Buckwheat pancakes filled with autumn

Buckwheat pancakes with apple and raisin compote - add walnuts if you like

 One of the joys of taking on an allotment plot is the things you find not only on other plots but in the unworked spaces around them.  I’ve written before about the walnut tree, discovered thanks to the unearthing of a squirrel's larder, but it remains one of my favourite finds.   Clearly a young tree, untamed by any human hand, once again this spring I watched soft buds emerge from grey branches that, through winter, looked and felt iron-hard and unyielding.  Within a few weeks the lower branches began to drape into the surrounding long grass like the elegant arms of a dancer reaching for the ground.  The beauty of the tree is not only in its looks.  Those low-hanging branches make for easy harvest of its fruits.  Around the end of June, when the outer casings were a smooth, bright green and still releasing a resinous aroma.  I harvested just enough young walnuts to fill a large Kilner jar.  *Quartered, they showed themselves to be at the perfect stage - the inner sweet nut soft and not quite formed.  They relaxed in a bath of cheap vodka, some sugar, lemon peel and a few spices for six weeks on my balcony.  Passed through muslin, the deep brown liquor now sits in the deepest recess of my larder, not to be touched before Christmas arrives.  Then a rich vanilla ice cream will be calling for an anointment of luscious, sticky, bitter **Walnut Liqueur. 

Green (unripe) Walnuts

The walnut tree seems so quintessentially English, yet it’s a non-native tree.  Brought by the Romans, the tree Juglans regia is here at its most northerly reach.  The common name of 'English Walnut' for the tree is used here to distinguish it from the American 'Black Walnut' but it originated in China and south-east Europe.  Our recent warmer summers have seen the trees fruiting better than ever.  This week I took another bagful of walnuts from the tree.  Their casing now a softer, rougher green but not yet peeled back exposing the hard, brown under-layer we are more familiar with.  These are at the 'wet' stage.  Peeling back their green jackets and cracking them open now reveals a fully formed, slightly tacky nut.  We will eat some over the next couple of weeks, enjoying their sweet, almost milky taste which pairs so well with salty sheep's milk cheeses.  If there are any left I will dry them for storing by leaving the husk-less nuts spread in a single layer in a warm, dry place for two weeks.

Wet Walnuts

I promise, while I've been doing this squirrelling-away, I've made sure to leave plenty of walnuts for the birds, and the squirrels.

Here's one of the dishes I'll be using the dried nuts in:

Buckwheat pancakes with apples, raisins & walnuts

(pancake mixture makes around 12 x 20cm thin pancakes)

For the pancakes:

120g buckwheat flour
50g plain flour
pinch of salt
1 medium egg
175ml full cream milk + 175ml water
30g melted butter

For the filling:
About 500g of warm apple compote and a handful of raisins
(peeled and chopped apples cooked down with a knob of butter and sugar to taste depending on the type of apples, then add the raisins while the apple is still hot)
a handful of shelled walnuts, roughly chopped

Combine the flours and salt.  Make a well in the centre and add the egg and a little milk then start to draw in the dry ingredients to the wet, adding more of the milk and water gradually until you have a smooth batter.  Add the melted butter and mix in.
 
Lightly butter a 20cm heavy-based frying pan and heat to medium-hot.  Keep the heat at this level throughout.  Pour in enough pancake mixture to quickly swirl it around the pan and lightly coat it and cook until the underside is lightly browned. This is a sacrificial one as the first pancake is always poor so discard it.  Add just a little butter before cooking each pancake.  Pour about 2-3 tablespoons of batter into the pan and quickly swirl it around the pan to coat it thinly.  Brown lightly and turn the pancake to lightly brown the other side.  Repeat the process and when each pancake is light browned on both sides add it to a plate and keep warm in a low oven until you have used up all the mixture.

Spoon some of the warm apple and raisin compote onto each pancake and add some of the chopped walnuts folding the pancakes over.  Serve with cream.

Note:
*Always wear gloves when handling walnuts that have their green outer casings intact as the tannins are highly staining.

**David Lebovitz has a recipe on his website for Liqueur de Noix.  In Italy it is known as Nocino and my go-to recipe can be found in Kitty Travers's brilliant book on the subject of ice cream, La Grotta Ices.

La Grotta Ices by Kitty Travers

La Grotta Ices book

Before I say a word about this book - La Grotta Ices which was published in June - I have to declare I know the author.  Given the trajectory of her career, I'm sure I ate Kitty Travers's food at a couple of favourite London restaurants before we met.  I love a good pudding, and ice creams in particular, so a good pastry chef is to be treasured.  Then I spotted a little Piaggio Ape van whizzing across south east London.  It was driven by a willowy tall, rosy-cheeked woman who seemed to have found the secret to happiness.  And she had.  She had followed her dream.

I'm not sure of many things but I firmly believe we all have ice cream memories.  Often it's that first lick of Mr Whippy soft-scoop vanilla (with a chocolate flake if you were flush) in a dry, brittle, tasteless cone.  It's a memory of taste, time and place that stays with us.  For me it's the jingling sound of Greensleeves announcing the arrival of the ice cream van.  A strawberry Mivvi, please.  For Kitty Travers, her memory is a slice of supermarket economy vanilla brick that, after suffering several re-freezes emerged from its damp cardboard box as a "curious foamy gum".  I remember it well.  I suspect few of our first ice cream memories would stand up to much scrutiny on taste, but they are no less fondly held.

La Grotta Ices - Scooping

As with most things, once you've tasted the good stuff, you want more.  In Kitty's case it was the flavours of abricot, cassis, groseille, and callison in a little glaciere off the Croissette in Cannes that began the seduction.  A scoop of ice cream became part of her morning ritual before a 16-hour waitressing shift.  A dip into Jeffrey Steingarten's book The Man Who Ate Everything, specifically the chapter "The Mother of All Ice Cream", fed a passion to discover how such flavours could be delivered in the form of ice cream.  An inheritance allowed her to fly to New York to study and to 'stage' for Mario Batali and Meredith Kurtzman at Otto Enoteca and for Gabrielle Hamilton at Prune.  She thrived and then the visa ran out.  The boost to her confidence returned her to London where Fergus Henderson was only too pleased to employ her at St John Bread & Wine where she scooped up her first ice cream - Fresh Mint - as pastry chef.  Holidays in Italy were spent working, sampling and learning about gelato in the best places for it - Rome, Naples and Sicily.  Not all was 'la dolce vita' and decision time came when she was assured by a gelato maker that she could never learn to make ice cream like an Italian (being in her twenties, she was far too old!).  She decided there and then that she would try to do something "relevant to the place" she came from and "make it perfect".  She would make ice cream.  La Grotta Ices was established in London in 2008, named in recognition of that little glaciere in Cannes which fed her early ice cream dreams.

If the La Grotta Ices book doesn't make you value the importance of seasonality, nothing will.  The order reflects the author's ice cream making year which changes constantly as ingredients come into their, often short, season and then bow out.  She reminds that if you buy with seasonality in mind you will find fruits that are not only ripe and tasting at their best but good value too.

Strawberry Salad Ice Cream
Recipe from La Grotta Ices

Achieving the perfect balance of water, sugar, fat, solids (proteins) and emulsifier is key.  The ethos is fresh, seasonal and minimally processed.  Expect recipes to include milk, cream, eggs, sugar, fruits and natural flavourings.  You'll find no 'fat-free' here, unless it's a sorbet - thank goodness. There's imaginativeness in flavours and textures in these 75 recipes but no 'let's see how off-the-wall we can get'.  Some combinations are creative and surprising but always thoughtful.  The recipes start logically in January with the arrival of sharp citrus fruits from Italy, their peels rich with oils, put to use in Kumquat Custard; Blood orange & Bergamot Sherbert; and Mimosa (blossom), Seville & Orange Rice.  We move through spring and summer's rhubarb, strawberries, cherries, peaches, apricots, blackcurrants and resiny early Pigeon Figs with ice creams like Leafy Blackcurrant Custard; Apricot Noyau; a sorbet of Tomato & White Peach; and Pigeon Figs & Pineau de Charentes.  Early autumn brings sticky figs, grapes, melons, plums, pear and quince, so we have Damson Grappa; Melon & Jasmine Sorbet; Pear, Myrtle & Ginger.  Late in the year there's a turn to richer flavours in the form of nuts, dried fruits, candied peels, butterscotch and malt so you'll find Pistachio; Medici Almond; and Butterscotch & Agen Prune.  Herbs, geranium leaves and fruit leaves are valued too, particularly useful if you are waiting impatiently for your fruits to ripen as the leaves (some are poisonous, so check) deliver interesting flavours on their own as well as adding another dimension to fruit ice creams.  There are recipes for Mint Chip; Blackberry and Rose Geranium; Blackcurrant Leaf Water; Peach Leaf Milk Ice; and several uses for the sublime fig leaf.

The writing around the recipes is pitch-perfect.  Little vignettes of the author's adventures in pursuit of a true passion: Memories of breakfasting on poached quince after feeding the livestock on an Urbino pig farm.  How to avoid, or enjoy, a Prickly Pear.  How eating too many Kiwis in the name of love led to a visit to a cowboy-hatted doctor, the part played by Mussolini in the drama, and how Italy can be too much if you're not careful.

Leafy Blackcurrant Custard
Recipe from La Grotta Ices

There's good advice too, like: Keep your Loganberry source to yourself - they are as rare as hen's teeth and short in season; why good quality cocoa powder works better than chocolate in ice cream; keep your eyes open and nose alert to walnut trees and lemon verbena bushes on common land; after sieving berries, use the pips for making a pip juice; and eat chocolate pudding flavoured ice cream with a good friend so they can wrestle it from you before you polish it off in one go!

I am certain I will make every recipe in this book because I have the advantage of knowing just how good La Grotta Ices is.  I already have summer favourites like Strawberry Salad, Tomato and Peach Sorbet and Leafy Blackcurrant Custard.  I badly want to make Tamarillo ice cream because of its thrillingly tropical flavour and the sumptuous colour it takes on; Carrot Seed because I'm a grower and I'm intrigued; Lime and Botanicals because I like a nice G&T; and Pistachio because it's pistachio.

The artwork in the book is eye-catching and fun and photographs, by Grant Cornett, capture perfectly the nostalgia around our ice cream memories.  I should tell you too that I attended one of Kitty Travers's early teaching classes at The School of Artisan Food.  She still runs regular Introduction courses there so I have included a link just in case you want to catch, as I did, some of her infectious enthusiasm for her passion.  And here's a link to the La Grotta Ices site for up-to-date info on where you can buy the ice creams in London.

I don't know about you, but I still wouldn't turn my nose up at my ice cream memory - though I'm told my Strawberry Mivvi has slipped from its stick for the last time.  Probably for the best.

Published by: Square Peg/Penguin Random House

I bought this book

Syllabub & boozy cherries

Syllabub with eau-de-vie cherries

Winter's chill is not something we want to think of when market stalls are piled high with the sweetest English strawberries, peas in their pods and sharp, grassy gooseberries.  When the English cherry harvest joins the party, around the third week in June, the cold months seem a long way off. But if you are a preserver, you always have a thought for those little jars and bottles you can squirrel away at the back of a cupboard.  The bitter orange marmalades and quince jellies, glowing like stained glass when you hold them up to the light; perfumed apricot jams and black as night damson; slabs of fruit 'cheese' and sharp fruit vinegars.  The cherry harvest is short and sweet. Within 6-8 weeks the harvest has moved from white Napoleon to deep-dark Regina and the time has come to decide how best to preserve some fruits to bring out in the depths of winter.

Cherry jam is good but there is only so much jam a family can eat.  Cherries in eau-de-vie is better. Not only do you have delicious, boozy cherries to eat but there's cherry liqueur in time for Christmas too.  You can use kirsch or vodka instead of eau-d-vie, or even brandy, if you like. General guidance for the method comes from Jane Grigson.  Fill a jar almost to the top with washed and dried cherries, pricking each fruit 2 or 3 times.  Pour in enough caster sugar to come about a third of the way up the jar then fill to cover the fruit with eau-de-vie.  Close the jar and give it a shake.  Leave in a cool dark place for at least 3 months (I've done so for more than a year), shaking it from time to time to fully dissolve the sugar.

I don't ever remember eating cherries as a child growing up in northern England.  I've learned they grow best in Southern and Central England which would account for it.  My early experience of them was limited to those jars of ruby red maraschino cherries which made an appearance at Christmas time, always brought out by the Auntie who liked a cocktail.  The one who was the most fun.

With a history going back to at least the 17th century, originally syllabub was a frothy drink made by milking directly from the cow into a bowl of wine, cider or ale which caused the milk to curdle.  As you can imagine, it was intended to be consumed on the spot.  Syllabub progressed to a firmer textured cream by whipping in sharp fruit syrups or wine.  This dish was more stable than the original, so, it was possible to keep it for a day or two.  Hannah Glasse  in her book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, first published in 1747, describes a recipe for 'Everlasting Syllabub' which calls for  "Rehnish wine, half a pint of sack and two large Seville oranges" to join the milk.   She also stipulates the addition of calf's foot jelly.  The sturdiness of the finished dish can only be imagined.

The recipe for syllabub below is the one I always turn to since it was recommended to me years ago. I'm sure I was told it was a Katie Stewart recipe from when she wrote food columns for newspapers.  I vary the wine/liqueur depending on what I am pairing the syllabub with - sometimes I reach for white wine or sherry or, maybe, elderflower cordial instead.  This time I wanted something to match the almond quality of the cherries which comes from steeping them with their stones intact, so, Amaretto seemed right.  The toasted almonds, which provide a necessary crunch, could be replaced by an almond biscuit.

The dish is light enough to make a Christmas meal dessert and you can prepare it in advance.  I know if you want to replicate this recipe right now you'll need to buy some cherries in eau-de-vie. But next year, when the cherry season arrives, you won't!

Syllabub with eau-de-vie cherries and almonds

Syllabub with eau-de-vie Cherries
(Serves 6)

Around sweet 40 cherries (drained from the eau-de-vie)
250ml (10 fl oz) double cream
100g (4 oz) caster sugar
Grated rind and juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons Amaretto liqueur
25g (1 oz) toasted almonds

Cut the cherries in half and lift out the stones.  Place all but 6 pitted cherries in the serving glasses/dishes.
Whisk the cream, sugar, lemon rind and juice and the liqueur together to the consistency of mayonnaise (should happen very quickly) and divide between the 6 glasses/dishes.

Place in the fridge for at least two hours, but it will keep refrigerated for up to 24 hours.  Top with the toasted almonds before serving.

Sweet-sour berries

My Strawberries Balsamic

The 18th century French philosopher Diderot described strawberries as being like 'the tip of wet-nurses' breasts'.  Thankfully he was referring to small wild strawberries, the large cultivated varieties we mostly eat today being some way in the future.  I owe this knowledge to Jane Grigson, who in every chapter of her Fruit Book serves up exquisite gems of information that add enrichment to the recipes she offers.  Recipes including classics such as Strawberries Romanov, Strawberry Shortcake and Soupe aux Fraises.  But, this time, I turned to Jane Grigson not for one of those recipes but rather for that 'gem' to lead me in to a dish I tasted in America two decades ago.  I loved it so much as soon as I got home I recreated it and have been making it every summer since.

I'm sure I'm telling you nothing you don't already know in saying strawberries benefit from a little added acidity - wine, lemon or orange juice all help to bring out their flavour.  Strawberries with vinegar seemed like a step too far when I first visited San Francisco a couple of decades ago and tasted them married with syrupy, sweet/sour balsamic vinegar.  Later I learned that in Emilia Romagna, the home of Aceto Balsamic production, they had been flavouring strawberries with it for decades.  Bringing things right up to date, Modena chef Massimo Bottura recommends aged balsamic to season not only strawberries but peaches and cherries too.

Strawberry munching slug

The very best Aceto Balsamico is made from a reduction of pressed white Trebbiano grapes aged for 12, 18 or 25 years (or even more) to a thick, dark viscous syrup and is, not surprisingly, expensive. Cheaper  'balsamic vinegar' exists but it's likely to have been made from wine vinegar thickened with guar gum or cornflour and enriched and coloured with caramel.  They are different beasts but all have their place, I guess.

The fact I still have strawberries on my allotment patch (the slugs, thankfully, having lost interest) and that the raspberry canes are now fruiting abundantly means the time has come to make this recipe again.   The good people of Emilia Romagna may not approve of including raspberries in the mix, and what Massimo Bottura would think I don't know, but this recipe is based on a particular memory of two decades ago, and raspberries were certainly involved.  So, I can't call this a classic but it is a recipe that takes me back to that first visit to San Franciso. It's also particularly good for perking up less than perfect strawberries - something we growers are well acquainted with.  

First pickings of the year
Raspberries on the allotment

My Strawberries Balsamic

(serves 4-6)

About 1kg (2lb) strawberries

100g (4 oz) raspberries

50g (2 oz) caster sugar

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

2 tablespoons water

Clean and hull the strawberries and put in a large bowl.

Put the raspberries and sugar in a bowl suspended over a pan of simmering water. Cook until the sugar dissolves and the fruit breaks up.  Remove the bowl from the heat, blitz briefly with a hand blender and sieve out the raspberry pips.  Mix in the balsamic and the water.

Pour the raspberry syrup over the strawberries and mix gently to coat the strawberries.  Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours before serving.

I think this needs nothing else.