Feasts and Festivals

28th January: The 199th birthday of ‘Pride and Prejudice'

2012-01-24T16:26:00.032Z

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’

It’s a rollicking good first line and sets the reader up wonderfully so that we really want to know who the young man is, and who is to be the wife he wants.

But of course what Jane Austen really means is: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of no fortune must be in want of a husband.’

Single women in possession of no fortune like Jane herself had very few alternatives to marriage. I’ve always felt such sympathy for the twenty seven year old Charlotte Lucas, who faced with the choice between spinsterhood and marriage, chooses the oleaginous Mr Collins and then has to encourage him to spend his days in the garden whilst she retreats to her own sitting room.

Here's Lawrence Olivier and Greer Garson as Darcy and Elizabeth in the 1940 MGM film version of P & P.

When you think about it in the context of the time, Mrs Bennett is being very sensible in her desire to see her five daughters well married. She doesn’t want any of them to become a spinster like Miss Bates in ‘Emma’ where Jane shows her sympathy for unmarried women by making such a point of Mr Knightley's courtesy to her.

But what of Jane Austen and food? There is quite a lot of food in the novels when you dig deep. It is often used to give us some indication of the character of the person eating; think of Mr Woodhouse and his not-unwholesome lightly boiled egg or Mrs Elton picking 'Knightley's' strawberries. In ‘Mansfield Park’, by describing the horrible Aunt Norris as sponging off the housekeeper and returning with a cream cheese and pheasants' eggs, Austen is telling us that Aunt Norris is a hanger on of the worst sort. In striking contrast when she is homesick, poor Fanny Price cannot be comforted even by gooseberry tart.

Anyway, today is the 199th anniversary of the publication of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, although Jane actually wrote it in the late 1790s. After the publication and success of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ she revised ‘First Impressions’ renamed it and sold the copyright to her publisher for £110. Not quite riches but a great success for a single woman of the time.

I’ve been reading the letters Jane wrote to her sister Cassandra which are wonderfully witty and ironic. In them Jane sounds just like Eliza Bennett and we can read about fashions, parties, gossip and about food – and drink – she mentions on one occasion that her hand is shaking because she drank too much the night before - not at all the sort of behaviour Lady Catherine de Burgh would have approved of!

This is an extract from a letter of September 1813 – Jane is in London:

‘Mde. Bigion was below, dressing us a most comfortable dinner of soup, fish, bouillée, (sic) partridges and an apple tart, which we sat down to soon after five, after cleaning and dressing ourselves and feeling that we were most commodiously disposed of.’

And in another letter she writes about a new cook, who has begun well because she can make apple pies and 'good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness.'

Apple tart it is then.

Apple Curd Tart

This is my version of a Jane Grigson version of a traditional recipe for a 'transparent' tart.

Make half a pound of sweet pastry and line an 8” flan tin

2oz lightly salted butter

2oz caster sugar

½tsp vanilla extract or a little grated lemon peel

I large egg

I large cooking apple

Fan oven 200c

Melt the butter and sugar together over a very low heat; the mixture must be no more than tepid, so test with your finger. Remove from the heat and beat in the egg. Quickly peel, core and grate the apple and add to the egg/butter mixture.

Put the tart case onto a baking tray and pour the apple mixture into it. Bake for 15 minutes at 200c then lower the heat to 180c and cook for a further 15 minutes. Serve lukewarm with cream.

Look on yonder earth: 

The golden harvests spring; the unfailing sun 

Sheds light and life; the fruits, the flowers, the trees, 

Arise in due succession; all things speak 

Peace, harmony and love.

From 'Queen Mab' by Percy Shelley (1792-1822) also published in 1813.

January 24th 1848: The California Gold Rush

2012-01-22T16:51:00.052Z

‘In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine

Lived a miner forty-niner and his daughter Clementine’

Attributed to Percy Montrose 1884

There is an old story in my Dad’s family that in the early 1850s one of his ancestors, who was a jockey, ran off to America to join the California Gold Rush. Failing to find gold – or maybe not even getting as far as California, he married a lady hot air balloonist and floated away into obscurity. I’ve never been able to track down who he might have been, or whether the tale is true and sadly there is no one left to ask. Maybe the jockey saw an advert like this...

The California gold rush started on January 24^th 1848, when James Marshall found a gold nugget at Sutter’s Mill in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The gold was so easy to find you could pick it up off the ground and not surprisingly by 1855 over 300,00 hopeful prospectors had made the long and often perilous journey to the gold fields. Some lucky people became millionaires, and many fortunes were made, not just from gold but also from servicing the needs of the miners. In fact, more fortunes were made from the miners than by them.

I’ve been reading recently about the significant contribution that the madams of brothels made to the opening up and civilising of the American west, and very surprising it was too.*

In 1860, the census taken at Comstock Silver Lode in Nevada recorded the town's population as 2,306 men and only 30 women, and in 1879 in Leadville Colorado there were 120 saloons, 19 beer halls, 188 gambling houses and just 4 churches. There were so many official and unofficial 'cat houses' it was not possible to record them. Most concert saloons had rooms upstairs that were used by professional girls.

A considerable number of brothel keepers were clever businesswomen and many madams became very influential. Most prostitutes were mature women and they earned more in one night (about $5) than most other women earned in a week. Those who rose to the top of the industry owned more wealth than any other women in America. ‘Diamond Jesse’ Hayman started as a prostitute in the gold fields and became one of the richest women in San Francisco where she owned a luxurious building for her workers and her clients. Jesse was notorious for always carrying a pistol. She said ‘I keep my customers close and my gun closer. It’s helped me settle many an argument’

Several madams helped open up the west by funding irrigation and road building projects. Eleanora Dumont, another pistol packing madam, bought huge amounts of real estate in the boomtowns of the Rockies and Sierra Nevada. Mary Ellen Pleasant, a brothel keeper who was born into slavery, was one of the most influential women in the early days of San Francisco. Mary Pleasant made many canny investments in property and operated as a financier to numerous local business projects. The madams founded schools and hospitals, often gave their girls free health care, pioneered contraception, smoking and sexual freedom. I’m sure that many of them were also downright unpleasant, grasping and violent but they were undeniably tough and brave.

So I've started the third year of the blog and I hope it it will be more varied than ever. I've got a new year's resolution to post every week, the manuscript of Cornish F & F has gone to the publishers so I can spread my geographical wings a bit. There will still be some folk lore and traditional festivals but lots of anniversaries and commemorations too. We've got a major festival in the UK this summer and the Olympic torch virtually passes my front door, so I'll certainly have to make something for that! Anyway I hope you find the blog as much fun to read as I do to write. Thanks for keeping me company. Leave a comment do...

Here’s a dish for a hungry miner or the sort of thing the Chinese cook in charge of the chow wagon might have made...

Smoked bacon and beans

500g dried white beans, it really doesn't matter which sort- I used haricots, soaked overnight

1 large onion chopped small

3 sticks celery ditto

2 bay leaves and a sprig or half tsp of savoury

vegetable oil or bacon fat

1 piece of smoked dry cured bacon about 500g in weight (or even better a ham shank but I couldn't get one)

2 fat cloves garlic finely chopped

10ml (1dsp) Tabasco sauce

Parsley or chopped wild garlic leaves

or/ a piece of stale good bread blitzed with the rind of a half lemon, parsley and a knob of butter

Saute the onions and celery gently in the oil/fat until the onion is soft but not brown - I like to keep this pale looking.

Add the bacon and garlic and cook for about 5 minutes. Add the bay leaves, the beans and the tabasco. Cover with water. Bring to the boil then lower the heat and cook for about 3 hours until the beans are soft and creamy. Stir it now and again.

Serve with the herbs sprinkled over or alternatively sprinkle the herby-lemony breadcrumbs over the beans and brown under the grill or in a hot oven. Cut the bacon into pieces and serve with crusty sourdough.

PS The Tabasco makes all the difference to this, it gives the whole thing a lift.

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,

Nor the furious winter's rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

From Cymbeline by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

* 'A Renegade History of America: How Drunks, Delinquents and Other Outcasts Made America’

by Thaddeus Russell (pub 2010).

Christmas Thoughts

2011-12-24T13:16:00.004Z

I’ve just come back from a tiny bit of last minute Christmas shopping – a scented candle for my sister and pork pie for my brother in law. In the queue in the butcher’s I met three friends; one picking up a turkey to cook tomorrow with her teenage girls, a very new friend queuing for her free range chicken and a old friend happily accompanied by her grown up son.

There was also a stranger in the queue who was panicking about cooking her first ever turkey, so we all chipped in and gave her the best advice we could – wrap the legs, use the giblets for gravy etc. That’s one of the best things about living in a small town - lives coincide, you constantly bump into people you know, but there are always new people to get to know too. It doesn’t suit everyone but it suits me, I’m essentially a small town girl.

Town was full of people of all ages happily doing their last minute bits and bobs. I especially like the combinations of shoppers you only see at Christmas; older people with grown up children by their side, fathers and sons looking bewildered by shopping lists, and the ubiquitous gaggles of jolly teenage girls heading for New Look.

Christmas gets a lot of stick from all sides as being too commercial or too drunken or too secular, or simply not what it was. But actually I think despite the commercialism and the fol-de-rols, people still regard Christmas as more than simply a couple of weeks off when the weather is bad. It still is a time for family and for friends. It is a time to reflect on the year past and a time to hope we can to do better in the year forward. It is a punctuation point that gives us time out from normal life and an opportunity to recharge out batteries, not just physically, but spiritually and emotionally as well.

When times are hard these things matter even more. There’s a lot of home made stuff going on this year, the TV is full of how to ‘do’ Christmas. But actually we don’t really need instruction; we know how to do Christmas. Every family has it’s own traditions, and long may that be the case.

So it’s the end of another F & F year. It’s been a bit of a strange one. Hopefully I’ll back to a bit more regular posting in 2012 and maybe a bit later in the year the book will make its debut. In the meantime watch this space and have a very happy healthy and peaceful Christmas.

Blessings.

Moon and Stars Cake

I’ve made a slightly lighter Christmas cake this year and instead of reprising last year’s stained glass decoration I got out my edible glitter and gold powder. It’s easy – cut out the shapes using biscuit cutters, brush with egg white and using a watercolour paintbrush, brush on the edible gold powder. Scatter with glitter. Stick to the icing with more egg white. That’s it. Enjoy.

12 December: St Lucy – Patron Saint of Higglers

2011-12-05T21:34:00.027Z

‘Hark! How the the cries in every street

Make the lanes and allies ring:

With their goods and ware, both nice and rare,

All in a pleasant lofty strain;’

‘The Cries of London’ (Anon c 1680)

In North Lincolnshire in the mid nineteenth century, my rather disreputable great grandfather Tom Burgess was described in the national census as a ‘higgler’. Here’s the definition:

‘One who sells provisions from door to door, one who buys fowls, butter and eggs in the country and brings them to the town to sell. From the verb ‘ to higgle’ to beat down the price of thing in bargain, Hence’ higgledy-piggled’ corrupted from ‘higgle’ – higglers carrying a confused medley of provisions; in a disorderly manner’

And here's a picture:

I seem to remember doing a post about St Lucy last year and concentrating on the traditional homely Scandinavian customs associated with her day. But what I didn’t know was that she is the patron saint of higglers. ‘Higgler’ is a sixteenth century word and is probably a variation of ‘haggle’.

Walter Skeat’s ‘Glossary of Tudor and Stuart words’ published in 1914 also says the phrase ‘to come in with one’s five eggs’ was a higgler’s phrase meaning to interrupt another’s conversation with an irrelevant or fussy story, referring to the practice of initially offering the higgler a much lower price for eggs than he was prepared to accept.

Oddly enough my Grandfather, Tom’s son in law was a sort of travelling grocer too. One of my very earliest memories - I must have been about three, was being taken by him to visit two elderly sisters who made farmhouse butter. I remember the marble tops in their cool dark dairy very well and the wooden paddles they shaped the butter with. It came in 1lb blocks with a criss-crossed pattern on the top and little beads of butter-milk seeping from it and was very dark yellow and very salty!

So what can I make that's buttery and eggy enough to commemorate the lost profession of higgling? I've been given gifts of both eggs and cheese this week, (my friends are lovely) so....

I’m going to make spaghetti alla carbonara – charcoal makers’ spaghetti. Wikipedia says the origins of this dish are obscure, and unrecorded before the Second World War. I don’t think that means it’s a modern invention at all, it was simply so common that no one bothered to write it down. The great advantage of it is that it can be made with only one pan, and like many simple dishes its origins are as peasant food. It’s a brilliant dish for one person – a solitary charcoal burner perhaps, in the wooded foothills of the Appenines.

I first ate it as a poverty stricken law student in a cold flat in Chester. My flat mate had done an Italian degree and lived in Naples for a year. I was both fascinated and slightly alarmed when I first saw her make it, and was transfixed when I saw the way the heat from the pasta cooked the eggy mixture. We used to make it with shreds of mortadella sausage at 19p for 4 ounces, but it’s more commonly made with pancetta or smoked bacon, I even make it with chorizo sometimes.

There are an infinite number of variations, you can add sliced mushrooms and garlic although I draw the line at cream (as you get when you order it in a pseudo Italian restaurant), and I don’t think the sauce should be runny, just nicely coating the pasta. It's real comfort food, something to make when you're alone, a bit tired or just too lazy to cook anything more complicated.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara

Cook enough pasta for one person – about 100 grams of fettuccine, spaghetti, or tagliatelle. Warm the dish you are going to eat it from.

While the pasta is cooking, beat a large egg in a bowl and grate a couple of ounces of cheese – it doesn’t have to be parmesan, in my case it's usually a bit of cheddar that’s been lurking in the fridge for far too long.

Fry the shreds of bacon or chorizo or sliced salami.

When the pasta is cooked, drain it and put it straight back into the cooking pan, pour in the egg mixture add a knob of butter and stir it round, the eggs will scramble as you do. Add the grated cheese and season well – lots of black pepper. Now add the meat and the oil from the meat pan. Pour into a warm bowl, add more cheese.

That’s it. Embellish as you wish (truffle oil is good), have a tomato salad to follow and eat on the sofa with your feet up and a large glass of something white and chilly – not water.

Holy Mole !

2011-12-03T15:25:00.016Z

Gosh a whole month has gone by and there's nothing new on the blog, shameful. There are reasons though; I cooked a supper for 36 people on 3 November - a pop up restaurant in my lovely library (www.morrablibrary.org.uk) and then I had a stall at the Christmas Fair today with lots of foodie treats on it - I sold out so that must say something - and I've got orders - numerous gilded gingerbreads and several Christmas puds.

I've also taken on the Chairmanship (chairwomanship?) of the new West Cornwall Decorative and Fine Arts Society and that's been a load of work - but is looking fabulous if you live within reach. Here's the programme - http://www.wcornwalldfas.org.uk/ - - you might spot some of my photos on the website.

The main reason for neglecting you all though, is that the manuscript of 'Cornish Feasts and Festivals' has to be delivered on 31 December and I'm determined to have it done in time. It's been a bit weird cooking seasonal food out of season and researching various summer festivals as the garden wilts from autumn to winter. The multi-talented Freya Laughton (http://freyalaughton.co.uk/) who is doing the illustrations has a bit longer than me to do her bit, but I have to meet the deadline both I and the publisher have set - and actually I want it out of the way so normal life can return.

The Halloween Supper this year morphed into a 'Dia de los Muertos' - A Mexican Day of the Dead event and I made a chicken mole with the help of my friend Helen Kestle (thingshelenlikes.wordpress.com). So if you will forgive the un-seasonality of this, here's the mole sauce recipe. We nearly gassed ourselves grilling chillies in my tiny kitchen - if you can do it outside I strongly advise it, otherwise open all the windows. I got the Mexican ingredients from mex grocer online( www.mexgrocer.co.uk) who were really helpful.

Anyway it was a triumph and a really fab excuse to dress up as Frieda Kahlo (minus the hirsuteness I hasten to add ) - my friend Tessa also came as the fabulous Frieda and did a great job with the eyebrow pencil - I'm afraid I was just too vain.

Settle yourself down for a morning in the kitchen, this took Helen and I over two hours to do....

I recommend this as an accompaniment to the cooking ( and the eating for that matter)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da9x0ZxtG3k&feature=related

Ramirez was Argentinian but don't let that stop you.

Mole Sauce

280g (10 ounces) dried New Mexico chillies

110g (4 ounces) dried guajillo chillies

110g (4 ounces) dried ancho chillies

225g raisins

1 whole bulb of garlic

4 onions

15 tomatoes

1.5 tablespoons allspice

1 tablespoon anise seeds

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

1 stick cinnamon

1.5 tablespoons cloves

2 tablespoons coriander seeds

1 tablespoon oregano

225 g almonds

200g pumpkin seeds

200g sesame seeds

I kg peeled and chopped sweet potatoes

1x 200g (7 ounce) can chipotle chillies in adobo or 28 grams (1 ounce) dried chipotles

2 or 3 lumps piloncillo or muscovado sugar

280g dark chocolate, or more...

Method

1. Wipe the dried chillies clean with a damp cloth. Stem and seed them. Toast each chilli on both sides over medium heat. Be careful not to burn them - toasting only takes a few seconds for each chilli as the pod starts to change colour and becomes more flexible. Put the toasted chillies and the raisins in a large bowl, cover them with water and then let them soak for a few hours or overnight.

2. Toast the garlic. Char the onions until blistered. Char the tomatoes until their skins blister. Set aside.

3. Reduce the heat, and lightly toast each of the spices until their aroma is released. Increase the heat slightly, and toast the almonds, pumpkin seeds, and sesame seeds. Roast the sweet potatoes at 200c until soft and brown at the edges.

4. Using a food processor, puree the chillies, raisins, and chipotle chillies in adobo using enough of the soaking water to give the puree the consistency of very thick cream. Place the chilli puree in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan and cook over a medium heat for 10 minutes.

5. Puree the garlic, onions, tomatoes, spices, nuts, seeds, and sweet potato. Add them to the chilli puree. Once these ingredients are all in the saucepan, continue cooking over low heat for 45 minutes, stirring frequently from the bottom to prevent burning.

6. During the 45 minutes and between stirs, add the lumps of piloncillo. While they are dissolving, melt the chocolate and add it to the mole. Cook for the remainder of the 45 minutes, stirring frequently from the bottom. Add more chocolate if desired.

This makes absolutely loads, I added a ladleful to 2 tins of tomatoes and about a litre of chicken stock, then added my browned chicken pieces - about 8 for this quantity of sauce. I cooked it for about an hour and a half. Serve with sour cream and a sprinkling of coriander.

Freeze the sauce you don't use but wrap it well before you do so.

Highly addicitive!!

31 October: Samhain

2011-10-31T08:07:00.005Z

A poem and a recipe for Samhain.

Samhain

This is the faery time

when old men and old dogs

seek a warm hearth.

The shifting seasons

dislocate space

and time in its endless spool

halts and thins.

Voices from the future

and the past

call like foxes

under an icy moon.

Round the Samhain fire

silhouetted against smoke

and needled by frost

we step through the gate of the year

into the dark time.

Yet in that dim deep silence

where leaves rot and summer

wastes away,

the seed stirs in man

in beast and in the earth

and in that death is life

and from decay springs birth.

L.W.

Penzance Apple Cake

8oz plain flour

4oz butter

8oz currants

1tsp ginger

2oz mixed peel

1tsp cinnamon

2 eggs

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda dissolved in half a cup of milk

2 peeled and thinly sliced dessert apples

Grease an 8 inch cake tin thoroughly. Blits the flour and butter until it is like breadcrumbs then put into a mixing bowl and add the rest of the dry ingredients. Beat the eggs and add them to the mixture and now add the milk and bicarb.

Put half the mixture into the tin and lay on the sliced apple, then add the rest of the mixture. Bake at 150c for about an hour and a half.

I sprinkled the top with fair trade muscovado sugar because I’m pretty sure is an early Victorian Methodist recipe – there is no sugar in it and the Methodists eschewed sugar as a protest against the slave trade.

St Simon and St Jude on you I intrude

By this paring I hold to discover

Without any delay to tell me this day

The first letter of my own true lover.

Trad Rhyme for the Feast of St Simon and St Jude which is the 28th October

Rosemary for Remembrance

2011-10-15T06:43:00.022+01:00

Sooner or later the wheel of life means that we will all be touched by tragedy; either our own or other people’s. Once upon a time there was a bright, clever and funny little girl and one weekend a long time ago, she and I made bread together.

We had a lovely time knocking the dough about and decorating the rolls we made with every nut and seed in my kitchen cupboards. Sadly, the little girl grew up feeling all the tragedies of the world were on her shoulders and even the happy memories of a loving childhood couldn’t save her.

This week she couldn’t bear that burden any more and now she doesn’t have to.

Rosemary is for remembrance. Here’s Ophelia-

'There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray,

love, remember: and there is pansies. that's for thoughts….

There's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue

for you; and here's some for me: we may call it

herb-grace o' Sundays: O you must wear your rue with

a difference…..

‘Hamlet’ Act IV Scene v

and here’s Friar Lawrence speaking of Juliet

‘Dry up your tears, and stick your rosemary on this fair; and, as the custom is, in all her best array bear her to church…

‘Romeo and Juliet’ Act IV Scene v

I've made a rosemary and fennel bread. It's good to remember.

450g strong flour - I used about 250/200 white to spelt

200ml water

75ml olivel oil plus more to sprinkle

1.5 tsp salt

1.5 tsp sugar

2.5 tsp instant yeast

Rosemary sprigs, fennel seeds, coarse salt

Semolina or polenta

Add water and oil to the dry ingredients and knead until smooth. Leave to rise in a warm place for about 1 hour

Roll out to an oblong about 15 inches by 10 and dimple the top with your finger tips. Sprinkle semolina on a baking tray and put the dough on it. Sprinkle over about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and then sprinkle with the herbs, coarse salt and seeds. Sprinkle with more semolina and leave to rise for another half an hour. Bake for 20 minutes at 190c.

You can pour more oil over it if you wish. This is great for tearing and dipping in a fruity oil.

We're having slow roast belly pork tonight so that plus this and a leafy salad with mustard dressing will be perfect.

We'll raise a glass.

I have a room wherein no one enters

Save I myself alone

There sits a blessed memory on a throne

There my life centres.

From 'Memory' by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

5th October: Callington Honey Fair

2011-09-27T17:12:00.015+01:00

England, my mother,

Lift to my Western Sweetheart

One full cup of English mead, breathing of the May.

From ‘Drake’ by Alfred Noyes (1880 – 1958)

Callington in East Cornwall calls itself ‘the town below the hill’, the hill in question being Kit Hill which is a ‘Marilyn’ (guess why?!) meaning that its summit is more than 150 metres higher than its lowest slope. Kit Hill (the name derives from kite, the bird) was given to the people of Cornwall in 1985 by Prince Charles as Duke of Cornwall to mark the birth of his first son Prince William, the heir to the Duchy, and it is now a country park.

Kit Hill is the highest part of the Tamar Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. From the top you can see the Eddystone Lighthouse, around Plymouth Sound and over to Bude on the north coast. The hill has been used by humans for over five thousand years, from prehistoric times through the long years of mineral exploitation and right up to the present day when it sits quietly in the sunshine like an old miner after a lifetime of hard work.

Callington too has a long history and is one of the main contenders for the site of ‘Celliwig’ the ancient capital of Cornwall and site of the court of King Arthur. In 1267 King Henry III granted Callington a charter to hold a market and one has been continuously held there since that time. From the early nineteenth century a Honey Fair was held every August and this continued until the Second World War. In 1978 the tradition was re-established and Callington Honey Fair is now one for the largest street fairs in Cornwall.

It is still however very much a place for the county’s bee keepers to meet together at the end of the summer and compare their experiences of the season with a little gentle competition thrown in. There are competitions for the best honey, honey products such as combs and beeswax and for recipes made with honey. I love the fact the competition details and rules are contained in a document referred to as ‘The Honey Schedule’.

Many very old Cornish recipe books contain recipes for ‘sweet wine’, the old Cornish term for mead or metheglyn - mead’s spiced variant, both of which are made by fermenting honey into alcohol. So it’s safe to assume that bee keeping has a long history in the county. Indeed the ‘First and Last Inn’ near Land’s End used to boast that the monks who apparently ran a pilgrims’ rest house on the site gave local newly weds enough mead to last them for one phase of the moon – giving rise to the term ‘honeymoon’. Well maybe.

Like apiarists all over the world, Cornish beekeepers are as susceptible to superstition as the rest of us, and an account of bee keeping on Trencrom Hill in the nineteenth century records the hives being placed in mourning by being covered with black cloths when there was a death in the house of the bee keeper. Certainly my beekeeping acquaintances say it’s important to tell the bees household news or else they may feel neglected and move on to a friendlier home.

This is a variation on a honey tart I made last year, I've added the spices that would have been added to mead to make metheglyn, so this is a sort of -

Metheglyn Tart.

Shortcrust pastry made with 8oz flour and 4 oz butter

4oz stewed cooking apples cooled and sweetened with two tablespoons of white sugar and 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp cinnamon and a good scraping of nutmeg

4oz fresh breadcrumbs

Zest and juice of half a lemon

6 tbsp good local honey

1 tbsp golden syrup

Line a shallow 10” plate with the pastry. Spread the apple over the pastry. Warm the syrup and the honey in a pan and add the lemon juice. Stir in the breadcrumbs, ginger, spices and lemon rind. Pour over the apple and bake at 180c for 30 minutes.

Serve with clotted cream or rich vanilla ice cream

You are my honey, honeysuckle,

I am the bee,

I’d like to sip the honey sweet

From those red lips, you see.

From the London Stage Play "Bluebell in Fairyland" (1901)

(William H. Penn / Albert H. Fitz)

September 29th: Michaelmas

2011-09-26T18:55:00.001+01:00

'The mind is its own place and in itself

 Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

What matter where, if I be still the same, 

And what I should be, all but less then he 

Whom Thunder hath made greater?'

From 'Paradise Lost' Book 1, line 254-8, by John Milton (1608-1674)

Together with St Piran and St Petroc, the Archangel Michael is one of the patron Saints of Cornwall. In Celtic regions St Michael is often associated with hilltops and St Michael’s Mount has been a holy place probably since there have been holy places.

‘The Mount’ as it is referred to locally, has had a number of names. In Classical times it was probably the island know as ‘Ictis’ the legendary source of tin from the west, in Cornish it is called ‘Karrek Loos y’n Koos’ meaning the ‘grey rock in the woods’, an indication of the changes of sea level that the coast of Cornwall has witnessed over the millenia.

St Michael is supposed to have had a heavenly battle with Satan in the sky over The Mount and the one of the stones that was hurled in the fight landed at Helston, giving the town its name – Hell-stone.The legendary rock is apparently built into the wall of The Angel Hotel. I think the tale is more likely to be told by those coming out of The Angel, than by those going in…

So St Michael’s Mount is one of those enchanting places where myth, legend and history have become so intertwined that the boundaries between them are barely distinguishable.

We do know for a fact, that for centuries The Mount was an important market on an ancient trading route. The market was a source of products from all over the known world; oils, silks and spices came from the Mediterranean, tin and precious metals, furs, wool and hunting dogs went the other way. This market may even be the original source of the beautifully scented narcissus flowers native to the Mediterranean area and now regarded as indigenous on the offshore islands of Cornwall.

St Michael’s Mount market also features in the legend of ‘Tristan and Iseult’ which was first written down about 1170. The author Béroul describes how the hermit Ogrin visits St Michael’s Mount to buy fine wool, silks and linen cloth for Iseult, so that she may be suitably clad for her return to her betrothed husband, King Mark. In order that Iseult should travel in a style fit for a Queen, Ogrin also buys her a beautiful palfrey with a golden harness for her journey to King Mark’s court.

In 1067 the Benedictine Monastery of Mont St Michel in Normandy gave its support to William the Conqueror, and he rewarded the monks with property in his new realm. The Benedictines erected a monastery and church on the Cornish Mount, which was consecrated in 1144, and the Mount became a major pilgrimage destination. It was also a significant stopping point on the network of pilgrim routes across Europe, in particular for pilgrims making their way to Santiago di Compostella from Wales and Ireland. This route from St Ives to St Michaels Mount is now a designated footpath, way-marked with the symbolic pilgrims’ scallop shell. So the ancient trading route still survives although these days it’s back packers and dog walkers, rather than Celtic traders and pilgrims.

On the top of the Mount is a precipitous stone chair; to sit on it you have to hang your legs over the steep drop. When a marriage takes place on the island the newly weds are supposed to race to the chair, the one to sit in it first will then have dominion over the other for the duration of the marriage! It’s a very stiff climb, the victor probably deserves the prize.

So, it’s St Michael’s Day tomorrow - Michaelmas. As well as naming the town of Helston, St Michael’s celestial fight with the Devil caused Satan to fall to earth on a bramble bush, thereby making the eating of blackberries after the 29^th September inadvisable because the Devil has cursed and spat on them – or worse.

To counteract all this devilish activity the Michaelmas recipe has to be that culinary marriage made in heaven - bramble and apple pie. Just ensure you picked the blackberries before the 29^th.

Extra Rich Bramble and Apple Pie

Shortcrust pastry made with 250g each of plain and self raising flour and 125g each of butter and lard

4 apples peeled, sliced and lightly stewed with half the quantity of sugar below (I used tart eating apples which kept their shape.)

250g blackberries picked over for spiders and washed.

1 teaspoon cornflour

100g sugar, plus a little extra to sprinkle.

1 egg or a spoonful of cream

Knob of butter (optional)

Enamel pie dish

Oven 180c.

Stew the apples gently with half the sugar, cool.

Divide the pastry into two portions, one slightly larger than the other. Roll out and line the pie dish with the smaller portion. Put the stewed apples on top of the pastry.

Toss the blackberries in the cornflour and put them on top of the apple, sprinkle with the rest of the sugar.

Top with the pastry lid, crimp the edge and make two little cuts in the top for the steam, you can make pastry leaves if you have some off cuts. Brush the pie with the egg or the cream and bake for 35– 40 minutes. Keep and eye on it and cover with foil if it is getting too brown.

Now do my Grandma’s trick. Take the pie out of the oven and let it cool just a little. Then very gently put a sharp thin wide-bladed knife or a spatula between the lid and the bottom of the pie and ease it off all the way round, but don’t remove it. Raise the lid at one side and sneak a knob of butter on top of the hot fruit. Let the lid down again. (You don’t have to do this!)

Serve with cream.

'Now Ogrin, having left the lovers in the Hermitage, hobbled upon his crutch to the place called The Mount, and he bought ermine there and fur and cloth of silk and purple and scarlet, and a palfrey harnessed in gold that went softly, and the folk laughed to see him spending upon these the small moneys he had amassed so long; but the old man put the rich stuffs upon the palfrey and came back to Iseult.'

From 'Tristan and Iseult' by the 12c Norman poet Béroul translated by Hillaire Belloc (1870-1953)

20th September: Crying the Neck

2011-09-17T15:26:00.011+01:00

Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest home;

 All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.

Lyrics by Henry Alford 1810-1871

I’m not going to make any apology for repeating last year’s post about the fascinating tradition of 'Crying the Neck'. Feasts and festivals are all about making your own kitchen traditions and I haven’t made a poppy seed loaf since this time last year, so it’s time to make another. In any case you might only have just found this blog so it will be new to many of you.

In Cornwall the last sheaf cut at harvest time is called 'the neck' and in common with many other country districts in times past, when it was cut, the end of the harvest was celebrated by 'Crying the Neck'. In 'Cornish Feasts and Folk-Lore' published in 1890, Miss Courtney tells us that the oldest reaper called out 'I hav'et! I hav'et! I hav'et' and his companions replied 'What hav'ee? What hav'ee? What hav'ee?' He then shouted 'A Neck! A Neck! A Neck!' and they all replied 'Hurrah!'

The neck of corn was then been made into a miniature sheaf gaily decorated with flowers and ribbons. This was hung in the farmhouse until the next harvest or sometimes tossed between the reapers, the winner legitimately being able then to kiss the girl of his choice.

There were similar traditions in other parts of the country – in East Yorkshire for example the reapers cried 'We hev'er, We hev'er! A coo in a tether!' Then there would be then a general scramble for apples in the stack yard when the last load was brought in. In September the Old Cornwall Societies across the county will be celebrating 'Crying the Neck' as a way of keeping the old traditions alive - good for them.

After the harvest comes the Harvest Supper, sometimes called the 'Mell Supper'. The word 'mell' coming from the Old Norse 'mele' meaning grain. This was an occasion for general rejoicing and not a little relief that all was safely gathered in. Until the 1840s harvest festivals were a purely secular if not pagan celebrations, but enter onto the scene the Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker, Vicar of Morwenstow.

When Hawker became Vicar of Morwenstow in 1834 it had been neglected by the Church of England for years, as to be honest, had much of Cornwall - the Methodist tradition in the south west is a legacy of that. Morwenstow really was a wild west area but it suited the young cleric down to the ground and he ministered to all - sailors, fishermen, smugglers, wreckers and miners.

Hawker was a real eccentric. He married twice; firstly to his Godmother 22 years his senior, then to a young woman 40 years his junior, both marriages apparently happy and contented. He once dressed up as a mermaid, excommunicated his cat for mousing on Sundays and far from donning clerical garb he habitually wore a claret-coloured coat, blue fisherman's jersey, long sea-boots, a pink hat and a shawl made from a yellow horse blanket. He talked to the birds, invited his nine cats into church and kept a pet pig.

On September 13, 1843, Hawker put up a notice in the church for a new type of service:

'Let us gather together in the chancel of our church, and there receive, in the bread of the new corn, that blessed sacrament which was ordained to strengthen and refresh our souls.'

Harvest Festival was born.

Hawker built a little hut for himself on the cliffs near his home and it can still be seen, it belongs to the National Trust these days. He used it to commune with nature, write poetry and smoke a little opium.

Poppy Seed Roll

I've never quite managed to make a smaller quantity of this so, this recipe makes two rolls.

Dough

Make a sweet dough with 200ml milk, 120g melted butter, 2 eggs, 1/2tsp vanilla extract, 500g strong flour, 1.5 tsp salt, 60g sugar and 2 tsp easy blend yeast. Knead it until it is smooth and elastic then let it rise in a warm place for an hour. Now make the filling.

Filling:

Put 100g sugar and 100ml milk in a pan, bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes.

Add 100g poppy seeds and 75g chopped sultanas or currants, 2 tablespoons of honey, a tablespoon of candied peel and the grated rind of one lemon.

Bring to the boil again and simmer for 5 more minutes, it will be quite thick and will thicken more as it cools. When it is cool add one egg white - keep the yolk for the glaze on the roll.

Roll the risen dough out into a rectangle about 2 centimetres thick and spread on the filling.

Roll up the dough into a big sausage with the seam underneath, tuck the ends under and allow to rise again for 30 -40 minutes. Brush with the yolk of egg. If you do this a couple of times it will be even more rich and shiny.

Bake at 190c for about 35 minutes. Keep an eye on it and if it's getting very brown cover lightly with foil. Cool, dribble over glace icing and sprinkle with poppy seeds.

3rd September: The Cornish Gorsedd

2011-08-27T09:19:00.020+01:00

Now, of all the birds that keep the tree,

Which is the wittiest fowl?

Oh, the Cuckoo—the Cuckoo's the one!—

For he Is wiser than the owl!

From 'A Cornish Folk Song' by the Rev. R.S. Hawker (1803-1875)

In his huge text on the geography of the known world, the Greek writer Strabo (63BC-24AD) refers to the Celtic tradition of honouring the bards, the singers and poets who preserved the history and traditions of the tribes living on the western fringes of Europe. Local tribal chiefs would have a bard on hand to entertain the company after supper with harp, song and story from a long oral tradition now completely lost.

We know from ancient Welsh sources that there were three major locations where these bards periodically came together for the purpose of ceremony and competitions in music, poetry and literature. One of these ‘Gorsedd’ places was ‘Beisgawen’ which is now widely accepted as being Boscawen n’ Un the ancient stone circle near St Buryan in West Penwith.

Modern interest began in the late eighteenth century with one famously eccentric Welshman called Iolo Morganwg, who researched what little was known about the ancient bards and then made up the rest! Just as the last few native Cornish speakers were dying out Iolo Morgawg established the Welsh Gorsedd and that led in the late nineteenth century, to interest amongst scholars in similarly restoring the bardic tradition in Cornwall.

The first Cornish Gorsedd back in the 1920s was held at Boscawen and I hope the spirits of the old bards were still there to see it.

Every year the Cornish bards meet at their chosen Gorsedd place - and then they process with dignified ceremony. The venue (Helston this year) is moved around the county to ensure everyone gets the chance to observe these revered custodians of Cornish culture.

The ceremony begins with the sounding of the horn ‘Corn Gwlas’ a symbolic call to the four points of the compass and the Grand Bard asks his fellow bards if there is peace. On their third assurance of ‘Peace!’ the proceedings commence.

It’s all very dignified, and a far cry from the Gorsedd meetings of the bards of ancient times which probably had a great deal of raucous feasting and heavy drinking associated with them.

Anyway, in association with the modern Cornish Gorsedd there are now numerous competitions both in English and Cornish for poems and other creative endeavours and finally after all that culture there is a jolly good tea for the bards and a Gorsedd concert for the local community.

Cornish Under-Roast

In all but the poorest Cornish kitchens, the cooking was done on a cast iron Cornish range, and the use of the range dictated the way that things were cooked – usually with the greatest economy as to fuel. A Cornish under-roast can be made with any sort of meat, but cheap cuts that benefit from long slow cooking are best. Quantities are hard to give, so this is a method rather than a recipe.

Peel some potatoes and halve them, boil them for five minutes then slice half of them and leave the rest in chunks, put the sliced potatoes in the bottom of a roasting tin. Lay on a thinly sliced onion. Season well. Lay the meat on top and then cover with the rest of the potatoes cut side down. Season again and dribble some oil over. Add about half a pint of water (or stock if you have it – a cube will do), cover the dish with foil and put into the oven at 160c for an hour. Take off the foil and cook for another hour. All the water will have been absorbed; the potatoes should be crisp and brown on top but melting underneath and the meat cooked to tenderness.

I like this with a leafy green vegetable especially buttered cabbage.

Dark Cornish chough, for thee

My shred of minstrelsy

I carol at this meditative hour,

Linking thee with my reed,

Grey moor and grassy mead,

Dear carn and cottage, heathy bank and bower.

From 'The Cornish Chough' by John Harris (1820-1884)

29 August : The Newlyn Fish Festival

2011-08-25T15:40:00.000+01:00

..Narrow nightwatch nigh the ships head

While tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

My feet were by frost benumbed

Chill its chains are; chafing sighs

Hew my heart round...

From 'The Seafarer' : Anon 8th Century AD

(Translated from the Anglo - Saxon by Ezra Pound)

The village of Newlyn clinging snugly to the east-facing slope of Mounts Bay is an extraordinary place; an important fishing centre, one of the first communities to resist so called ‘re-development’ and a famous nineteenth century artists’ colony.

Newlyn is still a lively fishing port. The harbour fills with fishing boats large and small and there is a fish market most mornings. Because of its easy reach to the Western Approaches fishing grounds, over fifty species of edible fish are landed here. Much of the catch is shipped up country and to Spain and France. Breton lorries take their loads of seafood home to be eaten by visitors to Brittany who little suspect that their ‘fruits de mer’ are actually fruits of Cornwall. The village is home to fish processing, ice making, chandleries and several really good fish shops. There are also some great pubs serving thirsty fishermen.

Pilchards used to be the lifeblood of Newlyn, but mackerel and herring were almost as important. The hardships of Newlyners’ lives in the nineteenth century are graphically captured in the paintings of Stanhope Forbes and his followers who settled in Newlyn back in the 1880s.

Stanhope Forbes’ first painting of the town called ‘A Fish Sale on the Beach’ was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885 and lead to hundreds more paintings him, his pupils and the other artists who formed the artists' colony.

The painters were attracted by the light, the cheapness of accommodation and models and the direct train from London! Usually painting in the open air the artists captured the faces of the fisher girls, the oilskinned fishermen and the older folk as they mended nets or gossiped by the quayside. The Penlee Gallery in Penzance now houses many important examples of their work. A recent TV programme about art in West Cornwall condemned the Newlyn artists for painting chocolate box paintings. How dare they! The paintings are far from that - and often depict loss and tragedy as well as the blithe sunny days when silvery shoals of fish are filling the bay..

In 1991, Len Scott the head of the Newlyn Fishermans’s Mission started the Newlyn Fish Festival. The festival’s aims are to allow ‘the fishermen of Newlyn the opportunity to show their industry off to the wider public who, perhaps, know little about commercial fishing or its problems’. The venture was a huge success from the outset and what started a fundraiser for the Mission has more than fulfilled the aims of increasing understanding of the fishing industry as well as giving everyione a great day out.

On August Bank Holiday weekend thousands of people flock to Newlyn to look at the boats, the stalls of every sort, watch filleting competitions and cookery demonstrations, see extraordinary displays of fish and eat some delicious fishy dishes.

So talking of delicious fishy dishes, here is one.

Marinated Mackerel

This recipe is an adaptation from ‘Cornish Recipes Ancient and Modern’ collected by Edith Martin and first published by the Cornish Federation of Women’s Institutes in 1930.

4 or more mackerel gutted, de-headed, flattened out and spines removed.

2 bay leaves broken into pieces

6 cloves

2 sprigs thyme

I onion

10 peppercorns

½ tsp chilli flakes

½ tsp ground mace

White wine vinegar (or half and half with white balsamic vinegar)

Cornish sea salt

Oven 160c

Chop the onion and lay the fish in a flat-bottomed dish. Sprinkle with the onion and the rest of the herbs and spices, then pour over the vinegar so the fish is just covered. Season well. Put into the oven and bake gently for an hour. Cool and remove the individual fish put into a serving dish and strain the liquid back over the fish. Serve cold by which time the fish has become wonderfully spiced and 'meaty'.

I buy my mackerel from the Mackerel Man who sits daily in a little van on a lay-by just outside Penzance; he keeps the fish in a giant cool box. When I asked him how he cooked marinated mackerel, he said the same way as his mother - with lemon peel and ginger. So the flavourings are almost infinitely variable; try adding parsley, tarragon, or even garlic with lime, ginger and chilli - whatever you fancy, just stick to the vinegar part of the method.

'Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water...'

(ibid)

Tea Treats and Parish Feasts

2011-08-10T15:29:00.003+01:00

Be present at our table, Lord;

Be here and everywhere adored;

Thy creatures bless, and grant that we

May feast in paradise with thee.

A Methodist Grace by John Cennick, (1718-1755)

It’s easy to forget that in the nineteenth century many children worked from a very young age. In Cornwall this usually meant working in the ancillary jobs associated with mining, and even in the areas of Cornwall where there was little mining, children worked long hours in the fields. The Methodist Chapel Sunday School was often the only place were such children might learn to read and write.

The annual tradition of a ‘treat’ being laid on for the Sunday School Scholars started at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the early days children were often marched to a hilltop to sing hymns and listen to a sermon after which they would be rewarded with tea and cake.

The Treats were often held at Whitsuntide or on the same day as the local fair in order to tempt the children and their parents away from more worldly pleasures. For the same reason many Tea Treats were held during the miners’ midsummer holidays, when the Victorian ministers believed that idle hands might fall into bad ways.

Tea Treats became the cause of much rivalry between different Methodist Chapels as to who could provide the most spectacular treat with the biggest band the most beautiful banners, the largest number of children and the best tea! By the 1860s some Sunday School Tea Treats attracted hundreds of participants and it’s important not to forget that they were hugely enjoyable social occasions, with everyone putting on their best clothes and looking forward to a spectacular tea.

The ‘Band of Hope’ became associated with many Tea Treats. With its aim of warning young people of the dangers of alcohol it recruited them with uplifting band music, banners and healthy outdoor activities. In 1876, the Bible Christian Sunday School in Penzance organized a joint Treat with the local Band of Hope Temperance Society. This would have involved a considerable amount of planning in order to obtain and serve over 200 lbs of cake, 18 dozen buns, 6 lbs of butter, 12 lbs of sugar and 5 lbs of tea!

In time, Chapels gathered together to hold their Tea Treats and with the coming of the railways, expeditions further afield became more common. On June 25th 1880 the ‘Cornubian and Redruth Times’ reported that twelve railway carriages took Sunday School children and their teachers from Redruth to Carbis Bay. Eight hundred cakes were also taken and the assembled company had both lunch and tea before returning to Redruth.

The normal fare at a tea treat was a great spread of saffron buns often called ‘Revel Buns’ and on this occasion only made ‘as large as cow pats’ ! Cornish splits with jam and cream, were usually on the table together with slab (ie fruit) cake and tea. The tea was sweetened as a special treat, Methodists not generally holding with sugar because of its associations with the slave trade.

Cornish Splits

These days scones are the norm for a cream tea but traditionally the vehicle for clotted cream and jam was a Cornish split. Here’s the recipe.

1 lb of plain flour

½ tsp salt

1 oz caster sugar

2oz butter

1/2 pint milk - or maybe a little more - flour varies as to its absorbency

½ sachet instant dried yeast

Oven 180c

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl and add the sugar and yeast. Melt the butter and warm the milk until tepid, mix together and then add to the flour. Knead for 10 minutes until really smooth then leave in a warm place until doubled in size – it takes about an hour and a half.

Knead again briefly and divide into eight ball then knead and mould each ball until it is perfectly smooth. Leave to rise again for about 45 minutes. Put into a hot oven and bake for 20 minutes. You may want to cover them with a loose sheet of foil or paper about halfway through – they should be a delicate pale gold not brown.

Leave to cool then split and slather with clotted cream and jam or with black treacle for an even more special treat. The Cornish call this ‘thunder and lightning’

Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,

To shine for Him each day;

In every way try to please Him,

At home, at school, at play.

A sunbeam, a sunbeam,

Jesus wants me for a sunbeam;

A sunbeam, a sunbeam,

I'll be a sunbeam for Him.

Lyrics by Nellie Talbot (c1874-?)

Grateful thanks to Cedric Appleby and his 2009 article on tea treats in the magazine of the Cornwall Association of Local Historians.

6th August: Goldsithney Charter Fair

2011-08-05T20:18:00.003+01:00

Goldsithney Charter Fair takes place in early August every year. In his classic book on CornishFolklore 'Popular Romances of the West of England’ published in 1865 Robert Hunt says...

‘On the 5th of August, St James's day, a fayre is held here, which was originally held in the Church-town of Sithney near Helston. In olden time, the good St Perran the Little gave to the wrestlers in his parish a glove as the prize, and the winner of the glove was permitted to collect the market toll on the day of the feast, and to appropriate the money to his own use. The winner of the glove lived in the Church-town of Sithney, and for long years the right of holding the fair remained undisputed. At length the miners of Goldsithney resolved to contest the prize, and they won it, since which time the fair has been held in that village, they paying to the poor of the parish of Sithney one shilling as compensation.'

Here's the glove on the Trevelyan Coat of Arms outside the pub in the village.

The fair at Goldsithney is indeed very ancient, the Domesday Book refers to the village as 'Plen-Goyl-Sithney', the ‘Field of the Fair of Sithney’, making the fair certainly pre-Norman. Fair Days were not just an opportunity for fun and meeting with friends and family, they were often when rents and other dues were paid and in the case of Goldsithney the fair also the day of a Leet Court when the Lord of the Manor ensured that all the obligations he could demand from the villagers had been carried out.

One of the primary activities at Goldsithney fair was and still is Cornish wrestling. In Cornish wrestling the combatants wear jackets and attempt throw each other by grapping their opponent’s coat. It has been a sport in the west of England since earliest times. The first written record is from 1590 and Richard Carew in his famous book about Cornwall said:

‘Wrastling is as full of manliness, more delightful and less dangerous (than hurling)... for you shall hardly find an assembly of boys in Devon and Cornwall, where the most untowardly amongst them will not as readily give you a muster of this exercise as you are prone to require it.’

You can picture the scene where the local lads are eager to show off their wrestling prowess and the local lasses are anxious to see them do it. Maybe when the match was over a pretty girl might expect a few freshly made fairings as a token of affection.

Goldsithney Charter Fair is one of those real community events organized by the village for the village, whilst still welcoming incomers from as far away even as Helston. There’s music and singing, a dog show, stalls selling lots of lovely things to eat, lots of drinking and lots of fun.

Fairings are sold all over Cornwall and are a favourite thing for visitors to take home, but they are really easy to make.

Cornish fairings (makes about 24)

225g plain flour

2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp ground mixed spice

3 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp salt

110g butter

110g caster sugar

2 tablespoons of crystallized ginger cut into small pieces about the size of a small pea. (Some old recipes used candied peel instead which gives a nice citrusy hit)

4 tbsp golden syrup

Oven 200c

Sieve the dry ingredients together and then rub in the butter until the mixture is the colour and consistency of sand, there’s minimal effort here but you could use a food processor. Stir in the sugar and the candied ginger. Warm the syrup and then pour it in to the mixture and mix thoroughly stiffish paste.

Roll the mixture into walnut-sized balls in the palms of your hands – each one weighs ½ oz if you are looking for consistency. Place the balls on a greased baking sheet allowing them room to spread out. Bake for about 10 minutes, move the baking sheet from the top of the oven to the bottom after 5 minutes or as soon as the biscuits start to brown. The crackled top is how they are supposed to look!

If you have any left over (unlikely) chunk them into softened vanilla ice-cream then refreeze it. Completely decadent with clotted cream!

PS Apologies for the lack of poem and the fact this is late, I thought I'd set it up to post automatically - but the gremlins got in...

25 July: The Knill Ceremony at St Ives

2011-07-24T18:10:00.004+01:00

As I was going to St Ives

I met a man with seven wives

Each wife had seven sacks

Each sack had seven cats

Each cat had seven kits

Kits, cats, sacks, wives

How many were going to St Ives?

Traditional English Nursery Rhyme

Observant visitors to St Ives will soon spot a conspicuous fifty-foot granite obelisk on the summit of Worvas Hill behind the town. Those prepared to make the stiffish climb to the top will see that it is a memorial to one John Knill (1733-1811) a former Mayor of St Ives. Knill built the steeple to be his mausoleum but failing to have the ground properly consecrated, he gave his body to be dissected instead, and what remains of him is actually buried in London.

As well are erecting the steeple in his lifetime, Knill used his meticulous lawyer’s training to establish a charity to benefit St Ives and to ensure his life was remembered. He dictated that once every five years, a portion of his gift should be distributed between the Mayor of St Ives for a dinner for himself and Knill’s trustees, ten maidens – the daughters of seamen, fishermen or tinners, two widows of the same, the family with the largest number of legitimate children under the age of ten and one musician. These people were then required to proceed to the memorial and perform a ceremony of remembrance.

The money ran out long ago but the ceremony is still performed every five years. The chosen persons and the civic dignitaries process to the memorial following the fiddler who leads them playing the tune of the Furry Dance. Once there the children dance, hymns are sung and Knill is remembered as he intended. So in the interests of blog authenticity I'll be up there today!

John Knill was an extraordinary character. He was obviously a man of considerable ability. A lawyer and a Customs Official, he was a patron of the arts, a collector, a treasure hunter and a dabbler in politics and he was responsible for the building of Smeaton’s Pier in St Ives harbour. Knill was chosen by the British government to travel to Jamaica where he devised a plan to prevent the smuggling of coffee. The planters of the island treated him with such lavish hospitality he was able to bank £1500 on his return from the island and there was speculation at the time as to the source of his wealth. The erection of the steeple too caused raised eyebrows, was Knill putting up such a prominent day-marker to help the smugglers who he was ostensibly trying to catch? Who knows?

Anyway Knill’s plan to arm small private vessels to catch smugglers seems to have backfired rather and led to tales of wrongful imprisonment and gross mistreatment. Knill then spent two years of his life obsessively searching for Captain Amery’s treasure. Amery was a notorious smuggler and pirate who reputedly stashed his loot in a cave on the Lizard peninsula. The search was only called off when it transpired that the Captain had died poverty stricken in Barnstable, something that presumably wouldn’t have happened if he had been able to access his own private hole in the cliff somewhere. Knill went off to end his days in ‘Lunnon’ although he did return to the town for his own memorial service in 1801.

The people of St Ives are referred to locally as ‘St Ives Hakes’ and hake with onions is a very traditional Cornish treat when this delicious fish is available.

Paper ‘pasties’ with hake and onions.

For four.

4 hake steaks

3 white onions

100ml cider, white wine or fish stock.

100g butter chopped into four slices

Cornish Sea Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Baking parchment

Oven 200c

A small handful of chopped herbs, I used tarragon but fennel, dill or just parsley would be just as good.

Finely slice the onions and sauté gently in three quarters of the butter until a light gold colour, add the cider and simmer until almost all of the liquid is evaporated.

Set aside. Prepare your paper cases by cutting four heart shapes out of baking parchment – as big as you can make them given the width of the parchment. . Divide the onion mixture into four and place on one side of each piece of parchment. Top with the fish and the herbs and season. Now fold over the parchment, match up the edges and start to fold and crimp the edge just as if you were making a Cornish pasty. Make sure the parcels are tightly sealed and put onto a baking tray. Melt the rest of the butter and brush the paper cases.

Lay your parcels on a baking tray and bake for 7-8 minutes in a hot oven. The paper should brown nicely. Take each parcel to the table on its own plate so that your diners get the benefit of the lovely smells as they open their paper ‘pasties’. Serve with new potatoes and a green vegetable.

The more traditional way to cook hake in Cornwall is to substitute milk for the wine and serve with mashed potatoes - but that's a bit invalidish for me.

The brute weight

Of the living sea wrought us, yet the boat sleeked lean

Into it, upheld by the whole sea-brunt heaved,

And hung on the swivelling tops. The tiller raised

The siding tide to wrench us and took a good

Ready hand to hold it. Yet we made a seaway

And minded all the gear was fast, and took

Our spell at steering. And we went keeled over

The streaming sea.

From 'The Nightfishing' by W.S. Graham (1918-1986)

20 July 1588: The Spanish Are Coming!!

2011-07-19T20:33:00.000+01:00

'Of fayre Eliza, be your silver song,

That blessed wight:

The flowere of Virgins, may shee florish long,

In princely plight.'

From 'The Lay to Eliza' by Edmund Spenser (c1552-1599)

On the 20 July 1588 the Spanish Armada was sighted off the coast of Cornwall by Cornish fishermen - a huge crescent shaped formation of tall ships heading for England.

The Spanish Armada had set off with the aim of overthrowing Queen Elizabeth the First. King Philip of Spain believed that if Mary Queen of Scots had still been alive to succeed Elizabeth, he would have succeeded Mary and during his reign he could have ensured Britain reverted to Catholicism. Mary unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, had been executed the year before. Philip was not happy. Nor was he very taken with the fact Elizabeth was supporting Dutch Protestants, given that at the time Holland belonged to Spain.

It had taken Spain months to prepare a huge naval force – about 130 ships including 22 fighting galleons. Secrecy was impossible and in any case Philip believed that there would be panic once the news of his ‘Great Enterprise’ was known in the population. The plan was to sail up to the Netherlands and then take on board a huge army of fighting men and convey them across the channel to invade England.

The English with their genius for organisation had a system of beacons to warn of the coming invasion. I don’t know where the first one was lit but eventually a row of warning fires had been lit all the way to London. On the 21 July Francis Drake fired on the Armada as they sailed up the Channel but initially with little effect - maybe he shouldn’t have finished his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe.

The English however continued to harry the Spanish over the next couple of weeks, their ships were more manoeuvrable and they had better fire power – the Spanish had more priests on board than gunners. On August the 8^th the Queen went down to Tilbury.

‘…..I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king — and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour should grow by me, I myself will take up arms — I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already, for your forwardness, you have deserved rewards and crowns, and, we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you.’

By September the main invasion threat was over and the Spanish were facing the extreme danger of being driven by heavy westerly gales onto rocks off the Scottish and Irish coasts. Many were wrecked.

But this was not the end. The war with Spain continued, and in July 1595 Spanish troops landed in Cornwall. The soldiers and sailors seized supplies, raided and burned Penzance and and several surrounding villages, killed Squire Keigwin outside his house in Mousehole, held a mass – where? and sailed away before they could be confronted.

Then in 1597 England was spared a Spanish invasion via the port of Falmouth by the intervention of the weather. This time a huge Armada had been assembled, with over 140 ships carrying 9,000 men. The English fleet was absent and the approach of the Armada was unforeseen. Fortunately, a gale caught the Spanish Fleet thirty miles off the Lizard, scattering it and sinking 28 of the ships. The first inkling the English had of their near escape was when one of the Spanish ships was forced into St Ives for repair – I wonder what sort of reception they got?

So July is the month of invasion in Cornwall, and it’s still the case, but these days it’s the more benevolent and welcome sight of German tourists in coaches and visitors from all over the UK and Europe in their cars and camper vans.

So - something summery I think...

Raspberry Orange Shortcakes

These are really delicious. First make some orange flavoured shortbread biscuits

6oz plain flour

2oz caster sugar

4oz butter - if you can get it I prefer the sort of butter specifically sold for baking, it gives a 'shorter' and crisper result, alternatively use a dense low moisture butter like Lurpak or President

pinch salt

graded zest of one orange.

Oven 150c

Soften the butter until it's very soft but not liquid. Mix into the flour and salt add the sugar and orange rind and mix with a wooden spoon until you have a smooth dough. Chill. Now roll out thinly to about 1/8th inch thick and cut into rounds, bake at 150c for 25 minutes. You don't want them too brown. Cool.

Whip some double cream and layer the biscuits with cream and fruit, I used raspberries and some wonderfully juicy black cherries. Sprinkle with icing sugar.

Eat soon, before the biscuit goes soft.

Scrummy.

I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,

All calm as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,

Driven by the spheres,

Like a vast shadow moved...

From 'The World' by Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)

Just in case you're wondering - and I'm sure you are, I took the photos on Penzance Promenade at the World Record Attempt for the most pirates in one place (8,734) on June 26th 2011. The lovely picture of a tall ship near The Mount was taken earlier this summer.

Header Photos

2011-07-17T16:29:00.017+01:00

These are the various pictures and photos I've used over the last eighteen months of the blog just for the heading. I try and change them seasonally - it keeps the blog 'fresh' and it keeps me amused! Hope you like them. They're not in any particular order. The photograph above is of the Jubilee Pool Penzance, taken by me on the 4th July 2011.

Fresco vignette of the Goddess Flora from the Villa Ariadne at Castellammare di Stabia Italy (1st century AD or BC)

'Road and Cornfields, East Yorkshire 2004' by David Hockney b 1937

'Haymakers' by George Stubbs (1724-1806)

'Spring: Gardeners, Sheep Shearers and Peasants Merrymaking' by Pieter Brueghel (1525-1569)

'Flora' by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606-1669)

'Guns firing on Metemma' by Edward Bawden (1903-1989) - from an old postcard

St Endellion Music Festival

2011-07-11T13:13:00.009+01:00

‘St. Endellion! St. Endellion! The name is like a ring of bells’

From ‘The Collins Guide to the Parish Churches of England’ Edited by John Betjeman

John Betjeman said the four corners of St Endellion’s tower peep at you like a hare in a cornfield, and indeed they do, popping over the brow of the hill as you approach. When you get to it, St Endellion is the most feminine of churches. It has wonderfully carved wooden pew ends, a delicate frieze and a beautiful ceiling. However the loveliest thing to be seen there is the Saint herself depicted in a gorgeous modern icon holding a single barley straw in blessing. St Endellion (or Endellienta as she is sometimes called) is also depicted in the wonderful choir stalls of St Hilary's Church in West Cornwall.

There could be no more delightful setting for a Music Festival and one is held here twice yearly. The St Endellion Music Festival is now over fifty years old, making it a more established festival in North Cornwall than many of the so called traditional but actually resurrected festivals. The summer festival starts at the end of this month.

http://www.endellionfestivals.org.uk/index.html

The special atmosphere of St Endellion’s Church has made both it and the festival a magnet and a refuge for musicians from all over the world. What began as a few friends coming down to restore the ancient rectory and put on a few ad hoc concerts has become a significant date in the musical calendar. There are now exciting plans to turn the buildings around the church into a centre for Music and Spirituality. John Betjeman, who loved the church and is buried at nearby St Enodoc, would surely have approved.

St Endellion is also the name of a soft brie like cheese from Trevarrian near Newquay. Made from Cornish milk and with the addition of double cream, it is rich and completely delicious. Naming a cheese after this particular Saint is highly appropriate as she is reputed to have lived only on milk!

We know about St Endellion from the work of Nicholas Roscarrock a famous Catholic recusant of the sixteenth century who wrote a book on the lives of the Saints, including more than a hundred from Devon and Cornwall. Roscarrock was born at a farm in St Endellion’s Parish and no doubt this saintly dairy maid held a special significance for him.

Roscarrock says that St Endellion was one of the children on the Welsh King Brychan and that she was born about AD470. Her claim to fame as a Saint is that she restored to life the man who killed her cow – and the cow as well. When she was dying she directed her followers to place her body on a sled to be pulled by two unguided bullocks, and where they halted so would she. They pulled her to the top of a hill and the church was built on their resting place.

I don’t want to mess about with something as lovely as St Endellion Cheese, but it might be nice to have something delicious to go with it.

Spiced Cherries

Cherries – I used two punnets

300ml of white wine vinegar

450g sugar

1 bay leaf and 1 sprig of thyme for every jar.

I teaspoon of sea salt

Spices to taste – I used 2 blades of mace, 1 tablespoon of coriander seed and 2 sticks of cinnamon. You could also use star anise, allspice or cloves, but don’t over do it.

Make the syrup by heating the vinegar in a stainless steel pan, bringing it to the boil and dissolving the sugar in it. Then add the spices and simmer for 10 minutes. Leave until completely cold – preferably overnight. Wash and dry the cherries leaving the stalks on and discarding any blemished ones.

Pack the cherries into sterilized jars adding thyme and bay to each jar. Top up with the syrup and seal. You might have some syrup left – it depends on the size of your jars. Leave for a week before eating. Keep in a cool dark place and eat within a couple of months.

The friendly cow, all red and white,

I love with all my heart;

She gives me cream with all her might,

To eat with apple-tart.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

2 July: Bodmin Riding

2011-06-29T10:53:00.034+01:00

'High o'er the ridge of Bodmin Moor

Grey Rowter keepeth guard

His age-old crown of granite crag

by wind and storm is scarred'

From: 'The Cornish Bells' by Charles Stubbs (1845-1912)

I’m going to Bodmin today. That’s a euphemism in Cornwall for going a bit mad, Bodmin being the site of an enormous Victorian mental hospital now thankfully closed. But actually I really am going to Bodmin –because it’s a fascinating place and because today is Bodmin Heritage Day and tomorrow is Bodmin Riding. There’s so much to say about Bodmin, it’s hard to know where to start.

The County of Cornwall as many of you may know is not far short of 100 miles long from the border with Devon right down to Land’s End. Bodmin Moor is more than half way up from the end, so to reach western Cornwall from the north you have to cross the moor, a place of dark deeds, peat bogs, Jamaica Inn and haunt of the famous ‘Beast of Bodmin’ – a jaguar sized black cat - sightings of which are guaranteed to get the tabloids going. Here's the moor in benign mood.

It also meant that until the coming of the railways, Bodmin was the last outpost of so called civilisation – the assizes were here, the gaol was here, the mental hospital, the barracks and the priory. Beyond Bodmin the gentry and their authority held little sway, religion was tempered with local superstition, there was smuggling and wrecking and the people there lived on their wits and on the edge.

Bodmin has a fascinating history. Before the Reformation it was the holiest town in Cornwall, Bodmin Priory was the proud possessor of the bones of St Petroc which were kidnapped in 1177 by a recalcitrant monk and then rescued from a monastery in Brittany where they had been taken. Henry II gave them back to the Priory having held back a few bones for himself – which bits I wonder? During the abolition of the monasteries, the bones in their 11^th century ivory casket disappeared and were found some 200 years later hidden under the floor of Bodmin parish church.

At some point the bones were lost (maybe the beast got them), but on Sunday the casket will be paraded through Bodmin in the sort of procession that is more usually associated with Catholic towns of southern Europe. The procession originated with with the ancient guilds of Bodmin and it’s unusual because it is accompanied by riders on horseback – hence ‘Bodmin Riding’. A special brew of ale will be made for the weekend – ‘Riding Ale’ and on Saturday there will be much jollification as the people of Bodmin try and capture ‘The Beast’.

One of the other historical events commemorated this weekend is the hanging of Nicholas Boyer a former Mayor of Bodmin who was executed in the town square for his part in the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549. The enforcement of prayers in English instead of Latin was staunchly resisted in the far west where Cornish was the vernacular and the failure to translate the Bible into the Cornish language is held by many scholars to be the cause of its demise. The preservation of the Welsh language had much to do with the fact the Bible was translated into Welsh and used in Sunday Schools, thus keeping the language alive, unfortunately Cornish speakers weren’t so lucky then, although these days the revival is gaining strength.

Enough already.

I’m going to make a beef and ale casserole - lovely Cornish beef from the Lizard peninsula simmered slowly in a strong ale. Here we go.

Riding Ale Casserole

1kg of stewing beef - I used shin which I cut myself into bigger chunks than my butcher does.

500ml strong ale ( because I'm making this in advance of the weekend to post on Saturday, I've used Fistral Organic Ale from Atlantic Brewery in Newquay. It has a strong clean citrus flavour and is brewed from a single hop variety - and it's delicious! I'll make this again after the weekend when I've got some Riding Ale from Bodmin and report on the difference)

Bay leaves, thyme, parsley stalks

2 onions, 3 cloves of garlic, 1 strip of orange peel

2 tablespoons flour seasoned with salt and coarsely ground pepper.

Oil – these days I use organic rapeseed oil for almost all my sautéing except where the taste of olive oil is vital.

250ml beef stock approx

Marinade the beef overnight in the ale with the herbs and orange peel.

The next day drain the beef well (keep the marinade) and pat dry with kitchen paper. Sauté the sliced onions and garlic until golden brown and remove from the pan, now put the meat into a plastic bag with the seasoned flour, shake it about, then sauté it in batches in the oil until it is brown and crusty. Deglaze the pan with the marinade and put everything into a casserole and add sufficient beef stock to just cover your meat. Heat the casserole on the hob until it bubbles. Now cover and put in the oven at 150c for 2 hours. I think this is better kept until the next day then gently reheated.

In winter you could make dumplings to have with this, or put it into a puff pastry case. On a chilly summer day I like it with crusty bread, followed by a green salad with a sharp dressing.

The poet Charles Causley lived in Launceston nearly all his life and knew Bodmin Moor well.

I saw a jolly hunter

With a jolly gun

Walking in the country

In the jolly sun.

In the jolly meadow

Sat a jolly hare.

Saw the jolly hunter.

Took jolly care.

Hunter jolly eager-

Sight of jolly prey.

Forgot gun pointing

Wrong jolly way.

Jolly hunter jolly head

Over heels gone.

Jolly old safety catch

Not jolly on.

Bang went the jolly gun.

Hunter jolly dead.

Jolly hare got clean away.

Jolly good, I said.

By Charles Causley (1917-2003)

June 18th - Bugle Band Contest

2011-06-13T19:32:00.024+01:00

'When music sounds, gone is the earth I know,
And all her lovely things even lovelier grow;
Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees
Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies'
From: 'Music' by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

A band festival at a place called Bugle, what could be more appropriate? The proper title of the Bugle Band Contest is ‘The West of England Bandsman’s Festival’ and apart from a couple of short breaks during times of war it has been held at Bugle near St Austell since 1912. Mollinis Park rings out all day to the harmonies and oom-pah-pahs of dozens of brass and silver bands which come to Bugle from right across the West Country. It’s a grand day out for bandspeople and music lovers everywhere.

Bugle village is deep in china clay country and at the time of the establishment of the band contest, the industry was producing around a million tons of china clay every year, not just for ceramics but also for kaolin’s lesser known use in the manufacture of quality paper.

Cornish china clay was discovered in 1746 by William Cookworthy, a Quaker apothecary and polymath who patented its use for his porcelain factory at Plymouth. The industrial villages around St Austell grew up around the china clay industry as did the spoil heaps so clearly visible from the A30 and nicknamed ‘The Cornish Alps’, although the landscaping that has taken place has now rendered them less conical and less white!

Brass bands sprang up across Cornwall in the nineteenth century in a similar way to the famous bands of the north of England and in the same way were associated with mines, factories and other works. Not surprisingly band contests followed, giving as they did an opportunity to show off the bands’ skills, earn a few pennies and take a much needed respite from the harsh conditions in which many bandsmen worked.

Although there are still huge deposits of kaolin around Bugle, they are now underexploited and the industry has significantly declined. Ironically ‘The Eden Project’ with its huge biomes constructed in a disused china clay pit, has become the most popular tourist destination in Cornwall and brought renewed prosperity to the area.

Less than twenty miles from Bugle is the Tregothnan Estate. Not that long after William Cookworthy started producing porcelain from Cornish china clay, Tregothnan became the first place in Britain to grow camellia sinensis – Chinese camellia - tea to you and me, and tea plants are still grown at Tregothnan today. So it seems appropriate to make a thrifty tea bread with Cornish grown tea and serve it on a Victorian porcelain plate that may or may not have been made using Cornish china clay.

Cornish Tea Bread

8oz mixed dried fruit

4oz golden caster sugar

1 tablespoon orange marmalade

Half a pint of hot black Tregothnan tea

8oz self raising flour and a pinch of salt

1 large egg beaten

Grated rind of half a lemon

Put the fruit, marmalade, sugar and hot tea in a bowl and leave until cold. Over night is best but you can speed up the process by bringing the whole thing to the boil then simmering for no more then five minutes. Leave until entirely cold.

Add the sifted flour, salt, lemon rind and egg and stir until thoroughly mixed together. Place in a well-greased and lined loaf tin and bake for about an hour and a half at 160c. The tea bread improves after a day or so and becomes more squidgy. Serve thinly sliced and spread with salty butter, I like it with cheese too...

You can of course make this with any black tea – it is particularly delicious made with black vanilla tea or Earl Grey.

Hey, there! Listen awhile! Listen awhile, and come.

Down in the street there are marching feet, and I hear the beat of a drum.

Bim! Boom!! Out of the room! Pick up your hat and fly!

Isn't it grand? The band! The band! The band is marching by!

From 'The Band' by C.J.Dennis (1876-1938)

Dorothy Leigh Sayers 13 June 1893 -1957

2011-06-12T17:43:00.026+01:00

'Towery city and branchy between towers;

Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;

The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did

Once encounter in here coped and poisèd powers...'

From 'Duns Scotus Oxford' by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) as quoted in 'Gaudy Night'

I’m a big Dorothy Sayers fan – actually I’m a big Lord Peter Wimsey fan. Sayers created the aristocratic detective as her beau ideal – he was handsome, intelligent, sensitive and courageous, what more could a woman want? And he was a Lord as well – albeit a younger son. Eventually she couldn’t resist his charms and put herself in her own novels as Lord Peter’s great love, the mystery writer Harriet Vane. The Lord Peter novels, as well as giving us a delicious portrait of the thinking-woman’s-crumpet-detective, do however tackle some of the major social issues of Britain in the years immediately after World War One.

In ‘Whose Body’ published a year before Lindberg’s record-breaking flight, Lord Peter flies as a passenger across the Atlantic with vital information to save his elder brother from being hanged for murder. Other novels tackle the plight of men shell-shocked in the war, the role of advertising in the modern world and most importantly the education of women and their place in society. Harriet refuses to marry Lord Peter because she owes him her life, she's scrupulously moral and she’s an independent woman. She's loth to abandon that status even for the man she loves and a title. It is only in ‘Gaudy Night’ – my favourite of the novels that they eventually get engaged. Dorothy Sayers manages to tease us with the sexual tension between the two of them for several of the books.

Sayers herself was a pioneer in a number of respects. She was one of the first women to be educated to degree level at Oxford – although she couldn’t collect her degree until five years after graduating. She was an exact contemporary of Vera Brittain and bears some resemblance to Sarah Burton the independent minded heroine of the novel 'South Riding' by her other contemporary Winifred Holtby. When Sayers worked for Blackwell’s in Oxford, her boss likened her to ‘a race horse drawing a cart’ meaning her talents were wasted there, although it's an unfortunate comparison. Certainly her intellect was formidable and she didn't hide it.

Somewhat unusually for a vicar’s daughter from Hertfordshire, Sayers had a number of lovers before she was married. In 1924 she gave birth to an illegitimate baby and arranged for him to be brought up by a cousin who did genteel fostering. The existence of her son John was the big secret of her life and although she told her husband when she later married she never revealed the truth to her parents.

She had a formidable appetite for work both in her writing – detective stories, translations, plays, journalism and poetry, and at the time she was in paid employment - with the advertising agency S. H Benson, where she was responsible for the famous toucan in the early Guinness advertisements.

I can’t resist the final scene in ‘Gaudy Night’

‘Peter!’

She stood still: and he stopped perforce and turned towards her. She laid both hands upon the fronts of his gown, looking into his face while she searched for the word that should carry her over the last difficult breach.

It was he who found it for her. With a gesture of submission he bared his head and stood gravely, the square cap dangling in his hand.

‘Placet magistra?’

‘Placet’

I know it's not to everyone's taste but that makes my toes curl (in a good way).

I’ve made a sweet omelette, something deeply, deeply unfashionable these days. It was the means by which Harriet’s lover was poisoned in ‘Strong Poison’ but Lord Peter of course proves her innocence . The Wimsey novels are a bit dated in a fictional detective world now characterised by the likes of Lisbeth Salander, but they are well written and intelligently plotted. Give them a go if you haven’t already.

Sweet Omelette

Per person

Two eggs, strawberry jam, icing sugar, butter.

Separate the eggs and whisk the whites until stiff peaks are formed. Beat the yolks and fold together. Heat the pan until really hot and drop in a knob of butter, when it has melted but before it is brown, tip in the egg mixture and turn down the heat. Leave it to cook gently - you can flash it under a hot grill if you wish. When the omelette is almost cooked, drop on a good dessertspoon of jam. Fold the omelette over and serve on a hot plate, sprinkle with icing sugar. Eat immediately. Do not add arsenic.

'Leave me, O love which reachest but to dust

And thou, my mind aspire to higher things;

Grow rich in that which never taketh rust,

Whatever fades, but fading pleasures brings.'

By Sir Philip Sydney (1554-1586) Chapter XI heading 'Gaudy Night'.

9 June : St Columba - Patron Saint of Poets

2011-06-07T13:01:00.015+01:00

As I dig for wild orchids

in the autumn fields,

it is the deep bedded root

that I desire

not the flower.

Izumi Shikibu (974-1034)

St Columba was pretty busy for a sixth century saint. As well as rescuing someone from the awful clutches of the Loch Ness monster he must be one of the few Saints to have caused and led a battle against another Saint. The Battle of Cúl Dreimhne took place in 561 and caused great loss of life amongst his followers and those of St Finian. The dispute was over a psalter that Columba had copied and which Finian claimed as his property – a sixth century copyright dispute in fact. Although Columba was obviously good at military strategy (he won the battle), he must have lacked political clout because he was exiled from Ireland to Scotland, something the Irish monastic authorities obviously regarded as a fate worse than death.

In fact Columba took the opportunity to found a monastery at Iona and his legacy there lives on nearly 1500 years later. The missionary school attached to the Iona monastery led to the evangelisation of the Picts and Iona became a place of renowned scholarship. Iona was the monastery where that most famous of illuminated manuscripts, The Book of Kells, was begun and it is also the original location of Celtic crosses with their characteristic halo around the interstices of the arms.

Columba sounds very jolly for a Saint. His biographer Adamnan says ‘He had the face of an angel; was of excellent nature, polished in speech, holy in deed, great in council, loving to everyone, happy-faced and rejoicing in his innermost heart with the joy of the Holy Spirit’.

I can see the connection between Columba and bookbinders, of which he is also a patron, and the connection with poets probably came about because of his prodigious hymn writing. I also think the Scottish Tourist Board should also adopt him, given the legend about the Loch Ness Monster arises directly from Adamnan’s report of his intervention.

Poetry has been my friend and consolation since my Dad read me Tennyson instead of nursery rhymes and it fascinates me where the human instinct to play with words comes from. People must have been doing it as long as there has been language. For years I had a dear elderly friend called Eleanor with whom I shared a love of verse. Then one extraordinary day she met my father and they recognized each other. Eleanor's mother was my great-grandmother’s sister which made her my first cousin twice removed. She didn’t know my maiden name and I knew nothing about her family – but a mutual love of words had drawn us together….

So here’s an ambrosial desert for the patron of poets.

Athol Brose

2oz medium oatmeal

1 pint double cream

3oz good runny honey

2fl oz whisky

Toast the oatmeal in the oven at 200c turning it regularly every 2-3 minutes until it is golden brown. Whisk the cream and the honey together until it stands up in soft peaks. Stir in the whisky, then the oatmeal but reserving a tablespoonful, spoon into pretty glasses and sprinkle with the reserved oatmeal. Chill.

‘In lona of my heart, Iona of my love,

instead of monks' voices shall be the lowing of cattle.

But ere the world come to an end,

lona shall be as it was.’

Saint Columba (521-597)

A Frabjous Day!

2011-06-06T08:07:00.018+01:00

'Oh frabjous day! Callooh Callay! He chortled in his joy...'

From: 'Jabberwocky' by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

Well sometimes life just takes over doesn't it? There you are blogging along quietly then everything happens at once. Domestic bliss takes a holiday for a little while but then comes back refreshed, wise old friends move on to another dimension, jobs must be done, those who need care and support must be given it and those of us injected with a puritan duty ethic must give of ourselves - and with love. So apologies for neglecting you my friends in bloggerland.

But the big news, the very big news dear friends is that I have signed a book contract. OH FRABJOUS DAY!!

Thanks to the inspiring Alison Hodge - she of Alison Hodge publishers -

(http://www.alisonhodgepublishers.co.uk/) we are going to see the publication of 'Cornish Feasts and Festivals'. Words and photographs by yours truly and wonderful quirky illustrations by the young and very talented Freya Laughton. Alison produces a smashing series of books called 'Pocket Cornwall' which are perfect for presents and just right for what Gerard Hoffnung called 'jolly memorials for when you pass away' - by which he meant holiday mementos. I am really proud to be in their company.

I have to deliver a manuscript by December, so now I have a perfect excuse to spend the summer mooching round libraries, eating great food and going to every feast and festival my adopted county can offer. So look out for lots of Cornish Festivals in the next few months and updates on the progress of the book as well. Anyway as a non alcoholic treat to myself I've been a'foraging and here's a glass of elderflower cordial to celebrate.

You can of course mix elderflower cordial with prosecco, champagne or even better Camel Valley Brut or Polgoon Aval... would I do that? Of course I would!

More soon - and that's a promise.

xxLiz

Elderflower Cordial

1.5kg sugar

1.5 litres water

20 young elderflower heads

2 lemons

70g citric acid (from wine making suppliers if you can't get it elsewhere)

Rinse the elderflower heads. Make a syrup with the sugar and water by heating them together until the sugar has dissolved then add the citric acid, the sliced lemons and the flowers. Cover and leave for 24 hours. Strain into clean bottles and keep refrigerated. Dilute with fizzy water or something more glamorous. Delicious.

Make sure the elderflowers are young ones - they go over quickly and old heads smell like old tom cats - not nice.

13 May: Julian of Norwich

2011-05-12T09:13:00.005+01:00

I cool my heels in a dank, dark cell

Where half-light becomes my element

God’s plenty in motes, with the music of the bell

A love feast of the penitent.

From: ‘Anchorite at the Gate of Heaven’ by Rosemarie Rowley (b 1942)

I lived near Norwich for several years and worked in the city, which I grew to love. It’s chock full of wonderful historic houses and fifty three mediaeval church buildings, more than any other city north of the Alps. My Grandmother’s ancestors came from North Norfolk and I was fascinated to discover that one of them had been sworn in as an officer of the watch in St Stephen’s parish Norwich in the late 1400s. I like to think that he was a Dogberry sort of character…

In the church of St Julian in Norwich is the shrine of Julian of Norwich – they are not the same person. St Julian was a legendary medieval nobleman who, out hunting one day, spared the life of a deer which then spoke to him and predicted that he would kill his parents. After this happened by accident; St Julian established a riverside inn for travellers, and a hospital for the poor. The church in Norwich on the banks of the River Wensum is dedicated to him.

On the other hand the Lady Julian or Mother Julian as she is sometimes known was definitely real and a fascinating character. She was born about 1342, so is roughly contemporary with Chaucer. We do not know whether she was a nun but we do know she became an anchoress – a person who tied themselves to a particular place – often physically as well as spiritually. There is a suggestion that the illness which lead to her devoting her life to contemplation, may have paralysed her from the waist down. She is the only mystic usually portrayed with her cat - so I warmed to her immediately! Her cell was under St Julian’s Church and so that is the name she became known by. It’s her feast day today.

Mother Julian wrote the earliest book in the English language known to be by a woman – ‘Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love’. She probably wrote it in the 1390s and it was mentioned in the Amherst Manuscript of 1413 when Mother Julian was said to be still alive. At a time when Europe was being decimated by the plague know as Black Death, to write of a loving rather than a vengeful God was rather remarkable, and for a woman to write anything of such quality and intellectual rigour at the time was astonishing.

Julian's theology was radical then and is still radical now. According to Julian, God is both our mother and our father; her views have greatly influenced feminist theology and she is now regarded as one of England’s most important mystics.

I’m sure her diet was slight but nourishing – unlike poor old St Guthlac she lived to be quite old, and I think we need another regional speciality but perhaps something rather less ascetic than poor Guthlac’s barley bread.

This traditional Norfolk pie, according to my copy of ‘A Cooks Tours of Britain’ by Michael Smith, was made on the 14th May at the beginning of what was a traditional holiday for maid servants. It could then be eaten cold by the family whilst the maids were off gallivanting. Lady Julian had two maids herself - Alice and Sara, maybe one of them made her this pie.

A Small Pigeon Pie (not a pie of small pigeons)

2 or 3 pigeons skinned

250g braising steak

1 pigs trotter

50g butter

500g good beef or game stock

250g rough puff pastry

1 onion

Brown the pigeons and beef in the butter. Take out and brown the onion. Place in a small casserole with the stock and the pig’s trotter and simmer for 1½ hours. Cool, then take the pigeon meat off the bone. Put all the meat in a pie dish and put a pie funnel in the middle. Season well. Now lay on the pastry – make a little slit for the funnel first. Crimp the edges and then pour the beefy stock into the pie through the top of the funnel.

I have only recently realized that this is what a pie funnel is for…. how silly I am, so an upturned egg cup (my former way of keeping the pastry up in the middle of a pie) would not work here! Egg your pastry and bake at 200c for about half an hour. Now cool and eat cold with pickles. I think this would make a great breakfast dish – but I am a bit of a heathen as far as these things are concerned. My husband loved this and demands another one - hot this time.

"All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well."

The Blessed Julian of Norwich (c1343- c1413)

May in Derbyshire

2011-05-06T14:32:00.014+01:00

I know where Wells grow—Droughtless Wells—

Deep dug—for Summer days—

Where Mosses go no more away—

And Pebble—safely plays—

From ‘I know where Wells grow’ by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

The month of May marks the beginning of the Derbyshire well dressing season. Many Derbyshire villages will start preparing elaborate designs of flower petals set into wet clay on panels which they then use to decorate their village well. The custom is ancient and may derive from the time of the Black Death when village communities gave thanks for their survival, or it may be even older and connected with the celebration of the spring and with water the bringer of life. Whatever its origin, well dressing is a long held practice in the pretty villages of the Derbyshire Dales. Some of the designs are incredibly elaborate and there is always fierce local pride at stake.

After the Reformation well dressing was prohibited by law. During the reign of Henry VIII, his Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, was instructed to arrange the destruction of all the equipment used in well dressing. At Buxton, the statue of St Anne was dismantled and the crutches and sticks of those people who visited the well seeking to have their ailments cured were smashed. The custom however proved impossible to eliminate and these days most of the flower pictures have a religious significance and there is often a religious service and procession to the wells to bless them.

I’ve been thinking what to cook, and Bakewell Tart seems the most obvious choice. Sometime during 1811 Jane Austen stayed at the Rutland Arms Hotel in Bakewell and this tart was their speciality. Jane’s tour of Derbyshire was immortalized in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, the Rutland Arms is where Elizabeth Bennet is supposed to have been staying when she first sets eyes on Mr. Darcy’s home at Pemberley, which Jane modeled on Chatsworth House which is only three miles away.

This is more or less Jane Grigson’s recipe as taken by her from the archives of the Rutland Arms. In case you’re wondering, Jane Grigson says that ground almonds in Bakewell Tart are ‘quite wrong’. That’s good enough for me; Jane Grigson’s word is gospel as far as I’m concerned. This tart is light and delicious especially with a few berries and a little creme fraiche.

Bakewell Tart

8oz pastry – I made my usual pate brisee

Strawberry jam

4 oz butter

4oz sugar

4 egg yolks

3 egg whites

Line your tart tin with the pastry and spread with a thinnish layer of jam. Beat the eggs and sugar together in a mixer. Melt the butter and allow to cook until a golden brown (take care!) now pour the hot butter into the egg mixture, beating at top speed. Pour into the pastry and cook at 200c for about 25 minutes until golden brown. Eat lukewarm.

‘Here's to one who took his chances

In a busy world of men

Battled luck and circumstances

Fought and fell and fought again

Won sometimes but did no crowing

Lost sometimes but did not wail

Took his beating but kept going

Never let his courage fail’

On the outside wall of the Rutland Arms Hotel in Bakewell

April 29th: A Spring Wedding

2011-04-26T06:52:00.000+01:00

Singing, today I married my white girl

beautiful in a barley field.

Green on thy finger a grass blade curled,

so with this ring I thee wed, I thee wed,

and send our love to the loveless world

of all the living and all the dead.

From ‘Epithalmion’ by Dannie Abse (b 1923)

It might be an appropriate time today to talk about that major feast in many people’s lives - the Wedding Breakfast – or more commonly now the Wedding lunch or supper.

It’s a natural thing to want to celebrate two people starting out on their lives together whether it’s in a posh church or by leaping over a gypsy campfire. There are numerous wedding traditions both old and new, but let’s stick to talking cake.

Wedding cakes have been around since mediaeval times. Originally small cakes were brought by the guests to the feast and piled up in a big mound. The guests would then throw these cakes at the bride and groom having first ensured that the happy pair could just reach over the cake mound in order to kiss each other.

I wondered if there was a connection between this jolly custom and the expression ‘bun fight’ – then lo and behold!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-12566910

The groom might also have broken a cake over the head of his bride – supposedly to indicate his governance over her as his wife. In Yorkshire a piece of cake was thrown out of an upstairs window – it was good luck if it broke into many pieces, which doesn’t say much for Yorkshire bakers. Alternatively a plate holding wedding cake was thrown out of the window. If the plate broke, the bride would enjoy a happy future with her husband, but if the plate remained intact the marriage would be unhappy. I rather think that if my new husband tried to break a cake over my head I might break a plate over his.

I dug out this old family wedding photo to show to you (my Grandfather on the right was giving one of his numerous sisters away) I love the expression on my Aunt Ethel's face - she's the little bridesmaid in the middle and my Great Aunt Lily as the Maid 0f Honour was so beautiful.

After the wedding breakfast, bridesmaids would take a piece of wedding cake to put under their pillow that they might dream of their future bridegroom. Traditional tiered wedding cakes derive from the mediaeval cake mountain and were first devised in the early seventeenth century supposedly by Charles II’s French chef. Initially the tiers might not all have been of cake but when Prince Leopold, the eight child of Queen Victoria, was married in 1882, the first multi-tiered wholly edible white iced cake was made, and this became the tradition. So Royal Weddings set trends in cakes, dresses and music – and t’was ever thus. Poor old Prince Leopold died of haemophilia only a couple of years later – Queen Victoria’s fatal legacy.

Here's a Mrs Beeton Wedding Cake - isn't it fabulous?

I’ve made a few wedding cakes in my time, my Mum made the cake the first time I was married, I made my own cake the second time, and I’ve made cakes for other people. I made one for a friend a few years ago and decorated it with Liquorice Allsorts – very wacky. And in case you’re wondering, the tradition of sending bits of cake to absent friends dates back only to the 1930s.

I’ve been wondering what to make for today. A croquembouche?– lovely but too French, a fruit cake ? – dépassé, so I’ve made a white chocolate orange flower sponge and covered it with white chocolate icing and the first local strawberries.

For the cake

100g white chocolate, 225g unsalted butter, 200g caster sugar, 4 medium eggs beaten, 180g SR flour,100g ground almonds, grated rind of one orange, teaspoon orange flower water

For the decoration

100g white chocolate, 50g unsalted butter, 2 tablespoons icing sugar, 1 tablespoon orange juice (or orange liqueur) 1/2 tsp orange flower water, white chocolate sticks ( I used little biscuits called Mikado which I cut to size - it took 3 packets) large punnet strawberries. white chocolate stars.

Oven 180c, 8" prepared spring form cake tin.

Melt the white chocolate and leave to cool. Cream the butter and sugar until white and add the eggs little by little, fold in the flour, ground almonds grated orange rind and the cooled chocolate and the orange flower water. Pour into the tin and make a depression in the middle to attempt to get a flattish top to the cake. Bake for 1 hour and check with a skewer that it is cooked through.

Meanwhile melt the rest of the chocolate for the icing and cool. Beat the butter and icing sugar together and add the flavourings and the cold chocolate.

When the cake is cold, cover with the icing and stick your chocolate sticks around the outside. Put the strawberries - bottoms down - over the top. You may want to glaze them with a little warmed sieved jam. Sprinkle with stars.

Felicitations.

Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

From ‘An Arundel Tomb’ by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

21 April: Grounation Day

2011-04-16T17:35:00.030+01:00

I used to think nurses

Were women,

 I used to think police 

Were men, 

I used to think poets 

Were boring, 

Until I became one of them....

‘Who’s Who’ by Benjamin Zephaniah (b 1958)

‘Grounation Day’ is a feast for followers of the Rastafari movement. It celebrates the anniversary of the visit of the Emperor Haile Selassie to Jamaica in April 1966. The Emperor refused to use the red carpet as he descended from his plane – he wanted his feet to be in contact with the ground when he first stepped onto Jamaican soil. The Rasta people who were watching were overjoyed by the symbolic gesture made by the man they revered as their Messiah.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Rastafari.

Rastafari are monotheists, worshipping a singular God whom they call Jah…… Rastas see Jah as being in the form of the Holy Trinity, that is, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. Rastas say that Jah, in the form of the Holy Spirit (incarnate), lives within the human, and for this reason they often refer to themselves as "I and I". Furthermore, "I and I" is used instead of "We", and is used in this way to emphasize the equality between all people, in the recognition that the Holy Spirit within us all makes us essentially one and the same.

Rastas claim that Haile Selassie, the former Emperor of Ethiopia was the resurrected manifestation of Jesus and therefore the incarnation of Jah on Earth. They believe that the Emperor will one day lead the righteous into Zion. These days we mostly know about the movement through Reggae music; Bob Marley and the poet Benjamin Zephaniah - who's an Ital vegan. I love the picture of him with the cabbage.

As is probably obvious, I’m really interested in the relationship between belief and diet, and given that the Rasta movement is relatively modern - it has its origins in the 1930s, it fascinates me that already it has taken on dietary conventions. Rastas refer to their diet as ‘Ital’ (from ‘vital’). It basically consists of unrefined food and lots of fresh fruit and vegetables – Rastas are often vegetarian or will only eat fish and ‘clean’ meat. Diet is about so much more than what you eat; in religious terms it’s often more about coherence, conformity and community.

The purpose of following an Ital diet is to increase ‘Livity’ or the life energy that Rastas believe is within all living things, so what is put into the our bodies should enhance Livity rather than reduce it. The general principle of the Ital diet is that food should be natural. Most Rastas are teetotal, although the use of ganga, which can induce a prayerful state, is one of their most common and controversial practices.

Well I haven’t smoked anything interesting since I was at University but an Ital diet sounds eminently sensible and delicious – unrefined food, simply produced, simply prepared, simply eaten. Let’s go for it.

I've made hemp seed flat breads - partly because I found some Yorkshire hemp seeds from Skerne near Driffield in my local health food store and couldn't resist something that came from my old home ground, (http://www.yorkshirehemp.com/) and partly as a sort of Rasta joke...

'Ital' Flat breads

1/2 tsp instant yeast

150ml cups warm water

150g organic wholemeal strong flour

50g gram flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon Yorkshire hemp seeds lightly toasted

1 tablespoon hemp oil - plus a bit for brushing on the breads

Toast the seeds lightly in a frying pan to brown them and release their flavour.

Combine flours, salt, yeast and seeds in large bowl. Mix the oil and water in a jug and

pour into the flour and stir until well combined.

Knead for 10 minutes, then put in a warm place for about 1 hour, or until the dough has doubled in size.

Divide into 8 lumps – I did this with my scales, each bit weighed 50g or you can make a long snake of the dough and divide it by eye. Preheat the oven to 220c and preheat your baking sheet.

Roll out each ball of dough into a circle about 4-5 inches across and 1/4 inch thick. Brush with a little more hemp oil and sprinkle with more seeds or some extra sea salt. Leave for about 10 minutes to recover (the bread not you)

Put on a hot baking sheet and bake each circle for 4 minutes until the bread puffs up. Turn over and bake for 1-2 more minutes. Don't overcook or you'll have cardboard. These breads are like a really tasty pitta with the added crunch of the hemp seeds to make them interesting.

We ate these with a white bean hummus ( 500g cooked white beans, rind and juice of a lemon, 50ml olive oil, tablespoon chopped fresh mint, crushed clove of garlic, S & P - bung the lot into a food processor and blitz really well until smooth - delish).

Guaranteed to increase your Livity.

xLiz

I waz whitemailed 

By a white witch, 

Wid white magic 

An white lies, 

Branded by a white sheep

 I slaved as a whitesmith 

Near a white spot

 Where I suffered whitewater fever.

 Whitelisted as a whiteleg

 I waz in de white book 

As a master of white art, 

It waz like white death.

From ‘Propa Propaganda’ by Benjamin Zephaniah (b 1958)

17 April: Palm Hearts for Palm Sunday

2011-04-14T14:46:00.026+01:00

'This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint

My pilgrimages last mile; and my race

Idly, yet quickly runne, has this last pace,

My spans last inch, my minutes last point....'

From 'Divine Meditations' by John Donne (1572-1631)

We seem to have rather gotten away from traditional feasts recently, so I thought I would revisit Palm Sunday. Last year I made a fig tart inspired by the English tradition of eating fig pudding on this day –

http://feastsandfestivals.blogspot.com/2010/03/march-28-palm-sunday.html

but today I’m going to be quite literal.

I’ve had a tin of palm hearts in my kitchen cupboard for ages, waiting for that special occasion to bring them out, then when I was in Paris last week I nearly bought another tin before I remembered them – so what better time to eat them than Palm Sunday?

These days most palm hearts or ‘palmitos’ are grown in Costa Rica, a country for which I have a great affection although I’ve never been there. In 1949 it amended its constitution so as to prohibit the establishment of an army. This has meant that over the last sixty years, money which might have been spent on arms has been channelled into health and education, with the result it is one of the most stable democracies in Central America with literacy and infant mortality rates on a par with the more developed world, even though it is still very poor. It is also increasingly ‘green’ in all its government policies, and the whole country plans to be carbon neutral by 2021. Today 25% of the country is environmentally protected as national park and yet it still manages to produce some of the best coffee in the world…

Costa Rica became a haven for American Quakers during the Korean and later the Vietnam War, when they were prosecuted for their refusal to fight or pay taxes which might have supported the US war effort. The Quaker community up in the cloud forest at Monteverde is inspirational: http://www.monteverdeinfo.com/monteverde-community.html

Here's what the cloud forest in the Monteverde reserve looks like:

Catholics in Costa Rica celebrate Palm Sunday - Domingo de Ramas, by waving palm fronds in huge processions (Quakers don’t!) but everyone can enjoy food with palm hearts whatever their beliefs. This is what you might be eating in Costa Rica this week:-

Pastel de Palmitos y Atún – a pie filled with tuna, palm hearts, eggs and spices

Arroz con Palmito – a rice dish with palm hearts and chicken broth

Pollo con Palmito – chicken and palm hearts – a sort of gratin

Chiles marrones Rellenos con Palmito – purple chile stuffed with palm hearts

Empanadas de chiverre – a little pasty filled with white spaghetti squash

Conchas de pescado con palmito – fish with palm hearts

So actually my idea of eating palm hearts on Palm Sunday wasn’t so mad after all! Here's a Latin American inspired salad.

Salad of quinoa, asparagus, avocado and palm hearts

I tin of palm hearts ( look for produce of Costa Rica on the tin)

6 asparagus spears lightly cooked

I avocado

1 cup of quinoa

1/2 chilli - or to taste

juice and rind of half a lime

tablespoon of chopped parsley

Home made vinaigrette - I use 100g extra virgin olive oil to 1 tablespoon of white wine vinegar, 1 clove of garlic and a teaspoon of salt. I make it in a jar and shake, keep in the fridge and top up as necessary.

Rinse the quinoa then cook it by adding it with twice its volume of water to the pan and simmer for about 10 minutes until translucent

Drain it and whilst it's warm add the vinaigrette - about 2 tablespoonfuls then add the grated lime rind and the juice. Let the whole thing cool down. Chop the palm hearts at an angle and add to the quinoa with the chopped chilli and parsley, toss lightly. Put into a pretty dish and lay the asparagus and sliced avocado on top, garnish with more lime or lemon slices. Serve cool but not chilled.

'....Serene will be our days and bright

And happy will our nature be,

When love is an unerring light,

And joy its own security.'

From: 'Ode to Duty' by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

April 11th: St. Guthlac of the Fens (673-714)

2011-04-10T14:00:00.031+01:00

'You are the bread and the knife,

the crystal goblet and the wine.

You are the dew on the morning grass

and the burning wheel of the sun.

You are the white apron of the baker,

and the marsh birds suddenly in flight...'

From ‘Litany’ by Billy Collins (b 1941)

Let’s go saint hunting in the Lincolnshire Fens. St Guthlac of the Fens was born about 673 AD. In his early youth he was a soldier in the army of King Aethelred of Mercia. However at the age of twenty four, Guthlac became a monk at Repton where his refusal to drink intoxicating drink caused much comment amongst the other monks and two years later he decided to become a hermit.

I wonder if soldiering in brutal Anglo Saxon England had given him an abhorrence of the deeds that men can do, and made him want to withdraw from the world? Anyway, Guthlac went to Crowland - then an island in the fens. Here he is arriving by boat.

The history of the fens fascinates me. They were literally the backwaters of England, teaming with life – eels and other fish and birds of every description. Think of those wildlife films you see of vast flocks of birds in Africa and you get an idea of what the fens were like before they were drained. The fen people lived off the waterland and the waterland was incredibly fruitful.

On a bend in the River Welland, St Guthlac built himself a small oratory and lived in a cell that he excavated from a prehistoric barrow. After his death in 714 a cult grew up around him; devotional poems were written about his life, and his biography ‘Vita Sancti Guthlaci’ was written by another monk – Felix.

Felix tells us that St Guthlac was tormented by British speaking demons. The visions that haunted him spoke the language of the indigenous people of Britain – not Anglo Saxon. I wonder if they were the voices of the Ancient Britons killed in battle by the Anglo Saxons and in fact Guthlac was suffering from post-traumatic stress?

Anyway poor Guthlac seems to have lived a miserable life in his barrow, eating only barley bread, drinking muddy water and wearing animal skins, his body weakened by ague and self mortification. He even shared his meagre rations with the crows and magpies because ‘man ought to set an example of patience to wild creatures’.

What Guthlac did do however, was give spiritual guidance to all who visited him. After he advised Aethelbald, the future King of Mercia, Aethelbald promised to found an Abbey when he became King and he did this two years after Guthlac’s death. Crowland Abbey met the fate of all religious houses in the sixteenth century, but its magnificent ruins survive.

Some Saints really do speak to you across the centuries and I’ve become quite fond of poor tormented Guthlac - his dark life seems so very different from St Maddern - who had a sweet little Cornish cell, a clear well and fields of herbs.

(http://feastsandfestivals.blogspot.com/2010/05/17-may-st-maddern-spring-walk.html)

What can I cook for such an ascetic person?

Here from the two Sams of the wonderful ‘Moro’ is -

Barley Bread

140g/5oz pearl barley, 1.6 litres/3 pints water, 1 tsp fine sea salt, olive oil for grilling or frying

1. Combine the barley, water and salt in a medium to large saucepan (with a thick bottom) and bring to a good simmer. Stir from time to time with a spoon to stop it from sticking on the bottom, and cook for about one hour until the total volume has reduced by half. Take care at the end of cooking, as the mixture may bubble like hot lava and could burn you.

2. Use an electric hand-held blender or food processor to roughly purée half the barley, then cook for two more minutes.

3. Remove from the heat and spread out onto an oiled plate or baking dish so that the mixture is about 2-3cm/1-11⁄4in thick. Leave until completely cold, then cut into wedges.

4. Drizzle both sides with a little olive oil and grill on a hot griddle or barbecue until crisp and slightly charred on both sides. If frying, place a frying pan over a high heat and add a little olive oil. Cook crust-side down for 3-5 minutes until browned and crisp, then turn to cook the other side for just a minute or two to warm through.

NB You have to really like the earthy taste of barley and its gelatinous texture for these to be your cup of tea. I found they browned better dusted with a little flour and I preferred then cold to hot.

I hope St Guthlac had a little bit of cheese to eat with his barley bread.

‘We gaze on wrecks of ornamented stones,

On tombs whose sculptures half erased appear,

On rank weeds, battening over human bones,

Till even one’s very shadow seems to fear.’

From: ‘Crowland Abbey’ by John Clare (1793-1864)

PS. And to prove the inclination to be a hermit is still alive and well - http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/27/neil-ansell-my-life-as-hermit

William Wordsworth : 7 April 1770-1850

2011-04-07T00:06:00.005+01:00

‘Hence rustic dinners on the cool green ground

Or in the woods, or by a river side

Or fountain – festive banquets that provoked

The languid action of a natural scene

By pleasure of corporeal appetite’

The Prelude (lines 93-97)

It’s William Wordsworth’s birthday and I’ve been thinking about early nineteenth century food and what they ate at Dove Cottage. Thomas De Quincy said that Wordsworth had an iron constitution and an excellent digestion. He remarked on it because his own digestion was dreadful and the use of opium to relieve his pain is what led to his famous addiction. Dorothy – even making allowances for her over-fondness was still always worried about William’s health. She cosseted him dreadfully.

In 1817 Wordsworth attended a dinner in London given by Benjamin Robert Haydon, a rather unsuccessful painter of historic subjects. Haydon invited Wordsworth to meet the young poet John Keats and then to make the party go with a swing he invited the wonderfully witty and sociable Charles Lamb. The evening was such a highlight in his life that Haydon referred to it in his diary as ‘The Immortal Dinner’, which became the title of a fascinating book by Penelope Hughes-Hallett – and many thanks to my friend George for telling me about it.

At this time fashions in serving food were changing towards service ‘a la Russe’ – i.e. the food coming to the table in stages as we do it nowadays. Before that there were ‘courses’ but that simply meant a sort of buffet spread to which you helped yourself from the table. So when we read menus of gigantic meals held before the early nineteenth century, it doesn’t mean everyone ate everything!

Haydon’s dinner was a great success conversationally and Charles Lamb was a great trencherman – he writes a lot about food. Wordsworth unfortunately was indifferent to all the fancy dishes and was used only to very plain fare.

At Dove Cottage the Wordsworth family lived frugally and ate a simple diet. Sir Walter Scott after a visit there, recalled 'three meals a day - two of which were porridge' and says it was a domestic life characterized by ‘plain living and high thinking’.

Behind Dove Cottage was a small garden and orchard; William described it in his poem ‘The Farewell’ as a ‘little nook of mountain ground’. Much of it was left as wilderness but they did grow a few vegetables. Dorothy Wordsworth was the family gardener and bread maker and she often writes in her diary about what she plants – runner beans were a regular feature and she frequently made records making the family bread – sometimes of wheat and sometimes barley. A dish of bread soaked in milk was the Wordsworths' most usual family supper - it was soothing to the digestion and a way of making stale bread palatable and not leaving it to waste.

So having travelled a little distance from its beginnings as a dish made from left overs here’s a rather up-market -

Bread and Butter Pudding

I do all sorts of things with B & B pudding, I make it with panettone, brioche or saffron bread, I spread my bread with marmalade or apricot jam, I omit the sultanas and put in dried apricots and sometimes substitute grated parmesan for the sugar and make a savoury cheese pudding. This is the plain sweet version.

I small loaf of good day old white bread thinly sliced and cut into triangles

3 large eggs

I large carton double cream and a splash of milk

2 tablespoons of caster sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

4oz butter

3 tablespoons sultanas or mixed dried fruit – I used a mixture and added extra peel.

1 dsp Demerara sugar

A wide shallow dish – well buttered, and a roasting tin it will fit into.

Oven 180c.

Prepare this in the morning if you can and leave it to stand all day before baking. Warm the cream in a pan and add the sugar, stir until the sugar is dissolved. Beat the eggs in a bowl and pour on the warm (not hot) cream, add the vanilla.

Melt the butter until liquid – do not brown. Lay the first layer of bread in your dish (I use the raggy bits for this layer) and brush with melted butter then sprinkle with 1/3 of the dried fruit. Repeat until all the bread, butter and fruit is used up. Make the last layer as decorative and regular as you can with the pointy ends up so they brown, now sprinkle with the last bits of fruit and a dessertspoon of Demerara sugar.

Pour on your creamy egg mix and get it well into all the cracks and crevices, you may need to add a splash of milk depending on the size of your dish. Leave the uncooked pudding to stand for at least an hour.

Put your dish in a roasting tin and pour cold water round it, now put into the pre-heated oven and bake for about 45 minutes until well risen and brown. I like to serve it warm rather than very hot, sometimes with more cream or a fruit compote – or both!!

‘Fresh butter, tea-kettle and earthenware,

And chafing dish with smoking coals

Beneath the trees we sat in our small boat

And in the covert ate our delicate meal

Upon the calm smooth lake’

The Prelude (lines 170-174)

1 April: The Wise Fools of Gotham

2011-03-31T17:10:00.020+01:00

Three Wise Men of Gotham  

Went to sea in a bowl.  

If the bowl had been stronger

 My tale had been longer. 

Nursery Rhyme c 1765

About 1540, a collection of stories was published called the ‘Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam.'The author was given as ‘A.B. Pizisicke Doctour.’ No one knows who that really was and the hint that it was Andrew Boorde, Henry VIII’s physician was probably false. The stories were not original but had previously appeared in various Mystery Plays, notably at Wakefield.

The practice of regarding people from a particular location as mad, foolish or stupid is common in many cultures across the world. In Mediaeval England, long before we pointed our fingers at the Irish, it was the much maligned inhabitants of Gotham in Nottinghamshire.

The Gothamites got their reputation from a story about King John when he was marching towards Nottingham, intending to pass through Gotham. Believing that any land crossed by a king became a public road – which they would then have to maintain, the peasants of Gotham decided to try to prevent the King from passing.

King John sent the Sherriff (of Nottingham!) to find out the reason for their lack of co-operation. When they heard this the people of Gotham decided to act as stupidly as they could, to avoid punishment. When the Sheriff arrived some villagers were trying to drown an eel in a pond, some were dragging their carts to the top of a barn to shield it from the sun's rays, some tumbled cheeses downhill hoping they would find their own way to Nottingham market, some people were building a hedge to catch a cuckoo. The sheriff and his men and asked what they were doing.

'We are rolling stones uphill to make the sun rise' they said.

'You fools!' said the Sheriff. 'Don't you know that the sun will rise without any help?'

‘Oh will it?’ they replied. ‘We never thought of that. How wise you are!’

The Sheriff gave up trying to get any sense out of them and fearing their madness was contagious, went on his way. So having got the better of their betters, the villagers became known as the wise fools of Gotham. A local expression ‘There are more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it.’ tells us what the people of Gotham think of the story which is still commemorated in the name of the Gotham pub- ‘The Cuckoo Bush’.

So it’s an obvious day to make a fool. Some cookery books suggest that ‘fool’ as in rhubarb or gooseberry comes from the French ‘fouler’ - to crush. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t and says ‘origin unknown’. It seems quite straightforward to me – if we think of the words we use for cold desserts; fool, trifle, flim-flam, whim-wham, flummery, they all signify something of little regard, light as air, a bit of nonsense, in other words something fluffy and of no account with which to sweeten off at the end of a meal.

Fools have been around at least since the time 'The Merie Tales' were published, I especially love gooseberry fool, but we’re not there yet, here’s a rhubarb one.

Rhubarb Fool

About 6-8 sticks of rhubarb

Rind and juice of an orange

2 tablespoons caster sugar

1 dsp orange flower water.

1 tub full fat creme fraiche

Wash the rhubarb, trim it and cut into one inch lengths. Put in a wide dish and sprinkle with the sugar, grated orange rind and the juice from the orange. Roast in the oven at 200c for 30 minutes. Remove and cool. Mash lightly with the back of a fork, add the orange flower water. Fold together with the creme fraiche and chill. Serve from a deep glass with a ginger biscuit or orange flavoured shortbread.

And I, which was two fools, do so grow three. 

Who are a little wise, the best fools be.

From ‘The Triple Fool’ by John Donne (1572-1631)

March 26th: The Boat Race

2011-03-24T14:35:00.030Z

'Yes, the danger must be growing

For the rowers keep on rowing

And they're certainly not showing

Any signs that they are slowing.'

From 'The Rowing Song' by Roald Dahl, (1916-1990)

It’s the 157^th Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race today - sixteen big chaps giving it their absolute all. I shall be watching.

The race began in 1829 after Charles Merivale of Cambridge challenged his old school friend Charles Wordsworth of Oxford to an ‘eight’s race'. The first race was held at Henley on Thames but not long afterwards moved downriver to the Thames tideway. The course is now over the four or so miles between Putney and Mortlake. About a quarter of a million people turn out to watch the race from the riverside – and the pubs along its length; and some 20 million more watch it on the television.

The University Boat Race is not the oldest rowing race on the Thames. That honour goes to the Doggett's Coat and Badge race, the oldest rowing race in the world. Six apprentice Thames Watermen compete in Doggett's race, which has been rowed between London Bridge and Chelsea every year since 1715. The prize is a traditional Watermen's red coat with a silver badge displaying the horse of the House of Hanover and the word 'Liberty', in honour of the accession of George I to the throne. Aren't these guys totally fabulous?

The Oxford and Cambridge Boat race is a result of a challenge to the winners sent by the losers of the previous race and the current tally of wins stands at Cambridge 79 and Oxford 74, with one dead heat in 1877. There was nearly another dead heat in 2003 when Cambridge won by a margin of only 12 inches.

The course winds round in a big loop so it’s a race of tactics as well as manpower, the speed of the tide, the wind and the state of the river all have to been taken into account. The teams try and find the line of the fastest stream, so the toss of the coin which decides which team takes the Middlesex side and which the Surrey side can be decisive.

I find it really exciting and it's one of those British national events that tie us into our joint past. My Dad could remember the 1949 race when the BBC radio commentator reported: ‘I can't see who's in the lead but it's either Oxford or Cambridge’ and I can remember 1978 when in very rough weather the Cambridge boat sank.

So Oxford sausages or Cambridge tarts? I’m very partisan about the Boat Race and always support Oxford, so I’ve made Oxford sausages. These have two distinctive features; no skins and a unique ‘C’ shape. They would be a great breakfast for a beefy rower – unfortunately there wasn’t one on hand this morning.

Oxford Sausages

8oz minced pork  and 8oz minced veal or lamb

 4oz shredded suet  (I used vegetable suet - think of your arteries)

4oz fresh breadcrumbs 

Grated rind of 1 lemon

1 egg

½ tsp grated nutmeg , 1 tsp fresh chopped sage  or marjoram, 1tsp fresh thyme

salt and black pepper 

Tbsp flour for coating  and oil for frying

Mix the meats, suet, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, nutmeg and herbs in a large bowl. Add the egg to the mix and mix thoroughly. Form the mix into sausage shapes on a floured board, coat each sausage with flour and shape into a C.

Fry or grill for about 8 minutes or until thoroughly cooked through.

Just a quick comment about the recipe, which was taken from an old WI collection. The nutmeg/lemon/ marjoram combo was delicious, but I think I'd make them like a meat ball and limit breadcrumbs and suet to a bare minimum - they were a bit stodgy - and difficult to photograph elegantly..

Enjoy the race.

‘Jolly boating weather,

And a hay harvest breeze,

Blade on the feather,

Shade off the trees,

Swing swing together,

With your bodies between your knees.’

From: The Eton Boating Song. Words by William J. Cory (1823–1892)

19 March: St Joseph

2011-03-18T15:02:00.019Z

…Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

From: ‘Those Winter Sundays’ by Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

For Christians, today is the Feast Day of St Joseph the earthly father of Jesus and in many countries it's a day to celebrated the joys and trials of fatherhood. I love the poem by Robert Hayden quoted above about the love his father showed in his actions but unfortunately never in his words.

St Joseph's feast day is mainly celebrated in Italy but also significantly by the Italian immigrants of the southern USA. The Italian community of the south is mainly of Sicilian origin and St Joseph holds a special place in the heart of Sicilians. They believe it was the intercession of ‘San Giuseppe’ that averted tragedy during a drought there in the Middle Ages. The rain that fell on the saint’s day meant that the bean crop was saved and starvation averted.

Both in Sicily and in Italian-American communities the thing to do on St Joseph’s Day is to prepare ‘St Joseph’s Altar’ - ‘la tavola di San Giuse’. The table is covered with good things to eat which are symbolic of the famine and of St Joseph’s patronage of pastry cooks.

‘The gift of a blessed bean is the most well known of the customs associated with the St. Joseph's Day altar….(when) the dried bean is commonly called the lucky bean. Legend has it that the person who carries a ‘lucky bean’ will never be without coins.'

From: ‘St. Joseph's Day Altars’ by Anna Maria Chupa

In addition to the bean, the table is decked with wonderful breads which are fabulously shaped and moulded into crosses and symbols of St Joseph and his work as a carpenter. There will also be pastries and artichokes and lemons, candles and flowers. A green olive branch over the door invites passers by to enter and the table is blessed before the good things are distributed to the needy. A St Joseph's table might also be put together in a community centre as well as in a church and become the focus of a really good supper! A google images search will throw up many wonderful tavola - alas none were copyright free to use here, so we have John Minton instead.

Sicily is famous for its many pastries and a Tavola di San Giuse will also be laden with choux buns, ricotta fritters and biscuits filled with fig puree. The evening meal on St Joseph’s Day will often be of Pasta Milanese sprinkled with breadcrumbs symbolizing the sawdust in Joseph’s workshop. San Giuseppe celebrations have become more common across Italy as the Sicilian influence has spread, maybe because they provide a good excuse for having a little feast on a date that always falls during Lent.

So what to make? I love beans, so a solitary bean feast is on the cards – and on the table. I've taken some key ingredients from St Joseph's table and adapted this very loosely from a recipe in my very ancient copy of Elizabeth David's Book of Mediterranean Food.

San Giuseppe Bean Salad (for 1)

50ml extra virgin olive oil

Fat clove of garlic finely chopped

2 artichoke bottoms or grilled baby artichokes - from a jar or the deli counter

Half a chili

Cooked beans - about half a tin – You could use any sort but borlotti or broad beans would be the best

Parsley

Good breadcrumbs

Heat the oil through and fry the chili and garlic until golden, drain and remove but reserve the bits. Now fry the breadcrumbs until golden and lift out with a slotted spoon and set aside on kitchen paper.

Gently warm the beans and artichokes in the remaining oil (not too much - it's a warm salad not a hot one), add the chili/garlic back in, plate up and sprinkle with the parsley and the crumbs - these give a lovely crunchiness against the creamy beans. Eat with tomato salad and good bread.

Felice San Giuseppe!

‘Parfois je pense à toi, Joseph

Mon pauvre ami, lorsque l'on rit

De toi qui n'avais demandé

Qu'à vivre heureux avec Marie’

From ‘Joseph’ by Georges Moustaki (b1934)

Isabella Beeton: Born 12 March 1836

2011-03-11T12:34:00.043Z

We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

Owen Meredith: Earl of Lytton (1831-1891).

Isabella Beeton was the original domestic goddess. She introduced the aspiring Victorian middle classes to the ‘right’ way to manage a household, control servants and produce an elegant and fully costed dinner sufficient to impress the neighbours. All this despite dying at only twenty-eight years old.

Kathryn Hughes’s excellent biography ‘The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton’ explains how despite her early death, Isabella’s husband Samuel, a canny publisher, continued to produce ever more editions of ‘Mrs Beeton’ to serve the voracious and popular demand for her guidance which lasted well into the next century. In the 1890s my Grandmother was the cook for the Pickerings, a family of Hull trawlers owners who had made a fortune by going into steam power early. Her employer Rachael Pickering would have been the classic Mrs Beeton customer.

My own Mrs Beeton is an ancient edition of ‘Everyday Cookery’ first published in 1865, the year of her death. Its introduction is one of the last things she wrote:

‘We have been driven to feel that for all girls in every station of life, cookery should be a necessary part of education; and that to cook without knowing anything about the constituents or properties of the various kinds of food used is a great mistake.’

Substitute ‘everyone’ for girls and that’s a good principal for today’s ready meal world. Mind you, she does go on to say 'There is an innate love for housekeeping in most girls and it might so easily be cultivated.' Hmm...

Mrs B. has been much maligned poor woman, with her reputation for boiling vegetables until they are tasteless pulp and her countless variations on the steamed pudding, but there are good things in the books too. She is a stickler for using only seasonal food – mostly because of its cheapness. She is brilliantly varied, I think she’s good on fish and she reminds us not only of what we have gained by way of easy refrigeration, food processors and so on, but she reminds us of what we have lost as well. I have a weakness for moulds and shapes so some of the illustrations are right up my street.

Mrs Beeton was far from original. Her recipes are gleaned from Brillat-Savarin, Carème, and above all her British predecessor, Eliza Acton, who was the first cook to realise the potential market for instruction manuals amongst those new to the middle classes. What Mrs B does brilliantly though, is to make it all very accessible and attainable. For example, every month she provides her readers with a number of seasonal menus; and in order to help us keep up with the Jones’s she translates it into French for the Menu cards. Here’s one of the menus for March.

Spring Soup

Fried Whiting

Stewed sweetbreads

Leg of Lamb

Potatoes. Savoy

Ptarmigan

Rhubarb Tart

Cream

Lemon Jelly

That’s all one meal!

In 1865 Isabella died after the birth of her fourth child from that scourge of Victorian motherhood – puerperal fever, spread by the infected hands of doctors who should have known better. Samuel survived her until 1877 but his failing health meant by that time, the 'Mrs Beeton' brand had been sold to the publishers Ward Lock. Neither he nor Isabella could possibly have realised what they had started; Isabella Beeton to Nigella Lawson – the domestic goddess lives on.

I went to Stevenson’s fish shop in Newlyn yesterday and Mrs Beeton would be proud of me, there were fresh whiting for £1 each.

Mrs Beeton’s Fried Whiting

Egg and breadcrumbs, a little flour, hot lard or clarified dripping. Average cost 4d-6d each.

Take off the skins, clean and thoroughly wipe the fish free from moisture, as this is most essential in order that the egg and bread-crumbs may properly adhere. Fasten the tail in the mouth by means of a small skewer, brush the fish over with the egg, dredge with a little flour and cover with the breadcrumbs. Fry them in the hot lard of (sic) a nice colour and serve them on a napkin garnished with fried parsley. Send them to the table with a shrimp sauce or melted butter.

Time: about 6 minutes, Seasonable: all the year but best from October to March

I wasn’t sure about this, if I put the tails in the mouth first how would I fry the fish evenly, ditto how do I skin them but keep them whole?

So I put my trust in Mrs B and did exactly what she told me.

I immediately discovered that whiting have very sharp teeth, so the tails hold in the mouth very easily, and their skins are paper thin. I made a skin-deep incision round the tail and another behind the gills, then I cut off the fins with scissors. Getting my fingers under an edge of skin it came off quite easily - I used my kitchen scissors to help me. So far so good.

Then I dried the fish, brushed it with egg, floured and breadcrumbed it. I fried it flat for a few minutes to brown it and then put its tail in its mouth and finished it in a hot oven. It worked well, the only thing I did wrong was not to breadcrumb the head - so that it looked a bit bald and the photo tastefully omits to show its gnashing jaws.

'You shall have a fishy on a little dishy,

You shall have a fishy when the boat comes in.

Dance ti' th' daddy, my little laddie, dance ti' th' daddy, my little man.

Dance ti' th' daddy, sing ti' thy mommy, dance ti' th' daddy, when the boat comes in.'

Traditional Northumberland Folk song

PS. We're about to get a BBC documentary about Mrs Beeton fronted by Sophie Dahl so keep an eye out for it.

8 March: Mardi Gras

2011-03-06T17:54:00.070Z

'Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee,

He loves not Temperance, or Authority,

But is compos'd of passion....'

From 'Lent' by George Herbert (1593-1633)

‘Fat Tuesday’ aka ‘Mardi Gras’ is the day before Lent starts. Given the limits on personal enjoyment that Lent imposed – no sex, limited food, lots of devotional activities, it’s not surprising that Fat Tuesday was enjoyed as the last opportunity to let yourself go before Ash Wednesday when you had to be all penitential.

The word ‘Carnival’ comes from the Latin 'carne vale' – farewell to the flesh, and it means that in every sense of the word. Carnival was the season when all the good things were eaten up before the Lenten fast began, it was a signal to let your hair down and pull your skirts up. In 1817 Byron wrote to a friend from Venice to say he was on an invalid regime, having spent too many late nights during Carnival with 'the sword wearing out the scabbard'. Hmm...

Mardi Gras carnivals emigrated to the United States with the 18th century French settlers in the deep south, and the Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans are an essential part of the city’s economy which is as fragile as the levees which protect it.

The people whose Mardi Gras celebrations interest me most however are the Louisiana Acadians – the Cajuns as they are more commonly known. Their story is well known in the southern USA where it is regarded as one of the most shameful episodes of British colonialism.

The ancestors of the Cajuns were French Catholic settlers of 'Acadia' on the Atlantic coast of Canada. They arrived there about 1607 but around 1755 they were turned out by the British in a brutal episode of ethnic cleansing. Some 15,000 people were forcibly expelled from their homes. About a third of them – mostly women and children died during the process. Some Acadians went back to France, but some wandered south and these days there are twenty-seven parishes of their descendants in the swampy southern areas of Louisiana.

Cajun language, music and culture became amply seasoned with Creole and Native American influences and is still highly distinctive, as is their cuisine. Cajun country is very rural and the food is hearty, spicy, and based on rice, beans, pork, chicken and shellfish. I love it.

‘Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic and Can You Make a Roux?’ is a cookbook by Marcelle Bienvenue which reinforces the view that Cajun identity is rooted in family, community, food, and devout Roman Catholicism. The roux of the title, along with a fiery spice mix, are the two main foundations of Cajun cooking.

Enough. Let’s cook.

This traditional Cajun dish is from Emeril Lagasse’s book ‘Louisiana Real and Rustic’. It’s from Evangeline Parish and it’s a Mardi Gras speciality which is made by families getting together before Lent starts. The recipe uses American measurements, but they are really easy, just use a small mug if you haven’t got a set of measuring cups and I’ve tinkered with the ingredients a bit.

Chicken and Sausage Gumbo

1/2 cup vegetable oil and 1/2 cup plain flour

1½ cups chopped onion, 1 cup chopped celery, 1 sliced pepper

1 large piece of chorizo and 1 lb raw chicken meat chopped into one inch chunks

1 tsp salt, ¼ tsp cayenne, 3 bay leaves

6 cups water

2 tsp Cajun spice mix - buy this or make it - see below*

2 tablespoons chopped parsley, ½ cup chopped spring onions or chives

1 tablespoon filé powder (ground sassafras) and a dollop of sour cream – both optional but good.

Cajun spice mix is culinary nirvana as far as I'm concerned. Make up a quantity and keep it in a jar. I cannot tell you how heavenly it is. Rub it on a piece of indifferent farmed salmon, let it stand for an hour, then roast - and wow. This is my version of Emeril's recipe. He adds onion and garlic powder as well: 8 tsp paprika, 3 tsp cayenne, 5 tsp freshly ground black pepper, 4 tsp sea salt, 3 tsp dried oregano, 3 tsp dried thyme. Mix well, store in an airtight jar.

Method

Coat the chicken in the cajun spice mix and set it aside. Make the roux by mixing the oil and flour and stirring-stirring-stirring over a medium heat until it's the colour of a dark milk chocolate - it takes about 20 minutes. Have all the vegetables chopped ready and add them to the roux when it's attained the right colour. Keep stirring, after 3 or 4 minutes add the sausage, spices and the water. Bring to the boil then simmer uncovered on a low hear for about an hour.

Add the chicken to the pot and simmer for another hour, skim off any fat which rises to the top ( I didn't bother). Remove from heat and add the parsley, put in a dollop of cream and sprinkle with chives or chopped spring onions. Serve with white rice from deep bowls.

This is very warming and comforting. You can make the roux in advance and keep it in the fridge until needed.

and here's the fabulous John Hegley -

Lent

'Lent, is meant to be spent fasting,

In rememberance of the Lord,

Lasting six weeks without a decent meal,

Six weeks in the desert,

Without any dinner, without any dessert,

And without any tart, but he saved on rent,

and before he went he ate plenty of pancakes.'

John Hegley (b 1953)

Packing 'em in...

2011-03-06T07:58:00.000Z

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at The Morrab Library on 'Feasts and Festivals' and very belatedly I've caught up with 'The Cornishman's report on it...

http://www.thisiscornwall.co.uk/news/Liz-packs-em-true-taste-feast/article-3285652-detail/article.html

5 March: St Piran and the Cornish Pasty

2011-03-01T08:43:00.032Z

We ’ll cross the Tamar, land to land,

The Severn is no stay,

With ‘one and all,’ and hand in hand,

And who shall bid us nay?

From 'Song of the Western Men' by Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875)

It's St Piran's Day and I'm making pasties again as I did last year. However there's an extra reason to celebrate this year because the Cornish Pasty has just been given PGI status. PGI is a European Union system to protect local products, it stands for 'Protected Geographical Indication'. This means that commercially made Cornish Pasties join Gorgonzola, Champagne, the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie and Stilton in having to conform to certain standards. They must also be prepared (although not necessarily baked) in Cornwall to be referred to as Cornish Pasty.

Here's what the CPA (Cornish Pasty Association) has to say:

'A genuine Cornish pasty has a distinctive ‘D’ shape and is crimped on one side, never on top. The texture of the filling is chunky, made up of uncooked minced or roughly cut chunks of beef (not less than 12.5%), swede, potato, onion with a light seasoning. The pastry casing is golden in colour, savoury, glazed with milk or egg and robust enough to retain its shape throughout the cooking and cooling process without splitting or cracking. The pasty is slow-baked and no artificial flavourings or additives must be used. It must also be made in Cornwall.'

I've only got one comment about what the CPA says, and that's about with the crimping. When I was researching pasty making last year, 'crimp on the side' or 'crimp on the top' was a hot topic. I was told that crimping on the side is the West Cornwall way, and living in the far west that's what I did. This implies that crimping on the top is common practice elsewhere in Cornwall...but I'm really not qualified to comment.

What is worth saying is that a Cornish pasty was the food of the working people of Cornwall, when times were hard it may not have had meat in it or the meat might be taken home after the rest was eaten and then baked in another pasty the next day. If there were fish to spare it might contain a fish and quite often it contained offal. Getting PGI status mustn't fool us or let us forget that the standard recipe now isn't necessarily the way it's always been.

It's also World Book Day today and the Morrab Library here in Penzance will be giving away copies of Philip Pullman's 'Northern Lights' to children in the St Piran's Day choir and copies of 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold' to their parents, we'll also be indulging ourselves all day in that other great Cornish institution - the cream tea.

It's Lent next week - bit of a relief really...

Cornish Pasties (makes 5)

Shortcrust pastry – I made this with 4oz butter, 5oz lard and 1lb plain flour (and water and salt)

3/4lb swede

2 medium potatoes

2 onions

1lb beef skirt

Salt and black pepper

Knob butter for each pasty

Egg to seal and glaze

I blitzed the onion in my food processor until it was fingernail sized bits, and then I sliced the swede and the potato very thinly. I put all of these into three separate bowls (I covered the potato with water to stop it going black), and then I chopped the meat into small pieces across the grain (very important) and put it into a fourth bowl. So now I could get a production line going. I rolled out my pastry and cut circles with a small plate. I put a good pile of onion, swede, meat and potato (in that order) onto each pastry circle and seasoned well, then I dropped a knob of butter on the top. Remember the contents will shrink as the pasty cooks, so fill it well.

Then I folded the pastry over from front to back and sealed the edge. I tried to make sure it wouldn’t leak by turning and twisting the seam and this year they were leak free!

Then I brushed the pasties with egg, put them on a baking tray and baked them at 200c for 25 minutes then reduced the heat to 170c for another 40 minutes. I took them across to the Library and we scoffed them for lunch.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

ate a pasty five feet long,

Ate it once, ate it twice,

Oh my Lord, it's full of mice

Cornish children's playground rhyme

1 March: St David's Day

2011-02-28T22:08:00.055Z

'There were three jovial Welshmen

As I have heard men say,

And they would go a-hunting

Upon St David's Day..'

Anonymous 17c Welsh Ballad

It’s St David’s Day again, time to celebrate all things Welsh. I spent the happiest years of my childhood in Wales and all my oldest friends are from there. So ‘Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus’ to all. That actually means have a tidy St David’s Day, but you get the gist.

I was in my early teens when we moved there from Yorkshire and I'm sure the little town we lived in was where Dylan Thomas found some of the characters for Under Milk Wood. There were salmon poachers on the river and there were lots of extra marital goings on in the town. On one famous occasion when a husband came home unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon, the Nogood Boyo in the bedroom grabbed his shirt and nothing else and leapt from the window. His wife grounded him when he got home by the simple expedient of cutting off the legs of all his trousers.

The old lady who was the council rent collector was ancient, not often sober and went round town in an old raincoat with hundreds of pounds in her open briefcase. My Dad worked with someone who was a 'home nudist' i.e. she went naked as soon as she got behind her own front door, unfortunately she never drew her curtains. I went to school with Ivor Weale whose father owned the local garage and the milkman, Ralph Dyer, would open the back door and shout 'Dyer 'ere' when he dropped off your pinta.

We’d been there about a year when my Mum remarked casually to a friend that we’d only ever seen a Wye salmon in the river and not on our plates. A few days later a parcel arrived wrapped in newspaper and string, we were instructed to eat the fish and bury the bones and bits in the garden, on no account should we put anything fishy in the dustbin…

I went to the pictures every Saturday night and then on to the disco in the Strand Hall where I danced with country boys who smelt of coal tar soap. I joined the tiny public library, and as I disdained the children’s books, the elderly librarian let me have an adult ticket, but vetted what I borrowed. In the school holidays I had a part time job in an old fashioned chemists shop where I got bustled into the back when farmers' wives came in for all their necessities, in case I should be corrupted by their requirements.

For completely sentimental reasons I’ve made a pot of Liptauer - something we bought every week from Lyn Davies at Bristol House Grocers. There was always a big bowl of it in the chill cabinet next to the Brussels pate. How did this delicious Austrian cheese dip ever get to Breconshire in the 1970s? I’ll never know. There are lots of different versions. Here’s my recipe.

Liptauer

200 g cream cheese – the higher the fat the firmer the dip

100g goats cheese or feta - I think feta is better(!)

1 heaped teaspoon Hungarian paprika, you can always add more after tasting..

2 teaspoon capers chopped

2-3 cornichons finely chopped

1 teaspoon caraway seeds, I lightly crush them.

Blitz the two cheeses together, then add the other ingredients, mix well and put it in the bowl from which you want to serve it. Sprinkle with more paprika and a drizzle of oil.

Liptauer is fantastic on anything from water biscuits to black bread - I especially like it on slices of good rye loaf with extra gherkins or on a baked potato.

'Now the town is dusk. Each cobble, donkey, goose and gooseberry street is a thoroughfare of dusk - and night's first darkening snow and the sleep of birds....'

From 'Under Milk Wood' by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

25th February: Renoir and a clutch of birthdays

2011-02-24T19:29:00.022Z

‘It once might have been, once only:

We lodged in a street together,

You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,

I, a lone she-bird of his feather.’

From 'Youth and Art' by Robert Browning (1812-1889)

It's a very popular day for birthdays today. There's the painter Renoir (1841), the novelist and critic Anthony Burgess (1917), the actor Sir Tom Courtenay (1937) and the film maker and all round good guy David (Lord) Puttnam (1941). It’s been fun thinking about what I could cook for any of these anniversaries – French Café food, something with oranges, something fishy because Tom Courtenay is from my home city of Hull and I’m at a bit of a loss for David Puttman, except it should be barbecued on a chariot of fire.

I put a lot of writers and poets on this blog because words are my first love and consequently we have less artists and musicians. So for a change let’s talk about a painter. What do I think of, when I think of Renoir? Parisian cafes, pretty women, gorgeous frocks, dashing young men, voluptuous nudes, wine, sunshine…. indeed Renoir himself said ‘Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.’

Renoir captured all the frivolity of French café life in the late nineteenth century. He started life as a painter of porcelain but by the age of 19 he was living in Paris where he met his friends Monet and Sisley - members of the incipient impressionist movement. Renoir threw himself into the sort of rackety artistic life that Puccini portrayed in ‘La Boheme’. In a letter to his fellow painter Bazille he said ‘Although we (he and Monet) don't eat every day, I am still quite cheerful.’

His early paintings show boat trips and picnics full of young people – many of them portraits of Renoir’s friends, all having a jolly good time. Like many of his fellow impressionists he preferred natural light and so often painted outside – indeed he was almost thrown into the Seine during the days of the Paris Commune in 1871 when he was thought to be a spy. I think the dappled light of this scene is simply wonderful.

Le Moulin de la Galette (1876)

Renoir fully established his reputation with a solo exhibition held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1883 and his paintings from the 1880s reflect a move away from Impresssionism towards classical art and the female nude. In 1887, he completed a series of studies of a group of nude female figures known as "The Bathers". Unsurpassed in their representation of feminine grace, they show Renoir’s huge skill in depicting the textures of skin and drapery.

His later life was marred by horrible arthritis but he continued to paint even though he had to have the brush placed in his hand. He moved to the balmier climate of the south of France and his late pictures show the luminosity of light and landscape there. He died in Provence in 1919.

So here’s a little peasant dish that Renoir and Monet might have rustled up in their chilly studio up in Montmartre.

Omelette au pain (for one)

One egg, half a cup of breadcrumbs, salt and pepper, knob of butter.

Break the egg and whisk with a fork, add the breadcrumbs and leave until thoroughly soaked through. Season well. Heat your omelette pan and when it’s really hot add the butter. Whilst it’s still frothy pour in the egg mixture and turn down the heat to half. When the bottom is nicely cooked, flip to the centre and turn out onto the plate.

This is omelette au pain at its most basic; you can add cheese, onion, bits of bacon – whatever there is in the cupboard.

‘Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer.

Si clair, 

Leur incarnat léger qu’il voltige dans l’air 

Assoupi de sommeils touffus.’

From ‘L'après-midi d'un faune’ by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)

Trans: 'These nymphs, I would immortalise them. /
So bright/
Their rosy flesh that hovers there, light
In the air /drowsy with dense slumbers.'

19 February 'Riding the Stang'

2011-02-17T19:52:00.042Z

'If onny o’ you husbands your good wives do bang

Let em cum to uz and we’ll ride em the stang'

Yorkshire Riding Song (Trad)

I was rather hoping to save talking about 'Riding the Stang' for the summer, when feasts and festivals are somewhat thin on the ground, but an exceptionally late Easter this year means we have a bit of a hiatus. In fact Riding the Stang could actually happen at any time throughout the year, but let’s have it now.

So what exactly is ‘Riding the Stang’? Well stang is the old Norse word for ladder. Riding the stang was an activity carried out by the young men of a village when one of their neighbours did something of which they and the community, disapproved. The most common target was a man who beat his wife, but homosexual behaviour, adultery, henpecking and witchcraft were other activities often publicly condemned this way.

An effigy would be made of old clothes stuffed with straw and it would be given a signifying characteristic, so everyone could work out who it was. This was then tied to a ladder and carried round the village on the men’s shoulders. Pennies would be thrown or given to the riding lads. Finally the straw effigy was taken aloft to the house of the offending party and by shouting, blowing whistles and banging pots and pans a great din would be made so that everyone knew what was going on. The practice was repeated for up to three nights and then the effigy was burned in a prominent place. The pennies were spent in the ale house. It all sounds rather amusing, but actually I think it was probably deeply unpleasant.

Riding the Stang was common in the agricultural villages of East Yorkshire right up to 1900. The village of Hunmanby near Scarborough stopped the practice in 1860 upon the orders of the Lord of the Manor, Admiral Mitford. During the last riding episode that year, the bonfire got rather out of hand. The straw effigy was burned on Cross Hill adjacent to the market cross. Unfortunately the landlord of the White Swan Inn had left half a barrel of pitch unattended. Not surprisingly the riding boys added it to the fire. The resulting conflagration was so great that it burned down the village stocks and melted the lead on the market cross, causing the Saxon cross on top to collapse. So - no more 'ridings'.

The practice of ‘charivari’ was very similar to riding the stang and was often carried out on the occasion of uneven marriages – particularly between older women and young men. 'Rough Music' is the term more commonly used in the south of England for the same practice, there's an episode of it in 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'.

I think such rascally behaviour demands an appropriate Yorkshire treat. A Fat Rascal is basically a big decorated scone. If you're ever in one of Betty's Tea Rooms in Yorkshire have one for me.

Fat Rascals

150g plain flour and 150g self-raising flour sieved together
1 tsp baking powder
130g cold butter, cubed
90g caster sugar
Grated rind of an orange and a lemon
150g mixed dried fruit - I like to include some finely chopped peel in this
1 egg, lightly beaten and
50ml milk
To decorate
1 egg yolk, 1 tbsp water, pinch of salt, glacé cherries or apricots and blanched almonds
Oven 200°C,

Sieve both flours and the baking powder into a large bowl. Add the butter and rub into the flour until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add the sugar, citrus rind and dried fruit and mix well. Add the beaten egg and enough milk to bring the mixture together into a soft dough, I find this easier to do on a board than in a bowl. Form the mixture into 6 saucer-sized rounds, about 2cm deep.

Mix the egg yolk, water and salt together to make a glaze and brush this over the fat rascals. Decorate so as to make two eyes and prominent teeth. Transfer to a non-stick baking tray and bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden brown.

The citrus zest and candied peel is what really makes these absolutely delicious, you don't need to butter them as you would a scone.

Undone by the past

he once sold his wife and child

Nobody's perfect.

Haiku on 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' by David M Bader.

12 February: International Darwin Day

2011-02-11T21:54:00.043Z

Thus nature and thus science spake

In Flora’s friendly bower

Whilst Darwin’s glory seemed to wake

New life in ever’y flower

From ‘To Dr. Darwin’ by William Hayley (1745-1820)*

Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on February 12^th 1809. His father Robert Darwin was the son of Erasmus Darwin a famous doctor and freethinker and his mother was the daughter of Josiah Wedgewood.

Here's Darwin at eight:

‘About this time, I sometimes stored fruit for the sake of eating it; and one of my schemes was ingenious. The kitchen garden was kept locked in the evening, and was surrounded by a high wall, but by the aid of neighbouring trees I could easily get on the coping. I then fixed a long stick into the hole at the bottom of a rather larger flowerpot, and by dragging this upwards pulled off peaches and plums, which fell into the pot and the prizes were thus secured.'

Like his father and grandfather before him, Darwin was intended for a career in medicine, but was too squeamish to undertake surgery so he went to Cambridge with the intention of training for the Church. However his utter fascination with the natural world meant that far from taking courses leading towards ordination, he studied botany and geology. These subjects were regarded at that time as no more than 'gentlemanly hobbies' and Robert Darwin despaired of his son ever making anything of himself.

The summer he left Cambridge, one of Darwin’s tutors John Henslow recommended him as a naturalist to accompany a Naval ship on a voyage to survey the coast of South America. There was then a delay caused by Robert Darwin’s objections to his son’s journey - he thought it an unsuitable thing for a prospective clergyman to do. Eventually Josiah Wedgewood intervened on Charles' behalf, however another naturalist had been appointed in the meantime.

Fortunately Captain Fitzroy (pictured above and what a hero he was) was anxious to share his cabin only with someone that he thought he could get on with and he chose Charles Darwin. Darwin was 22 and Fitzroy only four years older. The course of history would have been changed if Fitzroy had not made that simple personal preference. When he heard that he was to join ‘The Beagle’, Darwin wrote to Fitzroy saying - ‘My second life will begin and it shall be as a birthday for the rest of my life.’ How prescient is that?

So today is Darwin Day, when we can promote and celebrate the towering achievement of one of the greatest of all thinkers. Darwin showed us that that human beings were not created to have dominion over nature but that we are part of that nature. There will be Darwin celebrations and lectures all over the world today. This is what The International Darwin Day Foundation has to say:

‘Recognizing science as an international language accessible to all individuals and societies, International Darwin Day provides a new global holiday that transcends separate nationalities and cultures. …..In Darwin Day, we are able to recognize the diversity among us, while celebrating our common humanity and the universal understanding we share.’

So to celebrate I suppose I could make a primordial soup (joke) but actually I’m going to make plum and walnut pie and think of the small Charles Darwin scrumping fruit over the kitchen garden wall.

Plum and Walnut Pie

8 ripe plums

2 tablespoons demerara sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

12 walnut halves

Shortcrust pastry*

*I made this the way my Mum does - 4oz fat (she uses half lard) 4oz self raising flour and 4 oz plain flour. Pinch salt, 1 egg, splash of cold water - depending on the size of the egg. It makes a scone like pastry.

Put the stoned and quartered plums in a pie dish and add the walnuts, sugar and cinnamon. Cover with the pastry, put on a baking tray and bake for 30 minutes at 180c. Easy as pie.

* Hayley was referring to Erasmus not Charles Darwin

'Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been, must ever be.'

From 'Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhhod' by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

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February 7th: St Ives Feast

2011-02-03T14:03:00.048Z

'Here goes up goes the silver ball
Free for country, town and all'
'Guage wheg ya guare teg - Fair play is good play'

It is Quinquagesima Sunday today and so tomorrow is St Ives Feast. I’ve been foraging for St Ives references in the archives of The Morrab Library and the archivist dug out for me a first edition of Richard Carew’s book ‘A Survey of Cornwall’. Based on information gathered in the late sixteenth century it was dedicated to Sir Walter Raleigh and printed in 1602. It was wonderful to be able to use something so old not just as an object of curiosity but for its original purpose as a reference text.

One of the main activities of the St Ives Feast is the hurling game still played between teams of children on Porthmeor beach on Feast Day which is tomorrow. Hurling used to be played all over Cornwall but now there are games only in St Ives and St Columb. The game is played with a silver ball (a bit like the Golden Snitch in Quidditch). The Mayor throws the ball into the crowd with the words quoted above. This is how Carew described the game when he saw it about 1580. It's a lot gentler these days!

Whosever getteth seizure of this ball, findeth himselfe generally pursued by the adverse party; neither will they leave, till he be layd flat on Gods dear earth…..The Hurlers take their next way over hilles, dales, hedges, ditches; yea, and thorow bushes, briers, mires, plashes and rivers whatsoever; so as you shall sometimes see 20 or 30 lie tugging together in the water, scrambling and scratching for the ball. A play (verily) both rude & rough, and yet such, as is not destitute of policies, in some sort resembling the feats of warre.

In Carew's day St Ives was a town of 'a very meane sort'. The only industry was pilchard fishing and he describes how the fish were preserved.

They are saved three maner of wayes: by fuming, pressing, or pickelling. For every of which, they are first salted and piled up row by row in square heapes on the ground in some celler …..where they so remaine for some ten daies, until the superfluous moysture of the bloud and salt be soked from them……Those that serve for the hotter Countries of Spaine and Italie, they used at first to fume, by hanging them up on long sticks one by one, in a house built for the nonce, & there drying them with the smoake of a soft and continuall fire, from whence they purchased the name of Fumados….

Until 2005 the Pilchard Works in Newlyn still preserved Cornish pilchards in the same way as described by Carew. The pilchards were exported to Italy, where they were used to make spaghetti alla puttanesca. These days the Pilchard Works no longer makes the traditional product but cans the fish in a number of different ways, packing them into delightful little tins.

This a Sicilian recipe for a pasta sauce with tinned sardines or pilchards.

Pasta with Cornish Pilchards and Fennel (for 2)

 One tin of Cornish pilchards in extra virgin olive oil
 1 fennel bulb, sliced and trimmed, with fronds reserved  
1 garlic clove, finely chopped 
30g golden sultanas
 1 tsp fennel seeds
 ½ red chili, finely chopped
a few slivers of lemon zest
 180g dried pasta - I used penne
 2 tbsp toasted pine nuts** If in doubt use pistachios as I did.

** Pine nuts. A friend of mine recently had a nasty attack of ‘pine nut mouth’ – it’s caused by an allergic reaction to Chinese pine nuts. It won’t kill you, but for days and days you will have a vile metallic taste in your mouth. Please don’t buy unlabelled pine nuts. Italian ones are a different variety and quite safe. There’s an article on wikipedia if you want to know more.

Cook the pasta in boiling, salted water. Whilst that is doing drain the fish and heat the fishy
oil in a large saucepan, add the fennel slices and cook over a medium heat for 5 minutes. Add the garlic, sultanas, fennel seeds and chilli. Cook for another 5 minutes. Add the fish pieces to the pan - I kept them fairly chunky. Warm the fish through.  Drain the pasta and add to the fishy mixture before the pasta dries off too much. Divide between two plates. Finely chop the fennel fronds and sprinkle over the nuts and lemon zest.

NB If you don't eat fish you can substitute smoked tofu for the pilchards, I tried it - it was good..

As I was going to St Ives
I met a man with seven wives
Each wife had seven sacks
Each sack had seven cats
Each cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, sacks, wives 
How many were going to St Ives?

Traditional Riddle

31 January: Anna Pavlova (1881- 31 January 1931)

2011-01-25T22:09:00.022Z

Dark-eyed,  O woman of my dreams,

 Ivory sandaled, 

There is none like thee among the dancers,

None with swift feet..

From: Dance Figure by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

There are lots of mysteries surrounding the most famous classical dancer of all time – her parentage, her age, the man who may or may not have been her husband, her last words… So let’s stick to what we do know. She was born in St Petersburg in the daughter of a laundress and her dark exotic beauty hinted at an interesting but unknown and unknowable ancestry.

She herself said that she was determined to become a dancer after seeing a ballet performance at the age of eight in the Mariinsky Theatre. She could not have been better placed in time and space to achiever that ambition. Physically however she was not suited to be a classical dancer, she was much taller than was usual, she had thin delicate ankles and highly arched feet – not the physical traits that the dance schools looked for.

However she had the looks and the determination and an enormous capacity for hard work. After completing the rigorous training of the time, her ethereal charm and fluid style meant she quickly graduated to prima ballerina. She had a short period with Dhiagalev and the Ballet Russe but unlike her exact contemporary Isadora Duncan, she preferred the classical roles and to be the central figure in a ballet company.

Pavlova was caught outside Russia when World War One broke out and never returned to live there. She made her home in north London, in Ivy House which had once belonged to the painter Turner. She had considerable artistic talent as a painter and sculptor herself and she filled Ivy House with a menagerie of birds, animals and her personal flock of swans. She lived with Victor Dandre who was her manager and possibly her husband, although she never gave him that status publicly. Their union was childless but in 1920 she founded an orphanage in Paris for Russian orphans.

From 1913 until her death she toured the world. She went to America, Australia and New Zealand and all over Europe. She performed as the centre of a company of her own making and specialised not in full-length parts but in short and accessible vignettes such as ‘The Dying Swan’ choreographed especially for her by Fokine.

Her considerable beauty, skill and iron will made her one of the first world wide celebrities. She became ill with pleurisy in 1931 and having refused an operation because it might affect her dancing, she died at the Hotel des Indes in The Hague. She was barely fifty years old. Her remains were interred in London and despite a move to return them to Russia in 2000 they are still there.

Which brings us to the Pavlova. This frivolous meringue confection as light as a ballet dancer's tutu was created about 1926, maybe in New Zealand maybe Australia – that is a source of dispute to this day. Because you can vary the fruit there are lots of versions, I like it with passion fruit and kiwi - very conventional, but there were no ripe passion fruit today so I used a mix of raspberries, blueberries and kiwi.

A Corps de Ballet of Pavlovas

4 egg whites
1 cup caster sugar
1 tsp white vinegar
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tablespoonful of cornflour
Oven 130c
A baking tray covered with parchment on which you have marked eight circles of 8cm (about the circumference of a smallish mug)

Make sure your mixing bowl is grease free - I wiped mine with a vinegar-soaked piece of kitchen paper. Whisk the egg whites in your mixer until soft peaks form, starting slowly then speeding up. Now add the sugar slowly at the highest speed, take your time and ensure each spoonful of sugar is really well whipped in before adding the next. Add the vanilla, cornflour and vinegar and beat on high for 2 more minutes. Spoon onto your prepared tray. The pavolvas should be much higher than you think – about 6cm - I did measure mine (sad).

Bake at 130c for about 75 minutes – check after an hour. They should be no more than barely coloured and you want them slightly squidgy in the middle. Whip double cream for the base on which to put the fruit. I marbled some of it through with Seville Orange Curd courtesy of Hugh F-W.

( See http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/29/seville-orange-recipes-fearnley-whittingstall) - or you could mix it with creme fraiche if you're feeling the need to cut the fat - it just doesn't hold its shape so well. Decorate with fruit of your choice. Enjoy!

She beat the happy Pavement

 By such a Star made Firmament, 

Which now no more the Roof envies; 

But swells up high with Atlas ev'n 

Bearing the brighter, nobler Heav'n, 

And in her, all the Dieties.

From: ‘Gratiana Dancing and Singing’ by Richard Lovelace (1618-1657)

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25 January: ‘Up Helly Aa’

2011-01-21T17:05:00.016Z

'Men will quake with terror

Ere the seventy sea oars

Gain their well earned respite

From the labours of the ocean'

From 'King Harald's Saga' by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241)

On the last Tuesday of January the people of Shetland celebrate the great fire festival of ‘Up Helly Aa’. The festivities culminate in a huge torchlight procession of men dressed as Vikings and the ceremonial burning of a Viking style longship. Up Helly Aa has only been a continuous festival since 1870, but the Viking heritage it celebrates is over a thousand years old.

The Viking influence is strong in the off shore islands of north-eastern Scotland, but it permeates the culture of mainland Britain too. If you draw a diagonal line on a map roughly from the Wash to the Wirral, north of that line was the ‘Danelaw’. This was a huge area administered according to Scandinavian principles and under the rule of the Danes – including the wonderfully named ‘Ivar the Boneless’.

From the middle of the ninth century the population of the Danelaw was increased by Vikings not of the raping and pillaging sort, but by settlers from the Scandinavian countries. By the year 1000 the Viking city of Jorvik - York, had a population of 30,000 and was one of the most important trading centres of Europe. The River Ouse was navigable up to the heart of the city and with their sailing genius and shallow draughted vessels the Vikings were trading deep down the rivers of Europe into Russia and as far as Byzantium.

So on their epic voyages across the seas and down the rivers what did the Vikings eat? We know something about their food from the sagas and poetry of the Norse men – the bread was 'heavy, thick, packed with bran’ served with 'broth in a basin' (from the ‘Rígsþula’). The excavation of the almost perfectly preserved Oseberg Ship in Norway brought to light Viking cooking equipment which included a cauldron with its tripod which would have been used on board a longship.

As seafaring people the Vikings ate fish as their main source of protein and they preserved in a number of ways. They certainly dried it on racks in the cold open air in the same way as the inhabitants of the Lofoten Islands do to this day. They buried it – I’m not joking - shark and puffins were buried then excavated and eaten and gravad lax, which I love, actually means ‘buried salmon’. They also smoked it and brined it and they preserved it in lye to make lutefisk

The origin of lutefisk is apparently down to St Patrick. When the Vikings were pillaging Ireland St. Patrick sent men to pour lye on their store of dried fish in the hope of spoiling their food and sending them home. However the Vikings declared the fish a delicacy and it has been a favourite dish in Norway ever since – well maybe.

I've made one of my favourite things - Jannson’s Temptation. I think my original recipe was from Sophie Grigson but I’ve been making it my way so long I’m not sure. It’s very rich so it’s definitely for a treat, and it needs a sharp green salad with a mustardy dressing afterwards.

Jansson’s Temptation

For 2

A small packet of smoked salmon - or a good handful of trimmings

500g potatoes peeled and thinly sliced

250ml of cream – I use single but you know that double will be better don’t you?

Black pepper

Butter a small casserole or soufflé dish. Put in a layer of potatoes then some shreds of salmon, add a few grinds of pepper then more potatoes and so on until it is all used up. Pour over the cream. Bake it at 180c for about 45 minutes or until you can piece it easily with a skewer. Leave to rest for about 10 minutes before eating.

January 17th: St Anthony The Great

2011-01-10T14:10:00.029Z

…..Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,

 Caverned in night under the drifted snow, 

Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast

Beat down upon their naked bodies, know 

That day brings round the night, that before dawn 

His glory and his monuments are gone.

From ‘Meru’ by W.B Yeats (1865-1939)

A long time ago I went to Egypt and actually I had very mixed feelings about it. It's a country of uncomfortable contrasts. On the last day back in Cairo, we went to visit three Coptic Churches - some of the most ancient places of worship in Christendom. What I mostly remember is their atmosphere; after nearly two thousand years it felt as though the bricks themselves had taken on an aura of wise contemplation.

St Anthony the Great was a Coptic Monk who was born about 250 AD in Egypt and is regarded as the founder of ‘desert monasticism’. This is a branch of Christianity that is extremely ascetic and rooted in the hermit tradition. The Desert Fathers practiced what came to be known as ‘hesychasm’ a Greek word meaning stillness, rest, quiet and silence. After fighting my way through the crowds of Cairo I found that very appealing.

There was (and is) a tradition that Coptic contemplative life be open to men and women who were not intellectual and did not necessarily come from the upper classes. One tradition has St Anthony as having spent time as a swineherd and his symbols of the pig and the bell reflect this and his life as a monk. Here he is with his little pig.

What St Anthony is mostly associated with though is the disease erysipelas, more commonly known as St Anthony’s Fire. Erysipelas is a nasty bacterial infection that makes the skin go red. The monks of St Anthony’s Monastery were particularly skilled in its cure; I suspect that they had developed an early form of antibiotic.

One of the most distinguishing features of the Coptic Church is its fasting tradition. Orthodox Copts fast for about 200 days a year: weekly almost every Wednesday and Friday, for long periods at Advent and Lent and during something called the 'Jonah Fast' - which represents Jonah's time in the whale. Their diet at this time is very simple – a little rice, a few pulses, vegetables, maybe a little spice.

I really liked Egyptian food, I was a veggie at the time and contrary to all the advice we ate lots of salad and street food. The dreaded gippy tummy didn’t affect us anything like at much as it did the rest of the party. Here’s a dish of really typical Egyptian street food, there are loads of versions – this is mine.

Kosheri (for 3-4)

200g rice – weigh in a measuring jug

100g lentils – brown, green or puy

1 large onion

Olive oil

¼tsp ground nutmeg, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and ½ teaspoon ground coriander, salt

A few toasted almonds or pine nuts

Chopped parsley

A spicy tomato sauce made by simmering a tin of chopped tomatoes with two crushed cloves of garlic, a splash of wine vinegar, dried chilli flakes and 1-2 tsps ground cumin.

Cook the lentils until soft but not mushy.

Warm a tablespoonful of olive oil in a pan and add the spices - heat them gently, you don’t want to scorch them. Add the rice and turn it until coated with oil, now add double the volume of water to rice, season and put on the lid. Simmer until the rice is cooked and all the water absorbed. ( I usually make this with a mix of rices - basmati, wild and red, if you do you may need to cook them separately)

Finely slice the onion and fry until dark golden brown – a few caramelised bits are nice.

Gently mix the cooked rice with the lentils and put onto a warm dish, tip the onions over the top and sprinkle with the nuts and parsley. Serve the tomato sauce on the side.

I think this is deeply comforting food – and good for you!

I couldn't resist giving you the whole of this poem by the Armenian poet Zahrad (1924-2007)

A Woman Cleaning Lentils

A lentil, a lentil, a lentil, a stone.
A lentil, a lentil, a lentil, a stone.
A green one, a black one, a green one, a black. A stone.
A lentil, a lentil, a stone, a lentil, a lentil, a word.
Suddenly a word. A lentil.
A lentil, a word, a word next to another word. A sentence.
A word, a word, a word, a nonsense speech.
Then an old song.
Then an old dream.
A life, another, a hard life. A lentil. A life.
An easy life. A hard life, Why easy? Why hard?
Lives next to each other. A life. A word. A lentil.
A green one, a black one, a green one, a black one, pain.
A green song, a green lentil, a black one, a stone.
A lentil, a stone, a stone, a lentil.

10 January: Plough Monday

2011-01-06T21:26:00.037Z

‘I will go with my father a-ploughing to the green field by the sea,

And the rooks and the crows and the seagulls will come flocking after me.

I will sing to the patient horses with the lark in the white of the air,

And my father will sing the plough song that blesses the cleaving share’.

From 'I Will Go With My Father A-Ploughing' by Seosamh Maccathmhaoil (1879-1944)

It’s Plough Monday and I’ve been thinking about ploughboys and ploughing and all things associated with them.

In ‘The Vision of Piers Plowman’ written by William Langland in three versions between 1367 and 1390, Piers Plowman is the honest working man who guides the dreaming hero towards a better life. Piers shows himself to be a more virtuous role model than members of either the corrupt clergy or the dissolute and grasping aristocracy.

After Piers Plowman many other writers, including Chaucer, portrayed the ploughman as the ideal hardworking but downtrodden peasant. This is partly because in many villages there would be only one team of oxen and the ploughman worked the team on all the village strips - not just his own, so he was an essential part of the welfare and economy of the village. In contemporary literature he came to represent all those of the same estate in life.

A generation before Piers Plowman was written, there had been a huge fall in the population after the Black Death and Richard II attempted to pin agricultural wages to their pre-plague levels. The response of the working population eventually led to the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, which was also the year John Wycliffe was sacked from his position at the University of Oxford for his criticism of the Church of Rome. The movement towards the reformation started earlier then I thought. All these fermenting issues bob to the surface in Piers Plowman and in the Canterbury Tales.

Plough Monday was the day the agricultural year started, and before they began all their hard work the ploughboys took the opportunity to have a bit of a party by dressing up, blacking up, drinking or even performing their own ‘Plough Play’. We know from something called ‘Dives and Pauper’ anonymously written about 1405, that Plough Monday was a notable day. The author comments on the practice of blessing the plough by taking it inside the Church and leading it around a specially consecrated 'plough light'.

There is quite a lot about food in Piers Plowman including a dialogue between Piers and a character called ‘Hunger’, Piers says:

‘I have no penny to buy pullets nor geese nor pigs, but I have two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an oat-cake and two loaves of beans and bran baked for my children. I have no salt bacon nor no cook to make collops but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbages…’

From Passus VI translated by Kate M. Warren 1895

Piers Plowman’s Pottage

150g pearl barley
1 litre good vegetable or other stock (the better the stock- the better the soup, I used some made from a goose carcase)
2 medium leeks, finely shredded
¼ Savoy cabbage, shredded
Handful fresh chopped parsley and a few finely chopped spring onions or chives
Salt and ground black pepper

Put the barley in a large pan, cover with cold water, bring to the boil and simmer for about 30 minutes. Drain. Return to the pan, add the stock and bring back to a simmer.
After about 20 minutes test the barley - if it's done to your liking, add the leeks and let them simmer for four to five minutes until just tender. Add the cabbage and cook for two to three minutes, until tender. Season to taste, add the parsley and chives and serve at once.
Piers would have got his protein from his bean bread, you can add some shredded chicken to this - or cooked beans or whatever you have.

'And than I thanked this good husbond,
And prayed God the plough to spede,
And all tho that laboreth with the londe,
And them that helpeth them with worde or dede.'

From 'God Spede the Plough' Anon 14c text.