I mentioned on Tuesday that I’ve returned to bread making after quite a long break, and re-started my sourdough starter. In fact the one I made from about 1/2 gram of dried starter flaked from the rim of the original container and given a couple of days feeding, has done so well I made a loaf with some (probably stale) leftover flour in the absence of a delivery from the mill. The resulting loaf in the photo above was pretty good,and so I’ve re-christened the two starters Eeyore and Tigger for fairly obvious reasons. The flour I’ve ordered is made from organic Maris Widgeon wheat which is less productive (50% less than Canadian hard wheat for example) and more expensive but is slightly lower in protein and, the millers claim, perfect for slow proving. I’ve been lowering the protein level by adding cake flour to the mix – which works after a fashion. Breakfast today was a joy!
But we’ve also been busy on other fronts as well. The allotment, mercifully, is pretty well closed down for the winter except for picking the apples; the winter crops will sit quietly in this awful weather. It seems that if you have about ten fruit trees you’re entitled to call it an orchard. We’ve got ten so we can talk about our orchard with a contemptuous toss of the head to those poor souls with only five. Yesterday Madame made a Dutch apple cake and we’ve had stewed apple every day for ages. The great thing about seasonal food is that it almost always runs out before you get sick of it.
Back in the flat I’ve been sifting through thousands of photos of unidentified wildflowers; giving them names, dates and locations – which is a massive undertaking – and then building a database. I’ve got a good memory for where I first saw a plant and so sticking a pin in the OS map for the ones that preceded phone cameras, isn’t as hard as it sounds. So far I’ve got 320 ram stamped entries, all double checked and accompanied by photographic evidence.
Last night we went to a lecture on modern art in Bath, given by the Director of the Holburne Museum. Apparently the City Council allowed a nationally important collection of craft ceramics including the Leach archive to go to Farnham and the national photographic collection to be taken to Bradford. What a huge loss to the city! In return we got the nationally trivial Crest Nicholson development south of the river which looks like a Russian bonded warehouse and was so badly built it’s pretty well bankrupted them with compensation payments which are a closely guarded secret because they’re trying to sell the business before anybody notices! Ah joy – Bath has a Director of Heritage but no head of cultural activities. They say it’s Jane Austin and the Roman Baths that bring the tourists in; but the traffic down Milsom Street towards the shops is always greater than the traffic in the other direction.
So there we are. All’s well with the Potwell Inn and tomorrow we’re off to the Mendips on a fungus hunt before it starts raining again.
Maybe I spoke too soon. I was so pleased that the original sourdough starter hadn’t actually died, I implied – OK bragged – that it was indestructible. However, when I added a feed of dark rye flour to the original batch I also scraped off a few tiny flakes of starter that had dried out (maybe 1/2 gram)and were stuck to the rim of the old fermentation jar, then dropped them into a jam jar with some tepid water and a tablespoon of dark rye flour and left them both on one side overnight.
In the morning the old faithful had thrown a few sulky bubbles but otherwise nothing; however the homeopathic flakes in the jam jar had bubbled up all over the worktop and when I unscrewed the lid there was a healthy hiss. It was so eager to make bread I transferred it into some luxury Tupperware accommodation, fed it again since when it’s been growling at me from above the stove. Tonight I shall make a batter with some leftover organic flour; but I’ve ordered a trial batch of Shipton Mill organic Maris Widgeon flour and I’ll start experimenting with that when it arrives. Baking is such a joyful activity and it annoys me that many so-called experts make it sound difficult. It really isn’t. Sure, the whole process takes maybe 36 hours but of that it takes 10 minutes to make the batter, maybe 20 minutes to weigh out the ingredients and knead, and 35 minutes to bake. Aside from that you can do something useful; make lists, identify plants fill databases and write blogs. What’s not to like?
Oh and sorry – the English insult “barmy” derives from the excited way the yeast bubbles out of its container – the barm pot. There’s one on my stove.
As it turned out, my brilliant idea of a trip on the canal was a lot more testing than I’d remembered from previous expeditions long ago. The boat – at 65 feet was hard work; like steering a blind carthorse through a minefield. Directions needed to be figured out long before they were undertaken because narrow boats don’t do anything quickly and steering from the unprotected deck in the persistent rain and wind made me feel like Socrates must have felt as the impact of the Hemlock spread through his body. My hands and feet became more and more painful and even regular offerings of Dundee cake and hot tea failed to move the dial.
The canal has become a kind of linear favela. An improvised substitute for non-existent affordable housing, untreated mental health and addiction problems and unemployment amongst young people. Yes of course there are posh well-found boats for second homers and even airBnB offers (check out the combination locks) and there are numerous canal holiday companies but an uneasy truce between the stakeholders looks and feels highly unstable. Then, recently, the number of permanently berthed wide-beam boats has exploded and can make life very difficult when negotiating a sharp bend. Even finding a mooring spot near any of the villages, towns or road bridges is a nightmare. You can tell the struggling boaters from the piled high wet logs, one wheeled bikes and scrap metal piled on the roof. It’s a sad reflection of a betrayed generation left to rot by governments who don’t give a shit.
The last day was by far the coldest and although the sun eventually broke through and dispersed the mist, I was on my knees as we pulled back into the boatyard. I’m getting a bit old for this malarkey. Our joy was complete when, after we’d loaded up the car, we discovered the battery was beyond flat; rather – dead. Luckily one of the engineers (we’d seen so much of them trying to fix the heating during the trip that they felt like friends) saved the day with a portable lithium battery.
But there’s always a plus side, and this photo taken in a quiet stretch between Avoncliff and Dundas shows the beauty of the autumn trees. The lone fisherman, by the way, gave us a short seminar on how boaters should pass to preserve harmony. He said that many boats tried to pull over to the opposite (shallow) side instead of holding to the middle – thereby stirring up the mud and ruining the fishing altogether.
I’ve always had difficulties with this season. The dying of the light drains the joy out of me and I seem to lose all motivation. But every year – I ought to know this by now – there’s a kind of Kübler Ross moment of acceptance and – as if a switch has been thrown – I feel OK again. I woke up at 5.00am on Sunday and paid an outstanding bill and then fetched my sourdough starter from its hiding place in the kitchen; unscrewed the lid gingerly and sniffed, expecting the worst. It was fine and a lightning bolt of optimism shot through me. Back during lockdown when everyone was making sourdough, the internet forums were full of newcomers suffering from starter anxiety and wondering whether it was even possible to take a break from feeding the ever demanding baby. Yeasts, I should say, are lovely, useful and tiny organisms and are rather harder to kill than Bindweed. I often neglect my starter shamefully – I’ve had it for well over a decade – and it still comes back and fills the kitchen with a delightful apple fragrance. Interestingly, no-one I’ve given it to has managed to keep it alive for any length of time. Has it micro-evolved to the exact conditions of the Potwell Inn kitchen? We’ll be off to the mill this week to get some decent organic flour and all will be well and all manner of things will be well once more.
So I made my peace with winter and spent most of yesterday walking (in my head) on the estuary of the river Esk in Cumbria where it joins the Irish Sea.
We were here in late August 2019 and I took a few photos of flowers I didn’t recognize. Five years later and my plan to organise retrospectively some of the 13,000 photos into a botanical database brought me back again in memory to this beautiful and bleak area, just south of Sellafield. The initial plan was to add Sneezewort to the file, but then I noticed another bunch of photos with nothing but a date and location in the EXIF data. First impression was that they were all pictures of Samphire except that when I looked properly it was clear that they were all three of them different plants and that none of them was Samphire. I should add that there was an abundance of Samphire around but that the proximity to Sellafield would make the eating of anything found on the seashore pretty dangerous! Anyway, in a very contented few hours I’d nailed all three and added them to the database; all of them shoreline and estuary specialists.
The title, “Well tempered household” is a steal from a gardening classic by Christopher Lloyd called “The Well Tempered Garden” – well worth reading even though he seems to think of a small garden being anything less than three acres. “Tempered” in the sense that he’s using it has nothing to do with bad tempers or good manners because it’s drawing on a process familiar to sword makers when steel is heated and cooled in order to make it less fragile, more ductile and altogether stronger. A well tempered garden in this sense is a garden that’s capable of withstanding the kinds of climatic surprises and shocks that we’re becoming all too familiar with.
So extending the metaphor to a whole household – like the Potwell Inn – seems not to be too far a stretch, at least to me. We’re not tidy, we’re frequently bad tempered but the Potwell Inn is a well tempered household because in amongst the joyful moments we’ve seen a few shocks and many stresses; we’ve endured scary times and sad times; we’ve frequently been hard up, and to borrow another idea from Nietzsche – what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I like to think that layer after layer of experience has been forged into the steel of our being, such that our resilience has made us strong.
Of course there are some shocks that experience can’t overcome. Yesterday we went to visit an old friend with Motor Neurone Disease and against all the odds we had a really lovely afternoon together. Any difficulties in listening to his failing voice were overcome, and – not for the first time – I felt the presence of a kind of luminosity which is not unusual among those who are approaching death. We left and drove back to Bath on a warm and sunny evening and I was overwhelmed by a sense of fullness as all my summer evenings were forged into one. It was an unexpected and extraordinary moment.
Back in the kitchen there were jobs to do, and so I kneaded the new batch of dough for the morning and set it into a banneton that I’ve only used a few times before. I don’t think I could ever write a full account of baking bread. It’s so embedded in my memory and my hands that hundreds of micro decisions contribute to the final loaf. There is a recipe stuck to the fridge, but it’s overwritten with so many amendments I rarely even look at it. But when the stars align and the starter, the batter and then the dough come right there’s a feeling that it’s going to be good. But there’s another feeling too because having the starter right, having the flour and then the loaf right are tokens of stability. Well tempered baking is a fundamental part of a well tempered household and so too is the allotment which brings us healthy food. Today we harvested tomatoes, potatoes, aubergines, green beans and sweetcorn and Madame picked 2Kg of blackberries from the footpath. Today we’re winning the sweetcorn battle with the badgers six nil. Lunch was good.
The Pyrex bowl in which I’ve proved every loaf I’ve ever baked is so precious and replete with memories that it’s only ever hand-washed. I’m not sure I could cope with losing it. The sourdough starter is more than ten years old and always sulks when we go away and don’t feed it. Recently a couple of American neighbours were in the process of moving away and they entrusted a three generations old sourdough pancake batter to our care.
So yesterday evening we ate late, watched television far too late – binging on “Bear” series two – and then listened to some of the music again while we drank too much wine. The sound track is amazing. A short night, then, and up early with a thick head to bake the loaf.
As the produce floods in, I spend more and more time in the kitchen. Today there were the blackberries to be cooked and strained through a cotton twill bag to make jelly. Bramble jelly is one of the most fragrant of all the jellies, and it always feels like we’re eating summer when we have it. Then today I also made the first batch of roasted tomato passata which we use as a base for many meals throughout the year. I suppose all this is another instance of resilience; of the tempering process that keeps the household on track even during the toughest of times. Without our sack of flour, the bakers yeast and the sourdough starter and a cupboard full of preserved produce from the allotment we’d have felt very exposed, but as it was, our principal enemy was isolation.
Are we self-sufficient? Absolutely not; but are we well tempered and resilient? without doubt!
There – I thought that the headline would attract some small interest! The loaf, by the way, is a fifty fifty wholemeal/white sourdough mix that I made last year. As you see, it makes a lovely – if rather close textured loaf – but I rarely bake it because the flavour is so intense it tends to overwhelm whatever you eat it with. Our everyday recipe is a combination of rye starter with organic white flour which, over 36 hours, develops a lovely rich wheat flavour without shouting at you. Barely a week passes without me learning something new about baking and although occasionally when I’m in a tearing hurry I’ll use the bread machine (I’m not a fundamentalist Sourdough Savonarola), slow is always best, and if – through lousy organisation or sheer idleness – I resort to the supermarket, I invariably experience buyers’ remorse.
Any sort of food, but particularly bread, seems to embrace far more than calories and glycaemic index. It forms a cultural space where memories and experiences jostle with history; even sociology and anthropology. Hearth, home and heritage; journeys abroad or even unexpected food closer to the kitchen all combine in a cloud of metaphor, where cooking and eating become a performance that can wake you out of lethargy or melancholia and set you on your feet again.
Last night we watched a lovely Greek film called “Green Sea” which explains perfectly what I’m struggling to write. It concerns a woman who has completely lost her memory apart from being able to cook despite having no sense of taste. She washes up at a working peoples’ seaside cafe and cooks food so beautiful that it brings alive, occasionally to tears, the people who eat it. It not only recovers the memories of the customers but it eventually restores her own when she has an epiphanic experience with a teaspoon of honey!
You may have noticed that I read a lot of books. On my desk at the moment are MFK Fisher’s “The Gastronomical Me”; “Welsh Food Stories” by Carwyn Graces, “Welsh Fare” by S Minwel Tibbott; “Beard on Bread” by James Beard and the recently published “English Food” by Diane Purkiss. On the shelves there are many dozens more. These are all books that explore so much more than recipes – but express cultures too. Films, in many ways, have a unique part to play in this exploration. I could – off the tip of my tongue – name ‘Couscous’, ‘Chocolat’, and Stanley Tucci’s ‘Big Night’ in which there’s a wonderful single shot scene involving his character cooking an omelette from scratch whilst conducting an argument with his brother. There’s ‘Babette’s Feast’, ‘Julie and Julia’ also starring Stanley Tucci with Meryl Streep and more recently ‘Bear’. Then there’s ‘Bagdad Cafe‘ – I could go on for ages. One day when I’m in the mood I’ll make a list.
So now, finally, I get to the pancheon thing. For fifty five years to the month, every loaf I’ve baked was proved in a Pyrex bowl. It was a wedding present given to us by my mother’s closest wartime friend. It’s grown into an icon for me; scratched to the point where I can barely see through it. But I’ve recently become so paranoid about breaking it that I’m finding it increasingly hard to use. It’s the only object whose use spans our entire marriage and I’ve got this irrational fear that something terrible will happen if I drop it. I’ve written before about my mother’s “little sharp knife” – a unique piece of bone handled but otherwise inconsequential wartime utility ware – that does it too. The few dressmaking knick knacks I still have from her working years – thimble, pincushion and so on have the same quality – and the sound of a sewing machine in the next door flat send me into rapturous childhood memories.
I need a new proving bowl, but finding one has become faintly obsessive. Fifty years ago I visited one of the few surviving local slipware potteries in the country at Wrecklesham. It finally closed down about ten years later after the claypit was sold off for housing land and the market for traditional slipware collapsed under the competition of pyrex, melamine and more glamorous (?) kitchenware, oh and the complete absence of skilled throwers . I’ll write more about that visit another day. They were still – just about – making a few pancheons for trendy interior decorations but they were way above what we could afford.
I’ve looked on and off for years for one, but the problem is that they’re very expensive when bought from antique shops and – not knowing when they were made – there’s always the suspicion that they’re lead glazed. Any acidic food left in them could lead to lead poisoning. It’s a shame because that glorious amber coloured and unctuous glaze is quite difficult to replicate without lead flux. But then, miraculously and almost certainly due to the surge of interest in home baking during Covid, one or two potteries have seen the gap in the market and begun to produce hand thrown slipware pancheons once again. Why bother? Well, for all the reasons at the top of this piece. Of course you can prove your dough in any old container, but bread making occupies a cultural space as well as the usual culinary one; and those of us who bake get tremendous pleasure from working within that almost extinct culture using traditional tools and equipment, and of course I trained as a potter when I was young – which is why I visited Wrecclesham all those years ago. Buying a new pancheon joins two of the threads of my life together. Best of all I’ve found a pottery less than twenty miles away that’s making them and as soon as they reopen in January I’ll be down there to check them out (fussy customer!) and if they’re good – and they look very good online – I’ll retire the Pyrex bowl and start afresh. It won’t do anything for the bread but it’ll do a lot for me.
More recently we found a potter called Nathalie Hubert down in St Quentin la Poterie in Provence and we bought some of her lovely oven/tableware which radiates sunshine into our flat whenever we use it, and then we invariably begin to talk about our travels there. Cooking, eating and sharing memories over a few glasses is at the heart of human thriving – not an optional extra for the wealthy. In fact the wealthy always lose out because they don’t have to struggle to learn the skills and find the money, they just flash the wad and it all falls into their laps, and straight out again. Of course it’s hard work excavating history, reading, practising, watching, talking and learning from the people who really know. But as Aneurin Bevan once famously said to a heckler – “If you’d just shut up and listen you might leave this place slightly less stupid than when you came in”
Looking back to my optimistic post about making 36 hour sourdough in late November I see that I wrote that the temperature outside in the communal hallway drops to about 12C in winter. Well that was then! After record breaking warmth in November we’ve switched to record breaking cold and this week the overnight air temperature has dropped to -6C and it hasn’t risen much above zero all day, and so the hall temperature – assisted by the open window downstairs which our neighbours use to disperse the tobacco and weed smoke – drops to about 6C. This last couple of weeks we’ve used the hall as a large additional fridge.
Living as we do in a concrete block of flats built to 1970’s specifications, we’ve been struggling with black mould on the walls for which the only remedy is keeping the flat warm – which costs about £120 a week; rotating a dehumidifier around each room and spraying the affected areas with bleach. A request for advice from our landlord (Church of England Pensions Board) has gone unanswered for three weeks. Just feel the love!
This morning it was so cold inside the flat that I had to resort to three layers and a woollen hat. Madame thought this was so funny she took this photo from the warmth and comfort of our bed – I possibly look like a miserable old git. But amazingly the sourdough had hardly slowed down during the night and so I was able to knock it back early – hence the grubby apron; not really grubby more spattered with bleach stains (see above). I make all sorts of bread, and the difference in flavour between the slow 36 hour sourdough and a quick four hour yeast loaf is so huge you wouldn’t believe they’re made with exactly the same flour
The kitchen is a real sanctuary during these troubled times. With the allotment frozen it’s the only place I can make things happen. This morning I knocked up some eggs benedict for a breakfast treat. The loaf is proving until this evening when I’ll bake it, and there’s a casserole in the oven – it feels like a small victory against entropy except that when we went up to the allotment to get some bay leaves we discovered that the rats had found our stored squashes and eaten the lot. I can’t get too cross about it though; there are bigger challenges to face.
I read somewhere this week that blogs with a vaguely homestead/self sufficiency feel are doing especially well at the moment. I can’t say I’d noticed it here at the Potwell Inn – maybe because this blog is not about polishing the political turd with a bit of lifestyle blather. We won’t bring about the desired paradigm shift with home made marmalade. Although I loathe William Cobbett’s reactionary politics, I do think that Rural Rides and Cottage Economy are an indispensable record of a period of great hardship in the 18th Century, and I’d be pleased if the Potwell Inn provided a similar account of these low and selfish decades.
PS – The algorithm that WordPress uses to pick similar postings has selected three that mention marmalade. Obviously artificial intelligence has a way to go just yet!
The 36 hour loaf – showing very strong gluten development
This was an experiment that was rather forced on me because, (not for the first time), the oven door – posh hide and slide – has begun to offer just a touch of resistance and a faint grinding noise as it opens. Rather than wait until it breaks completely, we called out an engineer and he ordered the bits. Two weeks later we’re still waiting for the oven to be repaired, but at least it’s still usable with care. Obviously he can’t come to fix the oven if it’s in use, or even hot so we attempt to manage the situation by keeping the oven cool during working days.
The downside of this cooperative gesture is that under the previous 24 hour bread baking schedule there was no alternative but to bake during the day – so I wondered what would happen if we changed the dough cycle from 24 to 36 hours. So the new regime was to make the batter at around 8.00 am and make up the dough at 8.00pm. This length of time demands that things are kept relatively cool for the whole process – around 18C instead of 21C, in our flat at least. Once kneaded the dough went into its bowl to prove overnight until 8.00am the next day – outside the flat in a corridor that goes down to somewhere around 12C on winter nights. Then it was knocked back and placed in its banneton and shuffled around the flat from warm to cold to try to get it ready for baking at 8.00pm – 36 hours in total. All this sounds like a lot more work than it is in practice – it’s more like a kind of benign contemplative neglect.
By 8.00pm on the second day the loaf had risen like a pale belly, just above the top of the banneton – it looked lovely – so I turned it on to the peel, slashed it and slid it into the oven for 10 minutes at 220 C and twenty minutes at 180 C on full steam. The question is – is there a discernible difference between the 24 and 36 hour method? It makes absolutely no difference to the workload or fuel cost and since I work for free there’s no reason not to adopt it.
There’s no question that with sourdough, time equals flavour and the 36 hour loaf certainly tasted better. The crust is a matter of choice because I can’t bear those palate tearing loaves so beloved of Instagram bakers. The best justification for baking at home is that with a bit of experience you can bake bread just as you like it – never mind what the current fashion dictates. We like the crust to be firm but not hard and the crumb to be open textured but not so full of holes you could spread a quarter pound of butter on to one slice. Sourdough can be quite springy so it helps if it’s possible to slice it thinly for toast – but that’s just what we like. If you prefer the razor crust and the texture of Swiss cheese you can do that too.
Sourdough has a much lower glycaemic index than yeast bread made quickly with the same flour and for me at least it doesn’t provoke the weird feeling of bloating and discomfort that (delicious) white bread almost always causes – so it’s a win win decision. For UK readers we use Shipton Mill organic white flour and a starter that’s fed with their wholemeal rye. I’m sure you can bake excellent and equally well flavoured bread with dozens of other flours but being a creature of habit I’ve got used to the texture of the dough and the right feel during kneading. Years ago I was very fond of an 80% flour made by Bacheldre Mill but sadly they stopped producing it. I’ve yet to see any 100% wholemeal sourdough loaf that was worth breaking your teeth on. During the lockdown my son got me a 25 kilo bag of the typical refined white flour used by bakers. I could hardly use it, but it kept us going.
One of the most useful lessons I’ve learned about baking at home is to find an artisanal bread that you really like and then go all-out to imitate it. It’s a process, not a religion, and there are no penalties for heresy! All the important knowledge is in your hands rather than in any recipe – the feel rather than the theory – and even the most embarrassing failures (almost) always taste good even if they don’t look great. There are no secret ingredients, just flour, water and a little bit of fat – and ignore all that unhelpful nonsense about very wet doughs unless you like scraping two foot diameter flatbreads off the floor of your oven. Amazingly, and completely in accordance with common sense, if your loaf spreads out like a cowpat when tipped out of the banneton, you need to make it a bit stiffer next time. And that’s about it. With a bit of luck nobody dies!
All I want for Christmas is my ……… don’t go there!
15th November 2022
You might have thought – with no supporting evidence at all apart from a mention in a glossy food supplement – that the quince was just another unusual fruit. Quince marmalade, quince cheese and quince jelly all feature on the menus of aspirational (overpriced) restaurants where the finished food slides effortlessly onto the plate and we eat it with no thought of the process; in fact with not much thought at all except possibly its impact on the bill.
A couple of years ago I made medlar jelly which is unlikely to figure on any menu anytime soon because the faffery involved in picking, bletting, cooking and bottling them exceeds any fleeting pleasure at its weird flavour. The French name which roughly translates as dog’s arse, referring to its appearance, is close to being the only amusing thing about it. The recommended use of medlar jelly as a companion to game is a bit of a clue – possibly best eaten with something like a long buried seabird. Its principal value is its prodigious longevity. We’ve had half a dozen jars in the store cupboard since the day I made it – and they’re likely to stay there until they start growing an obvious layer of penicillin.
However yesterday’s task seemed, on the surface, to be a more likely culinary prospect. Quince figures on posh menus and in historical novels but never having tasted it I wouldn’t know why, and when our allotment neighbour’s tree set a huge crop this year we asked her if we could pick a few.
Possibly the nicest thing about the quince straight from the tree is its astounding perfume. Three in a bowl fragranced the whole flat until they quickly went mouldy and then smelt a bit darker. It’s best – the books say – to pick them is when fully ripe and still on the tree. This is one of those bits of hand-me-down gardening advice that has escaped serious scrutiny for generations, because they pass from not quite ready – to lying dead on the grass in the single blink of an eye. In precisely the way the badgers harvest our sweet corn during the night before we intend to harvest them, the moment you look a quince tree in the eye a stopwatch starts ticking and by the time you’ve fetched your bucket they’ve gone – apart that is from the ones at the very top of the tree just out of reach. Undaunted I balanced on a wobbly rail and picked four pounds of them ripe, but still on the tree.
The quince does not give it up without a fight. As I was slicing and chopping them the pips reminded me irresistibly of sets of spare dentures for rats (see photo above). This thought was probably brought on by the fact that some of these fruits had clearly been nibbled by rats – which are great tree climbers – but not consumed. If one bite was enough to put a rat off what could they possibly taste like? Much chopping later I quickly looked at my treasured 1968 HMSO book “Home Preservation of Fruit and vegetables” and found that I needed to simmer them for up to four hours, strain them through a jelly bag, return the pulp to the saucepan and add more water, simmer for another 10 minutes and then pour back through the jelly bag.
During this time the overpoweringly fresh, floral radiance was followed by something more like boiled sweets or bubblegum. Many hours later I’m still waiting for the last drops of juice to drip from the soft but essentially undamaged chopped fruit and then the sugar, boiling and bottling can begin. I reckon we might get four 14 oz jars out of it with a following wind.
However I have to report a deeper pleasure in the making. We’d over indulged in the last everyday sourdough loaf and so I had started a replacement early on the previous morning and left it proving in its banneton overnight. Fermentation is a time and temperature process, and so I woke several times in the night wondering if it was overflowing its banneton like a muffin top – that’s annoying – and so soon after 5.00am I was having a sleep defeating mental battle about going to check. I lost the battle and got up at about 6.30 and, needless to say, the dough had behaved perfectly; gently domed above its basket.
And then, alone in the kitchen, I had one of those epiphanic moments, remembering Christmases past. My parish duties meant that on Christmas Eve I would be at work by 8.00am and then after three services finishing at around 2.00am after the Midnight, I would turn the oven on, grab a few hours of sleep and then start the Christmas turkey in the oven before racing off to take another five services – getting home by 1.00pm usually totally exhausted. But those solitary moments in the kitchen were absolutely precious to me. If there is a reason this memory popped into my mind it must have been the perfume of the quinces, still filling the kitchen with Christmas perfumes; citrus, apple and spice. If I can bottle that later today it will be the first time I’ve ever made a preserve that made me shed a tear!
Postscript
24 hours on and here are the results. Exactly as I predicted the 4lbs of raw quince yielded 4 lbs of quince jelly; bearing in mind the added water and sugar. The flavour is lovely- certainly not bubble gum or candy – but not the same as the raw fragrance of the quinces off the tree. Chatting to a neighbour on the allotment yesterday she told us that she’d baked a couple in the oven and eaten them with ice cream, and that they were delicious. So all in all, well worth the effort. Picture below.
My Dad had a simple repertoire of basic food – it was grilled bacon. Aside from that he couldn’t cook at all. I went to see him one day and he said “Thank goodness you’ve come, I just offered to make my friend a coffee but I don’t know how to do it”. “Just add boiling water, Dad”. My Mum on the other hand was a plain cook, largely I think due to my Dad’s culinary conservatism; but – although I never realized this until recently – she broke all the stereotypes and not only taught my sister to cook but me too. I was only thinking about her the other day when I was coating a piece of fish with flour, egg and breadcrumbs. I have no idea how old I was but after she taught me how to do it, I clearly remember tipping the leftover flour back into the tin complete with the fishbones I’d removed from the fish. Why I did that I’ve no idea, but my Mum was a fierce complainer and so later, when she discovered the bones, she sent the bag back to Henry Jones on Stapleton Road and demanded a refund. I was too scared to tell her that I was the culprit but the flour mill sent three bags by way of compensation without questioning the likelihood of their product being contaminated by fishbones. The first home baked loaf of bread I ever encountered was made by her. In those days flour came in two sorts – plain and self raising both white and over refined, The plain was a soft flour, low in protein, and really only suited to cakes and so her bread never tasted as good as the loaves from the bakery at the top of the road. The process, though, was fascinating and has always stayed with me.
Today I was making a chicken and ham pie and as I rolled and cut out some decorative leaves I remembered that was another of the tricks she taught me. On another occasion I asked how she knew that the Yorkshire pudding batter was thick enough she didn’t say a word, but swished a spoon back and forth in the bowl making a distinctive plopping sound that I’ve never forgotten. I still use the same test today.
So I do realize that expecting young people to cook these days is a counsel of perfection however powerful the arguments in favour. I still think it’s worth a nag, though, because in these straitened times cooking is an act of resistance as well as a deeply satisfying and therapeutic (yes, that word again) way of spending some time. There’s a kind of alchemy to cooking; taking basic ingredients and by combining them creating something with depth and complexity. The combination of chicken, leeks and tarragon with good stock transcends its ingredients. All power, then, to the charities that are working so hard to teach young people how to do it. Two of our sons are professional chefs and the other is a more than competent cook too, but so many 18-30’s have grown up without any exposure to what I’d like to call real food which introduces the skill of making lovely meals from the cheapest raw ingredients and might even lead to a job eventually. Eating together creates powerful bonds too. Junk food makes us ill and in extreme cases even kills.
I’m profoundly grateful for my Mum’s departure from the 1950’s norm. Of course, at school, my sister learned dressmaking and home economics while I did some wood work and engineering – skills which should never have become gendered, but we both escaped with the cookery basics on which we could build and, in case you’re wondering, I could also sew a patch on my jeans or stitch on a button. At school one of our sons did at least get a chance to cook, but when he made a bechamel sauce properly his teacher said she’d never seen one that wasn’t lumpy before – oh dear! Just think – most of us can’t afford to eat out except for rare special occasions – but if you can cook you can eat like the rich; better in fact because they’re completely dependent on other people to feed them.
At the Potwell Inn we make five meals from a medium sized chicken with some lovely chicken stock, using up even the leftovers. A simple rolled breast of lamb or piece of pork belly makes the most fabulous and inexpensive meal, and ironically a piece of unpasteurised handmade Cheddar turns out to be far more economical than the cheaper industrial product because the flavour is so much better. Our waste is greatly diminished too, with all our paper, cardboard and peelings going straight to the compost heap.
Being hard up is tough going and our hearts go out to the young people who are struggling. This culture sucks the life out of us if we let it, but we don’t have to accept the King’s Shilling and become dependent. Being just that bit independent with the allotment and the kitchen lets us lift two fingers to the bailiff and the beadle.
Home made lentil soup and home baked sourdough with autumn sunshine.
Eating is an agricultural act
Wendell Berry
That memorable quotation from Wendell Berry is the same sentence that inspired Michael Pollan – both of them profoundly important voices within the US farming and food scene. You’ll find posts about both writers here on the Potwell Inn site. For Wendell Berry the point is that eating is part of the agricultural cycle. Crops are sown, cattle are tended and the culmination of that process is eating. Of course there are good and bad ways both of growing and tending, and these form a crucial moral prelude to the decisions we make about the food we eat. Here at the Potwell Inn we’re neither vegetarian nor vegan but we absolutely respect the rights of others to make their own ethical decisions about eating. We all have to accept responsibility for our food choices.
But it’s not that simple to know what’s happened to the foods that supermarkets sell and the advertising media promote at vast cost. Yesterday Madame and I watched every TV news channel we could find in order to get some information about a big demonstration in London. The media were silent; but not the kind of silence that comes from simply not knowing anything. This was the silence of omerta. A tacit vow of silence that evades scrutiny and protects the powerful. And so we turned to a reliable source of news on the internet – Double Down News – where we watched a powerful video by George Monbiot, forensically examining what Vance Packard (more than sixty years ago) called “the hidden persuaders”; building his case on an examination of the intensive salmon farming industry. Monbiot is a vegan, but this was not an attack on eating fish. It was an examination of the hellish conditions surrounding intensive fish farming, the slaughter of seals if they threaten the “crop” and the utterly misleading advertising that leads consumers to believe that this industrial product is somehow the natural expression of historic and wild Scots culture. That’s “natural”; historic”; “wild”; “Scots” and “culture” stripped of their red light warning apostrophes and stapled on to an unforgivable product like a prom dress.
Before lunch today we were sitting and wondering how it is possible to live honest and virtuous lives in a post-truth culture when Wendell Berry’s sentence popped into my mind. I’d love to be able to say that I’d spent hours preparing the bread and the soup, but in reality neither take up that much time. Sourdough bread matures slowly like a narrow boat journey but with a bit of forward planning it always arrives bang on time with no more than 20 minutes of actual work. It takes longer than that to walk to the supermarket and back.
The lentil soup is act two of a very simple meal of gammon poached in cider and vegetables. The (very small piece of) meat, free range Gloucester Old Spot, raised on a local farm and sold by the farmer at the Saturday market, lasts us for at least two meals. The poaching liquor becomes stock for the soup. The herbs and vegetables are either grown on the allotment or bought at the same market and the cider comes from Herefordshire – forty miles up the road. In this way an occasional treat stretches to three meals and four batches of nourishing winter soup. This kind of thoughtful eating pushes back at the tide of disinformation, challenges the lobbyists and PR execs and enables us to live really fulfilled lives, eating cheaply and well and staying healthy without falling under the spell of the industrial behemoth.
At every stage in the production of food there are moral and ethical decisions being made which we know nothing about. At every stage there also are bad and downright greedy decisions being made that lead inexorably to eutrophic “dead” rivers and contaminated soils producing food that may even have carcinogenic properties. The story that’s not being told is about the many, often small pioneering projects that are producing foods which are ethical, organic and taste wildly better than their industrial imitators.
Nick and Kate’s eggs
A couple of days ago I wrote about our friends’ smallholding in the Brecon Beacons. Amongst the sheep and pigs; half a dozen hens spend their days scratching amongst the fallen leaves and dirt. Between them in peak season, in a good week they probably produce three dozen of the best eggs you’ll ever taste. Dark yolked and full of goodness, the eggs are the product of a free-ranging diet of insects, grubs windfall apples and worms with a feed of layers mash at night. These are eggs you can poach without being ashamed. The yolks sit up proud in self contained whites. What if the price of this kind of food to us, the eaters of it, is that we must confine ourselves to eating less of it? Well, why not?
Of course even finding such food can be a slow business, but the farmer whose meat we finally settled on is someone we now know and trust. The dairy farmer whose milk we buy sells better tasting milk and is able to run his herd profitably by selling direct to consumers. The flour we bake with is organic and comes from UK farmers – some of them no further than a short drive away. Again we buy direct from the producers; and of course our vegetables are mainly grown by us on the allotment.
So it turns out that growing, harvesting, shopping, cooking and eating really can be an act of resistance – pushing back hard against the lies that blind us to the realities of intensive industrial food production. Just as a thought exercise, imagine asking the manager of the local Sainsbury’s supermarket where his eggs come from? How much dairy farmers are paid for their milk? What exactly Red Tractor standards represent? I imagine the reaction would be one of bewilderment followed by the dark suspicion that you, as a dangerous radical; possibly hippy communist agitator would very likely be gluing your hand to a till, or throwing tomato ketchup at the security guard in the next couple of minutes.
So if you can’t get answers to these perfectly reasonable questions, don’t buy the product. Nothing is more likely to change attitudes than mindful shopping. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that selling milk from a vending machine at 20% above supermarket prices – next door – to a supermarket would be a sure fire failure. But it’s not. I regularly have to queue behind several other economically illiterate people to fill my bottles. Resistance – it seems – is anything but futile because every BS resistant customer represents a tiny but significant dent in the profits.
A simple meal with love is better than a feast where there is hatred.
Proverbs 15:17 Contemporary English Version.
Of course you might be thinking to yourself “how on earth would I find the time to do all this searching and growing? – and in any case I can’t cook !” There’s no denying that’s a tremendous problem for all too many people but I might respectfully suggest that a long and penetrating reflection on the kind of life we live; on work-life balance and whether cooking for and eating with people you love isn’t more deeply fulfilling than a solitary microwave meal in front of the idiot’s lantern – might signal time for a whole change of lifestyle. Madame and I have been hard-up all our lives and yet we’ve had tremendously fulfilling times. We somehow understood that living as simply as possible freed us from the tyranny of lies. Greed and dissatisfaction are symptoms of an autoimmune disease of the soul for which the only cure is withdrawal from the steroid fuelled world of unfulfillable aspiration. Our eyes are all too often fixed on the destructive and false goal of freedom todo as we please, whereas true freedom is not so much freedom from want – we all deserve to have our basic needs met – but freedom from endless wanting. And if such a philosophy drives a few PR operatives out of business that’s a price I’m more than happy for them to pay!
