Guess when this was written

Guess:

“You, sir, are a poor gamester. When you squeezed out the three small groceries here in Berkeley by virtue of your superior combination, you swelled out your chest, talked about efficiency and enterprise, and sent your wife to Europe on the profits you had gained by eating up the three small groceries.”

The archaic language is a bit of a giveaway: this is from chapter VIII of Jack London’s The Iron Heel, published in … 1908. So this sort of thing has been going on for at least 100 years.

I think this raises questions like: is it inevitable that food retailers will go on getting more and more powerful, becoming dominant if not monopolistic in the market? Is this desirable? Is food different to other industries? If so, should it have different rules? Are we really only 9 meals from anarchy? If so, shouldn’t we build more diversity into our food supply?

Hmm.

Ashmolean Institutio Tayloriana

Yes, sorry. It’s been a while. I’ve been working a bit harder than normal. And my fridge overheated about three weeks ago and hasn’t yet cooled down, so I haven’t been buying any food or cooking either. The replacement defrost heater is on order, allegedly. And my lovely new niece, Kitty, arrived ten days early and preoccupied us all.

But we did go to Oxford at the weekend, for various reasons including a visit to the new Ashmolean museum. I never went to the old one (I only made it as far as the Taylorian library, which seemed a more glamorous place to work than the Radcliffe Science Library) but apparently it’s a great improvement. It was a bit zoo-like, given that it’s only been open a few weeks. We did a quick whizz around the Alfred jewel, the Stradivarius and the Camden Town group, before retreating to the vaulted basement for coffee. Where, astonishingly, perfection awaited, in the form of a table-top assembly.

Not a paper cup, plastic spoon or pissy little sachet in sight. If this is what the sustainable future looks like, I say bring it on.

A trip to Riverford

It’s been a busy few weeks, not much time for cooking, eating, or writing about either. But, two weekends ago, we were in Devon for the weekend and made a detour on the way home to visit Riverford. Imagine my excitement. 

First, though: we stayed at Combe House, just outside Honiton, and had a happy Saturday morning poking about their vegetable garden. I was amazed at how many summer vegetables they had, despite the lateness of the season. Amongst the kale, savoy cabbages, leeks, purple sprouting broccoli, rhubarb and artichokes outside, there were also salads, tomatoes and grapes in the greenhouses. There was also a particularly lovely quince tree trained against a sunny wall.

We had dinner here late on the Friday night after an epic five-hour drive from London. The menu is based largely on what comes out of the garden, and we did see someone harvesting greens for Saturday’s dinner. The food was good, but I’d say a touch too fussy: one too many flavours and reductions in each dish for my liking. For example: a wild mushroom and porchetta mille-feuille with strips of crispy pancetta and some sort of sauce that I can’t remember (so far so good) served with deep-fried foie gras bonbons (no no no). It was an unnecessary flavour and extravagance and only detracted from the dish. With ingredients this good and fresh, why bother? And I have unpleasant memories of eating foie gras bonbons at Le Moulin de Mougins on honeymoon – for me, they will always taste of being horribly ripped off. 

No such problems at Riverford. I approached it as a pilgrim on the hajj might approach Mecca for the first time. We came upon a group of grey sheds and barns in a fold in the Devon hills, misted over with fine autumn rain.

We mastered the audio player, turned the map the right way up and set off on a self-guided tour of the farm, narrated by Guy Watson. If anyone reads the weekly letter that comes with the vegbox (also reproduced on the Riverford website), you’ll be familiar with his sanity-inducing style. We visited the pumpkin patch and learned all about the clover that was sown in one field as part of the traditional crop rotation that ensures the soil’s fertility. 

There were lots of fruit bushes that were more or less finished, but a few raspberries remained. We were encouraged by Guy Watson to sample them, which we did. (I wonder how many conventional farmers would encourage or even allow you to taste things in the fields, for commercial or health-and-safety or even toxicological reasons?)

Anyway, it was a bit wet and we were a bit weary, so we headed back to the Field Kitchen for lunch. This was fantastic and I’d highly recommend it to anyone, with or without doing the farm tour. We had roast lamb with at least six different vegetable dishes – fabulous sweetcorn, greens, two salads, beans – all superb, followed by delicious puddings. Perhaps it was the freshness or the way they were prepared; they were undoubtedly the stars. My husband said they were the best vegetables he’d ever had, better than mine (you could hear the gauntlet crashing down) so it’s back to the Riverford cookbook for me. 

After lunch I crossed the ‘No unauthorised personnel beyond this point’ line and went for a nose around the packing sheds. A nice woman not unreasonably stopped me and asked me what I was doing, then explained to me where all the produce came in; where it was chilled, sorted, packed and then sent out in the boxes. I’m sad I didn’t get a picture of one of the huge Riverford articulated lorries as they were rather splendid. 

It was everything I expected it to be (and the food more so) and yet I felt slightly underwhelmed as I left. Why? Perhaps because it’s not such a mystery after all – a bit of land, a lot of hard work, a big shed and some lorries – it all seemed rather prosaic. But then maybe that’s a cause for celebration. After all, if there’s no big magic or mystery to it, and it’s a business like any other, they could be leading where others soon will follow.

It’s Sloe Time

As Bob Fosse almost said. Last weekend we went for a good forage in Sussex. We were overwhelmed by nature’s bounty – hedgerows literally bursting with blackberries, hips, haws, sloes and elderberries.

Elderberries

Blackberries

Sloes

A bunch of sloes hanging like grapes

 

We limited our harvest because I was too busy this week to do much with it – we ate the blackberries as we went along, and collected about a kilo of sloes. The more challenging hips, haws and elderberries I left for the birds. 

At home, I made half the sloes into jam. I haven’t tasted it yet, but I fear it will be quite bitter – no wonder I couldn’t find a recipe. (I suspect that, if they were any good for jam, someone else would have discovered this before me, hence no recipe). The rest went into gin. I decided that the orange-peel experiment of April wasn’t a success (it just tasted like Cointreau), so I went for the pure recipe: 450g of sloes and half their weight in sugar for every litre of gin. Pricked, sealed, inverted, labelled, left: perfect. 

 

This year's sloe gin

Starbucks: The Way I See It

This morning, I was on the phone arranging a meeting for Friday. We agreed to meet near St Paul’s tube, where there is a run of coffee shops: Starbucks, Pret a Manger and a few others. We have a problem in that I won’t drink Starbucks coffee and he won’t drink anything else. He said, that’s ridiculous; I said, how can you? It tastes like pencil sharpenings. We resolved to meet in Starbucks for the WiFi, but I would buy my coffee in Pret first. 

Anyway, the point is this: my dislike of Starbucks is based on more than the taste. I was once in Des Moines, Iowa, and I saw something on the side of a Starbucks cup that summed it up for me. I kept the cup and brought it home and it’s been sitting at the bottom of my desk for several years. Here it is. 

 

Read that small print. What does that say to you as a customer?

It say to me “Here’s a quote from a musician. If you like it, support Starbucks further (by listening to our radio station and increasing our audience numbers.) If you don’t like it, it’s simply the author’s opinion and has nothing to do with us.” 

Isn’t this the problem with big food corporations? They’re jolly enthusiastic about the positives (happy customers, good music, big profits) but refuse to take responsibility for anything negative – even something as small as someone objecting to what you print on your cups.

Julie & Julia

To the cinema to see the eagerly-awaited Julie & Julia. Well. It’s a lovely film. Lots of food, France, New York, writing – all my favourite things. And refreshing to see good marriages and supportive husbands depicted for a change.

But I feel a bit self-conscious. It’s not just the slightly obsessive cooking and photographing of food, or the delight in visiting Julia Child’s kitchen at the Smithsonian in Washington. It’s the bit where Julie wonders if anyone is reading her blog, then gets very excited when she gets a comment: “Julie, this is your mother. I am your only reader.”

Damson Cheese

Despite my enthusiasm for damsons, by Wednesday they were starting to go mouldy in their dish. 

I found a recipe in the River Cottage Seasons cookbook for damson cheese – essentially quince cheese (membrillo) but with damsons. It’s the same procedure as for jam-making (cook the whole fruit down to a purée with a few tablespoons of water, then push through a sieve to remove stones and skin, return to the pan with 350g sugar for every 500ml of purée and cook down till gelling) except you just cook down for longer until it’s really thick and sticky. I then poured it into a small Tupperware tub to set, and apparently it keeps in the fridge for up to a year. 

It has the same grainy texture as membrillo, but I can’t tell you much about the taste as I have a stinking cold and can’t taste anything. It looks pretty. 

 

Harvest Festival

Or, a super-market sweep. Today, at the farmers market, more cobb nuts, plums, damsons and lots of apples including Worcester Pearmains, Spartans, Red Windsors and Bramleys. 

Also, at The Mushroom Table, there was some wild Chicken of the Woods; a completely different muchroom to Hen in the Woods, apparently more like breast meat than the brown meat. 

Me & Jane

The only problem with box schemes and farmers (I’ve given up trying to decide about the apostrophe) markets is that cooking and eating can get a wee bit monotonous. I end up doing the same things over and over again. So, inspired by the idea behind the forthcoming Julie & Julia, I thought I might try cooking my way through Jane Grigson’s English Food, in the hope of expanding my repertoire.

First up tonight: unlikely sounding white soup. I used the end of the cobb nuts supplemented by a few blanched almonds. 

 The result: delicate, pale, quite creamy and rich, old-fashioned. Good, but I don’t know that I’d rush to repeat it. 

Cobb Nuts

Quelle excitement – yesterday there were cobb nuts on the Perry Court stand at Notting Hill Farmers Market. Never having had one before, I had to buy a bag. I looked them up and apparently they’re related to hazelnuts. They come in fat four- or five-fingered stars, and, once peeled and bashed open with a pestle, they yield a deliciously fresh creamy pale soft nut. V.G.