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Nick de Cent's Latest Blog
Nick de Cent is a journalist who lives and works on a small-holding near Colyton in
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September 2011
Harvest time and a cornucopia of flavours
Don’t tell the chickens or they’ll stop laying! It’s that time of year again – autumn – and after a wet and unseasonably chilly August, I feel entitled to start thinking about roaring log fires and other ways of remaining warm and comfortable this winter. Here at Blackacre, we’ve been busy stocking up on supplies for the coming months – not least a monumental pile of logs in the temporary wood store that was once our car port. But more of that later....
Our Silkie chickens have been hard at it breeding all year and show no sign of stopping just yet. The latest chicks hatched right at the end of last month, and mother and babies are doing well. The other breeds are starting to reduce their laying as they go into moult now, but we’re still getting a good number of eggs. But I’m thinking it’s about time to incubate a clutch or two of eggs to hatch some chicks next month: that way, the adults will be ready to lay next spring.
Around now, the kitchen is particular busy as we rush to turn our produce into jams, chutneys and liqueurs ready for a cheery Christmas and a distant reminder of summer during the chilly months ahead. Definitely John Keats’ season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, autumn has seen us harvest a bumper crop of plums: all three of our trees fruited well this year, especially the Victoria, which had one branch actually break under the weight of its dark purple fruit.
Sometimes it’s a bit bewildering to know what to do with such a glut, but we’ve hopefully made something for every eventuality: plum vodka for warmth and cheer on dark nights, a tangy chutney (the recipe we used was courtesy of Delia) to go with all that cold turkey at Christmas, and batches of ginger-spiced stewed plums now frozen and waiting to be incorporated in crumbles and pies. The chutney has been particularly good for using up our produce because it calls for cooking apples as well as plums, while a spicier variety also makes use of the few remaining unripe tomatoes in the greenhouse.
As Keats wrote, autumn seeks ‘to bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees’ and our orchard is no exception. Here we have a selection of fruit, though mainly apples of numerous varieties – including the once ubiquitous cottage garden cider apple tree – together with several types of pear and their close cousin, the quince. We’ll probably just eat the pears fresh or have them in tarts and with cheese or cold meats, but the quince need to be cooked. The fruit, although hard, have a distinctive fragrant taste and often turn pink in the pan.
The Spanish make sweet jelly blocks called membrillo, which they eat with cheese, while we’re probably more familiar with pots of quince jelly here in the UK. I’m going to try my hand at the jelly but will also make jars of one of my favourite accompaniments to roast lamb – quince aioli. This is essentially a garlic mayonnaise which uses stewed quince instead of egg yolks: it’s quite delicious and a country recipe from Spain.
Regular readers of this blog will know that we like to pulp our apples here at Blackacre, and then freeze the delicious juice fresh rather than ferment it into cider. My track-record with cider has been mixed, to say the least, and there are so many good producers around here, anyway, that’s it’s not really worth the bother making it. But there’s nothing better than the taste of really fresh, unpasteurised apple juice on a winter’s day when the sight of fruit on the trees is just a distant memory. That said, if anybody’s got a reliable recipe for producing not-too-dry cider, I’d be happy to give it another go.
In the hedgerows, the blackberries are still going strong along with elderberries, but the sloes on the blackthorn bushes will have to wait until the first frosts for picking. The rose hedge in front of our house is packed with giant red hips but I’m not going to the lengths of making the vitamin C-rich syrup; instead I’m going to leave the fruit to the hungry birds, who will be grateful for the winter sustenance provided by the hips, along with the haws, holly berries and, lastly, the less-palatable fruit of the ivy.
It’s going to be a bumper harvest for acorns around here too, so the pigs will be happy. Unfortunately, I think the squirrels have eaten most of our cob nuts, though there are plenty in the hedges roundabout.
More promisingly for us humans, in the woods beyond Southleigh and up in our copse, the chestnut trees are dangling their spiky fruit. In Italy, chestnuts were a staple amongst the peasantry and ground into flour, as well as a hearty ingredient in numerous stews and puddings. In Britain, we tend to stick to roasting them by the fire but I fully intend to use some in a variant of the chestnut-based dessert Mont Blanc, although my pudding – learnt from my mum – adds the crunchiness of meringue to make it more like a pavlova – yum!
It’s in the woods and fields, of course, that we find some of nature’s most delicious bounty this month – fungi. Looking for mushrooms and toadstools is something of an art – and much is left to chance – and you do need to know what you’re doing when it comes to identification. My advice is to equip yourself with a good field guide and a wicker basket, and then get out there in the early mornings after some rain, but do not eat anything you are not 100% sure is safe. The flavours are varied and immense, and go perfectly with breakfast bacon or in hearty casseroles. One of my favourites is the giant puffball, which you can often find in orchards: if you come across a young one – they turn into a black sticky mess of spores when they’re older – try slicing it up and frying the pieces in butter for breakfast.
Winter Warmth
OK, back to our rapidly growing log mountain. Next week sees the installation of two log-burners, as we seek to avoid the clutches of the licensed bandits who sell heating oil these days. We’re hoping to get through the winter with very little use out of the central heating boiler, although we will obviously keep the Rayburn running in the kitchen.
The recent hike in the price of fuel has prompted a total rethink in terms of our energy use. Whereas once I was highly resistant to relying too much on electricity (Economy 7 heating was inflexible and notoriously costly if you used it at the wrong time of day) the advent of Solar PV panels has changed the game. If you’re producing your own electricity – which, hopefully, we will be by the end of next month – suddenly it makes sense to switch over as much as possible to that form of energy.
So, we’ll be exploring whether it would be more economic to install a new energy-efficient electric water heater in the kitchen. At the same time, electric blankets seem to make more sense than having the central heating constantly on in the bedrooms – the rising warmth from the wood-burners downstairs will take the worst of the chill off anyway – while we already have electric showers installed in the bathrooms.
Once installation of the solar panels is complete, we’ll be able to judge whether we’ve done the right thing. If not, I guess we always have the plum vodka to drown our sorrows. Cheers!
Words and Photos by Nick de Cent.
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