dovegreyreader scribbles

Let's Preserve It ~ Beryl Wood - Apple and Mint Chutney

A request for the Apple & Mint Chutney recipe, and though I have never tried it, I will be very soon. 

Having used my rather formal WI recipe book for years (no jars with names on, fill to exact distance from the rim etc) I found Let's Preserve It by Beryl Wood a few years ago and it rekindled my love of the preserving pan and this season especially, but really the book is an all-year-round affair. I love it for the way Beryl reckons if it grows you can preserve it. First published in 1970 (Nigella swears by it) apparently as a 'manifesto for safeguarding our grandmothers' artisan ways'.

In her 2011 introduction to this reprinted edition Rose Prince suggests...

'Her book was a nudge that reminded me not to walk past a hedgerow without collecting a few rosehips or blackberries during their season, nor miss a glut of cheaply abundant fruit and vegetables. She reminds us that making a few pots of pickles, jam, jelly or fruit curd upholds a great and endangered tradition.'

I'm not sure I remembered the detail of this introduction. This being me I would have waded straight into the recipes, but I'm now fascinated to discover that Beryl Wood was secretary to the progressive obstetrician Dr Grantly Dick-Read. When he and his family returned to the UK from South Africa Beryl came with them continuing to pursue what Rose Prince describes as an 'off-beat career',  with stints at pest control and running an all-women car hire firm.

The book's 579 recipes are arranged alphabetically by ingredient so finding yourself with ...oh let's say a glut of lemons, and with no other thought than to make gallons of lemonade, Beryl will have you making chutney, curd, jelly, marmalade. pickle and then a whole raft of Lemon & Other Things. 

I've used my copy as a bit of a diary too and written in additional ingredients, or variations on quantities, as well as the date I made whatever it was. It would seem on 11th September (our wedding anniversary?) 2015 I made apricot jam. It was the year the Tinker (my dad) had died so we probably didn't feel much like painting the town, but I do know that I planted the kernels and now have three little apricot trees to show for that day.

So for those who asked here it is.

Apple and Mint Chutney.

Chop and chuck in the pan, boil until it thickens and then pot. Beryl's chutney tips include using the best vinegar, tie whole spices in a muslin bag, don't prepare onions until ready to use, don't over-cook, and chutneys always better for keeping...at least a month if you can manage to keep your hands off it, preferably a year. Cover in the same way as jams and enjoy it all.

3 1/2 lb apples

1 dsp (dessert spoon) chopped mint for each lb of apples

1lb onions

1lb each raisins, currants and sultanas

3/4lb brown sugar

2oz ground ginger

1oz salt (this is quite a lot, I sometimes use a bit less in Beryl's recipes. Clearly she wasn't worried about her kidneys or high blood pressure )

1oz mustard seed (tied in muslin bag)

1/4 oz cayenne pepper

1/4 oz mixed spice

3 & 1/2 pints malt vinegar

Happy preserving.

 

Preservation...

I hope this Thursday finds you well and not too windswept if you are here in the U.K. We’ve had to swaddle the greenhouse as usual in order to stop it heading for Wales.

But lo, it’s that time of year again. 

Time for the Transformation Challenge which this week is all about turning apples and tomatoes into chutney. 

I perused the book, wrote the shopping list and headed out on a mission for gallons of vinegar, brown sugar and all those spices I thought I had until I realised I’d thrown them all out in 2019 because most of them were dated 2015 (or even earlier)...

I doubt I'm the only one who's had a rampage through the food cupboards this last few months and decided that perhaps items from 2009 could go as well. To my shame it was the medicine cabinet that offered up the most shamefully out-of-date specimens.

How can that be when it seems like only yesterday I bought them.

In the end finding mace and mustard seed and pickling spice wasn’t quite so easy as I’d thought and I was grateful to my chauffeur who pulled up outside three different shops before my list was fulfilled.

Wednesday dawned nice and sunny and we were ready for the off. The Kayaker made the mistake of calling in just as the mass chopping was about to start, so he drew the short straw and was allocated the onions, while Bookhound did the tomatoes and I just gathered everything else together. 

Chutney is so easy isn’t it. 

Chop it all up, chuck everything in the pan and simmer until it’s thick enough to pot,

And so the shelf is now filling up with Green Tomato, Red Tomato and I have Apple and Mint in my sights just because it sounds delicious. 

I do of course live with a champion. Bookhound's Apple Chutney won first prize at the Village Show a few years ago, except it was never to be repeated because he couldn't remember what he'd put in it.

But all this has barely made a dent in the apple crop so next it will be blanching and freezing as many as I can before I surrender; except I’m always really grateful to my Late Summer Self when my January Self finds all this fruit for pies. 

Then it will be blackberries. 

Ours are nowhere near ready yet and we’re getting precariously close to September 1st when the farmers are allowed to cut the hedgerows again (they have to be left alone from March 1st for the nesting birds). I’m sure I’ll find some secret picking places and then it will be all systems go on the spiced bramble jelly and some jam.

Some years I’m a bit lightweight on the preserving front, but this year, even without the Village Show to spur me on, it suddenly seems really essential to have some comfort stores laid up ready for winter. The light is definitely  changing, the sun is a little lower in the sky, and we seem to lose another ten minutes of light every evening now. We always go out for a barn owl walk as dusk falls and that has shifted from 9.30pm to 8.30pm very quickly. 

And on the subject of barn owls we really have no idea what may have happened this year.

We had a nesting pair, and all seemed on course for owlets, Mrs Ravilious seemed to be ‘sitting’, Mr Ravilious was back and forth, but sadly we heard no owlet noises. We wonder whether the very hot weather in April and May might have done for them.  But the good news is there have been owlets very nearby, maybe our female decamped, so the colony lives on and thrives. At the moment we have one owl roosting in the box, a male we think, who pops out every evening at dusk and goes off hunting, and we are seeing several around the fields as we walk. Food has been plentiful and the fields have been nicely quiet, making conditions ideal, so it’s all a mystery yet to be solved. 

And another mystery to be solved, I’d better tell you about Magnus...

The naughty boy has been AWOL for five weeks now and I have to admit we are beginning to wonder what he’s up to. His longest previous was three weeks a few years ago and, though we’ve put the word around, no one has seen as much as a whisker. I’m hoping he’s doing a Six Dinner Sid and has found a nice supply of food and maybe a new temporary friend or two....but all the same we’re feeling a bit (make that very) sad without him.

We might have to start thinking about kittens because we have never been cats-less in forty years...which will of course be the cue for him to stroll in the door. 

Meanwhile has the preservation descended on you...

Along with this 'thinking ahead to winter' rather than be ambushed by it...

I'm not wishing summer away because we usually have fine weather through September and into October, but I do feel the need to be prepared perhaps more than usual...

I'd love to know if there is anything special that you do in readiness...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family Memoirs

Checking in through the August sabbatical from bookish posts to bring you...well a sort of bookish post.

But firstly, how has your week been...

I hope, wherever you are in the world, you are finding some peace and calm in amongst all the ongoing noise.

I am putting my August to good use with plenty of reading (lots of bookish thoughts to come) and doing  useful things like Sorting Out the CDs. I mean, however did we accumulate so many, and what to do with them since I got with the times and upgraded myself to  iTunes, MP3 downloads and a blue tooth speaker. I spent a happy day going through them all and importing some forgotten gems onto my computer, before putting them all back where I'd found them, so I'm no further forward.

I'm back in the land of Kate Rusby having rediscovered her lurking in the CD repository. There was Little Lights, Sleepless and Awkward Annie, Underneath the Stars and Hourglass  and I've added the new album out this week. Hand Me Down is a selection of cover versions recorded during lock-down and you can hear every last emotion of  these times in her voice. Kate and her family have been a shining light through lock-down with their cheery weekly Singy Songy  sessions on Facebook. Of course ordering the MP3  means I don't have the CD notes explaining the choice of songs, but no matter. As James Taylor also emerged from the CD mountain there I was, back in the sixth form common room circa 1970, listening to Carolina On My Mind as Kate Rusby sang her equally emotional and exquisite version. It's the ultimate homesickness song...

In my mind I'm gone to Carolina
Can't you see the sunshine?
Can't you just feel the moonshine?
And ain't it just like a friend of mine to hit me from behind?
Yes I'm gone to Carolina in my mind

...that yearning to be back somewhere special (not the sixth form common room I hasten to add) and who knew that Paul McCartney and George Harrison had contributed to the original version (thank you wikipaedia).

And then there's the chez dovegrey LP cupboard...

No turntable for years, but who knows whether there's a vinyl in there worth a small fortune. We regularly open the dresser cupboard thinking we could use the space for something else, look at them, feel overwhelmed by the task and close the door again.

No such problem with books, and having recently read House of Glass - the story and secrets of a twentieth century Jewish family by Hadley Freeman (I will be commending it to the house with bells on, thoughts coming next month) it set me off on a journey around my shelves again in search of more family memoirs that I have really enjoyed.

In fact I was so enthused I wrote this post.

And I spent ages doing all the links.

Then as I was doing a bit of housekeeping on the scribbles last night, and updating the sidebars, I realised, to my embarrassment that I'd already written about family memoirs at the end of April.

Blame the Strange Times, and if I'd forgotten I'm hoping you may have too, my apologies for repetition, but this time I looked harder and I've found double the number of books... 

I had a bit of difficulty deciding when a family memoir became autobiography but decided, in the end, that it needed to be written by a member of the family, and predominantly had to be much more about others than themselves. I want delving and skeletons dragged out of cupboards, I want revelations and surprises.

I came up with quite a good haul in the end and then decided to sit them on their own Shelf of Great Importance so here they are, and this should stop me writing about the same books for a third time.

The Three of Us ~ Julia Blackburn

Running for the Hills ~ Horatio Clare 

On Chapel Sands ~ Laura Cummings

The Hare With Amber Eyes ~ Edmund de Waal

Elisabeth’s Lists ~ Lullah Ellender

The Music Room ~ William Fiennes

House of Glass ~ Hadley Freeman 

A House Unlocked ~ Penelope Lively

Hancox ~ Charlotte Moore

Climbing Days ~ Dan Richards

The Baroness ~ Hannah Rothschild

The Great Western Beach ~ Emma Smith

The Photographer at Sixteen ~ George Szirtes

The Pulse Glass ~ Gillian Tindall

Forty Autumns ~ Nina Willner

Links are to scribbles various down the years, and how lucky was I to interview some of these authors in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot Festival

...Edmund de Waal (below), William Fiennes (above), Hannah Rothschild. It seems like several lifetimes ago that I had the nerve to ask ceramicist and potter supreme Edmund de Waal to assess my school pottery dish...

And we presented Edmund with a knitted hare with amber eyes, the very first of many knitsuke given to authors various as a souvenir of their visit to the tent.

But there must be so many more family memoirs (even more than you mentioned last time) and I love reading them so all your suggestions (again) very welcome (even more).

Meanwhile, am I the only one with a slight aversion to autobiography...

And am I right about my distinction between autobiography and memoir...

And has any music in particular cheered you during this last few months...

And now I think about it, what has Kate Rusby done with Hand Me Down but create a sort of musical memoir of her life...

Orchids

I thought I'd share something that has kept me and my book room very cheery these last few months, though I suspect Moth Orchids might be a bit of a Marmite thing.

Loved or loathed.

Orchids always seemed so exotic back in the day didn't they. A costly investment requiring heated greenhouses and much cossetting, but this version, the Phalaenopsis, now perhaps verging on the ubiquitous, like the Swiss Cheese Plants and the Rubber Plants of the 1970s.

Did anyone else have a prize specimen of Monstera deliciosa or Ficus elastica...

And I bet I wasn't the only one to polish the leaves with Baby Bio Leafshine...

And what were our homes graced with in the 1960s...

Tradescantia...

The Spider Plant in the hanging macrame basket perhaps...

Moth Orchids now easily bought in the supermarket, but I’d never really bothered, having quickly killed one that I was given as leaving present from work, until a few years ago a friend sent me one for my birthday. 

‘Just ignore it’’ she said,  ‘water it on a sort of when you remember basis,’ and that’s exactly what I did. It would go weeks without attention but the thing flowered deep purple blooms solidly for three years. As one lot faded the next lot were ready in the wings and suddenly I accumulated a few more. Easy to add one to the trolley in Tesco's. They’d flower for months and months and then I’d move them into the Orchid Rest Home (the laundry room) while they regrouped. Some would take a couple of years to flower again but by adding new ones in between I always seemed to have at least one in flower.

Then lockdown happened and to my dismay not a single one even in bud.

Cue Bookhound to the rescue, and home from shopping in those really early days with three all sold past their sell-by-date at a bargain £2 each, because everyone was fighting over toilet rolls and had forgotten about the orchids. I arranged them on the windowsill and there they have sat for the last five months, throwing out more and more, and even more flowers, and showing no sign of fading.

Thinking these must surely be on the wane any day soon, and now having something of an addiction, I added another on to the trolley last week because I couldn't resist the colour and the patterning on the petals...

I re-potted a few older ones a while back but I know plenty of people usually just leave them be.

So is it just me and orchids, or you also susceptible to planting an occasional one in the trolley with the weekly shop...

All tips gratefully received...

What about feeding them...

I do when I remember, but is there an optimum time in the growing/flowering cycle...

And if not orchids do you have another pot plant favourite...

 

 

Do Drop in...

Nipping in from the staycation deckchair, and the August sabbatical from longer bookish posts, with a post each Thursday-ish to make sure you are all alright, and this week to share my remedy if anyone is having a bout of the glums.

I had a mild episode on Tuesday which I think might be about occasionally realising I can’t just hop on a plane to New Zealand and see Offspringette, all compounded by the fact that it’s her birthday today, but it’s not just me. These days you very quickly realise it’s the same for everyone and there’s an odd sort of comfort in that. Anyway my bout of glum was swiftly rectified by an airlift into Waterstones to breath in some books. There was nothing I wanted but it was lovely to browse (again) and my remedy for anyone feeling a little marooned and holiday-less is of course a good book...

The Caravaners by Elizabeth Von Arnim, first published in 1909, and which I had bought as a special offer from Handheld Press.  

I’m about a hundred pages in and delighted not only by the story and the writing, but by one of those serendipitous moments when you discover that the date on which you are reading is the exact date something happens in the book. It is August 2nd when the German Baron and his wife set off on what is proving to be an ill-fated but hilarious holiday, travelling by horse-drawn caravan around England, and so I’m feeling like a tag-along and I really can’t stop laughing.

He’s such a pompous snob, and his wife, mediated through his eyes is, to his amazement, having a wonderful time and everything else is an unmitigated disaster. 

I skimmed the introduction in the Handheld Press edition and glimpsed  ‘feminism’ ‘extreme political right and ‘rhetoric of xenophobia’ and decided that, for now, this might be a book that I want to read for pure pleasure, not to argue for any latter-day relevance (unlike Rose Macaulay whose 1920’s writing is screaming 2020 at me) or worry as I read. All in good time to ponder all that, but for now I want to relax and enjoy. And thence to my shelves where I knew I had collected quite a few vintage books by Elizabeth von Arnim some years ago. The haul was way better than I remembered. 

And when I do eventually write about The Caravaners here I must remember to tell you about the 1974 student nurse holiday on board a horse-drawn caravan around County Mayo in Ireland...what on earth possessed us. It might have been fractionally worse than the student nurse holiday in Yugoslavia the previous year, when the very promising group of four handsome young men on the £48 Laker Airways package holiday flight, and travelling to the same hotel, turned out to be trainee Catholic priests...but that’s another story.

If you’ve read any of the Elizabeth Von Arnim books in my stash which do you recommend. They are all beautiful well-thumbed, probably by countless women in the past, and the typeface and font are readable so I could definitely try a few more. 

And if you are stay-cationing how’s it going...

Or have you travelled further afield...