winter

Sea Buckthorn Berries and Various ways with them in the Kitchen

9th October 2018 by Regula 1 Comment

I first came into contact with these bright orange berries on one of my trips to Sweden last year. We visited a pick your own farm where the hedges of Sea buckthorn were plenty and laden with fruit. I wondered where these rough looking shrubs with their vicious thorns as dangerous as barb wire normally grow. Sea Buckthorn grows in coastal areas in Europe and Asia, in dunes and on moors. Their Flemish name translates to ‘Dune thorn’, other names are Sand Thorn and Siberian pineapple. Their roughness reflects the landscape in which they thrive. Brisk winds and cold, draught, desolate plains. Their root system is invasive, but improves marginal soil. In some areas the bushes have even been used for soil erosion control and land reclamation projects. It sort off feels like their thorns tell us to let them be, so that they can do good for the surrounding earth, the wildlife and to bring a highly healthy berry to the people that live around them. Birds can nest in the branches, benefiting from the piercing thorns as protection agains predators.

The oval berries are tart, bitter and have little sweetness to them. They have been used for medicinal purposes for centuries, they are full of anti-oxidants, beta-carotene, vitamine C, A and E and they battle inflammation. A concentrated puree from the berries can be used to relief sunburn and some say it could be good for some skin conditions. You could call them a super food, but lets forget about that horrible hipster term shall we? The young leaves can be used for tea because of their amino-acids, fatty acids, minerals and ability to boosting the immune system. An oil is made from the berries and seeds and used for all kinds of ails. In a nutshell, the berries are good for you and the shrub is a good one to have around.

I enjoy the flavour, the mild tartness, their lack of sweetness. I bought a jar of Sea Buckthorn jam on my last trip to Sweden when I visited an apple orchard by the Baltic Sea. Of course because of their location they must have had a lot of Sea Buckthorn bushes around and in their shop they sold a jam called “Marmalat” which was more compote textured than jammy because they added a small amount of apple to the Sea Buckthorn. The jam was spread on toast and the jar empty much too soon so I started to look forward to the new Sea Buckthorn season and searched for a farm that grows the trees.

On an evening in late august my husband and I set out to visit a man with a passion for peculiar and otherwise difficult to find fruit bushes. Together we spent nearly half an hour harvesting just 500 grams of berries. The cruel thorns make harvesting very troublesome and the tree doesn’t like to let go of its berries very easily. The best method to harvest these berries and to prevent cuts in your hands from the thorns is to prune the bushes – that need a lot of pruning anyway – and freeze the branches whole. When frozen the berries are suddenly incredibly easy to pick and most just fall from the branches.

I wanted to make the jam and at the same time make as much of the fruit as I could. The jam was made by boiling the fruit, then straining the pulp. The pulp just keeps on giving, to the pulp of 500 g berries I added 1 liter of boiling water and left it to brew for half an hour. The juice that is left can be consumed as tea or juice and it is also makes a very good aperitif mixed with sparkling wine. My favourite thing to do with the juice however is to make a sorbet out of it. I’m not an ice cream lover because I’m not too fond of its sweetness but since these berries aren’t really sweet it makes for a perfect sorbet for me. Just freeze the juice in a shallow container and stir every 30 minutes until ready – or use a machine if you have one. Come to think of it, a slushy would work great too!…

Bitter Seville Orange Marmalade – A Potted History and How to Make it

27th March 2018 by Regula 12 Comments

Marmalade is like Marmite, you either love it or loathe it.
Marmalade is loved in Britain, smeared on golden toast as the last course of the English Breakfast. The humble jar of sunshine even has its own Marmalade Awards each year in Cumbria in the North of England. Anyone can send in their jar to be judged by marmalade royalty, and my friend Lisa from All Hallows Cookery School in Dorset just won with hers.
In a time when bitter flavour is bred out of vegetables and fruits, you would think many people are not that fond of marmalade. Marmalade is traditionally made from bitter Seville oranges. Originally from Asia, the Moors introduced these oranges in Spain around the 10th century. They are quite inedible in their raw state and if you can manage I salute you. Because of their sourness Seville oranges contain a high amount of pectin. In 17 and 18th century cookery books they get a mention as ‘bitter oranges’ and it wouldn’t be an British classic without a story.

The legend
In the mid 18th century a Spanish ship carrying Seville oranges was damaged by storm. The ship sought refuge in the harbour of Dundee in Scotland where the load deemed unfit for sale were sold to a local merchant called James Keiller. James’ mother turned the bitter orange fruit into jam and so created the iconic James Keiller Dundee Marmalade. It wasn’t a coincidence that James mother made marmalade, in the 1760s her son ran a confectionery shop producing jams in Seagate, Dundee. In 1797 he founded the world’s first marmalade factory producing the first commercial brand of marmalade. In 1828, the company became James Keiller and Son, when his son joined the business. Today you can see stone James Keiller and Son marmalade jars pop up at every carboot sale and antiques market. But the marmalade is still in production, only now in glass jars that off the beautiful radiant orange colour that is so typical of marmalade.

The truth as clear as marmalade
According to Ivan Day, a prominent food historian who I was lucky to do a course with, one of the earliest known recipe for a Marmelet of Oranges dates from around 1677 and it can be found in the recipe book of Eliza Cholmondeley held in the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies.

The earliest recipe in Scotland is titled ‘How to make orange marmalat’ and dates back 1683. It can be found in the earliest Scottish manuscript recipe book which is believed to have been written by Helen, Countess of Sutherland of the Clan Sutherland. The book is dedicated entirely to fruit preservation and jelly making. According to The Scotsman “The Countess was married to John Gordon, the 16th Earl of Sutherland, an army officer who was honoured following the defeat of the 1715 Jacobite rebellion.”
This bit of information transports me right to the wuthering heights of Scotland.

This early Scottish as well as English recipe debunks the myth that mother Keiller invented marmalade. Recipes for similar preserves even date back earlier in history. But the Keiller family definitely deserve a prominent spot in marmalade history.

But why do we call it marmalade and not jam?
As you maybe remember from my posting about ‘Quince Cheese’ here > , quinces are responsible for the word marmalade as their Portuguese word is ‘marmelo’ and they were made into fruit cheeses named marmalades. In Spain they call it ‘Membrillo’. Quince just like bitter Seville oranges, contain a lot of pectin and they are both too sour to eat raw. From both of these fruits the pips and peels are used to get a good set, and if you don’t have quince you could easily make a fruit cheese out of these oranges….

Quince tart and our workshop in Dorset

14th December 2016 by Regula 2 Comments

A still life of puddings I created for Borough Market Life Magazine – featuring the quince tart

Two weeks ago on a frosty yet sunny winter morning, we welcomed our workshop attendees at All Hallows Cookery School in Dorset. We started with tea and mini mince pies plus pancakes from the AGA for the early birds. It was hard to get started because we were all having so much fun getting to know each other, or catching up. We made the more delicate puddings from my book, a sweetmeat pudding – otherwise known as the Bakewell pudding, Snake fritters and a quince tart with intricate pastry work. Lunch was beef with prunes, lovingly prepared by our host and owner of the school Lisa Osman. I can’t think of a dish more fitting on a day of English cooking. After all, beef and pudding have been the icon of English food for many centuries. There was a time during the Napoleonic war when eating roast beef and plum pudding would have showed your patriotism. Visitors from all over Europe spoke with high regard about the quality of English meat and beef especially.

After our rather festive lunch in Lisa’s beautiful dining room which made me feel as if I was in a Jane Austen novel, she taught us wreath making which sounds far more easy than it actually was. We struggled and have a huge respect for wreath makers now. We all concluded we now understood why a impressive wreath is so pricy. It takes a ton of work, and will leave you with very painful hands. I finished mine at home and now have it on my front door for all to see….

How to make Quince Cheese

9th December 2016 by Regula 1 Comment

I’m not the biggest fan of sweet desserts after mains, I prefer an afternoon tea where the treats become the star of the show. That way you can enjoy them to the full and they do not become that thing you eat last when you’re actually too full to enjoy it. For an afternoon tea you can dress up, wear a hat, and pretend to be a lady of good breeding. Drinking tea with your pinky in the air, back straight, having polite conversations and enjoying the experience of eating from fine bone china. I’m also a sucker for a multi-tiered cake stand, and for clotted cream – lots of it.
Cheese and biscuits are my choice of afters and with a decent fruit cheese and port this quickly becomes my perfect kind of dessert.

Fruit cheeses are reduced jams or pastes. Centuries ago they were served after dinner as a digestive and they were often prescribed by apothecaries to cure minor ailments. The fruit paste was often pressed in a mould with fancy engravings and could look rather stunning. Moulds of this sort are rare to come by, I only know one person who has a mould and I believe he even carved it himself.

Although fruit cheeses should be thick and hold their shape, they should still be spreadable. You can make them into small cake trays for a nice shape or just in a large tray, you can then cut squares of the fruit cheese to wrap them and keep them. They are the most delectable accompaniment to blue cheese, but they can also be eaten all on their own, as a sweetie. A nice idea if you want to know what your child puts in its mouth, factory made sweets can contain all sorts of horrible additives. But it’s still sugar, make no mistake, to call it healthy would be wrong, but eaten and treated as a treat it is just fine.

My favourite fruit cheese is made of Quince. Quince are usually cooked and conserved. They look like otherworldly lanterns, large yellow pears with a strange downy covering. Raw they are considered quite unpalatable because of their tartness, but they are high in pectin which makes them ideal for making jams, jellies and fruit cheese. The pectin is most strong in the pips of the fruit, often ground up pips would be used to set other jelly like creations. But this is something I would not recommend you do as the seeds contain nitriles which turns poisonous when it comes in contact with your guts enzymes and acid. A few pips from your batch of quince are fine, just don’t chuck in a jar of ground up pips.

Quince and quince cheese was popular all over Europe since Medieval times. In Spain they call it ‘Membrillo’, in Italy ‘cotognata’ from the Italian word for quince ‘mele cotogne’ quince apple, the French call it ‘cotignac’ or ‘paté de coing’ from the French ‘coing’ for quince. Quinces are responsible for the word marmalade as their Portuguese word is ‘marmelo’ and they were made into fruit cheeses named marmalades. …

Cabinet Pudding – Or what to do with stale cake and booze

27th April 2016 by Regula 4 Comments

Let me share with you a recipe from Pride and Pudding, my debut book that was festively launched in London’s Borough Market two weeks ago. There is also good news if you haven’t ordered the book yet! The Amazon editorial team has not only included Pride and Pudding in their ‘Books of the Month’ – this week it is also part of their ‘Deal of the Week’ which comes with a 50% discount only this week. (Get it here >) Meaning it will only set you back a tenner! It looks like sales are going splendid as I haven’t seemed to have lost my spot in the first 10 of the top 100 Bestsellers. As an author you do fear no one will buy your book. As do you fear bad reviews and negativity. So if you have a moment and you like the book, Amazon reviews do make a difference.

Now back to the actual order of the day. Cabinet pudding was a favourite on Victorian tables, the first recipes for it appeared in the early 19th century, though similar puddings had been made long before then. It is also sometimes called Newcastle pudding, diplomat pudding or Chancellor’s pudding, though the connection with politics isn’t clear. Recipes also vary. There are theories about the name but none seemed to hold much truth to them….

We shall drink Lambswool on the Twelfth Night

5th January 2015 by Regula 17 Comments

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?

Ancient apple trees in Sussex

You might also like
Twelfth Cake for Twelfth Night >

Sussex Stewed Steak on a wet winters day

13th January 2013 by Regula 24 Comments

Eight in the morning, a wet winters day in the Sussex countryside. The sun is rising over the marshes and fields but the pink glow is quickly washed away by grey clouds of rain …
I walk trough a typical crooked path where the tops of the ancient trees lean towards each other creating an archway over the road, nature’s chapel.
Blissfully relaxed I listen to the bustling sound of busy birds in the hedges. Holding my breath, counting robins, coal tits and wrens. They don’t even seem to notice or care that I’m standing there.
Then it quiets down, the moment has passed and I walk on.

When I am at home but I have lots and lots to do during the day and not enough time to prepare a lovely meal, a Sussex Stewed steak is my dish of choice.
It really is the easiest dish you can imagine and it comes out of the oven as a warming meal with elegant flavors to enjoy with guests or just for your own family with plenty of leftovers for the next day. The Stout, port and mushroom sauce used, create a mahogany sauce with a deep flavour sometimes – depending on which Stout you use- you find some chocolate notes, and however a humble dish it turns out to be a feast for the palate every time.

For this dish you should use the chuck of beef, an economical cut of meat that has a deep flavour after slowly cooking it for a few hours. It is one of my favourite cuts of meat, it doesn’t cost the earth so I go for the best quality meat I can find. I buy grass fed Black Angus but I would love to try it with Sussex Longhorn beef one day. I suspect the Sussex Longhorn or the Sussex Red, will have been the kind of breed used for this dish decades ago.

I couldn’t find when the recipe first came to be but it is has been cooked in Sussex and beyond by generations of women. The most famous of women connected to this dish must be Elizabeth David who featured her recipe for the Sussex Stewed steak in her book Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen.
All the recipes I found were all very similar, did they all originate from David’s recipe or is this a far older recipe. Why is it called Sussex Stewed Steak? Is it because David gave the dish its name while she was living is Sussex? Or is it named after the breed used to cook this dish, the Sussex Longhorn or Red … Jane Grigson features her version of the dish in her book ‘English food‘, although similar it explains more how to prepare this recipe.
I cooked four different -although all very similar- recipes over the months, and this is the one I feel is the best, adapted from David’s and Grigson’s recipe.

David as well as Grigson suggests to serve the Sussex stewed steak with mashed potatoes and large field mushrooms. After trying a few other vegetable sides and potatoes, I agree the ladies are of course right.
The Sussex Stewed steak indeed pairs wonderfully with creamy mashed potatoes and sauteed mushrooms.

Sussex stewed steak

What do you need

1 kg of chuck steak in one piece
Flour to dust the meat with
1 large onion, sliced in rings
half a cup of stout
half a cup of port
2 tablespoons of mushroom ketchup*
freshly ground black pepper

To serve
Mashed potatoes, nice and creamy
sauteed mushrooms, a large variety.

* You can buy Mushroom Ketchup from Budgens, if you can’t find it you can substitute it with red wine vinegar.

Method

Preheat your oven to 160° celsius
Dust the meat with the flour and place in a baking dish that is just a little larger than the meat. If your meat has some fat, place in the dish with the fatty side down.
Place the onion rings around the meat and a few on top.
Pour in the Stout, port and mushroom ketchup, you might think it is not enough liquid but don’t add any more than instructed. Trust me.
Season with freshly ground pepper
Cover the dish with tin foil
Put in the lower part of the oven for 3 hours then take off the tin foil leaving just a bit behind to only cover the top part of the meat. If your meat had a fatty side, turn it around now with the fat facing up this keeps the meat from drying out.
Let simmer in the oven for another hour, this gives the sauce a chance of thickening slightly as you will see it is very runny, it will also color the onions.

Enjoy with a good pint of Stout, Porter or Ale!

You might also like:
Jo’s Lamb Hotpot >

Harvest soup for Samhain

1st November 2012 by Regula 6 Comments

The Celts called it Samhain which celebrated the end of harvest
and the beginning of winter. It literally means ‘summer’s end’ and is the primary festival marking the end and the beginning of the year.
Along with Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh it makes up the four Gaelic seasonal festivals.
Samhain was the evening when the veil between our world and
‘Netherworld’ was believed to be at their thinnest. It’s the feast of the dead, like Beltane is the feast of the living.
Bonfires played a big part in the festivities -much like with Beltane- people would jump over the fires or walk between them as a cleansing ritual.
Costumes and masks -usually animal heads and hides- were worn, as an attempt to cast of or taunt the evil spirits, this was referred to as ‘guising’.
It was also the time for farmers to choose which animals would need to be
slaughtered to get through the winter. This custom is still
observed now by many who raise livestock as the animals will no longer graze outside.
Food offerings were also made at Samhain, people would leave vegetables outside of their door to please the evil spirits and fairies. Later in time the food offerings changed into lanterns made of hollowed turnips – much resembling the carved pumpkins we know today.

The earliest record we have
of Samhain in the Celtic world comes from the Coligny Calendar,
a Celtic lunisolar calendar engraved on bronze tablets believed to be dating back to the first century AD. It was written in Gaulish, a Celtic language very close related to the Brythonic being Cornish, Welsh, Breton, Cumbric and maybe even Pictish.
Celtic
mythology is originally a spoken tradition, the irony is that the
traditions and tales were eventually written down by Christian monks in
the Middle Ages who then Christianized them to suit there needs and
believes. After all the best way to strip the people of their believes
is to simply adopt them to later on adapt them…

In my childhood there was no halloween, we had ‘All saints day’ and ‘All souls day’, we went to clean the gravestones of those who had passed and leave flowers for them…
But I was lucky because my mum had always been interested in Celtic mythology and she taught me about Samhain and all the other traditions when growing up.
So in a way, I grew up with Celtic traditions. On our travels to Britain we were always in search for Celtic and pre-celtic heritage while my mum told us tales about it in the car.
I feel fortunate to have been exposed to different traditions and religions as a child, I think it makes me a more liberal-minded person. It also makes me wonder how people can follow their religion and tradition blindly and without asking questions… but that is another story…

On to the soup!
I call this my harvest soup, it contains turnips, apples potatoes and a good homemade stock.

What do you need

butter
4 turnips (I used butter or yellow turnips)
1 bramley apple (or 1 cox)
1 large potato
1 liter of chicken or vegetable stock.

to decorate
toast ham or bacon for 1 minute in the microwave between a sheet of greaseproof paper
toast stale bread and cut into chunks

Method
Dice all the vegetables and apple.
Over a high fire heat two teaspoons of butter in a medium sized pan.
Add all the vegetables and apple and stir so they don’t burn
When slightly glazed add the stock and simmer for 30 minutes
Mix the soup until all the chunks are gone
Put back on the fire and bring to the boil for another minute
Season to taste with pepper and salt
Serve with the toasted bread and crispy ham or bacon

Enjoy and remember to set an extra plate for the spirits…

winter

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