Samphire, scallops and black pudding

The samphire season has just begun, and with this in mind, we drove up to Norfolk at the weekend with a coolbag to try to find some at a fishmonger. Unfortunately, it being a Bank Holiday, everybody else and his mother had also driven up to Norfolk. The fishmongers were empty of anything you’d have fancied eating, as if picked over by piscine locusts, and every seaside town we encountered was so full of people that we gave up and decided to go for a hike into the bleak salt marshes near Stiffkey (pronounced ‘Stooky’) to get away from everybody. Picnic backpack hoisted aloft, legs encased in waterproof boots, we walked out about three miles until we found the perfect spot by one of the causeway bridges that punctuate the saltmarshes – flowing, salty water running through a sticky clay bed. This is perfect samphire territory, and sure enough, there were beds and beds of the stuff growing along the water margin. I scrambled down into the water, offering up a prayer to the makers of Gore-Tex, and picked enough, roots and all, to fill both our picnic napkins.

Samphire is a glasswort, sometimes called sea-asparagus. (See the picture below for a bowl of raw, cleaned samphire.) There are a few different plants which are called samphire – we’re after the best-tasting variety, marsh samphire, which is a spectacular bright green, and grows in salty mud. The samphire Shakespeare mentions in King Lear was probably rock samphire, which is comparatively bitter. Marsh samphire has an assertively salty flavour reminiscent of oysters, and is tender enough to be eaten raw in a salad. (Dr W and I found ourselves snacking on it raw as I picked, straight out of the mud.) At this time of year, the samphire is young and tender – aim to collect shoots about the length of your forefinger, roots and all. Wrap them in a damp cloth and they’ll keep nicely in the fridge for a few days. To prepare, just rinse carefully in cold water from the tap and snip the roots off with scissors. Older samphire may be a bit twiggy – use your judgement, and snip off anything that’s not a tender tip.

If foraging’s not your thing, Tig (who is extraordinarily good value on the subject of seaweed and other salty things) mentioned in the comments of an earlier sea-vegetable post that the Fish Society will send mail-order samphire to you, in season.

Samphire’s at its absolute best with shellfish, so I grabbed a bag of tiny, sweet queen scallops from the supermarket and came up with this dish, which makes the most of the odd affinity pork has with scallops and samphire, sets them on delicious crisp discs, and marries the lot up with a beurre blanc flavoured with dill and Pernod. This looks and tastes most impressive, and while it’s a bit of a faff to put together, it’ll go down a storm at a dinner party, or served to people you love for a special occasion. To serve four as a starter or two as a main course, you’ll need:

150g cleaned marsh samphire
200g queen scallops
4 slices white multigrain bread
150g slim black pudding (if you can only find the pre-sliced kind, buy 12 slices)
3 fat, juicy cloves garlic
100g salted butter, plus another 225g salted butter for the beurre blanc
1 shallot
1 bay leaf
3 peppercorns
3 tablespoons white wine
2 tablespoons Pernod
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon double cream
2 tablespoons freshly chopped dill

Preheat the oven to 220°C while you chop the garlic finely, and cook it in 100g of butter until it is a very pale gold. Remove the garlic from the heat. Remove the crusts from the bread and use a rolling pin to roll the slices of bread until they are squashed flat, then use a round cookie cutter to make three circles out of each slice. Dip the twelve rounds in the garlic butter, lay on a baking sheet and cook on the top shelf of the oven for 8 minutes, until golden brown. Put on racks to cool.

Cut the black pudding into 12 rounds, leaving the skin on for now. Fry it over a medium heat in the remaining garlic butter for about 5 minutes per side, until the outsides are crisp. Peel off the skin and keep the little rounds of sausage on a plate in a warm place while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

To make the beurre blanc, put the wine, Pernod and vinegar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with the sliced shallot, the bay leaf and the peppercorns. Bring to a simmer and reduce until there are only two tablespoons of liquid left. Sieve the liquid to remove the shallot, bay and peppercorns, and return to the pan off the heat. Get the butter out of the fridge and cut it into cubes about the size of the top joint of your thumb.

Put the pan back over a low flame. Add a teaspoon of cream to the wine reduction and use a whisk to incorporate it into the liquid. (As I’ve mentioned in previous beurre blanc recipes, this addition of cream is cheating, but it does mean that your sauce won’t split.) Whisking vigorously, add the butter to the pan, three cubes at a time. When they are half-melted, add another three, still whisking hard. Repeat until all the butter is incorporated and remove from the heat.

When the beurre blanc is nearly ready, bring the remaining garlic butter and fat from the black pudding to a frying temperature and fry off the scallops for two minutes, until they are coloured and just barely cooked. Steam the samphire for four minutes.

To assemble the dish, make a little bed of steamed samphire on each plate, and put three discs of bread crisp on top. Put a slice of black pudding on each of these, pile the tiny scallops into the middle of the plate, and spoon over a generous amount of the beurre blanc. Serve immediately.

Elderflower time!

A quick reminder – it’s that time of year again, so if you’re in a foraging mood, spend some time this weekend harvesting some elderflower heads for cordial and fritters.

You may also enjoy this article from the Times on wild foods, especially if your garden is as full of nettles as mine is, but please do not follow Prue Leith’s example and raid the nests of wild geese for eggs unless you want a serious telling off from the RSPB! If you really can’t live without a June goose egg and you’re near Cambridge, head to the fruit and veg stall outside the Grafton Centre, where they often have a large tray of goose eggs to buy.

Elderflower fritters

I spent yesterday making this year’s batch of elderflower cordial. The wet weather earlier this year in the UK seems to have been a great thing for the elder bushes, which are positively groaning under the weight of all their flowers. The flower heads were so heavy with creamy pollen that I picked six extra heads to turn into fritters.

Foraging is brilliant. There is nothing like the warm glow you get from eating food which is, to all intents and purposes, free; it’s also a great pleasure to know that the food you’re eating is from a healthy environment (be careful to pick your elderflowers well away from any roads, and, as always, leave plenty of flowers on the bush – you’ll want them to turn into berries later in the year) and is perfectly fresh. Look for blossoms which are in full flower, and which have not yet started to brown or drop petals. For fritters, try to pick the heaviest, most pollen-filled flower heads you can find about three hours before you cook them. Pop them in the fridge in a plastic bag. Their scent will develop after picking and they’ll be very perfumed when you come to cook them (don’t leave the flowers in the fridge any longer than three hours or their scent will start to turn in the direction of cat wee).

To make six large fritters, you’ll need:

1 egg
200g flour
50g sugar
1 pint (450ml) milk
Six large elderflower heads
Flavourless oil to fry
1 tablespoon honey
Juice and zest of 1 lemon

Using a fork, beat the egg, flour, sugar and milk together with the lemon zest. Squeeze the lemon and put its juice aside. Let the batter rest for an hour.

In a large, non-stick frying pan, heat about ½ cm of oil over a high flame. Check the elderflowers for any arthropod inhabitants, but don’t wash them (you want to hold on to that pollen). Hold a head of elderflowers by the stalk and dip the flowers into the thick batter, then drop them, flower side first, into the hot oil. Fry the fritters in pairs so you don’t crowd the pan; they’ll brown better this way.

Turn the fritters after about two minutes – the flower side should be a golden, crisp brown. Fry until the stalk side is also crisp, then remove from the pan and drain on kitchen paper.

Remove to a serving plate and scatter the perfumed fritters with some fresh elderflowers, pulled from their stalks, and drizzle with the honey and lemon juice. Serve piping hot and crisp.

Sloe gin – finding your own sloes

Sloe gin
Sloe gin

Last year’s sloe gin has been steeping for ten months now – it’s time to decant. I found these pretty bottles at Lakeland (where they’re marketed especially for sloe gin), and filled four of them from last year’s Rumtopf.

I’ll be able to start collecting sloes, hopefully, some time next month. A quick recap – pick sloes after the first frost, prick them all over with a needle and for every pound of sloes you collect, pour over 8 oz of caster sugar and 1 ¾ pints of gin, then seal. You can leave the gin for as little as two months to steep, agitating the container occasionally, but the longer you leave it, the smoother the results will be.

Sloes
Sloes

I’ve had a few emails asking what a sloe bush looks like and where to find one, so I went down to the woods today (no big surprises) and took some pictures. The sloe is the fruit of the blackthorn bush, and you’ll often find them making up part of a hedgerow, or growing near the edge of a field. If you don’t live in the countryside, don’t despair – blackthorn can be found in scrubby land in towns, and is often planted in parks. Most of England’s public footpaths will have at least one sloe bush on its route, and a very pleasant afternoon can be spent foraging the hedgerows for a carrier-bag full.

Sloes, clustered on branch
Sloes, clustered on branch (this was a particularly heavily fruiting bush)

The blackthorn bush grows to between 3 and 13 feet tall. If you have sharp eyes, you can identify the bush in the spring by its froth of white flowers and remember where it is for later in the year. Although the fruits here look purple and delicious, they’re not ready yet (September 1) – you really need to pick them after a frost, which gives them time to ripen, softens their astringency and makes them easier to prick. If, as happened last year, the frosts just aren’t happening, pick in November and put them in the freezer.

Damsons
These ones are damsons, a wild plum. They'll make a great gin too (and they're edible raw, unlike sloes), but aren't the same fruit.

The sloes are nearly spherical and grow close to the branch. A raw sloe is a particularly disgusting beast – it’s sharp and astringent. It will make your tongue shrivel and your teeth squeak. These purple fruits are not sloes (compare with the picture above) – they’re wild plums, which ripen earlier, have longer stems, are soft to the touch and are sweetly delicious. If in doubt, have a nibble. Both fruits will have stones. If it’s delicious, it’s a plum. If it’s like sucking a fruity deodorant stick, it’s a sloe. The gin takes on all the fruit’s best characteristics, and none of the astringency.

Sloe gin is deliciously versatile. Try pepping up unremarkable Cava with a splash, drink it neat, use it in a martini or add some to mulled wine. I’ll be making another batch next month…until then, cheers!

Elderflower cordial

I love cooking at this time of year. Ingredients are quite literally falling out of the trees into my always-ready pan. Elderflower cordial, diluted with still or sparkling water, is the quintessential English summer drink. It’s also fantastic in many desserts with gooseberries; try adding some to the mixture next time you make gooseberry fool. It’s got savoury applications too, and is good in a chicken marinade.

I’ve recently discovered a very good Martini made with gin (Hendricks for preference), elderflower cordial, lemon zest and lots of ice. This recipe will make you plenty of cordial, so you’ll be able to experiment with it in cooking and cocktails all you like. It’s also joyously cheap, especially when compared with the cordial you buy in the supermarket.

Elder bushes are in flower in June, and you’ll see them all over the place, their flat, white flower heads on display. (You can also cook the flowers in fritters for a delicious dessert.) Pick, if at all possible, away from roads. Be careful that the flower heads you pick are fully open, but not starting to go brown; the plate-like head should not lose any flowers when shaken. Don’t take too many flowers from any one bush. You’ll want some in place to make elderberry and apple pie later in the year. Make the cordial as soon as you get home. The flowers lose their freshness quickly, even in the fridge, and start to smell like nothing so much as a horny tom cat. (Don’t let that put you off; the cordial itself tastes and smells ambrosial.)

To make around 2.5 litres of cordial, you’ll need:

2.5 kg sugar
35 elderflower heads (the plate-shaped mass of flowers)
2 litres water
3 lemons
100g citric acid

Put the sugar and water into a large pan, and slowly bring up to the boil, stirring now and then.

While the pan is coming up to temperature, remove the zest from the lemons and place it in a large bowl (big enough for all the ingredients) or a large pan. Slice each lemon into four and put the slices in the bowl with the zest and the elderflowers. Don’t wash the elderflowers, but do check there aren’t any little creatures living in among them.

When the sugar/water mixture is boiling, stir it to make sure all the sugar is dissolved, and take it off the heat. (It will be disgustingly hot. Be careful.) Use a ladle to pour the sugar syrup over the elderflowers and lemon. When all the syrup is in the bowl, stir in the citric acid and cover with a teatowel (or the lid if you are using a pan).

A note of warning – citric acid has, for some reason, been very hard to get hold of this year. Most chemists should carry it, and brewing supply shops and Indian supermarkets will also sell you packets. The chemists I spoke to this year said that the suppliers have had a problem, and this certainly seemed to be the case; I only found some in my fifth chemist. You need the citric acid as a preservative, so don’t try to make this without it. Tartaric acid (not cream of tartar) can be used instead. (**Update** When making my 2007 batch, I gave up on trolling around all the chemists in Cambridgeshire and ordered the citric acid online from Edict Chemicals, where it’s very inexpensive. Take a look – they’ve got some interesting food and household ingredients on offer.)

Leave the flowers to steep in the syrup overnight. Strain the resulting mixture through a square of muslin in a sieve the next day, and bottle with tight stoppers. This keeps well (especially in the fridge), but just to be sure, I like to freeze some for Christmas, when we all need to be reminded that there is a sun that’s not watery, and that the sky is sometimes blue. Drink deeply. It’s good stuff.

Chicken wrapped in wild garlic leaves and pancetta

Thanks to Kalyn for hosting Weekend Herb Blogging (and I’m sorry I’ve not taken part in a while; the winter has made herb blogging a real stretch of the imagination in the UK!)

Wild garlic isn’t the same plant as the garlic you buy in the supermarket. It belongs to the same family, but wild garlic (Allium Ursinum) has a tiny bulb with no separate cloves, soft leaves and a strong smell but a gentle flavour. Cultivated garlic (Allium Sativum) is a tougher-looking plant, with larger, much more pungent bulbs, and without the soft leaves, instead growing leaves a bit like a leek.

The leaves of wild garlic look a little like the leaves of lily of the valley; a little less glossy and rather softer, but similarly strap-like. In late spring and summer, their extremely pretty white, star-shaped flowers appear – they’re also edible, and are very good as a garnish or in salads. The abundant leaves are very strongly scented, so if you are walking in a wood where there is a patch, you’ll be able to find it with your nose before you spot it. Pick in winter and spring; the plant dies down after flowering. The bruising that happens when you pick the leaf makes the smell even stronger, so don’t leave the container you’ve put your leaves in in the back of the car- consign them to the boot. This smell (and the flavour) becomes softer and sweeter when the leaves are cooked. The leaves will keep raw for several days in the fridge.

I picked a bag of the leaves in Yorkshire, in my mother-in-law’s garden. Wild garlic spreads like crazy, especially in damp shade, and it’s considered a weed when found in gardens. I also dug two clumps and their accompanying soil up, and put them in pots in my own garden. I’m not going to plant them in the ground, because I have a feeling that if I follow my garlicky instincts, in a couple of years I may end up with an all-garlic garden, which isn’t a good look.

Try the leaves in a salad to taste them at their freshest. They’ll also cook beautifully in the same way as spinach (as in the side-dish I prepared to accompany this chicken – saute mushrooms in butter, and add the leaves towards the end, stirring until wilted, then add lemon juice, cayenne pepper and salt), but I think I’ve found the perfect application for them in this chicken and pancetta parcel. I’m very, very pleased with this recipe – if you can get your hands on any wild garlic, give it a try.

You’ll need (per person):

1 chicken breast fillet
5 slices pancetta
1 handful fresh wild garlic leaves
Pepper
1 knob butter

Lay the slices of pancetta out in a rectangle on a piece of greaseproof paper. The slices should overlap so there are no gaps. Lay the wild garlic leaves all over the top, then place the chicken breast on top of that. Grind pepper all over the chicken (you don’t need any salt; the pancetta will be salty enough on its own) and use the greaseproof paper to wrap the pancetta and garlic leaves around the chicken, as if you were rolling a Swiss roll. Use toothpicks to secure the ends of the pancetta.

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed, non-stick pan, and when it starts to bubble, saute the wrapped fillets for eight minutes each side. (Start by cooking the presentation side – the one without toothpicks – first.) Garnish with some wilted leaves and pour over the pan juices.

I served the chicken with roast new potatoes, the mushrooms and garlic leaves described above, and a bottle of Pouilly Fuisse. Delicious.

Sloe gin

**UPDATE** For pictures of the finished gin, pictures of a sloe bush, tips on finding a sloe bush and drinks recipes, click here.

This is, apparently, the hottest autumn on record in the UK. Things are definitely not behaving like they usually do outdoors; the leaves are staying on the trees, the apples and pears came ready early, and there are shoots in the garden which shouldn’t be there until next year. Most importantly for the hedgerow foragers among you, the sloes (the fruit of the blackthorn plant – see this post for pictures of the bush) were early, and there has been no frost.

This recipe is much more successful if you pick and use the sloes after they’ve been subject to a good hard frost. Since Mother Nature was not prepared to provide me with one, I turned to Mother Miele, and bunged a box of them in the freezer in September.

Raw sloes are bitter and astringent, and this drink needs a lot of sugar to balance them and result in a syrupy, deep pink liqueur. Gin is used as the traditional base, and I love the combination of the juniper and the plummy sloes, but you can use vodka or another clear spirit.

No cooking is involved. Each of the sloes is pricked all over once defrosted (you can embed some needles in a cork to speed this up) and steeped in sugar and gin – for every pound of sloes I use 8 oz of caster sugar and 1 3/4 pints of gin. The gin doesn’t have to be a particularly fancy one; I just used Waitrose’s own brand London Gin. For gin and tonic I usually use Hendrick’s, a far more complicated (and expensive) gin, whose aromatics include rosepetals and cucumber. Steeping sloes in gin was historically used as a way to disguise tainted gin, so it doesn’t make much sense to use your most expensive gin in this recipe.

I’m using a glass Rumtopf (a German pot for making liqueur fruits, usually made from porcelain) to steep the sloes. Although many recipes say you can stir the mixture regularly and then strain the berries out and make a start on drinking after two months, the gin is much more delicious if you can manage to restrain yourself and not stir it, and then leave it steeping for at least six months before you strain and bottle.

The rumtopf is not completely airtight, so I create a seal with some cling film. (You can use any large container you have for this; my parents use a jar which spends the other half of the year as a storage vessel for rice.) The sugar you can see here will gradually dissolve over the months ahead, and the bright, syrupy juices will leach out of the pricked sloes and combine with the sweetened gin. (For those of you who can’t wait six months, Gordon’s started selling sloe gin pre-bottled last year. It’s not as good as the home-made stuff, but it should keep you pretty happy until summer.)

There’s a quarter bottle of neat gin left over. Thankfully, I have prepositioned some tonic water and limes. I’m in for a pleasant evening contemplating my rumtopf.