Felicity Cloake

Last week, I was gifted an enormous bag of quince (quinces?). They look a bit like bulbous golden pears, sweet and juicy – but bite into them and they’re butternut-squash hard, and as bitter as a Bramley.  The obvious thing would be quince cheese of course, but that would just be an excuse to buy more Picos de Europa. So, having consulted Nigel Slater’s Tender, I decided to make a “fragrant winter breakfast” – quince stewed with apples, lemon juice and sugar. Never one to miss the chance to set the scene, Nige describes it as one “for those winter mornings when the sky is white and a sugar-frost has caught on the spider’s webs in the garden.” It’s pretty good – slightly too sweet for my taste, and I might well substitute honey for sugar if I did it again – but much more solid than simple stewed apple, with an elusive floral flavour.

The other dish, which I made to take to a dinner party on Saturday, was less successful. The donor of the quinces, Alex, expressed surprise at the idea of of a quince crumble, although in retrospect, the problem was less with the concept than the recipe (not the execution, obviously). The recipe, for four, called for 1.75kg of quince, which needed to be softened in butter “in a large frying pan” – I’ve got a big Le Creuset, but still, they took an awful lot longer than Nigel’s upper limit of 35 minutes to soften. Once they’d finally yielded (although, it turned out, only in places) I sprinkled on a laughably small amount of almond crumble topping, made with chestnut flour in deference to the gluten-free one, then boosted it with hazelnuts in panic it looked a bit mean – everything about this recipe, including the amount of sugar, seems designed for a much smaller amount of fruit. Everyone was very nice about it, but it’s undeniable that the quince were rather fibrous and crunchy, as well as a bit sour, and there wasn’t enough bloody crumble. And I didn’t make Bird’s custard. Still, there’s always next year.

The weekend before last, we went to a wedding in Suffolk. (The exceptionally fine wedding cake is shown above, in a state of somewhat debauched disarray.) Thanks to rather a lot of rioja, it was necessary, that fine September Sunday, to walk two and a half hours to collect the car. It was sort of worth it though, because of the bounty of autumnal fruit in the hedgerows. Blackberries, obviously (every year I forget that the big juicy ones are always rubbish – go for the tight, pinched looking ones…)

Sloes, rosehips, damsons, and, most excitingly of all, because I wasn’t quite sure of myself when pointing them out, wet walnuts (obviously – fresh from the tree):

There were also some cute wee apples, which turned out to be utterly, inedibly sour (although, I think, not small enough to qualify as any sort of crab):

(Actually, I’m still gorging myself on the much more palatable apples brought back from Richard’s parents’ very enviable orchard at the beginning of the month:…although sadly the plums and the pears are long gone.)

Anyway, that was another weekend, another wedding. When we finally got back to London, with half a dozen squashed damsons and a couple of slightly frayed tempers, it was to find a foraged feast waiting, courtesy of some rather more diligent hunter gatherers. Alex and Jon presented us with a Sophie Grigson-inspired cobnut pilaff (cobnuts are always one of those things I intend to buy, and then never get around to cooking. Time is running out, so I’m glad I scoffed two helpings of this):followed (and served up, just in time for Downton Abbey), by blackberry crumble pie. And custard. Bird’s custard. Utter autumnal bliss.

 Last weekend was also East Anglian – north Norfolk this time. We held a Come Dine With Me competition on the Saturday night (yeah, I know how to live), complicated by some rather tricksy restrictions. First of all, no gluten or dairy. Or, not much at least. Secondly (and more importantly as far as I’m concerned), no anchovies or cauliflower – once I realised Alex didn’t like them, they were all I could think about. And lastly, everything had to go with a great big bottle of Dead Arm Shiraz a kind soul had brought us for our birthday in June… easy enough for the main course, less attractive for a starter, especially with no cheese allowed.

With no time to make a terrine, and no smoked meat in evidence in the village (a place so very down-to-earth it was easier to find gluten-free amaretti than pears), I was tearing my hair out, until I happened upon two mysteriously premature partridge in the butchers. Defrosted or not, they made an excellent salad with some watercress, garnished with local apples and walnuts caramelised in even more local honey, and tossed with a cider vinaigrette.

Alex had an easier ride with the main course, opting for roast lamb with rosemary, served with roasted garlic and a beetroot and horseradish bake. I’m not mad keen on beetroot without vinegar (you can take a girl out of the 80s…) but, with the intensely savoury lamb, it was rather nice. Not as nice as potato would have been though, obviously.

And Richard made some chestnut-flour brownies, according to a David Leibowitz recipe. For some reason, possibly the gas oven, possibly the vegan marge, they didn’t quite solidify. But they were very tasty in any case. Even tastier when I won. (Actually, Alex and I drew, but I scraped ahead by virtue of my beetroot-related stoicism. So, basically, I won. After that, how could mere fish and chips hope to compete?

Last weekend I found myself in Lucerne, writing a travel piece about that most Helvetic of cities (well, it calls itself a city. Apart from the surprising number of people hanging around on the waterfront with plastic bags full of booze – which became less surprising when we saw the price of alcohol – it seemed more like a prosperous and picturesque little town to this particular Londoner). On Sunday, we sneaked smoked ham rolls from the hotel breakfast buffet, and caught the early train to the edge of the Bernese Oberland – where, a good six hours, and about 700 meters upward later, I met this cow, which I hold directly responsible for this spinach dumpling dish at the Rathaus Brauerei (microbrewery), which, I believe, was described coyly as coming “with Appenzeller”:

and this spinach käsekuchen that sent me skipping heavily along the path from Meiringen (birthplace of the meringue, no less – but no sign of them at 8am on a Sunday morning, the godless hussies) to Grindelwald:

It looks burnt, but actually, it was just chock-a-block with spinach, and thus represented, for Switzerland, remarkably good value (I think it cost about £14. Say no more.) There was also the cheesiest sandwich I have ever not finished (even cheesier than Kappacasein’s alpine overload), and a moitié-moitié fondue, made from half Gruyère and half Vacherin Fribourgeois, with the result that, by the end of the weekend, I was starting to believe that it really was possible to eat too much cheese. It isn’t, of course – I was just hallucinating. Probably because of the cheese.

Other things we ate included some pleasingly delicate roasted veal sausages on sauerkraut, also at the brewery:

and an extraordinary dish I sadly forgot to record the name of; a vol au vent filled with veal and pork meatballs, grated apples and raisins, gilded with a slightly sweet cream and wine sauce.

I also spotted some wild strawberries growing in the shady, wooded path up into the mountains – they were good, but not as muskily aromatic as the Provencal ones the legumier used to sell for €5 a punnet.

And, of course, there was beer (and one slightly apricotty, fragrant Swiss white wine, a Grand Cru de Nyon) – banana-scented light ale, and a clovey weissbeer, and everything tasting better with a view…

Writing book is a bit like having a baby (I imagine). There’s the thrill of the conception – the sealing of the deal, you might say – the long hard slog of the first trimester (nausea, sleepnessness, an ever-expanding waistline), another three months of corrections and anxiety, and then – waiting. Eventually, all goes quiet (book at the printers) and you forget the waiting will ever end; a pleasurable period of stasis before the tell-tale twinges, the advance copies, the interviews – the book’s thrilling birth pangs. This, as any mother will readily point out, is where my analogy breaks down, because the publication process culminates in a great big party – and actual gestation culminates in… well, you’ve seen One Born Every Minute.

So, Perfect: 68 Essential Recipes for Every Cook’s Repertoire, was launched into the world last Thursday (although Amazon and Waterstone’s seem to have ripped it untimely the weekend before) with a bash at Mason & Taylor in London’sTrendyShoreditch. Nice beer (including an intriguingly dark and salty IPA on tap which a very kind barman ran upstairs to pour for me), fab food, by all reports – sadly I never made it as far as the table thanks to a lovely crowd of well-wishers and fans of free drinks. Great review in the Evening Standard as well:

‘One rather engaging cookbook is Felicity Cloake’s Perfect (Fig Tree, £18.99), a collection of her admirable columns in The Guardian, talking herself through the best version of various dishes, from poached eggs to Yorkshire pudding. It’s rather a brilliant idea, to try out versions of a recipe, from anyone from Delia Smith to Elizabeth David, before plumping for the one that works best. You need finely honed culinary instincts, an open mind and a capacious cookbook collection for the formula to work; Miss Cloake has them all.’

Miss Cloake eh? Fancy. Anyway, everyone has been really very nice indeed about the book – the design, the illustrations, and even the bits I did. Remarkably, as my dad pointed out on Saturday, clutching the Review section, Perfect even appears to have topped the Guardian bookshop bestseller list last week – wooHOO!

Next stop: baby number two? It would be nice for Perfect to have something to play with, wouldn’t it?

More on the book here…

OK, so I lied. One more gratuitous picture of piggy wiggies to whet the appetite for the porcine feast which proved such a joyous conclusion to Pig Day (see previous post for more on the live aspect of things).

First up was Gergely’s Hungarian take on … pig brains. Sauteed with onions, and served on toast with a sprinkling of paprika (of course) they reminded me of a creamier, yet more unctuous version of marrow. Sadly the magnificent pork pie wasn’t yet set…

but we did break out some of the chorizo prepared by the Sausage Experts

and, under Rachel’s direction, fried it in copious amounts of olive oil, then served it with incredible brown bread and a drizzle of honey 

and then there were the pork chops, whose two marinades escape me

and the barbecue ribs…

and the lung paprikash (as usual, with offal, I found myself thinking – this is fine, but really, why would you, when there’s stuff like this on offer…)

to say nothing of the magnificent trotter paella, which, coming at the tail end of such a spread, received rather less love than it deserved. I’d like to think the hardy overnighters enjoyed it for breakfast.

Oh yeah, and there’s the small matter of the eyeball. The butchers kindly left both Miss Pig’s blue sparklers staring out at the assembled company of carnivores, and the temptation was too much for Ben Norum, of Blue Tomato fame. Ignoring professional advice about the little buggers needing lengthy soaking, he whipped up a hasty batter, and deep fried them both. There weren’t many takers for tempura eyeballs. Except Ben, of course.

Then Alex reminded me of the tagline on my Guardian Word of Mouth profile: ‘she likes to think she’d try any food once, but then no one’s offered her an eyeball yet.’ Damned by my own pen – and duty bound by stubborn, mule-like pride to swallow the second snack of Satan.

you can tell yourself that’s a blue cheese arancini all you want, but obviously it’s just a pupil. And if you think that’s disgusting, imagine eating it.

Not my finest hour. But, having taken one for all, I can say with a good deal of authority, if you’re ever offered an eyeball, don’t bother. Just don’t. And if you insist, don’t, whatever you do, add salt.

Huge, and belated, thanks to Rachel, Donald, and everyone at Dingley Dell: next stop mutton Monday?

A month and a half after the event, I finally feel I’ve cogitated sufficiently on Pig Day to commit some words to screen on the subject. Yes, I’m about to cast my pearls of wisdom before the swine of Dingley Dell Farm. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of Pig Day, let me quote Donald Edwards, one of the twin geniuses behind the festivities (see also, Rachel McCormack of Catalan Cooking):

And that’s how it happened. Kind of. Bleary-eyed after a drunken night of sausages and Scrabble, Alex and I rolled into Suffolk in no mood to slaughter anything, so it was fortunate that food safety regulations dictated that meat must be allowed to come down to chilling temperature before butchering – and thus the beast we were about to eat was already dead while we were still glugging wine and talking up our foodie credentials. (“Yeah, so, only a small glass, we’ve got to get up early and kill a pig”). More welcome, however, were the roast pork rolls awaiting us at Dingley Dell, which set off the Hayward bros’ talk about pig welfare very nicely indeed:

One thing that I took away from our little ride in the pig trailer, and our tour around the pig fields, was that pork labelling in this country is in need of reform. Pork can be sold as ‘produced in the UK’ as long as the last significant change to it took place in this country: so sausages made from, say, Irish pork (farrowing crates are still legal in the Republic, stalls so narrow the sow is hardly able to stand up, and certainly unable to turn round, to stop her accidentally crushing her pigletss) can still carry a British flag if they were processed in this country.

These silky little lovelies were about six hours old – their skins had the incredible translucent glow of creatures that had never breathed the cruel air of the outside world. (And yes, the question of sucking pigs did come up – they don’t do them at Dingley Dell; “it just doesn’t seem fair somehow.”)

Outside, marauding packs of slightly older little pigs galloped around, mischievously intent on disturbing the peace of their long suffering mothers.

The teenage pigs move into marquee-style enclosure with their peers a few weeks before slaughter – Mark says that there’s only a couple of truly free-range pig farms in the UK, simply because the cost, and unpredictability, of the final product puts off most retailers and restauranteurs. I’d like to think that one day this might change, but in any case, this lot – the upper fifth of boisterous pigdom – looked happy enough to this inexperienced eye. They were pretty shy at first, but once they got used to the presence of a load of cooing cameras, they gradually plucked up the courage to edge towards the branches we were proffering as bait.

Warning: here ends the cute bit. Only one pig features from now on, and it’s pretty dead, as you might imagine, given the next item on the schedule was a butchery demonstration from Wayne and Jim of Suffolk Meat Traders, who deftly sliced up our carcass while we scoffed some brekker:

And if anyone sees anything bizarre in the juxtaposition, I’m afraid you’re probably reading the wrong blog – all that tramping around the farm had really worked up an appetite.

Time to get cooking. I was put on to the morcilla team, making a sweetly spiced black pudding with a few buckets of blood Donald had procured from God knows where. Once I overcame my initial squeamishness (curious, how reluctant I was to taste it in its raw form, given cow’s blood is my absolute favourite chip dipping sauce), this was enormous fun, mixing paella rice, chopped onion, parsley, cloves, pig fat (so soft!), black pepper and lots of lots of gloopy blood And then we ate. How we ate. To be continued…

So, I’ve been away for a while. Five days cruising down the Rhine on a tidal wave of flammkuchen and Riesling, seven days in Croatia eating as much grilled squid as I could lay my lips on, and then a little hiatus of shock after receiving the rather incredible honour of two awards from the Guild of Food Writers: Food Journalist of the Year for my work for the Guardian and Fire & Knives, and the New Media award for my Guardian Word of Mouth column. I’m back in the land of the living now, having recovered sufficiently from the shock to dare put some scented stocks in one of the commemorative vases, and with a whole heap of photos to discuss here. Word of Mouth were kind enough to celebrate this with a little piece, to which I refer anyone interested, as I feel authentically British about the idea of boasting any further. But thank you, everyone. (AMAZING!!!! ahem.)

Pig Day, the Rhine and Croatia all deserve posts to themselves, so here’s a little pick and mix of other stuff I’ve enjoyed since getting back. First up, today’s excitement: a whole punnet of flat peaches courtesy of Whole Foods. (A rare bargain from my favourite pushers of organic acerola juice at only £2.99.) Flat peaches always make me feel happy for no apparent reason – I put it down to the miniature dachshund effect; squashed things just get the sympathy juices flowing. A sneak preview of next week’s column (wowzas) – tomato salsa stirred into some scrambled eggs for lunch. My post-university trip to Mexico yielded many great discoveries, from spiced hot chocolate to the fact that squid doesn’t only come deep fried, but the joy of chilli-laden breakfasts was one of my favourites – my abiding memory of Indian breakfasts is hostel peanut butter toast – and Huevos Mexicana is the king of the castle.  And this is kind of a knave version.

and yet another salsa in yet another setting:

Right, enough food self-indulgence. Next post will actually be informative, and hopefully a little bit interesting too. No promises though.