Chewing it over

Listing page content here

I spent many of my school holidays with a kind great-aunt, a deeply religious maiden, most of whose friends were nuns. Beside my bed, as well as Lives of the Saints there was always her favourite book, Jottings from a Gentlewoman’s Garden. Not ideal reading for a nine-year-old, but how glad I am now that I did occasionally dip into it before getting down to reading Bunty under the bedclothes. Otherwise I would not have appreciated the gentle pre-war style that Simon Courtauld seeks to reproduce in Food for Thought: A Culinary Tour of the English Garden. In this collection of his columns from The Spectator Courtauld chooses three vegetables or fruits for each month of the year, supplies some historical anecdotes and some cooking suggestions as well as clever tips for the kitchen gardener: keep whitefly from a pot of basil by putting a clove of garlic in the pot and plant apple mint among raspberry canes to keep raspberry beetle away. His tip about keeping walnuts ‘wet’ by covering them with a mash of crab apples was particularly welcome until I wondered, would ordinary apples do as well? How long does it work for? Do you keep it chilled? Does the crab apple mixture go bad? And there is the rub — the book is a bit short on specifics. Courtauld’s ‘recipe’ for summer pudding, for example, makes no mention of the proportions of fruit, or that the bread should be a day old and also specifies that the pudding bowl be ‘greased’ — I wonder what sort of grease would taste good with cold wet bread, and whether any grease would help it unmould. This book will strike a chord with readers who dislike aspects of modern life, from menuspeak — Courtauld loathes the words ‘coulis’ and ‘floret’ — to slimming recipes — most of his suggestions use cream.