The post Cherry brandy… the first step towards winter appeared first on Miss Foodwise.
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Preparing the cherry brandy or ‘Kriekenborrel’ as we called it in Belgium, is the first step towards Christmas and winter for me. On Christmas eve when I was a child, I was allowed one single drunken cherry in a small dainty glass as a treat. This is how memories are made, and how time and time again when Christmas comes, you need certain flavours to transport you back to the past. Nostalgia and Christmas go hand in hand. It is the one western tradition that is still going strong. People prepare things like this cherry brandy and plum pudding months in advance. The anticipation grows in the jars, and by every spoonful of brandy that is poured over the pudding every week.Preserving fruit in ‘Jenever’ which is almost identical to Gin, has been a custom in our parts for many decades. It was particularly popular in the 1950’s when my grandmother was young. Because my mother grew up with it, it was sentimental to her, which is why she taught me how to make it. I still have the last jar of cherries my mum and I drowned in Eau de Vie in 1998. It is quite special, because the jar holds memories as well as cherries. In my kitchen I have jars from 2006, 2010, 2011 and 2013. Some I give away, ladling the cherries and booze out into smaller jars to decorate with a ribbon and the date. They go to people I know will appreciate my precious preserve. Because I part with memories of making them and hope they will be cherished.
My cherries of choice are dark English cherries from Kent. Their flesh is thick and eats like a plum, their juice is deep red like the liqueur it produces after months of ripening. The ones you see pictured here are of the ‘Regina’ variety and grown in Kent. It’s good to see Kentish cherries on the shelves of English supermarkets. This means that the farm will have a set income and that it is worth to harvest the fruit. Far too foo often fruit is left on the trees because harvesting would cost too much. And although I’m not a particularly big fan of supermarkets, not everyone lives near a farmshop or market where you can obtain these beauties and other produce grown on local soil.
In Belgium it is hard to find home grown cherries too, again the expense of harvesting and demand are too high. Most of our cherries come from Turkey. They are usually quite flavourless and dull. When I was a child, we had cherries from Belgium and France in our shops. One particular type, which we called white bellies, were my absolute favourite. They reminded me of the red blushing apple of snow white so I pretended they were tiny apples. You see them rarely these days which is a terrible shame. It is those wonders of your childhood you miss when you grow up. Fruit you got every season which is now only available rarely and at premium prices in premium stores. The farmers wife at my local farmshop tells me that when they go to the fruit and veg market early in the morning to buy the produce they do not grow (they are a dairy farm), they see less and less older farmers selling the more rare fruit like mirabelle plums, sloes and medlars.They harvest them from their farm hedges from trees much older then they are themselves. But as these older farmers retire, so is lost the supply of these most wonderful fruits. I appreciate the farmshop for buying the produce from these old men, that way it is still possible to see more of the season than just what the supermarkets wishes us to see.
What about the future of cherries and other home grown fruits? One of the fears of Brexit in Britain is that even less home grown fruit will be harvested. Most fruit pickers are immigrant workers because English (and Belgian people too for that matter) don’t want to do the hard work. So the question is, will there be an even further decline in home grown fruit? Well… Britain hasn’t left the EU yet and we can’t know now what will happen later. So lets just buy local when we can.
In the 19th century most fruit was picked by the poorest people in the cities. Just like with hop picking, families would move out of towns like London to spend the summer by the orchards. Although it was hard labour, being out of the city meant that the children had clean air and nature to run and play in before and after work. They saw it as a vacation, a working holiday. The money earned would go to the mother, men usually stayed in the towns to work, and the women would use the money to buy well needed items like new shoes and clothes for the children.
The past 50 years 90 % of the cherry orchards have disappeared. Before the second world war there were about 40 000 acres of cherry orchards in England alone. These were mainly in Kent, Worcestershire and Herefordshire.
The labour was very intensive as the trees were very high, too high to cover the crop from the birds. Cherry pickers would climb on very high ladders with baskets tied to their waists. Nowadays trees are kept smaller so they can be managed more easily and trey can be covered with netting to keep the birds from stealing or damaging the entire crop. When you drive through Kent at this time of the year, you can spot the netting. It looks like a giant spider has creeped out of that Harry Potter book to cover the trees in her enormous web.
To be able to enjoy cherries for longer, drowning them in strong alcohol really is the best way.
As true and loyal readers of my blog will know, I have featured a recipe for my family cherry brandy before. This one is quite the same, but using more readily available alcohol and more sugar so it keeps for longer. Traditionally this liqueur should be made with sour cherries, not sweet, but it works just fine with either.
A little news, I am organising two creative gatherings in the autumn. One will be a two day retreat in Tuscany the last weekend of october, the other is a one day in Dorset end of november. If you are interested, details will be shared in the next weeks but you can already email me to be put on the list without obligation. We will be cooking, photographing, styling, eating, drinking, learning and we will also have the most wonderful time with like-minded creatives.
On to the recipe now
What do you need
sour or sweet cherries: 1kg
A neurtal alcohol of minimum 35%
(vodka, jenever, gin, everclear, eau de vie,…)
raw cane sugar: 500 g
brown sugar or mollasse: 1 tablespoon
glass preserving jars
Method
Rinse the cherries well and pad dry with kitchen paper. Remove the stalks carefully without damaging the fruit.
Layer the cherries with the sugar, pour over the alcohol and close the jar.
Put in a dark place at room temperature – a cellar is perfect – and shake every day for a week
Forget about the cherries until christmas or thanksgiving!
Enjoy in a dainty glass or add them to your cake batter (don’t forget the kernels!). If you got some leftover from last year, toss on your ice cream. Also a treat baked into a batter pudding or clafoutis.
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Cherry tart and prostitution >
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Quince really are a mystical fruit. They hang like lanterns from the trees, forcing the branches to bend down with their weight. One can not ignore their smell, how they fill your kitchen with that sweet incense-like scent. The smell far sweeter than they really are, because as far as fruits go, they are very tart. So tart that they are considered inedible raw.
Recipes over time always require you to cook quinces, and cook them long and slow. Some authors claim you should never put spices with quinces but most instruct you to add cinnamon, cloves, peper and more sweet spices.
Quinces are responsible for the word marmalade as their Portuguese word is ‘marmelo’ and they were made into fruit cheeses named marmalades. The marmalades were served after dinner as a digestive and they were often prescribed by apothecaries to cure minor ailments.
The pear shaped yellow fruits were made into pies, preserved whole and in form of a syrup and they were also made into Ratafia. Ratafias were infused alcohols much like the Amaretto we know today. It could be made with apricot kernels, bitter almonds – which produce the original Amaretto, cherry kernels and cherries, and our beautiful quinces.
Ratafia of quinces was popular in the 18th century in England, and in the 17th and 18th in France. The following recipe is that of Vincent La Chapelle, the master cook to the fourth earl of Chesterfield, William IV, the Prince of Orange, John V of Portugal and even the mistress of Louis XV of France: Madamme de Pompadour.
Like with so many historical writers, he borrowed a lot of his recipes of another author, in this case the French Francois Massialot who published a book on court cookery and confectionery in 1692. These two gentlemen both share recipes for Quince Ratafia, but La Chapelle instructs us to bring the quince juice to a boil, while Massialot does not. They also use different spices, making the end result not the same drink at all.
You must have some Quinces, and rasp them with a Grater; all being grated, you must have a Piece of strong Cloth, put in a small handful, and squeese it with all your Might, that the Juice may come from it; when all is squeesed and you have all the Juice, put it in a Preserving pan, let it take just one single Boiling, and let it cool; being cooled, measure two Quarts of Juice and two Quarts of Brandy, Measure by Measure, and clarify some Sugar; to each two Quarts, ten Ounces of Sugar, a Piece of Cinnamon, four Cloves, and three or four Grains of white Pepper whole; stop up your Jug very close, put it aside for two or three Months, put it through a Straining-bag, until it come very clear, and put it up in Bottles flopped very close.
Vincent la Chapelle, The Modern Cook, London, 1733
In 1830 ‘The Cook’s Dictionary’ by Richard Dolby instructs us to leave the scrapings of quince for 24 hours until they start to ferment, then extract the juice and add it to spiced brandy. We’re not going to ferment the quince, I will try that next year as I just caught the last of the quinces of the year at the market. And I’m going to leave out the spices because I want to know how it tastes like without them, quince have such a delicate flavour.
What is your favourite quince recipe?
Quince Ratafia
What do you need
250 g quince juice
250 g sugar
700 ml vodka or Eau de vie
a strainer
a cloth or jelly bag
1 liter bottle
Method
As Quinces vary in size and juiciness, I can only give you the amount of juice needed.
In my case I used three large quinces, of which two had little juice so it does really depend.
The original recipe states to grate the quince and then put the grated flesh into a cloth which you have to squeeze to get all the juice out. I am not convinced this works very well and if it does it will be labour intensive. Do if you have a juicer, use that, if you have a blender, use that and strain very well.
Do remove the cores and pips but leave the skin on, just give it a good wash to remove the grey dewy coating quinces often have.
After you have juiced your quince, pour the juice in a saucepan and bring to a boil on a gentle flame.
Once it has boiled, take off the fire and leave to cool.
When cooled, line a strainer with a cloth or jelly bag and place on the bottle you are using.
Pour the juice in the cloth and continue to do so until all the juice is strained.
You need to do this as there might still be some sediment in your juice that you need to remove.
Now add the sugar, and then the alcohol, close the bottle and shake.
Shake the bottle every day the first week and once a week the following month.
Then leave to rest a couple of months and enjoy cold in a dainty glass.
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Ypocras – mulled wine
Sloe Gin
Hop brandy
The post Quince Ratafia appeared first on Miss Foodwise.
]]>The post We shall drink Lambswool on the Twelfth Night appeared first on Miss Foodwise.
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Although I was brought up with a lot of Pagan traditions, living in the city of Antwerp meant that some customs were harder to follow than others. As city dwellers far removed from any orchard or field, we were ignorant to the traditional rites surrounding harvest and sowing time. If there is no nature to honour, no field to gather around the cleansing fire, the feasting quickly becomes part of the past and forgotten.
Industrialisation has brought us wealth and the choice of matching shoes with handbags on a regular tuesday morning. It has brought the technical bits and bobs we all love and loathe. The big world has become smaller and the challenges bigger. The lucky few still live outside of the ever growing concrete cities. We follow their lives on Instagram with a sense of nostalgia, as if we have ever experienced living surrounded by trees and liberating fields and forests, and then tragically lost it.
But that is what it is, we have lost something, and most of us can feel it. There have never been more depressed people, nor have there ever been more people who are unhealthy because of their eating habits, eating too much rather than starving, but malnourished nonetheless. Our daily bread is soiled with adulteration, slowly making us ill. Animals are kept away from fields and live their ever shortening lives on the concrete floors of factory farms to keep the cost of your daily need low, fruit is left on the trees to rot because farmers can’t afford to harvest it, the price a farmer gets for his milk hasn’t gone up in 20 years (based on Belgian farms) so milk is being sprayed onto the soil of the farmland where the cows can no longer roam freely because of bureaucratic nonsense about fertilizer. Small scale generation long fishermen turn their boats into flower beds because the fishing quotas set out to protect fish stocks have made it so that only the big destructive factory fishing vessels can make a living, scooping up the fish only for part of it to be actually consumed and the rest turned into animal feed because their nets just catch too much for it all to be sold and cooked by us humans. The fisherman that could have made his day by catching one Dover Sole, now has to trow it back, while the big monsters take and take and kill the sustainable fishing industry.
We got lost as humans, because we lost part of our human nature.
Let today be an Epiphany.
The Epiphany is the Christian feast that concludes the twelve days of Christmas. In Pre-Christian pagan traditions this marks the time for Wassail. The practice of ‘wassailing’ meant singing and drinking in the apple orchards on the Twelfth Night to awaken the trees, to warn of the evil spirits and pray for a good harvest in the autumn. It could be that the feast of Wassail comes from the Celtic festival called ‘La Mas Ubhail’, the Feast of the Apple. Wassail comes from ‘waes hael’ meaning ‘be thou healthy’ or ‘be whole’, a salutation in Old English. During the feast these words would be addressed to each other and to the oldest apple tree in the orchard.
A drink traditional to Wassail is called ‘Lambswool’ and it is very possible that ‘La Mas Ubhail’ got phonetically Anglicised, to ‘Lamasool’ and later ‘Lambswool’. In historical books we often see that a lot of words were written down phonetically, resulting in a number of different ways to note down one single word.
Robert Herrick, a mid 17th century poet mentioned the custom of Wassailing and Lambswool in his poem about about Twelfth Night, we also get an idea of the recipe too:
Next crown the bowl full With gentle lamb’s wool Add sugar, nutmeg and ginger, With store of ale too; And thus ye must do To make a wassail a swinger
Give then to the king And queen wassailing : And though with ale ye be whet here, Yet part from hence As free from offence As when ye innocent met here.
The drink Lambswool is a mulled ale, poured over hot apple puree, although some people swear by whole apples, or apple pieces cooked in spiced cider or ale. However, as far as a drink goes, you can’t swallow a whole apple, nor can you swallow apple pieces so it is most probable that the recipe containing whole apples is just derived from the recipe made with apple puree. It is possible that the soft puree resembled a lambs fleece to people in the old days, resulting in giving it the name of what they associated it with, lambs wool.
Another reason for thinking that an apple puree was used it that this is the end of the season, so the apples which are left in times before refrigeration and fancy techniques to keep fruit from ripening, would not have been the prettiest of the bunch. An hot and spiced apple puree fortified with ale would be warming on a january evening, and would allow people to prepare it in a kettle rather than an oven which is used for the recipe with whole apples. Remember this is a country dish and ovens were a privilege for the well-to-do. But the sugar in the dish also tells us this wasn’t a drink for the poor, it could have been a special treat from the lord of the manor, or from the farmer to his farm labourers.
Last year I spoke to you about the intriguing Twelfth Cake, a fruit cake elaborately decorated with sugar or wax figurines which was also a privilege for the well-to-do. This cake, which is also mentioned by Herrick in his poem also started of as a humble ‘plum cake’ for the feast of Wassail. City folk picked up on it and adjusted the cake to their festive needs, making it the centrepiece of the table and causing queues in front of bakeries. Because it became popular in the city and with the wealthy, we get our first recipe for it in a 1803 book. A recipe for Lambswool is more difficult to find, as the drink remained in the countryside. So judging from the poem of Robert Herrick, I came up with this recipe for you.
Lambswool
serves 6-8
What do you need
- Bramley or Cox stewing apples, 500 gr (peeled and cored about 300 gr)
- water, 100 ml
- sugar 100 gr
- freshly grated nutmeg, 1 teaspoon
- ginger powder, 1 teaspoon
- a good ale, 750 ml
Method
Peel and cut your apples in small pieces and place in a pot along with 100 ml of water and the sugar and spices. Stew until soft and puree so there are no bits left.
When ready to serve, heat up the apple puree and add the ale while whisking. You should get a nice froth while doing so. Serve at ones.
Are you celebrating the Twelfth Night? Or are you having a slice of King cake, galette Du Roi or Driekoningen taart? Or are you wassailing and drinking Lambswool?
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| Ancient apple trees in Sussex |
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The post We shall drink Lambswool on the Twelfth Night appeared first on Miss Foodwise.
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