Impressions of another

It is not often that I receive a written review of something I've cooked; the closest is usually in the form of a bread-and-butter letter. But a few years ago, family friends had supper and stayed over with me; and one of them was an Australian priest who wrote a diary for his parish magazine. The egocentric in me was delighted. I quote:

"The meal was good. With the drinks were little pieces of toast spread with a pungent, dark coloured, but tasty paste, there followed a cold orange soup and then a good salad with an eclectic collection of interesting food from a platter, including pickled herring in cream, prosciutto, ham, and more, all excellent. Ice cream and strawberries for dessert."

The "pungent, dark coloured, but tasty paste" might have been tapenade, I suppose. The cold orange soup was certainly Gazpacho (not, I must confess, homemade). I find it surprising that I would have served ice cream with strawberries.

Chilled soup

I recently received a marketing e-mail from Waitrose which included the headline "An exclusive 25% off chilled soups". Below, it read: "Soup is the perfect comfort food to cheer up a chilly autumn day. That's why we're offering myWaitrose members 25% off all chilled soups until 7 October". Apart from the flawed logic, it is the misuse of "chilled" to which I object. Presumably, they are referring to soup which is served hot but sold from their refrigerators rather than in a tin or a packet. But to me "chilled soup" conjures up Gazpacho and Vichyssoise - perfect Summer soups but not, I suspect, what the marketeers had in mind. As a matter of fact, I'll happily eat Gazpacho all year round: and, in fairness to Waitrose, having criticised their use of language, they are the only supermarket in the land which sell Gazpacho (Alvalle is the brand) that bears any resemblance to what you can get in Spain.

My uncle Alex has a novel way if Gazpacho is ever on the menu at any dinner party he attends. He asks for it to be put in the microwave. Cold soup, in his view, is unacceptable.

In my mother's recipe book is a recipe for "Strawberry Gazpacho". I reproduce it below:

1/2 lb strawberries
1 teaspoon tabasco
1 tin beef consommé
1/4 pint orange juice
2 cucumbers
Salt and pepper
Blend in food processor.

I have not tried it, and must confess I would feel slightly wary about doing so. Beef consommé and orange juice? Hmmm.

There is a further recipe for another chilled soup on the same page:

Beetroot consommé

Boil pieces of raw beetroot, carrots, onions, potato and stock cube. Make up with one packet of Madeira aspic. Serve chilled with sour cream.

Granny’s strawberry ice cream

When Granny grew strawberries in the back garden, she kept them, as they grew, in jam jars. I never wondered why but discovered, many years later, that it was to protect them from snails. Unfortunately, the snails were undaunted by the jars and simply crawled in to feast.

Despite the snails, she managed every year to harvest some fruit. Strawberries and cream were served in white and pink china bowls that had belonged, I think, to her mother. I have inherited them.

Then there was homemade strawberry icecream, made either from her own strawberries or ones we had picked at Snitterfield. It consisted very simply of the fruit mashed up with milk and single cream, poured into a Perspex bowl and put into the freezer.

Taken out, it always needed a little while to defrost slightly; thus there was a thin layer of pink-purple slush before the hard slab underneath, which needed to be chopped out of the bowl with a knife.

More of a sorbet than an ice cream; so cold it hurt your teeth as they sank icily through. Occasionally we were allowed to pour cream on to it, which hardened and could be peeled off the ice cream to be eaten in its own right.

A slightly less austere version of this recipe would use double cream and stuff the milk.

Snitterfield

The very name "Snitterfield" conjures up what it was and is: a quintessentially English place, in the heart of England - Warwickshire - and a place where childhood memories were forged without my even realising it.

Granny would take us, probably once each Summer. It was a pick-your-own fruit farm. Two white plastic punnets placed in the green cardboard metal handled basket, on the ground that if you only used a basket, there was a risk of the fruit tipping out. 

Then out to the fields. Raspberry hedges almost always. We tried strawberries once. But mostly it was raspberries. Long rows of hedges where we would separate and then try and work out, through sound, where the others were. The sun, always, beating down. Other families wandering past. Keeping a rather superior eye on my younger brother to ensure that he wasn't blithely gathering underripe raspberries.

Full punnets. The hut where the fruit was weighed and paid for. The baskets now stained purple. The repetitious joke in the queue: "They should weigh you when you go in and when you come out".

Back at home, fresh raspberries and cream, occasionally with meringues that made you cough. Some of the raspberries into the freezer to have when there was snow on the ground. We spent one afternoon over a saucepan making raspberry jam so thick you could hardly spread it.

Once, we were disloyal to Snitterfield. My mother and aunt Christine accompanied us and, on the way in the car, Granny spotted a new pick-your-own-fruit farm and a decision was made to try it out. We ventured into the fields but a few samplings later, my mother concluded that the raspberries were not worth eating. Granny was not entirely convinced but Christine agreed: "I'd rather eat a bowl of bread and butter". She also suggested an alternative use for one of their punnets and our minds were quickly made up. Before her threat could be put into action, we left and headed to Snitterfield.