Cornflower

Time flies when you're having fun

 

    It occurred to me yesterday after an afternoon spent gardening in a bitter wind that I'd been so absorbed in what I was doing that I hadn't a clue how long I'd been at my task: thirty minutes? an hour? It was in fact two hours but it felt like far less, and I wondered what other activities are similarly 'timeless' - what do you do that seems to still your mind in that way and block out the world for a while?

    While you ponder, if you haven't already done so do take a moment to enter the draw for a copy of Laetitia Maklouf's Sweet Peas for Summer: How to Create a Garden in a Year (and read about everyone's dream gardens in the process). It's down to Laetitia that I was putting in the nemesia you see here yesterday - one of her April suggestions is "a puff of nemesia for your terrace", shallow pots of "fluffy, pastel clouds of candy floss", good for pollinators and with a lovely scent (mine are Wisley Vanilla). To be enjoyed to the full on warmer days.

Cold Cream, warm Honey and a Ladder

 

 

    Quodling apples with a sweet cream:

    "Pippins, Pearmains and Genets may be eaten rudely off the bough but try a Quodling thus and it will prove as sour as an unwilling bride. Yet bake such a Fruit slow and it will sweeten after a marvellous Fashion.

    Take the best Fruit from free or Paradise Stocks when the Day is bright and cold. If to keep, wrap them in Ferns and pack them in a Maund. If to eat as I direct, place them in an oven whose Sides your Hand may touch for an Instant. Leave the Quodling for a Night then slide a Peel beneath to lift it. Its Innards will be turned as soft and thick as Pea Soup. Prick it that the Steam may escape.

    Next take cold Cream, warm Honey and a Ladder. Climb the Ladder. Pour the Honey and Cream at a Fall into a Pot of Gascon Wine and let it froth, the higher the better. Whisk the sweetened Cream until it stands in melting Peaks.

    A baked Apple is no Kickshaw or any dainty Dish. Set this Quodling as best you may upon a Plate and pour on the Cream. Break the Two together so that the hot Temper of the Quodling meets the Cold."

    From The Book of John Saturnall - please do read all about it here.

Friday flowers - lily-of-the-valley

    I'm glad to see this Lily-of-the-valley surviving the competition from weeds in a corner of the garden; I'll cut a stem or two to bring inside.

    Woottens of Wenhaston have the plants on special offer just now, and it's from them I learned that "in pagan times it was considered the special flower of Ostara, the Norse goddess of the dawn," and "by the late seventeenth century, lily of the valley water was used to alleviate a wide range of ailments, 'it having an especial property to help weak memories, raise Apopletick persons, cheer the heart, and ease the pain of gout' ".

    I don't think I've ever seen it growing outside gardens, but in Wild Flowers Sarah Raven says it is "rare, but abundant locally across Wales, England and Scotland. Absent from Ireland". She describes it thus: " the tiny, almost bashful Lily-of-the-valley lives in shady woodland and is a miracle to come upon. Delicate, graceful and spare, like the bridesmaid to a virgin queen, its restrained display is worth crossing the country to see. No more than six or seven white flower bells appear fully out at one time on every dropping stalk, luminous against the flat, green background of its own matt foliage. Its vanilla honey scent is by far the sweetest of any British native - a pure gift."

Cookbook of the week - Tender Vol. I

    We're cooking with Nigel Slater again, but this week from his whopping Tender: Volume I, A cook and his vegetable patch. What you see here is a truly excellent cake, a real revelation: Beetroot Seed Cake. Now please, beetroot-haters, don't rush off; stay and hear more and perhaps I shall convince you to try it.

    "This tastes no more of beetroot than a carrot cake tastes of carrots, yet it has a similar warm earthiness to it. It is less sugary than most cakes and the scented icing I drizzle over it is purely optional," says Nigel.

    Some ingredients: cinnamon, sultanas, mixed seeds (I'd toast them first, next time), that marvellous grated beetroot ... it's quite scrumptious. As to the icing, Nigel suggests making it with lemon juice or orange flower water but I used rose water as that's what I had and I'd do so again.

    There were a lot of sceptical comments from my family as I was making this cake, but they had to eat their words in the end as they find they love it, and even the extremely anti-beetroot Mr. C. wants more of it, so if you have the book, do try the recipe.

Would you like Sweet Peas for Summer?

 

    Gardening books cover the spectrum from the highly specialist and technical at one end to the wholly aspirational at the other, but here's one which is inspirational as well as practical, which - if you're anything like me - will have you rushing out to start sowing, planting and making plans before you've gone beyond the first few pages.

    Laetitia Maklouf's Sweet Peas for Summer: How to Create a Garden in a Year is an account of how Laetitia created her own garden from scratch, moving into her London home in February and promising herself that she'd turn the fairly unremarkable patch - lawn and a few fruit trees - into a flower-filled haven by that summer. She did just that, and outlines her ten easy steps in this beautiful book, so if you're inclined to make changes to your own plot, whether full-scale ones or smaller improvements here and there, why not let Laetitia guide you through each stage.

 

    She puts the emphasis on working with what you have and tackling a few straightforward tasks, outlined season by season and month by month, to make a new garden or improve your existing one so that you can enjoy it now as well as in the future.

     This would be a great book for a new gardener, but also for anyone looking for a bit of impetus to make achievable changes. Laetitia tells you how to do things but also gets you excited about doing them, from the planning - she suggests you make a "lust list" of plants you love, but she also includes planting plans designed around personality and mood - to cultivating your chosen flowers and vegetables and using what you grow in imaginative ways.

    I've found her enthusiasm infectious and just the thing to get me outside and busy before Spring slips away.

    Laetitia's publishers, Bloomsbury, have very kindly offered a signed copy of the book to a Cornflower reader, so let's have a draw. To enter, please leave a comment on this post telling us something about your dream garden, i.e. what you'd have if you had no constraints. Favourite flowers? A walled garden with glasshouses? A rill? An arboretum? A place of Versailles-like formality or a wild, romantic, sweetly-scented hideaway? You're welcome to enter no matter where in the world you live, so please do have a go, and I'll draw a winner in a few days' time.

                                                ~~~~~~

    Meanwhile, over on Cornflower Books I'm giving away a great novel - please pop over there and put your name in the hat for that book, too).

Kathleen Ferrier

 

    Mr. Cornflower writes:-

 

    This weekend there are many tributes to the singer Kathleen Ferrier, who was born on this day one hundred years ago, and who died tragically early (in October 1953). This is mine.

    The shock and grief at her loss were both a reflection of her enormous popularity, and an echo of the  emotional response her voice brings forth to this day. From the very first note she is utterly distinctive; a warm, rich contralto, clearly lower than the average female singing voice - she occasionally sang tenor parts in mixed choirs - and very much part of a lusher, richer style which even in her own time was being superseded by a more austere approach. Although her career lasted barely ten years, she recorded a great deal, and some of her songs - the showstopper arias from the Messiah, folk classics like Blow the Wind Southerly - are part of the 'national soundtrack'. But if you are coming to Ferrier for the first time, let me suggest a less famous starting point: the aria Come to me soothing sleep from a now forgotten Handel opera, Ottone.

    She showed great courage in her final years, raising that lovely voice above the cancer which eventually killed her until one day, her bones weakened by the disease, her leg broke when singing the role of Orfeo and she had to be carried off the stage. I also think of her in the post war years, walking to rehearsals and performances through the bomb damaged cities of Britain, singing of forgiveness and redemption in the St Matthew Passion, or entrancing audiences with German songs at the Edinburgh Festival. She brought hope, happiness and consolation to millions; there can be no finer memorial.

Books and cakes - 50

    For all the detail John Fowles goes into in The French Lieutenant's Woman, he gives us little about food. Early on, before his complicated love life has taken away his appetite, Charles requests a double dose of muffins for his breakfast, but as we had those with Lord Peter Wimsey last month it wouldn't do to repeat them today. Instead I had to look to the book's setting for inspiration for the cake, and as that is mainly Dorset, Dorset apple cake it is.

    This is perhaps too rustic a food to feature at Mrs. Poulteney's table, particularly when she's entertaining Lady Cotton, her "rival for social supremacy" - those gatherings were "in essence, if not in appearance, a thunderous clash of two brontosauri; with black velvet taking the place of iron cartilage, and quotations from the Bible the angry raging teeth; but no less dour and relentless a battle"! Perhaps the cake might appear in the more easygoing Aunt Tranter's house, with Mary feeding a piece to Sam during a snatched moment together.

    There are numerous recipes around (this one and this, for example), but I thought of Dorset's River Cottage, reached for my copy of River Cottage Every Day and made the Apple and Almond Pudding Cake which you see above.

    Back to the book - the 50th. the Cornflower Book Group has read - its post is here.

Cookbook of the week - The Home Cookbook

    I've been using Monty and Sarah Don's The Home Cookbook this week (you may remember a few posts from it around the time of this one), and it's given us three suppers to enjoy: Pasta with Chard and Mushrooms, Potatoes with Bacon, Onion and Sage, and what you see above, the amazing Roast Butternut Squash Salad with Toasted Seeds.

    Cut the squash into chunks and roast with olive oil until soft and slightly charred round the edges, then serve with rocket, cubes of feta cheese, toasted sunflower, pumpkin, poppy and sesame seeds (or whatever the cupboard will yield), and a balsamic vinegar dressing. This got rave reviews from my tasters!

Cover stories

 

    The subject of jacket design crops up on Cornflower Books from time to time, and I even have a recently created Pinterest board devoted to it to which I add any particularly striking covers as I come across them. If you're interested in the occasional art-related posts which appear on this site, you may like to see what's over the way as there are some very talented artists and illustrators making beautiful books.

    Today's post is a case in point with an appropriately 1950s feel to the lovely jacket for an equally charming book. Do have a look.

Simply red

    Hugh F-W's roasted tomato sauce (red onion and red pepper added to the basic recipe) about to go into the oven. I've said it before, but we make it pretty well every week, keeping pots of it in the fridge to go with pasta, gnocchi, risotto, etc. It involves no effort other than minimal chopping and mouli-ing when it's done, and it cooks away happily while you get on with other things.

In a fankle*

    William Holman Hunt's Lady of Shalott at her loom is to be one of the highlights of the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Britain - Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde will be on from 12th. September to 13th. January.

    Going off at a slight tangent, I can recommend Diana Holman-Hunt's book My Grandmothers and I which the excellent Sightly Foxed have recently re-issued.

 

*tangle or muddle.

Shakespeare's Restless World

    For everyone who enjoyed Neil MacGregor's radio series A History of the World in 100 Objects (or the accompanying book), just in case you missed it his new series began on Radio 4 yesterday. Shakespeare's Restless World looks at 20 objects from Shakespeare's time to shed light on the preoccupations and pleasures of his audiences. The first episode, on Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation medal (above), can be heard here, and as before, this is fascinating stuff.

Start the week with sunshine

    There have been so many food-related posts here lately that it must look as though I never set foot outside the kitchen, and while that's not so, having the cookbook of the week project has certainly helped enormously with putting greater variety into everyday meals, while baking is never off the agenda.

    More from Miranda Gore Browne's lovely book Biscuit, and today's offering - another from the "almost healthy biscuits" chapter - is Lemon and Poppy Seed Polenta Biscuits: a few bites of crunchy, zesty deliciousness sandwiched with a lemony cream cheese filling, which Miranda rightly says taste "sunny"!

    The recipe makes many more than are shown here (15 or so in all), but I had impatient tasters waiting so I didn't stop to fill the whole lot before taking the pictures.

    Miranda's style comes across so well in the book, and I think she and her recipes would lure even the most reluctant baker into the kitchen. With over a hundred treats to choose from there is temptation on every page, but who could resist such things as Coat-pocket Biscuits to give you a 'pocketful of quiet' during hushed occasions such as weddings or concerts, Adventure Biscuits (will I have an adventure if I eat one, I wonder), Hot Chocolate Dunkers, Fudgy Nut Conversation Stoppers, and Chocolate and Stem Ginger Warmers, "a hot water bottle of a biscuit".

    "There is no limit to the world of biscuit-making," Miranda says, and she proves that in fine fashion here.

Cookbook of the week - no. 15, part 2

    Not something to do every day, but now and again, making fresh pasta is worth the time and effort. Mr. C. does it here, using Mary Contini's recipe from Dear Francesca, serving it with her tomato and ricotta sugo.

Friday flowers - feathered and flamed

    This tulip is Ivory Floradale, described by Sarah Raven (from whom I bought the bulbs) as like "an ostrich egg on a stem" - she's right. Mine are more yellow than ivory, but still very handsome with that splash of red feathering or flaming as a single petal accent.