You will find a discount on the new Unfitted Kitchen furniture, a recipe from Prue Leith, 2025 dates for South Downs food festival, an exhibition recommendation and a medieval recipe from English Food by Diane Purkiss...
The Eyes Have It
Eye contact is everything. It makes cooking sociable and enjoyable. In our new Unfitted Kitchen collection, just launched, the island and the peninsula are both configured to guarantee that you are never face to face with a wall while putting together your meals.
THE UNFITTED KITCHEN COLLECTION IS A CELEBRATION OF BRITISH AND EUROPEAN DESIGN AND CRAFTING
The crafting of all the furniture pieces is shared between Lithuania, Somerset and Stockport. Jonas Mongirdas is a young furniture maker based with his team in Kaunas, in the heart of Lithuania. He sources beautiful olive ash from Ukraine, among other fine timbers. Paul Longpre brings his history of making our one-off kitchen furniture in his Bruton workshops to this new range, and Steve McNulty is an enthusiastic young craftsman in the North of England. Add to this, the TPB hobs are from Barcelona, the Røroshetta extractors Norwegian, the fridge in the Frigidarium is German (Liebherr), and the Quooker boiling water taps are made in Holland. It comes together in a harmonious cosmopolitan whole that says everything about the spirit of cooperation and sets the scene for customers’ own personalities and ideas.
Prue Leith has very kindly written a recipe especially for my readers. It is based on the insight that traditional Christmas pudding can sometimes be a hard sell for some in the family.
Prue says: ‘Most children hate Christmas pudding so here’s one they’ll love. You don’t have to measure anything exactly, just flavour the ice cream with the second ingredient to your liking, usually three parts ice cream, one part either Christmas pudding, mincemeat or mince pies. I usually use last year’s leftover Christmas pud’ which has lurked in the freezer for a year!
* 1 litre box soft-scoop vanilla ice cream
* About 250g leftover Xmas pudding or mince pies, or 4 large tablespoons mincemeat from a jar.
* Sprig of holly
* 2 tablespoons brandy (optional)
Tip the ice cream into a big bowl, and, using a tablespoon, work in crumbled up pudding or mince pies, or mincemeat from a jar. Spoon the mix into a pudding bowl and press down to eliminate air holes. Freeze.
To turn the pudding out, turn it over on a serving dish and drape a cloth wrung out in super-hot water over it. Then give it a shake to dislodge it. If it doesn’t come out, push a palette knife down the sides to loosen it.
Put it back in the freezer until serving. Then stick a sprig of holly in the top, take it to the table and flame with the brandy. (The best way to do this is to heat the brandy to lukewarm in a small saucepan – you’ll lose the alcohol if you overheat it and then it won’t light – then take pud’ and saucepan to the table, light the brandy in the saucepan and pour it, flaming, over the ice cream.
chipolatas, herb and chestnut stuffing, or a beef or venison Wellington’ - but all are disappearing fast.
Lee the butcher has a superb array of Ribs of Beef, for a spectacular show at Christmas or New Year's Eve, and Stansted’s wild venison is available as haunch roasting joints, steaks or for stews. Just let them know how you would like it and they'll prepare it fresh for you.
In the cheese counter the shop is getting into the Christmas mood with Raclette and Truffled Baron now available, with truckles of Stilton and aged cheddar, and a vast array of locally made favourites like Isle of Wight Blue and Tunworth.
Choose from a local cheeseboard or a Christmas classic, with over 75 varieties of cheese to tempt you.
Phone the shop on 02392 413576 Postcode PO9 6DU
Slips of Yew Exhibition
If you buy an Oven and China Cabinet from the new Unfitted Kitchen collection, your kitchen will be home to a piece of original artwork by Felicitas Aga in a frieze along the top of the cabinet. There is currently a wonderful opportunity for anyone in the South East of England to see a major exhibition of Felicitas’s paintings. Slips of Yew, presented by Greg Rook of Blackbird Rook, is on from 5 December to 15 January 2025 at the TCHC Viewing Room gallery in Alton. Born in Sweden, Felicitas Aga grew up in Norway, Appalachia, and a medieval town in Germany, always surrounded by mountains and forest. These landscapes form a vital part of her visual language, while her (aesthetic) interest in Catholicism infuses her work with a sense of ceremony and layered symbolism. The use of stencils is a defining characteristic. Derived from large charcoal drawings, these stencils bring structure to her otherwise fluid process. Colour is a narrative force, Felicitas’s palette often evoking landscapes both real and imagined. The layered surfaces of her work mirror the layered process of thought, where ideas, memories, and images intersect to create something both deeply felt and universally resonant. .
What my new friend Diane Purkiss, author of English Food (William Collins, 2022), doesn’t know about medieval food is not worth knowing. I have from her a Christmas recipe to share with those among you who would like to try something really new – or extremely old – and interesting, but good luck persuading your children to eat it. This is Frumente, which Diane says ‘is very far from easy or straightforward, but is the ancestor of virtually all puddings’.
Instructions here are in Middle English followed by a translation:
Tak clene whete and braye yt wel in a morter tyl þe holes gon of; and seþe it til it breste in water. Nym it vp & lat it cole. Tak good broþ & swete mylk of kyn or of almand & tempere it þerwith. Nym Ʒelkes of eyren rawe & saffroun & cast þerto; salt it; lat it nauƷt boyle after þe eyren ben cast þerinne. Messe it forth with venesoun or with fat motoun fresch.
(Take clean wheat and smash it well in a mortar until the hulls are gone, and boil it in water until it bursts. Take it up and let it cool. Take good broth and sweet cow or almond milk, and mix it therewith. Take yolks of eggs and saffron and cast thereto, and salt it. Do not let it boil after the eggs be cast therein. Serve it forth with venison or fat, fresh mutton.)
Diane told me she made this once when starting out as a food historian. She explained that it takes eight hours for this stovetop pudding to ‘reach a tipping point of soft gelling, in which the wheat kernels melt into each other and the milk. About 30 seconds after that it will start to burn. Eight hours. Then 30 seconds. You can’t leave it to simmer; you have to keep stirring it like porridge’.
Attempts to replicate it use something like bulgur wheat miss the point, which is the ‘miraculous softening of the wheat kernels into a delicious jelly’. ‘Theologically’, Diane says, ‘the point is the link to the wheat in the field, long gone, and by Christmas much missed. This tiny remnant of the sustaining luxury crop is a promise to the household that next year there will be more, because we are spending the last of it at Christmas. It represents the sweetness of the field, and the transformation of the humble as the incarnation represents the transformation of humanity’.
Well, I made it as faithfully as I could. The result you can see. It tastes very mild, neither salty nor sweet, and has not exactly been polished off by my family. The closest familiar taste and texture might be bread sauce if it’s eaten as an accompaniment to meat, but that hardly captures the strange delicate essence of my saffron-infused Frumente. I used millet rather than wheat, which some recipes approve, but the gelling effect was sadly illusive.
