Let’s hear it for the borlotti bean!

_1080674Almost all my experience of eating haricot type beans has been from tins, and I’d grown into the lazy assumption that they were all much of a muchness – worthy, protein rich and both floury and tastless; the kind of food you eat to become a better person. When I’m in Potwell Inn mode it’s true that I sometimes dig into my deep wells of idleness and the lively sceptical mind silts up a bit.   It certainly silted up on the subject of growing pulses.  We tried Borlotti beans about 10 years ago and although they grew well, when we’d shelled them and put them in a Kilner jar looking awfully pretty, we had no real idea what to do with them, and so they languished in their role as kitchen eye-candy until one day I was blind baking some pastry and thought I’d do something useful with them as baking beans in a quiche tin. Later, in France, we spotted a pile of them in a market.  “At last,” I thought, “I’ll ask how you’re supposed to use them”.  The response was a Gallic shrug and “je ne sais pas” – end of culinary research.

Sooo ….:   all these years later (visualize little filmic cliché effect with spinning newspapers), we grew them this season.  I know why: it’s because over the past couple of decades our food culture has changed beyond measure. My memory of allotments – and now I’m thinking of Mr King, a retired miner, and  yes there was a huge coalfield in South Gloucestershire –  my memory comprises potatoes, cabbages, celery that smelt of coal soot and, of course, red flowered runner beans.  These days we love new ideas and new vegetable species and all our cookery books are filled with exotic ingredients that supermarkets are pleased to stock as long as we keep buying them. Borlotti beans are almost passé now and so (as in most things) we clung to the disappearing coat tails of fashion and grew some. Now, of course, there’s an abundance of contradictory advice everywhere you look, but we were able to establish that you can eat them fresh and green – in the manner of broad beans, or semi dry when they need about 40 minutes to cook, or fully dried where you have to soak and pre-cook them – all the faff that put me off them in the first place. We also discovered that you can freeze them successfully when they’re in stages 1 or 2. Actually distinguishing between stages 1 and 2 is a bit tricky because on a real plant (as opposed to Gardeners’ World on telly) beans ripen at different rates and in any case, who hasn’t delayed harvesting for just a couple of days to see if they’ll fatten up a bit more.  Think courgette to marrow.

So in our freezer is a large bag of frozen borlotti beans which I reached into because I was cooking a sausage casserole, and I could make it into a cassoulet in a matter of seconds and get loads of brownie points from Madame.

New para! It really deserves a new paragraph because the beans are something different and entirely better than any canned or dried borlotti I’ve ever eaten. They have flavour, and that was something of a revelation to us both. In fact they transformed the dish from boring old sausage casserole to proper cassoulet. So this year we’ll grow a whole lot more for the winter because although we’ve still got lots coming on, the potatoes won’t last until the end of January and we need to factor in feeding ourselves well over the hungry gap.

 

Frugal? Thrifty? Tight …..

We have a bit of a surplus of carrots at the moment; largely our own fault for chucking seed at a bare patch of ground  in the summer “to see if they’d grow” – you know how it is, people are always saying things like “this allotment doesn’t do well with sprouts” and so, without any sort of planning we shoved in some Chantenay carrots and then when they germinated we sowed more Nantes. Of course plants are a good deal more resilient than we give them credit for and they’ve all thrived and kept us in roots for several months.  But now with the first frosts, the green tops have started to die back and so today we removed the tops, dug a few of the oversized ones for the kitchen and then covered the rest with fleece because we’ve nowhere to store them at the flat.  Ideally we’d have eaten them a month ago when they were at their sweetest and rather smaller, but we didn’t and so it’s stocks and soups for them. I’m not the greatest fan of carrot soup but Madame loves it and our children were fed gallons of the stuff when they were young and it never did them any harm;  in fact it was their favourite soup.

Eating things you’re not mad about hardly counts on the frugality scale, but I’ve noticed that generally speaking we’re more willing to give something new a chance if we’ve grown it ourselves. However I’m definitely not one to lecture the hard-up on making do with less.  I can’t think of anything more insulting or pointless than lecturing homeless people on the money that can be saved by making your own granola.

But sometimes the thrift goes bad on you and today we had a particularly fine example.  We were up at the allotment grabbing a few dry hours  with great joy and catching up with some outstanding jobs.  Top of the list was planting out as many of our infant broad beans as possible and then it was carrots, cleaning up around the brassicas to discourage pests (especially slugs) and giving the overwintering peas some breathing space. Weeks ago I sowed four rows of Douce Provence which will overwinter in the UK and give an early crop.  When we removed the fleece we found that three rows had germinated perfectly – pretty much 100% – but the fourth was quite empty. What could have been the cause? We postulated a mouse with OCD that only eats seeds in straight lines but that seemed a bit far-fetched even to a couple of old hippies.  We discarded every possibility until, at last, I recalled that I’d run out of seeds for the last row and found a few in  packet in the shed. It took two minutes to discover that the seeds in row 4 were one year out of date – just one.  I’d always assumed that the germination rate declined slowly in a nice gentle downward curve, but no – evidently these peas had all switched off simultaniously, like lemmings charging over a cliff.

So as soon as we got back home I checked our large and completely disorganised collection of old seed packets and discovered that over a half of them were out of date, so they were all ditched.  More surprising was the fact that we’d bought several packets of out of date seeds from a local garden centre this year. So we shall be carefully checking the use-by dates from henceforth.  I had no idea that parsnip seeds are only viable for one year, for instance.  Prior to that my worst experience with seed was trying to germinate Sweet Cicily  which seems to demand an absolute beating with severe weather before it will consent to poke out a single cotyledon.

But by the time the rain started again we’d got the broad beans in and ‘though I say it myself …. etc. I even managed to get one more board up and finish a wood chip path. Now we are both aching, but we’ve got a rough and ready cassoulet in the oven and everything in it apart from some sausages and the celery was grown by us.  In the spring, when the allotment is all expenditure and no returns, it’s easy to wonder whether it’s worth the expense. In December you know it really is worth it.

Later again I walked to the local supermarket to buy milk  – we don’t drive 25 miles to get organic milk from a friend’s vending machine because that would be silly!  Imagine my joy at seeing that the use-by date is 21st December, the solstice. So use-by dates bring sorrow and joy in the same day.  That could be the subject of an exceptionally boring sermon.

 

Winter thoughts at the Potwell Inn

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In the world of virtuality that we bloggers inhabit, it’s tempting to create a parallel unverse in which we are self-perfecting and untouched by the blights that affect lesser mortals. And so, by carefully selecting from the events of the day and choosing our words as poets might, we convey our privileged position on the sunny highlands of human consciousness without for a moment descending into bragging.

It will be a strange sort of book, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree ; – & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be as ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves.  Yet I do mean to get to the truth of the thing , spite of this.

Herman Melville in a letter to Richard Henry Dana on the first draft of Moby Dick

I read blogs. The best of them fire me up and get me back to work, but the worst of them make me feel inadequate – as if the only place to start a new life is “anywhere but where you are”. I see photographs of perfected lives, perfected allotments and perfected meals and I know that I could never compete. Nobody’s going to stick my face on an advert for the good life, so I created the Potwell Inn as a place where the real, the blight, the shit that happens, has a place as well – a place that I’m allowed to live in because I am fallible, I am human and I have never lost the longing for something better.

The Potwell Inn, in its first iteration by H G Wells, is set in the South Downs and it’s all orchard and grass and gently murmering river. It doesn’t rain – in fact the sun seems never to stop shining – but over everything hangs the shadow of Uncle Jim who may return at any moment in a drunken fury. H G Wells knew better than to write a novel of perfection.

So, mea culpa, in all my postings I’ve never mentioned anything much more frightening than allium leaf miner or a late frost; and you might run away with the idea that the Potwell Inn and its allotment exist in a faery glade at the edge of an exquisite Georgian city. It’s true that the city we live in has a lot of Georgian architecture – we’re lucky enough to live on the edge one of its most beautiful parks.  But Bath itself is a monster with a severe personality disorder that can’t make its mind up whether it’s a University town, a Roman tribute act, a continuously ‘in session’ meeting of the Jane Austin fan club or a vibrant modern shopping/eating/clubbing experience. In fact, “Bath – the experience” occupies a limited area at the centre and it’s surrounded by a hinterland that’s not so lucky.  Our beautiful Georgian terrace comprises mainly houses in multiple occupation filled with a shifting population of students, young families unable even to look in an estate agent’s window, and housing assocociation properties many of which have some deeply troubled residents.

So we live in a lovely flat near the centre of a beautiful city and the corner of our street next to the flat is a favourite spot for drug dealers because there’s no CCTV and there are four or five escape routes inaccessible to a police car if trouble kicks off. Through our windows we can enjoy a view of the river and the trees and also – at times –  violent domestic disputes, machete wielding ‘county lines’ enforcers and crack smoking minor league dealers on bikes. Most of the trouble never comes near us – just once I was the victim of the most pathetic attempted mugging in history. There’s a young man who lives a block away who we call ‘mong’ because he shuffles around as if he is permanently on spice or ketamine. He’s well over six feet tall so potentially could be a bit frightening if the fog ever cleared. I came down the road and despite the fact that he was already holding a mobile, he said “give me your phone” in his best menacing tone. I replied “fuck off!” in my most menacing OAP manner, and he said “there’s no need to be rude”. He probably had a good polite upbringing some time back.

The police and the local council are having a purge on rough sleeping and street begging in the centre because it scares the tourists. Naturally this means that the problem moves outwards towards us and street begging becomes petty crime – burglary, shoplifting, stolen bikes, muggings and such like. Sustaining a £200 a day habit either means a good begging pitch in town or something much more scary around the edges.  Our posturing local councillors – many of whom are part of the problem inasmuch as they own property and let it out at increasingly ridiculous rents – like to grandstand with talk about ‘zero tolerance’ but that does nothing to help the elderly residents who are terrorised by dealers and users.  We have no police station any more, and our air quality is so polluted by heavy traffic that we regularly break EU limits. So that’s where the Potwell Inn can be found – not in an  idyllic imaginary parallel world, but here on a cold December day when it’s too wet to get on to the allotment (again).

But this is where we’ve chosen to live and we love every moment. I’ve always had a conviction that there’s no better place than where you are set down, and the best way to live a flourishing, fully human life is to transform the place you live in rather than spend a fortune in time and energy looking for somewhere better. And so we get involved in the local neighbourhood and in its politics.  We all know that the source of many of these problems is lack of compassion and lack of resources compounded by a malignant ideology.  We love the fact that we can hear a dozen languages and more every day on the streets and we can shop in half a dozen food cultures within a mile.  We love the allotment and its capacity to provide for us, and our neighbours who live such interesting and occasionally complicated and exotic lives.

In one of those long meandering chains of thought that sometimes sieze my attention I began ten days ago with watching the riots in Paris on television and emerged 24 hours later with a changed perspective. That change of perspective took me to a single word; a crystallisation of the chain of thought and it was the word “commonwealth”.  The absence of the capital letter is absolutely deliberate because it is not a proper noun.  It doesn’t refer to any of the manifestations of the original idea that has been misappropriated so often from the days of Cromwell’s parliament to the cultural remains of the British Empire. It’s been so often misappropriated, in fact, that when I googled it, I looked at 27 pages of results without finding a single reference to its original meaning – a political community founded for the common good. This lovely idea seems to me to be slap bang in the middle of the Potwell Inn mission statement, or it would be if we had one!

I wondered for a long while whether to post this, and here it is. A provisional mission statement for the Potwell Inn, driven by the sheer baffling and beautiful complexity of human flourishing.

Commonwealth: A political community founded for the common good.

 

I’m not as young as I was

Philosophically speaking that statement is always undeniably true, but these last two days have offered plenty of reminders – not least my 72nd birthday on Monday followed by our 51st wedding anniversary today. Who’d have believed you were that old? (I rather hope I) hear you say but after a day on the allotment building paths and beds I believe I am a little older than the 35 I usually admit to. Sunshine in December is never to be ignored and the broad bean plants have germinated and are heading towards unruly adolescence so the question of preparing the bed for them is not theoretical. But the recent rain has saturated the ground, and so the allotment is saturated at about 12″ below the surface making it imperative to get beds and paths workable as soon as we can or else we shall be driven off the land altogether for months.

So at last the east-west path is completed and filled with about 6″ of woodchip.  Our two plots are side by side so it’s a very long path and quite a feature.  I’ve been mulling over whether I should give it a name – 5th Avenue or Broadway, in honour of several lovely trips to New York.  But being just a bit rigid about these things I felt that those rather hyperbolic names should be reserved for the north south paths, so that leaves something like Columbus and West 103rd for the new path.  I rather like biblical names as well, and I’d almost decided to call the water butts Tigris and Euphrates however that leaves one butt without a name, but it does suggest the possibility of Straight Street for the new path. I realize that American readers are more likely to be biblically literate than our fellow UK allotmenteers, but the small problem of two nations divided by a single language becomes clear with “butt”.  So I’ll let the whole question of giving names to paths rest for the time being.

The practicality of pegging the boards is always made much harder when it’s wet. If the pegs are wet they split when you hammer them in, but even if you keep them dry you need to make quite a large hole with a crowbar to get them started, and the wet clay sucks the end of the bar to the extent that it requires heroic strength to pull it out again. Madame told me that my grunts and curses were providing great entertainment to passers by on the footpath.  Obviously she told me that after we got home! However I did finally get about 40′ of edging in, at which point I realized that we would need prodigious quantities of topsoil to raise the beds above the wet zone and level with the top of the boards. The earth is hungry and seems to absorb an awful lot of compost, seaweed, leaf mould and manure, but it is slowly improving. I did a quick calculation and I think each bed would need approximately 1.3 tonnes of topsoil to bring it level.  That’s about £75 per bed and we’ve got eight beds that need raising – that’s £600 and I dread to think how many wheelbarrow loads. Way beyond our budget and frankly I’m not a fan of throwing money at the problem in any case.  So that leaves all the free methods we’ve access to, and a big effort on the compost front.  Time and patience solves most problems, and gives the allotment a kind of ecological integrity.

Later, with our wedding anniversary fast approaching we sat side by side on the bed rubbing a shared tube of Voltarol into our sore knees in a companionable sort of way.  There are some scenes you can never imagine when you’re twenty one years old. It’s not the capacity to do the jobs that’s lacking, it just takes a lot longer to recover.  But I’m feeling immensely proud of what we’ve achieved and I’m so looking forward to next season.  Suddenly there’s a foretaste of spring in the air.  We woke today to the sound of  a blackbird singing.  It’s often like that hereabouts,  we get a taste of the season to come and then the door slams shut for a few months, but it will come with a new beginning and new challenges.

I’m sitting on the seed order, unwilling to commit to just one selection.  I feel like a child in a sweet shop.

Ah! but what do you yearn for secretly?

IMG_4779Some years ago we were in Uzès where – as is almost universal in France – you could buy brilliant bread. There was every shape, size, flour, yeast, baking method and texture you could imagine so it was a good place to think about what constituted a good loaf, and I don’t mean a Good Loaf in the sense that there might be some hierarchy of goodness only known to the connoisseur.  I just mean the bread I like best, and it was in Uzès that I began to realize that the eyes could seduce you into buying something that was nowhere near as good as it appeared. There were loaves a metre long and weighing 3 or 4 kilos that the baker would cut you a piece from. There were loaves with crust like razor wire and there were tooth snappers, and the bread you most lusted after was often pretty indigestible or stale by teatime.  Afficionados and people who write books on this subject will purse their lips and inspect what they like to call the crust and the crumb for its adherence to their particular prejudice. They may comment learnedly (and loudly) on the merits of the true San Francisco sourdough and you may well feel that there must exist, somewhere in Paris, a standard perfect loaf in a glass case alongside the standard kilogramme. This elevation of an ordinary domestic skill to the level of high art not only inflates the price but sets up as a standard a highly specific style that stifles all alternatives.

So we need to ask ourselves what kind of bread we yearn for secretly and then try to make it. Sometimes I want nothing more than the cheapest and most refined and steam baked white loaf in the shop so I can toast it until it burns black at the edges and then I can eat it slathered with salted butter. Actually that turns out to be suprisingly difficut to make without a small factory adapted to the Chorleywood procees – “the cheapest way to make water stand up” as one wag put it.

But one thing has become canonical for no reason than I can work out. I suppose most people will know that ciabatta was only invented in 1982 in Verona, and that it was only invented in response to the popularity of the baguette. The open texture of the baguette and the even more open (ie full of holes) texture of ciabatta have taken the bread world by storm and so they have become something all home bakers must force themselves to reproduce in every loaf unless they are to live in shame and the fear of a visit from the  bread police. But ……

It doesn’t have to be like this.  The crust and the crumb are variables you can control if you choose to do so.  I feel a certain sense of pride when I knock out a sourdough loaf that looks exactly like the ones in the £35 coffee table book, but then all too often the crust is razor sharp and toothbreakingly hard, and the huge open textured crumb dries out rubbery and then hard as rock in 24 hours.  The only way to satisfy the exacting customers (if there were any) of the Potwell Inn (if it existed) would be to bake every day and frankly I don’t have the time – even though I do, in fact, exist!

And so after a good deal of thought and several expensive retreats I wish to announce that I will no longer be a slave to fashion even if my friends stop talking to me.  I formally eschew the temptations and allurements of the gospels of Bertinet and Tartine and I loathe and abominate the works of Hollywood and the colour supplements.  And if anyone dares to ask me what’s on the menu I shall reply “bread” with a curl of the lip and a toss of the head and I’ll enjoy what I bake with the butter running down my chin and the strawberries coasting across the limpid surface of the toast like schooners  in full sail. I know how to live, I do!

Culture vultures escape Brexit dread.

 

I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

Charles Olson “Call me Ishmael”

Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is that some things, though limited, can be inexhaustible.  For example, and ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, is inexhaustible.  A small place, as I know from my own experience, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure – in addition to its difficulties – that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.

Wendell Berry, “Faustian economics”

Yesterday the rain continued and looks set to keep us off the allotment for some time, so we were pleased to be off to Shaftesbury to spend the night with friends.  My phone tells me that I spend at least an hour a day gazing at it, and yesterday I probably spent more because we were away from the laptop where I can easily spend hours at a stretch.  Is that shocking? Well, the phone is my newspaper, my letter box and my principle research tool when I’m away from the books, and yesterday I took a series of peeps at the World Organic News website that collates all sorts of useful material from around the world.

But I found myself getting restless about the blogs where people have an abundance of land.  Just imagine the privilege (and responsibility) of working several acres organically and never having to make either/or choices about what can be grown. If the work of tilling that we do is significant for turning the world away from its wasteful and destuctive habits, does that mean that having more land is more powerful than having almost none? My head says “of course not” but the heart says “hell yes! – if I owned all the land in the country/world, I could turn things around in a decade”.

So I want to wave the flag for small plots. Our 250 square metres gives us a lot of healthy pleasure and good food. If we had some factor – say ten – times as much, it might be more fun for us and it would certainly give us a surplus to sell.  But what if we argued for, say a hundred times the acreage of allotment land to be made available but kept the standard size at the traditional 250 square metres – enough to feed, (it was said), a family of four. That could mean a hundred families (however you want to construe the word) engaged with the earth and benefiting from from the exercise and the food.

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As we drove back from Shaftesbury today we passed an organic farm – my guess is that it extended along about 2 miles of the road. Terrific stuff!  I was thinking, but then I saw two enormous tractors parked in one of the access roads, and I wondered what was happening to the fragile soil habitat in this beautiful Wiltshire downland. No doubt there are huge benefits to be gained from the efficient organic farming of large amounts of land but that’s only when you count financial benefits above societal and cultural benefits.

In this time of crisis (the word derives from the Greek crino – to choose), simple questions about “what factors should we add to the financial in order to come to a concept that genuinely constitutes “profit” need to be thought about and answered.

Anyway, apart from that we managed to fit in three galleries with one opening night and a convivial meal with friends. I love it when an exhibition forces me to think seriously, and the two artists exhibiting at Hauser and Wirth in Bruton have sent me home full of questions. If you look carefully enough you’ll see three musicians playing in the background of the Berlinde De Bruyckere works.  They were improvising using the works as inspiration. It was beatiful.  The other exhibition was by Takesada Matsutani and again forced me to think hard about the way we make aesthetic decisions. While we were there we spotted Charles Hazlewood, the conductor, it’s a good place for people spotting!

Then later we went to Messums Wiltshire where we were welcomed to have a look around even as they were setting up two new exhibitions – how unusual is that?  next we went to the opening night of a show at the Shaftesbury Arts Centre and met two of the founders of “Common Ground”, Sue Clifford and Angela King who set the charity up with the late Roger Deakin (read his books, they’re tremendous).  They were celebrating the decision of Shaftesbury Council to put in a bid to buy back the piece of land called “The Wilderness” in the town.

So by the time we’d done all that we didn’t eat until late but we ate too much and drank too much and went to bed exhausted and stirred up.  It’s the only way to be!

Why cook anyway?

 

IMG_4510I’ve often written about the strange sense I occasionally get that when I’m doing something simple like using a builder’s trowel, building a wooden frame or most particularly when I’m gardening or cooking; I feel that I’m channelling something or someone. I absolutely don’t mean this in any supernatural sense – this isn’t about ‘ghosts’, but it is about the sheer complexity of our inner lives. I’m aware that when I ask the simple question “Why cook anyway?” there’s a way of answering it directly –

  • I cook because I really like eating good food’ but we’re too hard up to eat in restaurants.
  • I cook because I like to determine the meals I eat and the ingredients in them because it’s better for me (us) and the world if we do.
  • I cook because nothing draws people closer than eating together and cooking is a way of showing love for them.
  • I cook because we have the allotment and we grow most of our own vegetables.

But none of those simple answers account for the uncanny sense of channeling that sometimes comes with kneading dough, or taking something out of the oven. On the allotment it might come with the smell of the earth or the sound of a robin. I remember it clearly one day in winter when I was laying a hedge with Chubby Ball. _1080661

Sometimes when I cook it feels like a meditation, a wordless reflection whose content could never be expressed except in the act of cooking, and sometimes I even feel as if I’m reaching out towards a memory – especially a memory of my mother.

 

It would be easy to think of the Potwell Inn as a simple idea – a “two up two down” kind of conceptual building that houses a “happy place”. But what if I pushed at the boundaries a bit and revealed that the Potwell Inn is actually a very old, very large building with many rooms and such a long history that some parts have become derelict and some rooms have not been opened in decades?

Yesterday I was reading Christopher Bollas’ book “The Shadow of the Object”, and I came across this passage.

 

 

…. I have termed the early mother a ‘transformational object’ and the adult’s search for transformation constitutes in some respects a memory of this early relationship.  There are other memories of this period of our life, such as aesthetic experience when a person feels uncannily embraced by an object.

IMG_4763When I read those words I was seized by the memory of an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’ late work that we saw in Somerset that absolutely floored me because one of the glass display cabinets contained some objects deeply familiar from my childhood. I’m not adding a photo here because they all seem to be copyrighted but if you Google “Bourgeois the empty house” you’ll find them all.

My mother was a dressmaker and the only objects I have from her life are associated with her craft. What’s most powerful is the way in which these three objects, a pincushion with needles and pins, a thimble, and a rolling device for marking through a paper pattern into fabric bear within themselves an imprint of her whole being. They aren’t just tools, they embed her – prickly, spiky and absorbed in her work. The sound of the sewing machine was the sound of my childhood.

Stumbling on the Bourgeois sculpture was a shock, It was heavy with what Bollas calls “the unthought known”. And to get back to the original question “why cook anyway?” is it any surprise that cooking, gardening and sewing are all activities filled with the unthought knowns of my earliest infant years?  When I’m bearing experiences that pre-date any form of language and are inflected into actions, I am ‘uncannily embraced’.

 

When we first discovered that we were expecting our first child I went into a very strange state, having no vocabulary to express what I was feeling.  So I cooked.  I cooked meatballs in tomato sauce, I’ll never forget it, and I poured all my feelings of confusion into that one dish. As I brought it to the table, Madame who by this time had become quite concerned that I wouldn’t come out of the tiny galley-like kitchen to talk about it was giving me one of her looks. The whole dish – it was pyrex – slipped from my fingers and smashed into a thousand pieces on the floor – meatballs, sauce and glass. Looking back forty years we can laugh at the absurdity of it all, but it was cooking as I’ve never done it before or since.

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Too old to start smoking?

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The photo on the left started off way bigger than this, but I needed to edit it because frankly the state of the worksurface on the left of the hob was – well – pretty filthy, and while I don’t mind being a bit of a slob in the Potwell Inn kitchen, I’m not sure I want to share it with the customers! I’m assuming there are (at least) two distinct types of the readers, and the first – on seeing the unedited photo – would say “where’s the Dettox?” whereas the second would be saying “what kind of thermometer is that?” I tend to fall into the second category. Anyway I’ve spared anyone the trouble of worrying about my overflowing coffeee stains so we can concentrate on the topic in hand, which is smoking.

Madame and me tend to take a different line on the subject of preserving. She’s absolutely fine with jams preserves and pickles, but we are divided on the others – namely salting, fermenting and smoking.  With the exception of smoked haddock, where we stand as one in our enthusiasm for the real stuff, (not the pickled dayglo yellow stuff), smoking and fermenting are solitary pleasures which I share guiltily with my sons. I say guiltily because about 100 years ago, when I was a student, I got a summer job at Harris’s, the huge bacon factory in Calne, Wiltshire, when I worked in the stores and where I discovered that “smoked bacon” was not smoked at all in any accepted sense, but anointed with a kind of creosote so powerful that we only took occasional deliveries in jerry cans covered in hazard signs. So that probably means that most of the so-called smoked foods I’ve ever eaten are nothing of the kind.

Therefore, I say, why not have a go at the real thing? Some foods are simple to make but difficut to source –  sausages for instance – need casings and casings come in boxes of ten miles worth at a time, unless you can persuade a friendly butcher to sell you some. Black pudding is difficult to source for the same reason, but more so because you can’t just ship up to an enormous slaughterhouse with a 5 litre bottle and ask for a bit of pigs blood. And even if a friendly slaughterman did feel sorry for you and fill it up, you’d then be lumbered with a long drive home trying to agitate it with your left hand while driving with the right hand.  I’m really sorry for any vegetarian who’s offended by all this talk (Mags and Caroline especially) but I promise I’ll shut up right now.

However real smoking is easy and cheap to do and adds a real zing to the bland and the ordinary.  You don’t even have to buy a ‘proper’ smoker because a wok and a rack will do it just as well. Mine is a purpose built hot smoker which is the only type I can use in our flat with its built in smoke alarms. A cold smoker is generally a hefty looking thing the size of a filing cabinet, so that the smoke can cool down and do its work without heating up the food. For me that adds a whole “Russian roulette” frisson to the idea of smoking. I’m a belt and braces kind of man and killing the bugs with both heat and smoke works better for me than sitting down at the table and checking next week’s diary in case I get campylobacter (again).

I’ve always known that my fascination for procedures with their own special languages and arcane literatures probably marks me as an eccentric but so be it, that’s the way I am, and – oh joy – smoking is preceeded by brining, and that can involve a list of possible ingredients longer than the index of an Ottolenghi book. Today’s couldn’t have been simpler though – three hours in a brine flavoured with honey and crushed black pepper followed by overnight in the fridge to dry out and firm up, and then 30 minutes in the smoker with a thermometer to make sure it all gets over 75C. My chef sons laugh at my caution and say 65C is OK but I’d rather be safe than sorry. What you get (what I got) at the end is a couple of smoked chicken breasts that will be delicious in salads where a little goes a long way, or in a sandwich, and at a fraction of the cost.  However you use it, it’s economical and assists in our aim of eating less meat and more veg. If you’re looking for a steer [sorry – terrible pun -], Diana Henry’s book “Salt, Sugar, Smoke” is full of great ideas.

Rain has been keeping us away from the allotment so I’ve been choosing veg varieties for the seed order. Yesterday I spotted a hazel catkin in amongst the leaf waste that the council dumps at the site, and that combined with scanning the seed catalogues has brought an almost tangible sense of spring around the corner. Is it 17 only days until the solstice? Soon that great explosion of life and growth will begin again and we shall be celebrating the lengthening days at the Potwell Inn.

The Tao of sourdough?

IMG_4760I will never make any kind of claim for understanding sourdough because I don’t; and neither would I write any kind of definitive guide to it for two reasons”

  • I never seem to reach a point where I feel there’s nothing left to learn, and –
  • I hate the way books so often intimidate and make our efforts feel pointless.

On the other hand I well remember leaving art school with a degree in ceramics and remarking to one of the lecturers that it would have been helpful if they had taken the time to teach me some techniques and not left it all to me to find out. So in that spirit I feel it’s OK to share some of the facts I wish someone had told me about years ago. So herewith the Potwell Inn bakery shortcourse, completely free of charge.

  1. Bread flour  – For too long I thought that the stronger the flour (ie. the higher the  protein level) the better the bread would be. Not true! The loaf in the photo is made with a third soft wheat flour and only two thirds strong bread flour. Obviously there’s a crossover point where you get a cakey texure but 1/3 to 2/3 seems to work with the flours I use. Should I say what they are?  Well no, because anyone can bake beautiful bread using whatever ingredients are to hand, as long as they’re prepared to experiment a bit – which leads me to –
  2. Complete failure is very rare – Sometimes they’ll slump, and sometimes they’ll stick to the banneton and sometimes they just sulk.  But the resulting bread is almost always better than anything you could buy.
  3. Rice flour I wish I had a pound for every mixture I’ve tried to dust the dough and help it to release. Of all the things I’ve tried, rice flour works best.
  4. Getting a hot base –  feel free to buy a lump of granite or a hi-tech widget made from recycled space shuttle nose-cone tiles, but I use a cast iron griddle for Welsh Cakes that was incredibly cheap and holds a tremendous amount of heat. I never clean it.
  5. Kneading –You can use a machine but you’ll learn more about the quality of a dough in ten minutes of hand kneading than you will in a year of tiny changes to the recipe. Flour is a natural product and even branded flours can vary from batch to batch.  Wholemeal flour takes more water than white, but beyond that, the exact proportions can vary from week to week. It’s easy to add a bit more flour if a dough feels too sticky but it’s horrible trying to add water to a too-stiff dough, so start wet and stop as soon as you can.
  6. Sourdough takes up too much time –  first make the batter, say ten minutes maximum, and then go and do something else for the rest of the day or night – whichever suits you best. Second, add the final amount of flour, the salt and some olive oil bearing in mind point 5 above and knead it for ten minutes or until it just ‘feels’ right. Let’s say that takes you another 15 minutes. Then go away again for a another 12 hours or so. Third, fold the dough over on itself gently a few times and form it into a ball and put that in a banneton which you’ve copiously dusted with rice flour. That takes another 5 minutes. Leave it for another three or four or however many hours it takes to look perky.  Finally turn it out, slash the top and bake it as hot as you can get the oven for ten to fifteen minutes and with steam if you have it.  Then turn the oven down a bit and bake for another 30 – 35 minutes. Elizabeth David suggested in her book “Bread and Yeast Cookery” that you’re trying to imitate the falling temperature of a wood fired oven. You have to be there for some of that bit – so let’s say another twenty minutes of your undivided attention. So that adds up to not a lot more than an hour of actual work. If you’re away at work, bake at the weekend or maybe kick the batter off before work on Friday morning and finish baking before lunch on Saturday.
  7.  Have you got a posh steam oven? Yes but for the first 47 years I didn’t and I still made bread. I’ve got a very small and cheap car – priorities I suppose.
  8. You need to buy a starter – No you don’t.  If it smells nice it’s probably OK – no faff, just dark rye flour and water and lots of time.
  9. Is it a spiritual experience? Only in the sense that you have to be ‘in the moment’. In that respect it’s just like every other craft skill, you have to have a dialogue with the material.  It’s not MDF board!
  10. Why bother? Because £4.00 for a large loaf is ludicrous however big the baker’s beard is, and very soon your bread will taste better than theirs, I promise.

Meanwhile – back on the allotment

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Even with the eyes of a proud parent I’d never claim that our allotment in winter is ‘handsome’ – as the Cornish might say.  I think, perhaps, ‘showing potential’ is a better description. The months between November and April – and that’s half a year, can be a stark reminder that we have no control over the weather and our aspirations to clear ground and to build raised beds run into the hard reality of sodden soil and rain from the south west.

But yesterday the rain stopped and the clouds cleared for just long enough for us to go and do some work.  When we took on the first plot in May, three years ago, it was a weed infested field and our whole priority was focused on clearing, sowing  and planting to make the most of our late start. It was a good year for crops, the ground having laid fallow for as many as three years. But as we’ve come to understand the soil better, we’ve realized that ‘though it’s very fertile – it’s also very fragile. It’s an alluvial loam with a clay content high enough to ball-up when it’s wet. There’s about 12″-18″ of topsoil overlaying an impermeable clay layer which led to serious waterlogging last year. Our strategy has been to pile on as much organic material as we can in order to improve the soil structure.  The decision to move to raised beds was pretty much forced on us by the soil conditions and so, three years on, we’re revisiting the design of the first plot to incorporate the lessons we’ve learned and the plots have piles of boards and pegs stacked here and there, ready to sieze any opportunity to do some infrastructure work. The most urgent need is to get at least one 12’ X 4’2″ bed ready to plant out the overwintering broad beans which are doing well in the tiny unheated greenhouse.

The ground is already so wet that it would be foolish to walk on it, so we’ve concentrated on building a deep surround which will contain the mulch on the grape vine next to a path.  Since we have a free supply of leaves most of the allotmenteers on the site use leaves.

So a couple of hours of damp work saw the surround all but complete, but more than that, it was lovely to be out in the fresh air after an enforced week inside.