The sun's shining hot today, perhaps we'll have an Indian summer, so then we'll need something lovely to drink ... and here's the method for making a Venetian spritz:
Mix
1 part white wine
1 part Campari
1 part sparkling water
Add
a little ice and a slice of lemon
There's masses more about this traditional treat from the Veneto at Living Venice. Thanks for the reminder, Nan
Last night at supper, talk turned to the topic of thank you letters. I have just received a particularly effusive one from a friend of Horatio's: a real pleasure ... incredibly kind of you to provide such a feast both for supper and for breakfast ... no better place to be ... etc etc. This was regarded as both a very good letter to send to a mummy AND as a little over the top (but probably because it was written several weeks after the event.
Lucius was having none of it: Not interesting ... no point in writing a letter if it didn't say something ... bah humbug.
Here's his idea of a letter worth writing (mine too, although I don't think it would do as a bread and butter letter):
No.3 Commando was very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow, so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and said don't spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion.
So Col. Durnford-Slater DSO said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree?. Yes, sir, 75lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir.
And when Col. D Slater DSO had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don't want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir.
Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. DS DSO said you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.
So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it ½ acre of soil and the whole young plantation.
And the subaltern said Sir, I made a mistake, it should have been 7½ not 75. Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.
So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry and ran to hide his emotions in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.
This is quite true.
Letter from Evelyn Waugh to his wife, 31 May 1942
My nephews, who are staying, now face the prospect of writing two letters each, so that they please us both.
These not cheese puffs are what we ate with pre-dinner drinks, very good. It's from a recipe in yesterday's Guardian mag by the baker Dan Lepard; he calls them black olive gougères
175g drained Kalamata olives
1 large clove of garlic
1 tbsp chopped thyme (rosemary would do too)
50ml olive oil
150g strong white flour
3 eggs
75g grated parmesan, plus more when reheating
Blitz the olives, but stop before they turn to a mushy paste. Meanwhile, bash the garlic to a paste. Put this with the herbs and oil into a saucepan, add 125ml water and bring to the boil (no time at all). Tip in the flour, beat until it forms a ball, then add the eggs one by one, beating thoroughly each time. Lastly beat in the cheese (I used very strong Cheddar in the mix, parmesan to finish).
Using two teaspoons, scoop balls of the mixture onto a non-stick baking sheet and bake in a hot oven 200C (180C fan) for 15-20 minutes. Cool on a rack. Plate them and sprinkle with a little finely grated parmesan and leave until you are ready to put in the oven to warm through. (I found 120C wasn't quite warm enough to melt the grated cheese, so turned the oven up a little.)
from today's Times ... we're talking Red Bull (80mg caffeine per can*), Relentless (160mg), Cocaine (240mg per can) ... also Coke (35mg), and to some extent coffee (although you sip that because it's hot, whereas these cooled drinks are gulped, often several times a day):
Scott Willoughby, of the Cardiovascular Research Centre in Adelaide, Australia, recently showed how the sugar-free version of Red Bull can cause the blood to thicken, raising the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
In his study, Willoughby assessed the cardiovascular systems of 30 young adults one hour before and one hour after they had drunk a 250ml can of sugar-free Red Bull. He describes the results as "remarkable". Sixty minutes after drinking the Red Bull, the subjects displayed the kind of cardiovascular abnormalities that might be expected in a patient with heart disease, including an increased stickiness of blood.
"If you add in other risk factors for cardiovascular disease - stress or high blood pressure - this could be potentially deadly," Willoughby says. "The can comes with a warning of its own. But if you have any predisposition to cardiovascular disease, I'd think twice about drinking it."
*Caffeine stats from Professor Roland Griffiths, of The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, USA. He found 505mg of caffeine in an American canned drink called Whoop Ass.
There's not much official UK guidance on this - according to The Times, just two pointers: any drink containing more than 150mg of caffeine per litre has to say so on UK labels; & the FSA advises pregnant women not to consume more than 300mg/caffeine per day.
Here is a rare recipe for this blog: one I haven't tried. But it's nettle time of year; Gertrude asked me for the instructions but didn't leave an email address, so here they are. I know that there's a lot of interest in cooking with nettles, because my posts about nettle soup and nettle tea are amongst the most visited on Joanna's Food, particularly at this time of year, when they grow with such profusion.
I'm giving CDW's exact instructions, as found in A Greener Life. There is some suggestion that this helps with rheumatism; not sure I believe it, but it sounds worth a try.
Nettle beer
makes 4.5 litres
1 kilo of young nettle tops
zest and juice of 2 lemons
25g cream of tartar
500g demerara sugar or honey
4.5l water
15g brewers' yeast
Wear rubber gloves to pick the nettle tops. Wash and drain them. Place the lemon zest and juice, cream of tartar and sugar or honey in a large container, preferably an earthenware fermenting vessel. Put the nettles and water in a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Boil for 15 minutes. (This can be done in two batches.) Strain the liquid into the lemon juice mixture. Stir well. Allow to cool to around 21C/70F. Remove a little of the liquid and make a paste with the yeast. Stir into a large container. Cover with a layer of thick cloth, tied down so that it doesn't sag into the liquid.
Leave in a warm place for three days to help the yeast to activate. Strain into bottles and cork loosely. Store in a cool, dark place. It is drinkable in one week, but ... the longer you keep it, the better it be.
This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Cate at Sweetnicks
Links to other posts about nettles
Nettle tea
Nettle soup
Links to nettles on other blogs
Nettle and ricotta frittata from The Chocolate Lady
The Old Foodie on rennet from nettles
Chicken breast stuffed with nettles from Eating Britain
The distinctive and heady scent of quince transports me instantly to childhood and my grandmother's kitchen in 1950s Oxford. She used to make a delicious jam from fruit given to her by a neighbour, and it was a long job cutting the hard fruit into tiny cubes.
We have a quince in our garden, planted about 25 years ago by my mother-in-law, who used to put a few slices of poached quince into her stewed apple, rather in the way you might add a couple of cloves.
I make quince jam and jelly regularly, and this year, for the first time, I'm making quince liqueur - not to drink (although it's perfectly drinkable), but to use in my cooking throughout next year. It was a quick job, thanks to the Magimix, which made very short work of grating the fruit. I used Jane Grigson's recipe from her Fruit Book.
Quince liqueur
a one-litre preserving jar
3 quinces
60g caster sugar
about 600 ml vodka
Wipe the fluff from the quince with a dry cloth. Cut them in half so that they will fit into the feeder tube of the Magimix. Grate - yes, really, the whole fruit, skin, pips and all. The scented fruit will more or less fill your jar. Add the sugar, then the vodka, making sure that all the fruit is covered. Seal. Put in a dark place for a couple of months - there's no need to turn it.
This will need straining in December or January, at which point more sugar could be added. And then it will add a useful flavouring note to savoury as well as sweet dishes; quince is not only distinctive, it is also very strong - one quince on the kitchen table can scent a whole house.
Those funny folk at Innocent smoothie are craftier than they let on. This morning, for breakfast, I followed their recipe for strawberry and banana smoothie ... it was delicious, but not quite as delicious as the stuff that comes out of the box - more apple-y, pippier, a lighter shade of red. It just happened that Alfred had cunningly sneaked an Innocent carton into my shopping trolley yesterday without my noticing, so we looked up the ingredients - not a hint of apple, 76 pressed grapes instead. Red ones, at a guess.
Strawberry and banana smoothie for two or three
One banana
14 strawberries (well, all right, a small punnet of strawberries)
the juice of an orange (mine came out of a carton)
enough apple juice to get to the thickness (or rather, thinness) you want
Whizz all this in your blender.
As you can see from the photograph, I used apple juice from a bottle. It comes from Waterperry Gardens, one of my favourite places in Oxfordshire. I buy our apple juice there to give me a regular excuse to visit. It's as close as you can get to drinking an apple, as it comes from named varieties of apple, which means you can choose exactly how your juice tastes. Today's was Winter King, which is a little on the sweet side for my taste - I like the really sharp juices.
The smoothie was delicious, but the children said that Innocent's version was better, and I'm inclined to agree with them. Somehow, in their processing, they scrunch up the strawberry seeds. As you know, I'm not the biggest fan of industrially processed food, but I think that I'm prepared to make an (occasional) exception for Innocent. Or does that mean I've been "had" by their extremely slick marketing men?
My sister-in-law Kirsty says you can use tartaric acid as well as citric acid when you are making elderflower drinks, and I began to wonder what is the difference between them. It seems very feeble to be aiming at a healthy diet, and then not knowing anything about additives you choose to put in your food.
Tartaric acid (E334), like citric acid (E330), stops bacteria in its tracks, and they both also give a tart flavour to the finished drink.
I'm not any kind of scientist, so anything much deeper than this goes right over my head ... so much so that, after reading through the various links, I'm making a decision that would probably disgrace a primary school child - I am going to use tartaric acid rather than citric acid, because it seems to be used exclusively as a food and drink additive (it's used in bread- and wine-making), whereas citric acid finds its way into cleaning materials and shampoo, and is apparently the ingredient that does the damage to hair in Sun-in (have your children ever turned their hair green with the Sun-in / swimming combination? you haven't lived!)
The Food Additives and Ingredients Association website says it is produced in collaboration with York University, so I feel inclined to trust it as a starting point. The British Soft Drinks Association (yes, really) gives an overview explanation of the differences. But I'm not sure how much I trust it, because the funding for such a beautiful website probably comes direct from the soft drink giants, so here's Wikipedia on citric acid and tartaric acid.
They are both obviously tried and tested additives, so I suppose in the end, the best guide is taste, with ease of availability coming a pretty close second!
This is the one you dilute with water. It keeps for ages in the fridge - I've still got a little of the last jar from last year, and it's as good as it was on day one. Some people put it into plastic bottles and freeze them, but my friend Vivien says that the nasties in the plastic leach into the liquid, so perhaps it's not such a good idea.
Whatever, this is simple to do, the sort of thing that makes you feel tremendously clever and together, when actually you haven't done very much at all. The effect has been slightly lessened by the sort you can buy in the supermarket, which really does taste like home-made, because it is home-made, but on a much much larger scale. But it's still worth doing, if only to save money (it's amazing what they charge for a bit of flavoured sugar water!).
I've been making it for years, using a recipe that's been in my manuscript recipe book for as long as I can remember, so it's in imperial measures, rather than metric. The exact quantities don't much matter, because all that sugar and the citric acid keep it all sweet (in both senses) for years.
But when you've made it, don't just limit yourself to diluting it with water to drink on a hot day ... you can use the syrup to flavour gooseberries (just coming in to season), or apricots (the first from Sicily are just appearing in the shops now), or to make a sorbet.
Elderflower syrup
25 elderflowers, stalks removed
1kg sugar
2 lemons, grated, squeezed, and cut up
50g citric acid
1 litre cold, previously boiled, water
Put all the ingredients into a bowl in a cool place for two days. Stir occasionally. Or not. Strain and bottle. Dilute to drink. Keep in the fridge.
If you're impatient (and who isn't?), there's an alternative way to do this:
Quick elderflower syrup
Stir 500g sugar into a litre of water, with the juice of two lemons. Boil for about a minute, then add 10 elderflower heads. Remove from the heat, cover the pan, and leave to cool. When it's completely cold, bottle and strain.
The only reason I don't use this recipe (although I have made it in the past) is because it's a little more of a palaver.
Just make sure that the flowers are completely white - any brown and the whole batch will taste filthy (Sarah Raven says it makes it taste like cat's pee ... I wouldn't know!).
No, it's not champagne, and it's not alcoholic, but I don't know what else to call it, because elderflower champagne is its traditional name. And if there's a cross French wine grower reading this, well, think of it as a homage from England - remembering that more than half the fizz grown in Champagne is drunk in England.
Elderflower champagne is completely different to the elderflower cordial which you can make - or, these days, buy in a supermarket. It's cloudy, naturally fizzy (perhaps there are natural yeasts at work, I'm not sure), and not unlike the ginger beer we used to make as children with a starter that quickly got out of hand as it doubled every time you made it (only without the ginger!).
My mother-in-law used to make this delicious drink every summer, in an explosion of sticky bottles. I make it once in a blue moon - I don't know why I don't make it more often, because it's very little trouble, and very delicious. I suppose it's all that collecting bottles for weeks beforehand.
Anyway, I'm giving you the recipe now, even though I haven't started on it, because the elderflower are coming into bloom all over the place. I'll dig out the recipe for elderflower cordial and post it before the season is over - although as you can see from the photograph, it's only just getting under way here.
Elderflower champagne
3 large heads of elderflower
1 lemon
750g white sugar
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
4.8 litres cold water
1 large plastic bucket
Pick three large heads of flower in full bloom. Make sure they're not going over (you can tell by the browning of the petals), otherwise the finished result will taste nasty and not at all flowery. Peel a lemon, making sure not to include any pith. Squeeze the juice. Put the flowers, the lemon peel and juice into a large clean plastic bucket, together with the sugar, wine vinegar, and water. Stir vigorously.
Leave for about 24 hours, then strain and pour into strong screw-topped bottles - fizzy water bottles are ideal. Don't fill them to the top. Leave in a cool place for two weeks. You may find one or two of the bottles explode; there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it, but it means you need to put them somewhere that the resulting sticky mess is easy to clear up. I think they're less likely to explode the cooler they are, and you can take preventive measures by just slightly opening the bottles from time to time to let off the gas - it's easier to see if this is necessary when you're using plastic bottles.
Drink cold. Great for a party on a hot summer's day. Oh, and by the way, it doesn't keep long - although it tends to disappear pretty fast.
We had a party last night, for friends, neighbours, and relations. Twelve families, children of all ages, from five to 20-something, a few grandparents, parents getting away from last-minute chores. Lovely sound of happy chatter, the youngest children offering round things to eat - sausages, crisps, dips (I made a taramasalata, but it turned out too oniony for my taste), tiny baked potatoes, shavings of parmesan and of salami. And the whole house smelled of Christmas - spices from the mulled wine.
For each 75 cl bottle of wine (I used a merlot I bought from the Wine Society), add 75ml of sugar, 1 tsp of cloves, 1 cinammon stick broken into two or three pieces, the juice of one lemon and one orange (or, when it runs out, and you have to make more in a hurry, the juice of a couple of clementines). Stir until the sugar dissolves, then heat gently. In an ideal world, you should strain this into a jug - but we didn't have time.
Happy days!
The weather here has suddenly turned cold, we've had two or even three frosts this week, so I need to go out and deal with the blackened foliage of my dahlias. Not an inviting prospect. Instead, I've been reading essays by Elizabeth David, in Is there a Nutmeg in the House, and in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. Inspiring ...
I'm almost ashamed to say what it has inspired me to do today - there were strawberries at the market, so I am going to make Sir Walter Raleigh's recipe for "cordial water" which he regarded as medicine for cleansing the blood, whatever that means. It's a summery equivalent to sloe gin, with strawberries and vodka. The only thing that stops it being really embarrassing is that the strawberries were grown in Berkshire (the next county) rather than air-freighted half way across the world.
I'm going to soak 1.4kg of strawberries in a litre of vodka, probably for 3-4 days, and then add some sugar. ED says she regretted omitting sugar. Can't imagine how it will taste, but it will make a good Christmas drink, and anyway I forgot to pick sloes last month.
Every time I pick up a book of Elizabeth David's, I'm entranced. She writes so well, and has such interesting things to say about food, particularly its history. I nearly always end up cooking one or two dishes. All the same, I have one major reservation about her, which is that I can't help feeling that her strong emphasis on food from France and Italy was partly responsible for the collapse of interest in traditional British food in the 1950s and 60s. On the other hand, we are a trading nation with long-standing culinary influences from abroad (think curry/kedgeree rather than "nasty greasy foreign muck") , & it was a time when our population was diversifying, with all that that meant for our country's cookery. And although she wrote a wonderful book about British baking, that came later, and was never so popular as the earlier books covering Mediterranean foods. Still, we can't lay all the blame at her door, and I suppose we should be pleased at the revival of the best of British cookery which has taken place over the past few years.
The other thing I did today in an effort to keep myself indoors was to add a counter to my blog. It took about three minutes.
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