Tag: autumn cooking

Délicieux

Délicieux – “delicious” in English apart from its normal usage is also the title of a 2021 French/Belgian comedy-drama film directed by Éric Besnard, which charts the rise of the first restaurants in France just before the French revolution. We watched it a couple of nights ago and allowing for the odd historical inaccuracy, like moving the action from Paris to the Auvergne region, charts the fall of the aristocratic elite of the day and the subsequent redeployment of hundreds of highly trained chefs into parts of France that had no tradition of eating other than at home in the family setting. It’s a great film, up there with my other foodie favourites because sometimes when we’re sick to death of the murderous and cynical events on the news we need a couple of hours of relief. And it’s always good in any case to see the ruling classes humiliated and shamed even if it’s only in a film. Well worth watching and under a fiver.

Anyway, it made me sit up and remember how and why I started cooking in the first place. Mum was a decent cook with a small repertoire of favourites. By the time Madame and I got together I’d never tasted garlic, green peppers or any of what the supermarkets still describe as exotic vegetables. So when we moved into our first flat; I was 21 and Madame was 18, neither of us had considered how we were going to feed ourselves. I’d hovered in the kitchen and watched my mum cook; she showed me how to judge the thickness of Yorkshire pudding batter by the sound it makes, and I could make a passable bacon sandwich. My dad literally could not make a cup of instant coffee! Madame still can’t recall her mother ever cooking a meal and so confronted with starvation we agreed to take it in turns to cook and that’s never changed.

At the same time we were exposed for the first time to a different cuisine as soon as we went to college and started to meet new people from different social backgrounds who invited us to their homes and whose parents (who probably thought of us as amusing waifs and strays) invited us to eat with them. I fell in love with the whole thing but we could never have afforded to eat out, so the only way we could eat like our better off friends was to learn to cook. I bought books, slowly accumulated a few pans and after walking miles looking for ingredients, practiced. It never occurred to me to train as a chef; my whole ambition was to be a good cook. There was a shop around the corner that sold cookware and I would spend hours looking through the window at the Le Creuset pots. I bought my first ever carbon steel knife there and resolved never to make-do with inferior equipment – which meant that my skills and equipment were glacially slow to improve. It was decades before we could afford to travel and see continental food at first hand.

Our problem was that so many ingredients were simply unobtainable. We learned the location of bay trees, rosemary bushes and other herbs. Sage and thyme were only available in bunches as Christmas approached so we foraged for what we needed in the leafy streets and gardens and eventually got ourselves our first allotment. It’s a well rehearsed truth that olive oil could only be obtained in tiny bottles at the chemist. Luckily we had a deli nearby, run by a Hungarian refugee who imported foods we’d never seen or even dreamed of. We learned to grow some food and we were lucky enough to find neighbours who could show us how to dress the chickens, pheasants and rabbits that found their way to our door. The local butcher showed me how to humanely kill and pluck a chicken. When I was a community arts worker I learned to be careful about expressing any food preferences, because some of the young men I worked with would go poaching to order.

Today we were sitting at the table shelling the borlotti beans to store for the winter. At lunchtime we had a tasting of several varieties of apple that we grow and ate chunky bread. After a dreadfully tough summer we were on the point of giving up the allotment but Madame kept the faith and we’re back on track once again preparing the ground for next season. Against all expectations the fruit crop; sweet apples, pears, plums, damsons and cookers has been the best ever. The borlotti crop was the largest yet and even the potatoes held fast in the ground right through the drought. Chard, spinach and most of the herbs survived too, with minimal watering. The tomatoes and peppers suffered in the polytunnel but now at last the rain has come and the water butts are slowly filling. Storage is easy but harvesting water is a bit more tricky. The greenhouse roof faces east and west, taking most of the weather pretty well. The water butts there fill quickest, but the shed roof slopes to the north and its three barrels are much slower to fill. So the trick is to pump water from the full barrels to the empty ones so that every drop is captured. I can see that the dramatic climate change we’re experiencing is not going to reverse any time soon and so droughts, extreme weather and storms need to be factored into our planning.

So now we ache in places we didn’t know existed, but we grow closer each time we go to the allotment. The shared physical work renders the gym subscription redundant and the mental challenge of planning it all is rewarded at this time of year in the kitchen and at the table, and there really is some kind of spiritual dimension to it. The news is terribly unsettling, and the uncaring viciousness of so many people provokes paranoia and despair; but somehow the simple act of plunging your hands into the soil, or sowing and harvesting your own food have the strange capacity to heal those hurts. Our friendships among the other allotmenteers brings us together in a shared interest with a huge range of people and skills. Doctors; nurses; teachers and professors muck in with many others with quite different life experiences. The allotments are, in the truest sense, a university.

Shelling the borlotti

It was a bit of a culture shock coming home from Snowdonia for sure. As the fortnight drew to an end and the weather continued cold wet and windy, notwithstanding the forecast of unseasonably hot weather almost everywhere except where we were. But more than that, we were missing the allotment and worrying about our winter sowings in the polytunnel and all the usual autumn jobs still needing to be done. The plus side of a rainy holiday is the amount of rest and reading we were able to do without feeling that we should be somewhere else – like on the allotment!

The first frosts of autumn are almost impossible to predict and so we prepare for them around the second week of October just in case. Knowing that the basil wouldn’t survive we took most of the outside plants to the compost heap, knowing that we’d got a reliable supply of pesto in the freezer. The best of the tomatoes were processed before we left, but today we shelled and dried the borlotti and, because we were proposing to treat them for any lurking weevils by heating them to 60 C for two or three hours I grabbed a bowlful of wrinkled tomato runts and shoved them in the oven at the same time so they can be dried to a still moist consistency and packed into olive oil. It seems a crime to waste anything; but sometimes we get properly caught out. Last year, determined not to waste a single iota of vegetable waste , we chucked all the extracted seeds from the passata machine into the compost. A year on as we spread the compost on the tunnel beds we had a magnificent flush of tomato seedlings within days.

We’d never had an infestation of bean weevil before, but last year’s saved seed was somehow completely infested and had to be thrown away. This is a bit of a conundrum which I’m quite sure the commercial seed merchants solve by fumigating the seed – but we don’t have the means or the desire to do that so it would be good to know how to kill the weevil eggs organically. This year because of the odd weather we decided to dry the whole crop, but I might hold back a handful of seeds to see if they’ll still germinate after heat treatment. I’m not holding my breath.

Autumn has a whole set of compulsions of its own. Even as I’m writing this there’s a big pan of leek and potato soup on the stove, next to a sourdough loaf that was started yesterday, plus the aromatic perfume of the drying tomatoes. Yesterday I was desperate to make a pie, and we feasted on our own French beans, broccoli and carrots along with (vegetarians please look away now!) using my mother’s recipe for a shortcrust pie (25% butter and 25% lard and 50% plain flour), that uses no flavourings at all apart from stock, salt and pepper. It’s the very essence of my autumn memories. My sister still makes exactly the same pie to the same recipe.

Allotmenteering or any other kind of gardening never quite feels like the glossy magazines describe it. Casually describing it as therapeutic hardly covers the gamut of emotions that it induces – it’s hero to zero and back again every season, even every week in our case. Nobody who’s ever been in therapy, made a pot and fired it, painted a watercolour or written at length would ever call any of them therapeutic except for the way they teach you how to ride the punches, celebrate the fleeting triumphs and do the essential work whether or not you feel like it. As for me I’d never do anything except by the grace of deadlines; and so we’ll sow more rouge d’hiver lettuces this week because if we don’t there may be no lettuce, or spinach or whatever next year. No food for you Mr Smarty Pants! We’ll also sow some Christmas potatoes to grow on in the polytunnel.

Part of the autumn compulsion will be, I know, the urge to sow broad beans – aquadulce claudia overwinter very well – usually; and this year the young plants, instead of tillering obediently and bringing in an early harvest of delicious beans, suffered from a month of cold east winds and passed away before flowering. This year we’ll give the early sowing a miss and start again in March which will, of course, ensure a balmy spring with record crops of early broad beans.

What certainly will be going in is some garlic. A good deal of the holiday reading was taken up with getting my head around epigenetics. The basic DNA – the genetic material of a plant which determines its general form; doesn’t change aside from mutations. However, apparently different genes can be switched on and off by all sorts of environmental factors – and this is one possible reason for the fact that seed saving of successful crops can lead to better results (on your unique patch of earth) – than expensive commercial varieties because the starting variety gradually adapts from year to year. Anyway, the upshot of this is that this year we’ve selected the best of this year’s garlic crop which we’ll replant tomorrow. We had them netted all last season so there was no trace of fly damage but some of the plants suffered from basal plate rot where the selected seed cloves didn’t. We’ll label these athletes carefully and grow them alongside what we South Gloucestershire peasants like to call boughten seed. Six years of being told off at school for using that dialect term showed it was a surefire way of annoying teachers who thought educating us involved severing all our roots. We shall do a properly scientific comparison next year and onwards to see if any of these epigenetic changes occur: so long as the plants don’t get sicklier and sicklier.

Finally, here’s a photo of a stranger who dropped in for a rest and a warm up on one of our fence posts today. It’s a common plume moth that’s apparently mainly a night flyer. When I first saw it a thought it must be a lacewing but it wasn’t. One of its endearing habits is to roll its wings up like a brolly when it’s resting. But it’s most endearing habit of all is that it lays its eggs on the bindweed which its caterpillars like to eat. We have an abundance of the foodplant lurking on the edges of the allotment silently waiting for the moment to tunnel in under the fence. I had a word with the little moth and she promised to come back mob handed with her mates next week.