As a locked-down cook, I still have a long way to go. I have continued to try, of necessity. Bad gardeners blame their soil and tools. Bad cooks blame their ingredients. After two failures last weekend, I am blaming my local Co-op store. They have served me loyally all year, for which I am grateful, but when it comes to blackberries and Jerusalem artichokes, they, not I, lack punch.
What else could have gone wrong with my obedient attempt at artichoke soup with parsley? I harked back to that old classic, Katie Stewart in
The Times Cookery Book, much reprinted since 1972. The artichokes were Jerusalem artichokes and as one person living alone, I halved her quantities throughout. I peeled the artichokes, a pound and a half of them, no easy task as their surfaces are so bumpy.
I did not cut my fingers and I even put the peeled tubers in water with lemon juice to stop them turning muddy while they waited, stripped of their knobbly skins. I peeled an onion, medium sized, browned it in butter with the artichokes for 10 minutes, made half a pint of chicken stock, admittedly with a convenience cube, and boiled, then simmered the vegetables in the stock and a quarter of a pint of milk.
After 40 minutes, I put the entire softened mixture into the electric blender and puréed it for quite a while. I added four tablespoons of cream, reheated the mix and then topped it with shredded parsley. The artichokes were slightly bitty, but the colouring looked good. The result was almost entirely tasteless, thickening to the texture of grainy porridge. I gritted my teeth and reheated it for day two.
What went wrong? I blame bland, shop-compatible artichokes, but I will never grow my own in the garden. Jerusalem artichokes are a wildly invasive crop, throwing up 5ft or more of scratchy top growth and running far and wide. Their tubers break and elude all attempts to dig them fully out.
On farms, they are planted as cover for pheasants by farmers who have shoots. My aim is to deter other people’s reared pheasants from strutting in my spring garden, where they peck the flowers on the crocuses and scillas. I do not want to offer them asylum in a bed of artichokes.
So much for artichoke soup in my kitchen, unless readers can identify
a remedy. What about blackberry sorbet? The queen bees of the
River Café Cook Book Easy, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, have guided me throughout lockdown and made me feel dangerously competent: they make this sorbet sound Robin-proof.
My weekend aspiration is always to cook at least one dish I have never cooked before, especially if its colours contrast with the others on the menu. Blackberry sorbet contrasts smartly with off-white artichoke-porridge pretending to be soup.
I combined 350g of caster sugar with 150ml of water and prided myself on stirring it into a fine syrup. I added the juice of half a lemon. I mushed the blackberries as the queen bees told me, by pulsing them in the blender. I then mixed the mushed blackberries into the syrup and froze the lot, stirring it once after half an hour.
I left for an outdoor task, the top dressing of two new beds, on which more in another week. I used a lovely mix of green waste and rotted manure, a compote, I told myself, which had never been near a blender. Eight hours later I was ready for the blackberry mix. It had frozen like an old-fashioned Arctic iceberg. It had to sit for two hours even to become workable. Then it was tasteless, except for its gritty seeds, which stuck in my teeth.
Had the authors left out an ingredient? Cream? Separated eggs?
I blame the superstore’s blackberries, flown in from Ecuador to be ready for me and my crazy out-of-season impulse. I should have waited. In late summer and autumn, tasty blackberries are available in my garden on the variety called Loch Ness.
Like the RHS, which gave it an award of garden merit, I recommend Loch Ness highly. It has no spiky thorns. It grows about 6ft high and wide, but can be pruned and trained up a stake. Unlike other cultivated blackberries, it does not need to sprawl along an entire fence. The one little trick is that it is a floricane variety, one which fruits on the previous year’s wood. Do not prune the old wood out in a fit of spring tidying.
Loch Ness fruits heavily from late July onwards. It is not going to satisfy an impulsive cook who wants it now, months out of season. My imported blackberries cost £8 a pound, serving me right for being impatient. Has anybody made this blackberry sorbet recently and found it not just cuttable, but edible?
Chastened, I am returning to homegrown produce: beans, carrots and radishes. The best news in veg gardening is that runner beans now come on dwarf plants that can be fitted into small gardens without the need for poles. Try Hestia from Thompson and Morgan, a lowly runner bean that crops well and should be spaced in rows 18in apart.
Either sow it indoors now in sustainable heat and plant it out from pots in late May or sow it directly outdoors, an inch and a half deep, when all risk of frost is past. Last year we had frost on May 16, so do not be in a hurry.
Dwarf broad beans are excellent too and have a longer history. The Sutton was bred by Suttons in the 1920s: back on sale now, it is only a foot high. Seeds can be sown outdoors now, 2in deep in well-raked smooth soil. They crop about three months later.
Homegrown carrots have a supreme quality: they can be picked when very young. Abandon all ideas of winning prizes with your carrots at a local
show. The massive winners, judged for size, will be way past their tasty best. Young roots should be picked when only an inch or two in length.
Big chunky ones are far less useful than finger carrots, slim and long, Amsterdam Forcing 3 being an excellent one from Thompson and Morgan. The seeds can be sown directly outdoors in broken-down fine soil, covering them hardly at all.
Last, a winner for everywhere, including window boxes owned by utter novices: radishes. They are best in rounded classic shapes, but last year
I deviated from the usual scarlet-and-whites and tried Purple Plum from Unwins. By staggering the sowings, I had crops on into autumn, adding a new purple-blue tone to the one recipe that I have yet to mess up.
In her excellent Mediterranean Cookery, Claudia Roden sets out a Tunisian radish salad in which radishes are stripped of leaves and whiskers, roughly chopped and mixed with the juice of half a lemon, cayenne pepper, bits of parsley and two tablespoons of olive oil. At home this salad is called slatit fzill, but if you make it with purple radishes you will give it a new twist. It trips up experts, on the palate, not the tongue.
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