A time to gather

I know this blog primarily centres on taste but, in terms of memories and associations, smells are equally evocative, if not more so. How appropriate that wood smoke, a breath of it lacing the evening mist as we arrived in Norfolk on Friday, is for me a comforting scent of home. It transports me to countless afternoons spent clearing (ragging about in) woods as children, building huge bonfires with Dad and Grandpa and watching them crackle. Then if we were very lucky we’d wave a marshmallow on a stick at the embers until the doughy white skin blistered brown and started to ooze. This was usually the stage at which we lost them to the fire, making the eating all the more pleasurable.

Despite recent Indian Summer-like days, those damp mushroomy notes of autumn have returned to the countryside; the perfect accompaniment to the spike of smoke, pricking our nostrils and calling to our olfactory gear just as the springtime called Mr. Mole out of his burrow in The Wind in the Willows. It makes you want to wrap up and get outside for walks, to light the fire and be cosy. On Friday we ate at our warm and welcoming local pub, The Dabbling Duck, which was celebrating British Food Fortnight with some very British dishes, steak and kidney puddings and crumble with custard among them. The BSG’s Lancashire Hotpot didn’t touch the sides. I plumped for fish in a golden batter, with enormous chips and minted mushy peas – it was Friday after all!

Each season brings its own welcome scents; one of the roses in the garden smells so sweet, like the most delicate cup of tea imaginable, its petal-packed heads flower twice a year. At the height of summer, the swathes of lavender under the windows exude a heady fragrance, as they heave with bees (which incidentally have a very keen sense of smell – honeybees have been trained to detect landmines), clamouring for their hit, and as the heads are warmed by the sun, by the evening it is intoxicating. However there is a power to autumn’s earthy aromas, when evidence of nature’s industry is in such abundance, and something deeper, winter, waits beneath the surface. The hedgerows heave with berries, fruits and seedpods, furnishing their occupants with storable riches before they close down for the year.

Thoughts drift to mushroom-hunting excursions amongst the leaf litter - until you realise that Nature being Nature doesn’t make any one thing that looks like the photo in the fungi book, but rather several of them. Which is it; the ‘slow agonising death on ingestion’ one or the ‘very nice with toast’? The ensuing 45 minutes is spent flicking though the book several times to make absolutely sure, then abandon the mission in favour of the more hazardous in appearance but far lower fatal-seizure-risk chestnut (nut allergy sufferers excepted). As I write this I am lunching on a velvety mushroom soup: I am sure that the very nice person who picked these enjoys the fact that their patch isn’t full of idiots keeling over every half hour, so I’d say its definitely something best left to people who know, save perhaps a couple of flat field mushrooms from a damp pasture – and you know what they grow out of…

Feeling guilty at the drifts of apples littering the garden, uneaten and neglected, the BSG and I decided to bring them back and make them into a chutney or 20. And we didn’t stop there – at his Mum’s house we took pity on some unripe green peaches and he ploughed through the cookery books until he found a pickle to include them. Our kitchen has become a job-centre for unemployed fruit. Thank goodness we take in homeless jars, too. While we were at it, why not pickle some red cabbage too? Speaking of smells, the eye-watering sting of malt vinegar is not something I miss once it’s gone…

I am not averse to the odd present, and when the BSG returned from a recent work trip he gave me a pot of gold. Wow. A proper giant’s jar of French moutarde, in a rustic-looking (read more expensive) ceramic pot - which I’ll hang on to for storing salt - it has a very pleasing sulphur colour and a sharp tang. Even luckier for me then, that the BSG served up a perfect rare steak, served on sliced beetroot slicked in horseradish and a crisp green salad to celebrate its first outing. I hear you say that horseradish AND mustard is a belt and braces approach to a steak, but I couldn’t resist.

Where's the culinary alchemy?

You may have noticed that the BSG has not been featured much lately, he has been too busy riding tandem bicycles, getting hit by booms on sailing boats and visiting physios as a result. I have asked him to stop shouting at Masterchef: The Professionals on the telly, to put down Nigel Slater's new book and to get back into the kitchen.
He is enjoying (if that is the right word) the copper pan I bought him at an antiques fair - something to do with good heat? Simple pleasures I suppose.

Pork you pine for

The other day, whilst minding my own business, I stumbled across this bombshell, and chose to take it entirely out of context. It was, after all, a headline on a discarded newspaper lying on the pavement, between a grubby chewing-gum mark and a cigarette butt: obviously whoever else had read this didn’t believe it either and had chucked the offending article away in disgust, without even waiting for a bin to come into view. I am pretty sure that in the unwritten rulebook of autumn, Sunday lunches are near the top. The one that we had at Tam’s house in Suffolk was a case in point.

Dare I say it, we had all slightly overdone the Moscow Mules (not to mention the wine and champagne) the night before, and her herb-rubbed shoulder of lamb, roasted directly on the Aga rack, its juices dripping over silky boulangère potatoes, was the edible equivalent of an almighty hangover-busting hug. To follow, a couple of dark plums plucked straight from the tree, some squares of dark chocolate and some velvety coffee took the Sunday blues far away, for a little while at least.

But where am I?

This was Suffolk, where it’s all about pigs and apples.

What luck to find, having cycled through the leafy tunnels to the local farm shop, that Saturday was Apple Day; cooked, pressed, toffee-d, brewed, these versatile and seemingly uncomplex fruits were presented and celebrated every which way. This chance to peruse was welcome as the day had started unseasonably warm. Each variety displayed differences in the look of its skin, perhaps due to how much the sun had touched it, which branch it had been on or leaf it had resided under: from emeralds to neon-greens, russets to coral pinks; sweet, tart, pink-fleshed, smooth or nobbly, these were all there for the tasting. The crisp acidity of the Lord Lambourne made it my favourite on the day, but I suspect that, rather like wine, it depends upon your mood and what you are going to accompany it with, if anything at all, that is.

So here it is: the pig section. And greedily on Saturday I had it twice. Lunch at the pub after a good morning’s activities had to be pub-like, if you know what I mean. So I opted for a ham sandwich with crisps and a salad, (well, an onion and tomato wedge, on the side). Boring? Not at all – for this wasn’t something you would apply the word ‘wafer’ or ‘value’ to, or perhaps even the word ‘slice’. Every uneven hunk looked like it had been shaved off with a chainsaw, dwarfing the bread that was trying desperately to contain it – the kind of meat worthy to be included in a ploughman’s lunch. Salty pink and delicious, I am afraid it had to be adulterated with the obligatory smudge of hot yellow English mustard.

This was a simple example of the sheer gloriousness of British fare which surrounds us throughout the year, and it is British Food Fortnight now until the 4^th October so we must celebrate it now!

The second porcine delight of the day was slow braised pork belly, taken from that sweary Ramsay man’s book Secrets, and it has prompted me to do more cooking from books. I would probably get into all sorts of trouble for reproducing it word for word here, so go and track down the recipe - this is the kind of dish you cook for someone who will then instantly fall in love with you. After cooking for a few hours in a mixture of soy sauce, sherry vinegar, stock and aromatics the meat only needed to be looked at to fall apart in a melting, treacly mass, atop a pillow of the creamiest mash you can imagine (the BSG’s heart soared at the discovery of a potato-ricer in the house). Alongside these glistened leaves of squeaky forest green chard, its rhubarb-hued veins a sharp contrast, its iron taste a welcome palate cleanser between shovelfuls.

Completely sublime are two words that fall embarrassingly short of doing this dish justice. I took no photos of it – there was no time to waste – but suffice it to say we all fell just a little bit in love with Tam on the spot.

Oh, and we (notably the BSG) couldn’t let perfectly good crackling go uncrackled…