Rhubarb sorbet

Rhubarb sorbetLast winter, my friend Kate and her family moved into an enormous and ancient pile of a house in one of the nearby villages. You know the sort of house:  the street is named after it; it’s got medieval bits, Georgian bits and Victorian bits; there are wonderful corners all over the place for the kids to play hide-and-seek in; and there’s a huge, leafy garden I’d give my right arm for.

Part of Kate’s garden appears to have been looked after, a century or so ago, by a kitchen gardener with a fondness for rhubarb. Rhubarb crowns grow very slowly indeed, but Kate’s rhubarb patch, having been around for a good long while, is now about the size of a couple of transit vans. No one family can consume that amount of rhubarb in one year without severe intestinal upset, so a few months ago she gave me a few kilos of stalks. Since then, they’ve been sitting, chopped and cleaned, in the freezer, coming out occasionally to be stewed and consumed with custard. Time to ring the changes – here’s a non-custardy application of rhubarb which is grown-up enough to be wheeled out at your next dinner party. There’s a lovely balance of tart and sweet in this sorbet, and it’s a glorious colour. You’ll find it works well as an in-between-courses palate cleanser, or as a dessert. Leave any custard well alone; this stands up on its own.

To make about a pint and a half of sorbet, depending on your rhubarb’s age and water content, you’ll need:

1kg rhubarb
200g caster sugar
30ml water

Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and simmer very gently with the lid on until all the rhubarb has collapsed into a greenish mush (about 20 minutes). Remove from the heat. Strain through a jelly bag, a fine sieve or a muslin-lined colander for several hours or overnight and let gravity do its work, without poking at the mixture – you want the juice and only the juice. You’ll notice that the solid bits of rhubarb left in the jelly bag look a lot like wet hay; all the pinkness will be in your juice.

Eventually, you’ll have a bowl of pink, fragrant syrup. Chill the syrup in the fridge for at least six hours.

Follow the instructions on your ice-cream maker, or pour the syrup into a freezerproof box and put straight in the freezer, removing after an hour to attack with an electric whisk to break up the ice crystals. Freeze for another thirty minutes and whisk again, then keep repeating every thirty minutes until you have something that’s recognisably sorbet. This sorbet will keep in the freezer for months, but I doubt you’ll be able to leave it alone for that long.

Peach and mango meringue pie

Peach and mango meringue pie
Peach and mango meringue pie

This one’s for my friend Michael and his daughter, who are going in for a pie competition this weekend. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out – it really does taste as good as it looks. This pie is made with an all-butter pastry (none of your revolting shortening here, Californians) which is flavoured with lemon zest, and has a juicy filling that’s very easy to put together. I have been obsessing a bit about meringue recently, and the lovely puffy cloud that makes the lid of this pie is a beautiful and really delicious way to top things off.

Michael and Yael are cooking in the US, where weighing scales are not the norm – unfortunately, cup measures aren’t the norm here in the UK, and I have real trouble using them when I’m baking.  As a result, I’ve measured by weight, not volume, below. For those who don’t have a set of scales at home,  there is a decent conversion tool here.

You’ll need an 11 inch (28 cm) flan case with fluted edges and a loose base that you can push out, and some baking beans (some use ceramic beans – I just used half a pack of dried butter beans from the cupboard). If you plan on transporting your pie, you may prefer to use a foil dish.

To make one totally fabulous pie, you’ll need:

Pastry
225g plain flour
25g icing (confectioners) sugar
100g salted butter
Zest of 1 lemon
1 egg yolk
3 tablespoons water (approx – see below)

Filling
4 large, ripe peaches (I used white peaches – choose the most fragrant fruit you can find)
3 ripe mangoes (I used Alphonse mangoes, which are my favourite)
2 tablespoons caster sugar
3 level tablespoons semolina (cornmeal for Americans)

Meringue
6 egg whites
225g caster sugar
1 tablespoon white vinegar

Peach and mango meringue pieStart by making the pastry. Sift the flour and sugar into a large bowl, and rub in the butter with your fingertips until you have a mixture resembling breadcrumbs. Try to keep things as cool as possible as you work; your pastry will be crisper and shorter if it stays cold. (My grandmother used to make pastry in a large bowl placed in the kitchen sink while she ran cold water around it – perhaps there’s a degree of overkill in this, but it does work well to help your pastry along in hot weather.)

Use a butter knife to stir the lemon zest, yolk and water into the mixture until you have a stiff pastry. You may need a little more water according to the weather; the behaviour of pastry varies horribly according to how much moisture there is in the air on any given day. Wrap the pastry in cling film (saran wrap for Michael and Yael) and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes to rest.

While the pastry is resting, turn the oven to 200ºC (400ºF) and prepare the fruit. Quarter and peel the peaches, then cut each piece into three. Dice the mango in pieces the same size as the peach bits (I’m sure you all know the mango trick, but here’s a YouTube video of someone preparing a mango just in case you’ve not done it before). You can keep the fruit around the stone section to nibble off as a chef’s treat. Cover and set aside.

Roll the pastry out on a cool, lightly floured surface to fit your flan dish. (I have a marble slab for pastry that my Mum bought for me at a gravestone shop. Again, this is probably overkill. It’s also a bit sinister, now I think about it.) Line the dish with the pastry, use a fork to prick the base of the pie case all over, and cut a circle of parchment paper to fit in the bottom. Slip the parchment inside the pie and cover it with baking beans. Bake blind – that is to say, without any filling – for 20 minutes until the pastry is golden. Remove the beans and parchment and cook for another 5-10 minutes or until the base is dry and golden too. Turn the oven down to 150ºC (300ºF).

Prepare the meringue by whisking the eggs and vinegar for about five minutes until you have stiff peaks (the vinegar will not add a detectable flavour to your pie, but it will make the peaks of the meringue simultaneously crisp and chewy, like a baked marshmallow), adding the sugar a tablespoon at a time as you go. You should end up with a very stiff, glossy mixture.

Sprinkle the semolina into the base of the pie dish – this will soak up excess juices from the fruit. Fill the dish with the fruit mixture (depending on the size of your peaches and mangoes, you may find you have some left over to make a fruit salad with) and sprinkle over the sugar.

Spoon the meringue carefully all over the top of the pie in a dome, making sure there are no gaps, and use a spoon to tease it into lots of peaks on top. Put the pie in the oven at the cooler temperature (don’t worry if the temperature hasn’t quite settled down yet – a little bit of extra heat at the start of cooking won’t hurt it) and bake for 1 hour – 1 hour 10 minutes until the pie is an even gold colour all over and marshmallowy inside. Serve warm or cold, but do make it as close as possible to serving as you can manage to keep the meringue nice and high and puffy.

Rhubarb and custard cake

There’s one seasonal ingredient in the shops at the moment which puts a very jolly spin on February: forced rhubarb. I’ve been buying it at the market and the supermarket (for some reason, the market produce seems rather redder) to simmer with some sugar to go with yoghurt in the mornings, and with custard at suppertime. We also spooned it over pancakes on Shrove Tuesday – I’m sure I’ll be sick of it soon, but we’re not there yet, so I chucked some in a cake.

This recipe is based on one I found on Usenet in the mid-nineties. The original was very simple: a box of cake mix, a few handsful of rhubarb, some sugar, and some cream. This is my cake-mix-free version, which is just as quick to prepare. It’s lovely and moist, has a fantastic rhubarb and custard flavour, and disappears very quickly.

I don’t really understand why you’d spend the extra on a boxed mix, when it only takes a minute to measure out flour, butter, milk and sugar. This also gives your inner control-freak the ability to manage exactly what goes into your cake. A bit of googling revealed that the ingredients panel on a standard box of yellow cake mix reads:

Sugar, Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour (Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Vegetable Oil Shortening (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Propylene Glycol Mono- and Diesters Of Fats, Monoand Diglycerides), Leavening (Sodium Bicarbonate, Dicalcium Phosphate, Sodium Aluminum Phosphat E, Monocalcium Phosphate). Contains 2% Or Less Of: Wheat Starch, Salt, Dextrose, Polyglycerol Esters Of Fatty Acids, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Cellulose Gum, Artificial Flavors, Xanthan Gum, Maltodextrin, Modified Cornstarch, Colored with (Yellow 5 Lake, Red 40 Lake).

Personally, I prefer an ingredients list that goes like this:

250g plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
125g softened butter
3 eggs
180ml milk
450g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4-5 stalks rhubarb
1 pint double cream

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F).

Sieve the flour into a large bowl with the baking powder and salt. Give it plenty of height, to get as much air into the flour as possible.

In a separate large bowl, use an electric whisk to cream the butter and 225g of the sugar together until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one by one, with the vanilla essence, at a high speed. Add the flour and milk a little at a time, beating as you go, until you have a velvety, light mixture.

Use a spatula to spread the cake mixture over the bottom of a metal baking tin – use a non-stick one, or line with greased parchment. Mine measured 30×35 cm; if yours is smaller, that’s fine, but be sure it has reasonably high sides and be aware that your cooking time may be a bit longer. Cut the rhubarb into small pieces and scatter it over the top of the mixture with the remaining sugar. Pour the cream over the whole arrangement and bake for 45 minutes.

Test with a skewer, which should come out nearly clean – if it’s still sticky or liquidy when you shake the tin, give the cake another ten minutes and test again. The top will be cracked and golden. This cake is good hot or cold.

Crème de mures – blackberry liqueur

A reader from France emailed me a few weeks ago with her own recipe for Crème de Cassis: blackcurrant liqueur for making Kir with. Kir is one of my favourite apèritifs – use one measure of Crème de Cassis or Crème de Mures (the same liqueur made with blackberries rather than blackcurrants) in a glass of five measures of chilled white wine. A Kir prepared with sparkling wine is a Kir Royale, and is also blimmin’ brilliant. Thank you very much, Jacqueline – and if you email me again to let me know what your surname is, I can give you a full credit for the recipe!

In this part of the world, blackcurrants are hard to find and very expensive when you do get your hands on them. Blackberries, however, quite literally grow on trees at the moment, and the method and amounts you’ll need for a crème de mures will be exactly the same. So if you want to make the most of this year’s surprisingly good blackberry harvest, get gathering at the weekend and produce a couple of home-made bottles of crème de mures (or crème de cassis if you have a handy currant bush) to impress people with.

Jacqueline says you’ll need:

1.5 kg ripe blackcurrants
2 litres of red wine (NOT the absolutely cheapest plonk)
Sugar

Wash the blackcurrants or blackberries, place in an earthenware pot or pyrex bowl and crush with a wooden spoon. Add the red wine and leave to macerate for 48 hours.

Filter, weigh the juice and add the same weight of sugar. Pour into an enamel or stainless steel saucepan (Jacqueline and I both used a Le Creuset pot) and heat to just boiling. Let it boil gently for 5 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon from time to time. Leave to cool to about 40°C, filter and bottle.

If filtered well, and bottled into sterilised bottles and well corked this will keep indefinitely. Jacqueline says that for a filter, she makes bags out of calico with loops for suspending from the legs of an upturned stool, making sure the bowl can be lifted out from between the stool legs when full! I have a Lakeland jam stand – I’m not awfully fond of it, given that these days it’s a bit peely, but it does the job. Don’t be tempted to hurry up the filtering process – just leave gravity to do its job.

Pimm’s Fruit Cup

Summer in the UK is a fragile, short-lived and unreliable thing (yesterday, in flaming June, we had tornadoes and hailstones), so when the sun shines and the air is balmy, especially here in Cambridge, we tend to overcompensate slightly with garden parties, great strings of barbecued sausages, silly hats, flowery frocks and that sine qua non of chi-chi English outdoor gatherings: a few jugs of Pimm’s Fruit Cup. A sweet, pinkish liqueur based on gin, Pimm’s is available in every off-licence and supermarket in the country; and we mix it with lemonade and what bemused foreigners interpret as a fruit salad, kick back and proceed to get completely sloshed in the sun. There’s a certain class thing at work here. Shakespeare in the Park? We drink Pimm’s. Wimbledon? Pimm’s. May Balls? Pimm’s. Opera at Glyndebourne? Pimm’s. We also drink it because it’s delicious, potent and tends to render pretty 20-year-old students of both genders delightfully cuddly.

This fruity, aromatic, rounded cocktail base was invented by James Pimm, who ran a tavern in the City of London. He came up with the drink, based on gin with fruit, herbs and quinine, some time in the 1820s, soon finding it was so popular that he was able to produce it on a large scale to be sold to other taverns and clubs. It’s been a popular summer drink ever since, although the amount of alcohol in the stuff has definitely been reduced by the company that now owns the trademark (Pimm’s has in my lifetime reduced its alcohol percentage from 35% ABV to 25%). You can remedy this by adding a splash of gin to your cocktail.

Pimm’s is a substance sadly missed by those who come to the university here for a year or so from overseas. When visiting friends we made at university who have since moved back to America or other Pimm’s-free lands, we usually try to bring a bottle for them so we can all spend an evening reliving our glided youth. But I bear glad tidings for the overseas summer alcoholic. You can actually make the base mix for your Pimm’s (which we shall now call ‘fruit cup’ – and indeed, Pimm’s is not the only available brand; try Plymouth Fruit Cup for a rather more aromatic option, or Stone’s Fruit Cup for a distinct ginger kick) out of a mixture of liqueurs you may well have in the drinks cupboard already – use 2 parts 40% gin, 2 parts red vermouth, 1 part Cointreau (or your favourite orange liqueur), 1 part sweet port and a dash of Angostura bitters. It’ll be a bit stronger than the pre-bottled stuff, but it tastes very fine indeed. If you do decide to make your own fruit cup from scratch, Hendrick’s gin, with its cucumbery overtones, really comes into its own here – and if you use Dubonnet for your red vermouth, you can award yourself the Queen Mother seal of approval: Dubonnet was her all-time favourite liquid.

You should build your drink in a large jug by gently muddling a small handful of mint in 1 part Pimm’s or home-made fruit cup, then adding 1 part lemonade and 1 part ginger ale, with a good handful of soft English summer fruits, some sliced cucumber and fresh mint bobbing about in the jug with some ice. I like raspberries frozen into ice cubes, so they float rather than sink to the bottom initially – this means that you can arrange for some raspberries to end up in everybody’s glass, and the freezing makes the cell walls burst, so once the cubes have melted, the liquid at the bottom of your glass will be syrupy with raspberry juice. Borage flowers (a blue flower with a taste reminiscent of cucumber) are a traditional addition, and look lovely in the drink if you can find them. One jugful will be enough for a lovely boozy evening for two.

Jean-Talon market, Montreal

One of the things that makes food in this city so fabulous is the abundance of lovingly raised, local produce. I’m just back from Marché Jean-Talon (between Jean-Talon and De Castelnau metro stations). This is probably one of those occasions where pictures speak louder than words.











Yes, that’s me. I look even more cheerful than that now, because I’m gorging myself on strawberries from the first picture.

Chocolate fondue

Thanks for all the kind emails – I’m still recovering from the flu and am decidedly wobbly, but a whole lot better than I was at the start of the week. Just as well, because next week I’ll be in Helsinki, on the lookout for reindeer, vendace roe, rye bread and soused herrings.

Cooking’s been beyond me since my encounter with this horrible germ, and my tastebuds are still not giving any kind of sensible feedback to my brain – most things are still either tasteless or, oddly, extremely bitter. Happily, there’s one foodstuff that even the flu can’t ruin for me: chocolate. So it’s out with the new fondue set.

If you’re making your own chocolate fondue, try dipping cantucci, those hard little Italian biscuits; dried pear, marshmallows and fresh, ripe bananas are also great. I’m not a huge fan of strawberries in any chocolatey context; they’re too acid, especially out of season, to work well with chocolate. I’m aware that I’m in a minority here though – if you like strawberries dunked in chocolate, dip away.

To serve four, you’ll need:

250 g good quality dark chocolate
100 ml double cream
2 tablespoons Amaretto
Fruits, biscuits, fresh almonds etc. to dip

Hopelessly easy, this. Put your chocolate in a sealed bag and wallop the hell out of it with the end of a rolling pin, until it’s reduced to little bits. Stir the chocolate bits into the cream in your fondue pot, and melt together with the cream over a low heat on the hob, stirring all the time. Transfer to a low flame on the fondue stand and stir in the Amaretto. Proceed to fight over who gets the pink marshmallows.

Raspberry Eton Mess

Raspberries are one of my favourite fruits. Not only are they great raw, in jam or baked into cakes and puddings; they freeze like a dream, so you can have a ripe, squashy taste of summer all year round.

Strawberries are the fruit traditionally used in Eton Mess, but at this time of year they’re very bland and prohibitively expensive. To be honest, I prefer the tart sweetness you get from raspberries anyway, so this isn’t a hardship. Using defrosted frozen raspberries in this dish will leave a lovely pink swirl in the cream. If you are using fresh raspberries, crush about a quarter of them for the same effect.

Eton Mess originated at Eton College in the 1930s, when something rather like it (a mixture of strawberries and bananas with whipped cream or ice cream) was sold in the school tuck shop. It’s evolved into a lovely flopsome, light desert punctuated with shards of meringue, crisp and chewy all at once. In the spirit of making a very quick, easy dessert, I’ve used supermarket meringue nests – you can make your own if you prefer.

To serve six, you’ll need:

1 pint double cream
1 lb raspberries
8 meringue nests (Waitrose and Marks and Spencer carry meringue nests which are ideal for this – crunchy on the outside with a soft give in the centre)

Crumble the meringues into bite-sized chunks with your hands. Whip the cream into soft peaks and fold in the raspberries and crumbled meringue. Spoon into serving bowls and decorate with a few spare raspberries (sometimes you’ll find mint leaves dressing an Eton Mess – I prefer mine mint-free). Serve immediately.

We ate our Eton Mess with an accompanying glass of Framboise liqueur. I’d planned to fold it into the dessert, but it was so very, very nice that a corporate decision was made among those dining to drink it instead. I think we made the right choice.

Quince Jelly

quincesI didn’t make any quince jelly last year; the quinces on the tree at my Mum’s house came ripe and then dropped off while I was busy getting married and going on honeymoon. This was an ill-considered piece of timing on my part, and resulted in a year of married bliss with no quince jelly. Catastrophe. This needed putting right before we found each other weak and snappish at the lack of sugar, our marriage under intolerable, hypoglycaemic strain.

Quinces are a lot like a large pear in appearance; they’re also covered with a soft, furry down. They smell extremely fragrant, but they’re not edible raw; a raw quince is very hard, astringent and bitter. Cooked, however, they change in character completely. They lose their golden-yellow colour and their tart taste, and become pinkish, soft and intensely scented.

When I make quince jelly, I follow Mrs Beeton’s recipe. (There are only a very few of Mrs Beeton’s recipes I would happily cook from, but her preserves are usually excellent, and, of course, preserving was much more important to the refrigerator-free Victorians than it is to us.) It’s very simple – all you need is quinces, water and sugar. She says:

INGREDIENTS – To every pint of juice allow 1 lb. of loaf sugar.

Mode – Pare and slice the quinces, and put them into a preserving-pan with sufficient water to float them. Boil them until tender, and the fruit is reduced to a pulp; strain off the clear juice, and to each pint allow the above proportion of loaf sugar. Boil the juice and sugar together for about 3/4 hour; remove all the scum as it rises, and, when the jelly appears firm when a little is poured on a plate, it is done. The residue left on the sieve will answer to make a common marmalade, for immediate use, by boiling it with 1/2 lb. of common sugar to every lb. of pulp. Time – 3 hours to boil the quinces in water; 3/4 hour to boil the jelly.

(If you prefer metric measurements, use 600ml of juice to every 450g of sugar.)

Quinces are, as I mentioned above, absolutely rock-hard. I sharpened my big cook’s knife until it had an edge that would put a samurai sword to shame, and started to lay about the quinces, helping the task along by imagining the faces of countless enemies on each one. (I bear grudges for decades. It provides me with excellent chopping-fuel.)

sliced quinceRipe quinces often have small brown patches inside, as in this picture (they’ll get browner as they sit in your pan and the oxygen gets to them, too). Don’t worry. It doesn’t mean your quince is bad. My Mum, who taught me to make this, always insisted that it’s important that you leave the seeds in, but I do wonder whether she’s confusing quinces with citrus fruits, where the seeds are important in jam-making for the pectin, the enzyme which makes the jam gel properly. I give her the benefit of the doubt and leave them in anyway. I also deviate a little from Mrs Beeton here; I don’t pare (peel) the quinces, having discovered a few years ago that it doesn’t make any difference to the finished jelly; you’ll want to peel them if you intend on making the marmalade (quince cheese) that she mentions, but I’m not intending on doing that; there’s little enough room in my cupboards as it is.

Le Creuset pansAbout twenty chopped quinces fill my two largest Le Creuset pans. I’ve plonked my knife and an apple between the pans so you can get an idea of scale – these pans are 26 and 28cm in diameter – this is a lot of chopped quince. The largest pan (the blue one) needs about three litres of water to fill it enough to make the quince bits bob about merrily, the orange pan about two and a half. Simmering for three hours will reduce the quince to a pulp in a gorgeously pink juice, and will scent your whole house with a honeyed, fruity perfume.cooked quince

I used to strain jellies by lining a sieve with butter muslin and balancing it precariously on top of the bowl I was straining the jelly into. This year I have seen sense and bought a proper jelly bag from Lakeland. I’m not impressed; the metal stand is coated with red plastic, but the plastic is flaking off the ring around the top as if it’s got a particularly nasty skin disease. I need to be careful that none of it ends up in the jelly.

jelly bagThe bowl I want to strain into is too big for the stand. It has to balance on it precariously. My hairy-handed sous chef, Mr Weasel, will need to hold it steady when I put the pulp in the bag.

Quinces contain enough pectin to gel naturally, but the set you get from quince-pectin alone is quite soft. I prefer a harder set, so I use jam sugar, which comes with pectin already added.

The orange pan yields five pints of juice, the blue one six. Bugger, that’s a lot. I don’t have enough jam jars. Today’s most shocking discovery is that it’s cheaper to buy Tesco Value marmalade and throw it away (31p per jar – and this is difficult, because throwing perfectly good food away makes me feel physically ill – but what do you do with six lb of jarless, cheap jam?) than it was to buy my pristine jars and lids from Lakeland (about 50p, including the lid, which has to be bought separately). Mr Weasel, craving jelly, drives to Tesco and buys six jars of sacrificial marmalade.

quince jelly
After 45 minutes of simmering (with no lid), 22lb (10 kilos) of quince jelly is ready to go into the sterilised jars. This should be enough to go on crumpets, accompany and glaze roast lambs, drizzle over blue cheeses and make presents for the neighbours until next autumn.