was a tree and it had spewed its load on to the pavement in front of me. Cooking apples, hulking things, spilling everywhere. The front door of the house was open and builders wandered in and out. In the drive was a skip. Inside the drive were even more apples. I picked up a few on the pavement and chucked them into my bike’s basket. I edged inside the drive as a builder wandered out. I was trespassing now. “Excuse me but do you think I could pick up some of the windfall apples?” I asked. “Of course”, he said. “You can take the whole tree if you like”. He smiled and walked back inside. It was as if I’d asked him if I could possibly eat the rotting vegetation that was languishing at his feet.

The cake – apple and rosemary with a glug of olive oil – is perfect for a cold day, good with a cup of tea, and all you need for tired muscles, frayed nerves and for sensitive types.

Apple and rosemary olive oil cake

Adapted from Lili Vanilli’s Sweet Tooth

It’s a bit misleading to call this an olive oil cake because there are 2 tbs of it in total and there is also butter. I’m simply lifting the title from the book, and it sounds nice. And it tastes very nice too, sumptuous, appley and damp; I have made it exclusively with almonds on a few occasions, and on every other occasion gone 50/50 with flour/almonds or hazelnuts. I put more apples in than the recipe asked for (240g) and I would suggest you go even further. I’ve had dry apple cake before and it tastes pointless.

Scant 100g plain white flour

Scant 100g ground almonds

1/3 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

1/3 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp baking powder

85g unsalted butter

85g light muscovado sugar, plus extra for dusting

2 eggs

2 tbsp olive oil

300g peeled, cored and diced Bramley cooking apples or sharp eaters or a combo

½ – 1 tsp fresh rosemary, finely chopped

2 – 3 Bramley (or other apple) slices

1-2 fresh rosemary sprigs to decorate

Grease and line a 23cm round cake tin (I used tin foil though I know you shouldn’t – it was fine). Preheat the oven to 180C fan assisted/350F. Whisk together the flours, spices and baking powder to ensure they are all well mixed. Set aside.

Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy – about 4 minutes. Beat in the eggs, then add the oil and beat to incorporate. Mix in the diced apple and chopped rosemary, then fold in the dry ingredients.

Put this into the prepared cake tin, level the edges and lay the slices of apple on top however you like. Coat the surface of the cake with a fine dusting of brown sugar. Dip the sprigs of rosemary into cold water, dust with brown sugar, then press into the top of the cake.

Bake for about 30 – 35 minutes or until firm in the centre and an uncooked spaghetti stick or skewer of some kind comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin for ten minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely, or serve warm.

One year on

27 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Not food

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Food, Fruit, Nonfiction, Stories, Sussex

I started with soft fruits. My first blog post back in the UK was on red gooseberries. Lovely in their brown paper bag from the greengrocer in Seaford (in East Sussex), the man with the curly hair and always a kind word. He is also the butcher. Joe approached him as he was carrying a palette of unskinned rabbits. Are they wild? He asked. ‘Wild?’ he replied. ‘They were furious’. He sold me the red gooseberries and invited me to live in Seaford; ‘seeing as you’re here all the time’. The sea is a big draw. And the wildness all around. It’s hard to know where to start.

There’s the ferry, yellow and bulky like a child’s drawing, on its interminable route to Dieppe. Hard to believe it ever gets there. There’s the sun, the sound of the sea crashing and drawing back in the night, the fishermen’s lights illuminating the black waves. The gulls and their grey babies. Clutches of apples already visible from the train. Bramleys, but still.

People have died. People die! I still find this hard to grasp. Every time I walk past Elm Villas and get a snatch of yellow wall I remember great friends who lived there and who are now both scattered over the cliff tops that just recently were covered in pink thrift. It was the house where I learnt about Jane Grigson and how pudding could be two tubs of ice cream from the Co-op and a cup of mint tea. Now the house belongs to someone else and already the furniture strikes me as ill-advised. Their magic has gone. And their magnificent kitchen table and all their books. But mostly it’s them that I miss.

I don’t actually live here. This is my mum’s place, but it’s where I come when I need it. It’s where lots of serendipitous things have happened. The place is full of rememberers – people remember Dirk Bogarde when he lived here, they remember Winston Churchill’s school days. They know – and I do too – where Grayson Perry lives. There are a lot of closet bohemians, because we are after all within thrashing distance of London. And yet, I think you couldn’t be further away. Particularly when you hear someone pronouncing it Sea-ford. I like the cafes – there are five good ones, all worth going to.

What I have learned, one year on, is that July is curiously the end. Now that I am a gardener in the most rudimentary way I know that this bit of summer is when the inevitable decline into Autumn begins. Things are yellowing now, they bolt and go to seed the minute your back is turned. It is the season of collecting what you’ve grown (and eating other people’s apples) and watering what is still to be harvested – in my case, a profusion of beans and squash. There are apricots from English trees which you must eat immediately, or face comparisons with blissful ones from the Med or California.

One year on: I held a two day old baby, my arms numb from the sheer surprising weight of her, so I laid her on the bed and stared at her twitching mouth. In the corner of the window, in a different house in Seaford, higher up the town, was the sea. The mother, my friend, was the original recipient of that goosegog pudding. Red gooseberries that made their way underneath a terrifyingly ethereal mass of Genoese sponge.

But it all worked out in the end. She’d been born in the corner of the room and, like the party with the pudding and the wild dancing, the place was now, still, full of people, children running in and out, sudden decisions to go to the beach. I was at some point mistaken for the midwife. When the real midwife arrived, I went for the train that took me back to Clapham Junction, not wanting to lose the newborn scent (honey and yeast) and the sight of her perfect Cupid’s bow mouth. So anyway, one year on, see if you can get yourself some red gooseberries. Jane Grigson’s recipe is one I would recommend. And enjoy what’s left of summer.

Trip to Suffolk, 1974

08 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Uncategorized

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Countryside, England, Food, Stories, Suffolk, Summer, Travel

I went to Suffolk and must write it all down before I forget, although much of the information was complex and hard to follow, compelling, beautifully described, but opaque. A bit like snooker, a game I love to watch precisely because I have no idea at all what is going on. I took a lot of photos. And if you want the science of it all, I would not be remotely offended if you went elsewhere.

I will however, as Noel Coward once advised, press on. This is a field of rape, and that is Sam Fairs, the owner of the field. It is mainly past flowering now (the spectacular yellow blossoms come in mid April to the end of May), so you are looking at the seeds housed in these long green pods. The seeds are the thing – they are pressed for their oil, on site. They are cold-pressed. A bit later, we went to watch this cold-pressing and the smell was interesting; yeasty, hops-ish, reminiscent of linseed. Sam and his family also grow winter wheat, winter barley, borage, marrowfat peas, but we weren’t here for that.

We were here for the rapeseed and its oil. I had already had an introduction to Hillfarm Oils (Sam and Clare Fairs’ extra virgin cold-pressed rapeseed oil) because I had been invited some months before to a meal where everything had been cooked using it. We even had the seeds speckled over custard for pudding – chalky, black things, tasting of dust and the outside. We had rape greens too. But I was amazed mainly by the colour of the oil – yellow, as if you could melt buttercups – and the flavour which everyone tells you is nutty and that is really the only word. Rich, nutty, warm, slightly grassy and always different, because like olive trees, there will be subtle differences in flavour based on the soil, the terroir, the weather. It’s our olive oil is probably the best way to look at it, we have it here and it grows brilliantly, though pigeons can be a menace.

The objective of any plant is to reproduce. This is apparently our objective too (As Sam put it, ‘growing more of me’.) When it comes to the rape plant, the oil is there to protect the seed, so it can do that, so it can carry on, so it can throw itself about. The farmer’s job is to capture it, harness it, pressing the seed to get the oil out. The way it was described it felt tantamount to murder. But in a good way. It made me think about what I was stepping on, what I might be killing mindlessly, where I am in the scheme of things. That plants are like me.

To return to the rape fields for a minute – they are presently green and house families of foxes that you can never see. There are butterflies, bees and insects. Come harvest time, the rapeseed pods will be brown and shatteringly fragile. But for now it is an endlessly waving green sea and all I wanted to do was run headlong into the midst of it, get lost and miss lunch.

Although I’m glad I didn’t because lunch was ice cream, scotch eggs, smoked mackerel and other exceptional cold collations, all locally produced, and later from the Cakeshop Bakery focaccia made with (actually doused is the word) rapeseed oil, speckled with crunchy salt, and an amazing root cake, made with beetroot, carrots, and the oil again. It was all really delicious. We ate it sitting in the Fairs’ garden. The tree behind us housed a family of owls. There were bats living in an outbuilding nearby and house martins somewhere behind me, under the roof. The next day we even saw a murmuration of starlings as we passed round a Blythburgh piglet and the sky turned dark above us.

There are no motorways here in this part of Suffolk and no out-of-town supermarkets, no superstores. There are hardly any chains at all. The doughty and magnificent Caroline Cranbrook saw off Tesco more or less singlehandedly some years ago. So for two days it was like living in 1974, but with our modern sensibility for a flat white and the urgency for soya milk.

At the hotel, there was no internet reception – it was down for the whole evening – and we created our own murmuration, swirling around in the lobby trying to ‘find’ a signal. Until we gave up and gave in to the deliciousness of being untraceable for a whole evening and a whole night. In the morning, we talked about life before phones over scrambled eggs. What did we do? It is almost unthinkable now, a childhood with no signal, no texts, boredom, back at dusk or before dinner. What about work? People wandered off in singles or twos to take photographs or walk to Framlingham Castle, phones waving in the wind. Suddenly ten texts, endless vibrating, cheers etc.

Later we were deposited back to the station at Darsham, to the branch line taking us to Ipswich and then to London Liverpool Street where modernity, mobile phones, Boots and angry people in a hurry eating crisps awaited us. We said our goodbyes and dispersed into the melée. Tired and full of pork and cake, but happy.

Thank you to Polly at Food Safari for organising this wonderful trip.

Delight in the dish

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Cake, Cookbook, Elizabeth David, Food, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories

This is ricotta pudding from Elizabeth David’s book Is there a Nutmeg in the House? The book is blue and there is somewhere on it a picture of quinces. In a heretical gesture, I added some dark chocolate, masquerading as raisins. I’m fairly sure that ED would not have approved. She would have spoken sharply. And of my decision to throw in some feta, to substitute strained Greek yoghurt, to add honey, as I have done occasionally, she would have regarded me coolly. I would have known this was not wise from the dip in temperature in the room.

It’s no surprise to me that she’d been an actress and had come to her writing life after failure in that department. I’ve always loved her writing; the recipe here for ricotta pudding (budino di ricotta) is simple and feels quite underwritten, basic almost. There is none of the hand holding we have now in cookery books. My mother remembers her kitchen shop in Pimlico in the sixties, remembers meeting her there, and watched as ED wrapped in tissue paper a present for my grandmother, to be shipped off later to Sydney.

It was an odd time then, hard to define when you haven’t lived it, but stories abound of London in the late Fifties, then the Sixties. It was this beatnik, makeshift place of eternal, random, spontaneous parties, according to my mother. ED appeared to be the only vaguely sniffy one there. But it was nice of her to wrap my mother’s present.

There was another figurehead at the time who gets talked of – Robert Carrier. Just before I was born, my parents owned a flat in Camden Passage, close to his restaurant. I think back then, you could afford to be a bit arbitrary and eccentric about food. Because people didn’t know about ratatouille and ricotta. These things came from the Continent, which a lot of people hadn’t explored in any great depth. And there had been rationing.

My mother knew more than most only because she had done the six week boat journey from Sydney, part of the first Push that included Clive James, Barry Humphries etc. and had stopped off along the way. She stayed in a brothel in Naples. But these are not my stories to tell. All I can tell you is how the book feels to read, and how it reminds me of the people who are still around, family friends in their eighties now and nineties, and how demure and evocative they can make an omelette seem. A collection of wooden spoons are there not just for show. An aura of quiet descends in the room, there are no winking red lights, no computer leads, and I find myself becalmed.

There’s the occasional sharpness if I lose the thread of the conversation, overwhelmed by central heating in a small space. A telling off is part of the deal somewhere, sometimes by accident I might break a chair. But on the whole it’s a relief not to be modern for a while. The food is delicious, simple, frugal, effortless. There is delight in the dish.

Ricotta pudding

Adapted from Elizabeth David, Is There A Nutmeg in the House?

I prefer strained Greek or Turkish yoghurt here to nasty supermarket ricotta. If you can find fresh, or even better if you can make it yourself, it will transform the dish. Ricotta is slightly drier, less silky than strained yoghurt. Not wishing to confuse, curd cheese is also lovely. I’m not imagining you’ll be as common as me and add chocolate, but if you have some raisins and some rum or marsala it’s a lovely addition. You can use honey here as well. And ground almonds instead of flour – ED does in her other cheese-cake recipes. She’s not here to tell you off.

100g raisins (optional)

4 tbsp rum

Butter, for greasing

3 tbsp plain flour (or ground almonds)

400g fresh ricotta or strained Greek or Turkish yoghurt

Pinch of sea salt

4 eggs

6 heaped tablespoons of caster sugar (or to taste)

Nutmeg

Grated zest of 1 lemon

Soak the raisins (if using) in the rum for a few hours until plump. Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. Butter a 25cm plain cake tin or oven-proof dish of about 1.5 litre capacity. Beat the ricotta or yoghurt until smooth. Beat in 1 whole egg and the three yolks, 4 heaped tablespoons of sugar, the salt, flour/almonds, the lemon zest, and a good grating of nutmeg. Use a whisk to get rid of any lumps. Finally, stir in the raisins, along with any rum left in the bowl. Beat the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Keep beating, gradually adding the remaining sugar, until you have a thick, glossy meringue that stays in the bowl if you hold it upside down. Stir a heaped tablespoonful of the meringue into the cheese mixture to loosen it, then lightly fold in the rest, keeping as much air in the mix as you can.

Pour into the prepared tin or dish and give it a gentle shake to level the surface. Bake for about 35 – 40 minutes, or until golden and set. Leave to cool to room temperature (it will sink). Eat cold – perhaps with cream. Lovely with some sharp, honeyed rhubarb.

His favourite butter

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Uncategorized

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Butter, Cooking, Food, France, Ingredients, London, Recipes, Stories

I have been cooking for a couple who live in Belgravia, and who spent twenty years in France and pronounce words – certain cheeses – with a proper French accent and when I was younger I found ths deeply unsettling until a friend told me how much she hated the way her Dutch friend pronounced the word Gouda. I am also cooking food from another time, when everyone ate cream daily. They are both slim and energetic older people who think nothing of eating a pudding every day, a gratin, cheese, bread, strong small coffee. Perhaps small is the key here, because occasionally they’ll remark on my portions and intimate that perhaps this is because of Joe’s rather gargantuan needs but in fact he is also a dainty eater. They like ice cream, tarts, pies, but in small amounts and eaten with style – at a highly decorative table in a room that I have seen but not yet entered.

“You can’t get food like this anymore”, the man said, as he passed me my ’empties’ from the previous day’s dishes – fish pie and lemon posset. “You can’t get it in a restaurant. Nobody makes this kind of food nowadays.” Dressed crab. Bisque. Onion tart. It’s true that no one quite eats like this. We are more timid perhaps. Shy of milk, the presence of Parmesan, nothing too florid, too lavish. “We love soufflés, Shepherd’s pie, sticky toffee pudding. No couscous.” These were my instructions delivered by phone and every day my journey takes me past that old London; Harrods with the bottle green awnings, the gold lettering, the Natural History Museum, the black railings everywhere, the white window boxes and lurid flowers. Big red buses. It’s hard not to feel a child again on the approach to Hyde Park Corner. You can imagine never seeing the same person twice. The doormen at the Wellesley. European women in varying shades of caramel, hair the same colour as their coats.

And then doing battle with that enormous roundabout. It’s probably not called a roundabout, but if you’re not already in the right lane, you find yourself going to Victoria station. Right in the centre is a bizarre series of enclosures impossible to navigate on foot. I’ve done it many times in the past and on every occasion have resorted to asking a stranger how to get across and together we have had a meltdown. I have never not had some sort of panic attack here. In fact it was while stranded under the Wellington Arch seven years ago that I decided to give up coffee. And always leave the house with at least ten pounds cash so I can hail a cab.

There’s possibly some Freudian impulse that has brought me back here, to a lilac mews seconds away. That and the money. I dropped off my portions today – smoked haddock in a mustard and Parmesan cream, homemade ice cream, chocolate sauce, ‘mocha-d up’, they said, approvingly. They love potatoes, so there’s them, new. And as I was leaving we talked about potted shrimp. He told me about his favourite butter only available in France. Jean-Yves Bordier. They both said it in a way I wouldn’t dare, with the breathful ease of two people who eat beurre and cheese every day of their lives. Who knew their French builders’ elegant coffee habits. And the life of weekly markets.

Occasionally I imagine that this is me – with my own favourite butter, for example. A liking for a specific farmer or greengrocer, someone who knows his peaches. I do actually: his name is Paul from Twickenham and he told me the other day about his grandma who made amazing rhubarb and strawberry crumbles for everyone and died sitting up, right there in the street on her stool, next to the fruit & veg. She was given a proper costermonger’s funeral with standing room only. But I wonder if that is sufficiently singular – whether it’s enough. It’ll have to do for now. I’m off to buy three tubs of cream and a tranche of Parmesan.

Pickle

03 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Food, Fruit, Ingredients, Jane Grigson, London, Pickled, Recipes, Stories

Christmas, what a slippery thing it is. Odd that the things I made with greatest pleasure when the flat was warm and still, weeks to go before the intensity of it all, were the things that were left and forgotten about on the day. In fact, the last jar of pickled pears I put in my brother’s car just before they left for Cornwall, and there it sat next to the mountain of cases and bags the day after Boxing day. It looked pathetic, so small, and also promising because I think they will be eaten and savoured in a way that’s impossible when you are spooning things on to people’s plates in a manic, hot-faced way, pointing things out, trying to get people to eat massive amounts of food and unwrap presents and play games all within an eight hour window. The cheese grew dry, the quince paste overlooked. I think I forked a pear out of the jar in desperation and stood over the person as they ate it.

So I remember the making of the pickled pears with friendliness and calm. it was about a month before Christmas and I was leafing through Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, wanting to find some way of not losing the depressed-looking pears in my bowl. I landed on her pickled pears recipe. Like me, she finds chutney ‘unsympathetic’, and so to spiced fruit, which requires a vinegar syrup to which you add what you like – bay leaves, blades of mace, allspice berries, some mustard seeds in my case. And then the fruit: pears here, but you could use plums, peaches, melon etc.

We tried them out when my cousin Lucas came round, and they were eaten scooped on to Stilton and with some goat’s brie, a crater-like round of white cheese which tasted cool like yoghurt and didn’t survive the weeks to Christmas, the smell so rotten and cloying, we were forced to bin it. We tried the quince paste which was nice but still too sweet and unmellow, and Lucas told me to make jelly with the quince debris, which I did that night, spending hours watching it drip soundlessly from its muslin pouch, afraid to move it and then cloud it over. The pears and cheese were followed by a cup of tea and a round of Bananagrams and us all pretending that that had been Christmas. Or could have been Christmas, the kind that takes you unawares.

I remember our conversation in a way that I don’t of Christmas day, which comes to me largely in images. The park early in the day, the quick furtive walk we did. Red cabbage that had somehow pulverized, standing in the kitchen eating blocks of stuffing, the Christmas pudding ready two hours after everyone had gone and its shining dome so perfect, the smell of concentrated fruit and alcohol sumptuous and totally pointless. We ate it watching Paddington.

What I have left now is the juice. I have half a jar of it, the pears long gone. Because it has sat unnoticed for this time, it is intense, dark, tea-like. It is gloriously spiced. Now I am using it to add to pulped garlic and honey, because of my rattling chest and snotty nose. There is nothing like a spiced vinegar syrup on January days, when the days are long and calm again. I don’t even think there are pears now, certainly none on the trees which are all black and knotted round here, like long witches’ hands. So make it for the syrup alone. I would. There’s a while before you have to share it. Happy New Year.

Pickled pears

Adapted from Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book

To vinegar: this recipe calls for white wine vinegar, but you could also make it with cider vinegar, which is about halfway between wine and malt vinegar, and not quite as shrieking in intensity. You could use red wine vinegar if you prefer the drama of it. I left my spices in the syrup, as you can see above. They continue to give up their flavour though so cloves might be best left out if you are using them. Other possibilities are a small piece of ginger, bruised, the thinly pared rind of a lemon, a red dried chilli.

6 large firm pears
350 – 450g light muscovado sugar (or to taste)
250 ml white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon of whole allspice
5 blades of mace or small chunk of nutmeg (or both)
3 bay leaves
1 teaspoon of mustard seeds

Peel, core and cut pears into 8 slices each (or thereabouts). Cover with water – about 750 ml. Boil hard for five minutes. Strain off and measure the liquid. To 600 ml of the water add the sugar, vinegar and spices. Pour over the pears and simmer until the pieces are cooked and translucent – about 20 minutes depending on ripeness. Pour everything into a bowl and leave overnight. Drain off the liquid the next day into a pan and boil for five minutes to reduce it slightly and then pack the pears into warm-from-the-oven, sterilized jars along with the spices – unless you’re leaving them out. Pour over the boiling syrup and seal while still warm. Store for as long as possible before using; Jane Grigson says a month. I keep mine in the fridge. Lovely with cheese, ham, duck, or ‘a discreet vegetable or two’.

Is it me, Lord?

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

Cooking, Food, Ingredients, Jazz, Jokes, London, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories

I have been making a lot of chicken broth. Boiling up the bones and doing a lot of skimming and straining so that all that’s left is the clear liquid to which I add a few choice vegetables. There is a lot of condensation during this process and all our windows steam up. I feel soothed. It reminds me of Ella. Ella was my landlady in Kilburn, north-west London, who took me in at a moment’s notice the night before starting my three-year stint at RADA. I had nowhere else to go. I found her notice advertising a room pinned on the board somewhere and went to a phone box and called her. She immediately invited me over and there she was, diminutive and smiling, and we sat at her table in the kitchen and she offered me food and we decided that I would move in the following day.

I stayed there nearly a year and regretted leaving and wish to this day I hadn’t. I reminded her of Doris Day, she said. It was a modern, modest house and it was always warm and I seem to remember quite red. There were photos everywhere – of Jazz bands, of singers, of the American pianist George Sheering who she had known in Chicago where she’d lived for a time as a singer.

But it was her kitchen I remember most. It was small but well-stocked. I had never seen a fridge as full. Stewed fruit in black juice; prunes and apricots, a few curling lemon rinds. I never remember there not being a bowl of her stewed fruit in the fridge covered in clingfilm. And chicken soup with matzo balls that reminded me of school dumplings. I remember the blue box of matzo meal always in the cupboard and the practiced way she said the word, which was new to me; it sort of flew out of her mouth. There were beads of fat that floated like sequins on the surface of the soup, and endless chicken. I was fed. Sometimes I would get out of bed, and open the door to find her holding a plate of toast or a bowl of porridge for me and then she’d collect all her teaspoons. Or I’d come home to find the hushed quiet of a bridge evening and glistening noodles for me in the kitchen.

Sometimes we sat at the kitchen table and talked: she told me about her love of Las Vegas, of her life in Chicago before coming back to London with her two young sons and starting from scratch alone. We talked about performing. She loved Bette Midler and sometimes she’d play the video of her on Parkinson or we’d listen to George Sheering who she couldn’t believe I’d never heard of. Or she’d tell me jokes or sometimes sing with her microphone along to a favourite piece of music.

I think she found me surprisingly dull. I was an actor but not, like her, an entertainer. I was just finding out what that was: there were entertainers, there were performers and there were actors. I was an actor. I wasn’t as good as her at anecdotes, at the knack of turning your life into a skit. She got one joke out of me, which she made me tell whenever she had her family to dinner. I would dread it because the humour lay precisely in the delivery and timing. Having grown up adept at silly voices and mimicry I was having my ‘funny’ rammed out of me at drama school. But Ella made me do it.

It’s the last supper and Jesus is with his disciples. He decides to speak to them. “I know that one of you will betray me”, he says. There is consternation amongst the group and a stunned silence. One of them, Matthew, finally asks “Is it me, Lord?” “No, Matthew, be assured. It is not you”, Jesus replies. After a brief silence Luke asks the same question: “Is it me, Lord?” Jesus smiles and rests his hand on his shoulder. “Luke, fear not. It is not you.” One after the other the same question is asked. Finally, it is Judas who speaks: “Is it me, Lord?”

And Jesus looks at him and screams (imagine a vicious mimic): “Is it ME, Lord?….Is it ME, Lord?“

Actually it was me. I did the Judas thing and left her for a yellow room under the flight path in Fulham to look after a small French boy and was never offered anything to eat except once when I was given a soft-boiled egg in aspic. It meant I could live rent-free and stay at drama school where I was investigating my breathing, amongst other things. She was the nicest person who’d ever looked after me. She died last year at the age of 87. This recipe is for her.

Chicken broth

Adapted from my mother-in-law, Susan Travers

This version requires the chicken broth to be cooked twice; once for 2-3 hours on day one, then the next day for around four hours with a sleep overnight to help all the flavours concentrate. Having made chicken broth many times, cooking it for four hours ‘only’, I can say this twice-cooked method (cooked for me and lovingly) surpasses all my efforts: it takes the broth beyond the flavourful brown water stage into deeply rich bovine jelly. It is worth the wait.

Serves 4

1 medium free-range chicken
2 large leeks, washed and chopped in half
4 carrots, peeled and left whole
1 whole head of celery, trimmed
1 large onion (red is sweeter)
1 small bunch of parsley
1-2 sprigs of thyme, rosemary or 2 bay leaves
1 tsp of sea salt (also season later to taste)
1 tsp of black peppercorns (optional)

Put everything into the largest saucepan you have and cover generously with water (it should be about 2 inches above the bird), and bring to the boil. Then turn down the heat, skimming off any scum as it appears (and keeping the ‘schmaltz’ – chicken fat – for your matzo balls if you want to make them) and simmer very gently for about 2-3 hours, partially covered. There should be the odd bubble but nothing more.

Turn it off and let it sit overnight. Keep it covered. This pause in the cooking helps concentrate the flavours. The following day, bring to the boil once more, then simmer gently for around four hours, partially covered again.

There are two methods for serving: You can strain the soup using the biggest sieve or colander you have, into another pan. Add whatever vegetables that have kept their shape. When the chicken has cooled slightly pull off what you like and add it to the broth. Add some more parsley. This method will give the broth the appearance of a consommé – clear and rather elegant. Or you can simply ladle straight from the pot into a soup bowl; mucky but good.

Roses and kale

07 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Not food

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Food, Fruit, Gardening, Los Angeles, Nonfiction, Stories, Travel, Vegetables

We have moved into our flat in Hampton (hence the silence, sorry) and I am thinking of getting an allotment. We went to Bushy Park Allotments on Sunday, to see if we could get in and at least get a good view of them, and there was a couple opening the gate carrying in a compost bin. We stood a way off looking at all the plots; they were untidy, shabby even, but there were also a lot of trees, and it looked both unkempt and rather beguiling; little portions of garden side by side as far as the eye could see.

The gentle hum of an engine, and I looked back at a man in a very low open-top car, with a bucket in the back and heaps of pink geraniums. He too looked unkempt and rather beguiling. He hadn’t sounded his horn, just sat in his very low down slightly rusted car waiting for us to move. He had shoulder-length sandy hair and was what people used to call rakish. My grandmother would not have trusted such a man; she would have said something about him being ‘freelance’. But there was a glamour about him and that he’d given us just the right amount of smile, to show he didn’t think we were in any way an irritant, made him alright.

The car rattled through the gates and disappeared into the thick brush of trees and stalks and general vegetable matter. That’s when we could have gone, but the couple smiled at us now and so I went up, leaving Joe to loiter, and said hello. Can I put my name down for a plot? (‘Put your name down!’ ‘Have you put your name down?’ has been a mantra of my mother’s since childhood). “Yes, you put your name down,” the lady nodded. And then they gave me advice along the lines of: make a nuisance of yourself, wear them down, and eventually someone will break and give you a piece of earth. “You need to not be afraid of hard work”, she said, looking me up and down in the way people do, thinking they’re being subtle.

They didn’t have much to do; it was cold and rainy and a few minutes later they’d emerged. ‘Put your name up on the gates and ask if anyone wants to share a plot’, the lady who was called Roz now said. I have to put my name up now as well as down. She said they’d picked some roses and they had some nice kale and they were done for the day. It seemed rather a bleak enterprise; coming to pick kale. I like roses but it wouldn’t occur to me to grow them on an allotment.

I think if it was me, I would take my lead from the freelancer driving through the gates and plant things with colour, a bit of rakishness, and some sweetness, some fruit, otherwise it all gets a bit Eastenders. A bit Arthur Fowler.

When I started this blog in LA I wrote about lemon curd. The curd was made from the very few Meyer lemons I’d eked from the tree we’d bought from an extremely rakish garden nursery on Fairfax and Santa Monica. We were promised ‘lemons in abundance’ from the nice stoned man and although the tree was initially heavy with fruit, it never fulfilled its promise. As Joe Queenan likes to say, it wrote a cheque it couldn’t cash. But the sweetness of those lemons, their strange hybrid flavour and the thin mellow peel, started me off. I loved the colour too, a happy, acid yellow. I was never devoid of fruit thereafter. I fell in love with fruit, probably because there was an awful lot of it about in LA – orange trees mainly and their rampant, swooning blossom – and it was the first thing I genuinely liked about being there. It was growing, it was nature, it was beautiful to watch.

Perhaps I have not got the point of the allotment quite. Although I would be happy to share a plot and I wouldn’t be shy of digging, I’d need to insist there was a splash of colour, some orbs, some blossom, a cage, a tree, some espaliered plums and some brickwork to keep them warm. In the meantime I think I can live without kale, a terrifyingly healthy leaf.

Staying put

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Food, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Sea, Stories, Sussex, Travel

This is tortilla, by which I mean Spanish omelette. Potatoes and onion sweated into a sticky mass and then flopped into beaten egg and then cooked at the lowest of heats until the top sort of coheres and then you flip it over and then it’s done. Better the next day. The recipe I use is by Delia. I somehow wish it wasn’t; someone less Spanish it would be hard to find. And yet it works.

We have been meaning to go on holiday. We were thinking of Mallorca, one of the Spanish Balearic islands. It’s apparently nothing like its previously sordid reputation and is actually really beautiful (and cheap if you use Norwegian Airlines and fly on a Saturday). But we didn’t go there. We flirted with Greece; Paxos, the place I visited when all I had was a single bed sheet and £40. We didn’t go there in the end. Something about scrolling down a screen and picking a place at random was off-putting, as if all these places were somehow the same, Turkey, Toulouse, Lanzerote, Labia? I think by the end we didn’t know if they were countries or cities or what.

And it wouldn’t really have been a holiday, more a kind of fleeing. As if we were train robbers, when we were just waiting for our flat to become available, and needed somewhere to stay in the interim. But we became a bit heady at the idea of Europe because we haven’t had Europe for so many years; the idea of it, where you get on a plane that costs 10p and suddenly you are in Bosnia! Or you get on a train and you’re in Paris, city of dogs. A coach to World War 1! But I really missed going into a travel agent and leafing through the brochures.

So we didn’t go away. Instead, I decided to photograph conkers against a hessian background and throw away my hideous shoes. I bought a new pair from Clarks shoe shop. In the end I had no idea what I was buying. They’re cream leather with green laces and they look like little crimped pies. “They certainly make a statement!” the assistant said, while I walked up and down. Anyway, I quite like them.

It is autumn here and everyone is going away. Mystified by the weather, everyone talks about it, and their colds, which are measly and mainly consist of sneezing. But there are extraordinary changes afoot, and it’s exciting. There are storms and dangerous fissures in the chalk Downs, the sea is wild but still swimable. There’s a colony of rare kittiwakes nesting in the cliffs at Seaford. On the seafront, some kind Lithuanian fishermen handed us some mackerel, which were a startling, shiny blue with eyes like little buttons. I don’t actually know that they were Lithuanian, because I didn’t ask. It was decided that they were, through some weird process to do with their courtly manners.

I was described as ‘the lady in beige’ today. There I was draped over a plastic chair waiting to have ‘my bloods’ taken by the phlebotomist and it made me smile. And a kind chef from my favourite cafe Front Room in Seaford gave me my own ramekin of Spanish almonds to go with my egg and chips. His gesture and the plate of food reminded me of the tortilla – a warm feast of oniony yellows and browns – which feels right for autumn, for rugging up in various shades of beige, for staring out to sea, and for staying put.

Englishly wonderful

27 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Dessert, Food, Fruit, Ingredients, London, Pudding, Recipes, Stories, Sunday lunch

This is summer pudding. Perhaps they were being ironic when they named it, because it’s made using late summer fruit; redcurrants, raspberries. A clutch of other berries perhaps if you’re feeling rebellious. But it is more a dark and winy end to summer days. Bread soaked, I want to say blooded, in the juices of just popping fruit, crunchy berries with rather drastic seeds. This thing, this glorious crimson dome, came at the end of a proper Sunday lunch. I didn’t make it, I simply watched its procession from the kitchen out into the garden to where we sat under a canopy of grapes. I think I may well have actually said all this, Dimbleby-like, as it was carried forth. I might have provided some sort of commentary.

I do this when I’m nervous. I say what’s happening, as if for the benefit of an audience. If you like Brecht, then you’d feel quite at home sitting next to me during one of these events. I say things like: “I can’t believe we’re sitting under a canopy of grapes”. Other popular expressions: “it’s such an amazing colour!” It’s basically meta theatre and it makes things more exciting, I find. And also if you don’t know what to say, you just describe your surroundings. “If in doubt, enthuse” a friend at university once advised.

It came with a small jug of the juice – “blood of Christ” – and a bowl of thick and undulating cream – “what an amazing spoon, is it ancient?” – and then there was the eating of it. “How Englishly wonderful!”, said another guest. And it was. Not too sweet, gloriously sodden, the cream a kind of lactic counterpoint. I said all this, but no one was listening. The cold of it was intoxicating.

Liz grows her own fruit in her allotment that she’s had for ages. Fruit is easier to grow than vegetables apparently – blackcurrants, redcurrants, nothing to it – though I think we had her carrots. She also made the apple and mint jelly that accompanied our lamb, and my elderflower cordial was made by her, I think, in France. If this had been me, no one would have needed to ask. I would have volunteered all this information possibly before the removal of coats. But there you go. Some people, Liz being one, have no desire to broadcast their efforts, or to write about them. The festishizing of food is not her style.

The trip from Chiswick to Putney had taken ages, with full and fetid tube carriages crammed with people eating enormous flapping sandwiches. We were hungry and it was cold by the time we arrived and I was wearing a dress in denial of the unrelenting autumn wind with stupid bare legs. And then there were the five years of no one we knew making a Sunday roast in LA. Then there was LA, where nothing was full of fat or scaldingly hot, no gravy, no sauce or large florid ears of cauliflower, no chunks of melting lamb, or red-stained lips and purple tongues or waves of cream. I was unprepared for the Englishly wonderful aspect of it all.

And I was also reminded of being in England before when I was much younger and the odd thing about Sundays, the melancholy aspect to them; that they were always the end of something that hadn’t quite begun. But more than anything, this meal was served with complete knowledge of what a traditional Sunday lunch should be. And we were coming to it as you might after a long absence. It was all a bit of a shock. We left at 5 o’clock and then talked about it for days. We tried to nail down the pudding, what it was that made it so good. Perhaps more than anything it was that this went on. It was the routineness of it, and next year all being well at around the same time if we’re in the vicinity and we don’t get lost, we’ll try it again. Summer pudding, late. With whatever berries you have, and more if you’re feeling rebellious.

The classic summer pudding has only redcurrants and raspberries, but this pudding also had blackcurrants and in fact are a popular addition generally; they add a bit of clout and deep colour. This is Nigel Slater’s recipe, which follows the classic one expounded by Jane Grigson and the like. Spoon over any extra juice which will add drama and will possibly garner you a round of applause. Or pour the juice into a jug to serve along with some thick cream with a preferably ancient spoon.

2nd October – Liz’s thoughts on her summer pudding via email

“So glad you enjoyed the summer pudding! I regret to say, it wasn’t really according to a recipe, although I started with an Elizabeth David one and then adapted it as I went along…. I think it is crucial to use stale white bread , and E D says only use raspberries and redcurrant in a ratio of 3 to 1. The amount of sugar is optional (I think I used about a quarter of a cup) and a little water. Simmer fruit for 5 mins. At that stage I thought mine was too sweet so added blackcurrants, and then not sure there was enough fruit, so added some strawberries. As you can see, I made it up as I went along! A useful tip is to line the pudding basin with cling film before putting in the sliced bread as it makes it much easier to get out.”