Frydmania

Last post of the year. Three months and writing. And actually a whole lot of blog reading too. My ideas for writing are increasing all the time. But in the meantime, there’s a series to finish: and blackcurrants to contemplate.

Blackcurrants. Ribena. Fruit pastilles. Jam. For me, they are the flavour of childhood: the one that you acquire as soon as you try the original squash (aka juice, cordial…as you like it). The tartness, the colour, the intensity. It’s all there.

Blackcurrant and I go back a long way, back to the days of Ribena in glass bottles. One of my more memorable early years moments was dropping a bottle of Ribena on the kitchen floor. Work out how to clean THAT one up, with no doubt a crying toddler in tow…Mental note to ask my mum how she did do that.

For any packet of sweets, really what I wanted was the blackcurrant ones. The others, yes, I would eat them, but the blackcurrant ones were the prizes in the pack.

Consider that moment as someone take the fruit pastille in the packet, and tears back the paper for you to take yours. If the next one was black, you were sorted. No wonder someone marketed a packet where EVERY one was blackcurrant. It’s the same principal as selling large individual chocolates from Quality Street.

Blackcurrant also seems synonymous with solving colds. Maybe it’s because blackcurrant throat sweets are particularly yummy. I remember the days of cherry flavoured Actifed cough syrup, and later how they changed the recipe to stop people drinking it and becoming addicted to it. Just imagine if they had made it blackcurrant in the first place. No hope of staying off it.

Later, in my main jam making phase, I made blackcurrant jam. It went well. And the colour when stirring it…I love the colours from fruit as you make jam, but blackcurrant is the darkest, glossiest. You’re not quite the alchemist, but you feel capable of concocting pretty much anything when you see it.

The last time I made it, sadly I didn’t really let it settle before turning it into jars. Result: blackcurrants in nicely coloured liquid sugar suspension. I am of course eating it up, but it’s not quite the finished product I was after.

Blackcurrants fill a certain space in the memory for different people. For my mother in law, it’s a memory of her grandmother’s jam, the one she didn’t have at home. For me, it’s the perfect jam from my first time in Poland, eaten day after day at breakfast and supper.

I’m sure I have used blackcurrants in other settings. A handful, at least, in a mixed berry summer pudding I made last year. Blackcurrant in particular seeps through the bread well, the acidity offset by other sweeter berries. It made for a close contender for the perfect pudding, I know.

Whatever your own food loves, your food memories…they are part of who you are. What you cook. What you pick from a menu. These ingredients shape how we experience others, how we remember them. And I wouldn’t be without them.

Home straight. Two posts to write. A month full of food posts – joined, funnily enough, by what feels like a month full of food in real life. The fridge is still full. Time for something lighter to finish up on: raspberries.

I had a glance back at the original list of post ideas. Most of them are done. A few extras snuck in, on a whim. But raspberries are on the list because…they have to be.

I have been thinking a bit about raspberries in the last few days. My Edinburgh granny had a great raspberry patch in her garden, and the raspberry canes seemed to produce well year in year out. At least as far as I could tell when it came to the jam. I couldn’t imagine one of her classic afternoon teas without it.

Raspberry jam is a substance to be treasured. The light that passes through the jam, the arrangement of the seeds within a thick jam – it feels like the jam is somehow woven, or cut from translucent stones.

It needs a plain backdrop to shine: a drop scone, a regular scone. Perhaps some plain toast. Within a jam tart, it takes on a further glossiness through the cooking.

Now my parents live in easy reach of a good number of wild raspberry bushes. Dan just got a pot of homemade raspberry jam in his mini Christmas food hamper from them, and we have been happily putting it to use on various things: croissants today.

I like the fact that raspberries need a certain amount of rain. They don’t mush like strawberries do in those conditions. They are up high on bushes, sometimes growing wild along walkways. They are, to my mind, the quintessential Scottish fruit – not the easy sugar hit of strawberries, but something more mysterious.

A good raspberry is a beautiful thing to contemplate – a perfect thimble of deep red. The texture, the structure means that they work well in garnishing puddings, drinks, and so on.

At times, you’ll find the shops selling off berries that are starting to go. Grab some, divide them off into a few pots, and stash them in the freezer. Wonderful for those days when you want some fruit to go with a yoghurt, or to be conjured into a smoothie.

One of my most memorable morning breakfasts was raspberries, rescued in this way, thick yoghurt, and some kind of little almond biscuits, now just crumbs. I put it together the night before. By morning, the crumbs had become the equivalent of trifle sponge, and the raspberries had bled their juices through the yoghurt. It was heavenly.

Back in my language school days, I remember an activity where we taught the students to enjoy some of the tastes of Scotland: making (and sampling) our own mackerel pate on oatcakes, and making our own cranachan.

To take the very Scottish (and also everyday) ingredient of oats, add the raspberries and whisky (and of course the cream): simple, and yet a joy to eat. It didn’t take the students long to become aficianados too.

There was a time when you couldn’t order a restauranty-type pudding without also getting the obligatory puddle of raspberry coulis. Good taste, but a shame for raspberry just to be the counterpoint. It deserves to remain centre stage, or at least more visible than a trickle of sauce.

Meanwhile, it’s time for a late evening snack. I’m sure there’s some toast in the offing – and perhaps I can beg some raspberry jam to go with it?

Need to soothe the troubled breast? Need a break from all that turkey? Need a way to settle grumpy children? It won’t make you a cup of tea, nor do your tax return, but pasta otherwise has a pretty good record for fixing the ills of the world.

We had a gale force five grump this afternoon, which even fresh-air-and-scoot did not fix. The point at which the mood turned was when I brought out spaghetti alla carbonara. Admittedly the grumpmeister was given additional shares of bacon, which probably made some of the difference. But still.

Pasta and pesto. Pasta and tuna. Sausage cooked with a thick tomato sauce and mini pasta shells. Lasagna, on occasion. Packet tortellini, for the nights you want to eat in five minutes’ flat. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times you wheel it out, it seems to satisfy every time.

Carbonara is a bit more effort, if you go the egg yolk only route, but the suppleness of the sauce is wonderful. (You could fry up egg and bacon, or you could cook the pasta, cook the bacon, and let the heat of the pasta cook the egg for you. Sorted.) I am not an egg girl, but I make an exception for this.

For all of the different food influences I grew up with, pasta was not a huge star.  My mum would cook spaghetti, and then proceed to cut hers up with knife and fork.

It took going to Germany to discover that eating spaghetti with a fork and spoon is a good idea: the spoon acts as a base on which to twirl the pasta. (If you want to see it in action, scroll down the link a little to the second picture.)

Lasagna was highly favoured, but then disappeared in five minutes’ flat. This was great for those eating, but occasionally defeating to mum, who had worked over it for an hour or more.

I later went for veggie lasagnas, cooking up a mix of veg, sticking it in the freezer and defrosting it when needed. Then you only had to make the white sauce, and assemble it.

Lasagna was pretty much my favourite food for a long time. After discovering that Garfield liked it too, that pretty much sealed the deal.

We had a longstanding joke with our friends in Italy that the guy was ‘a real woman’ because he could cook lasagna well ie to Italian-pleasing standards. It’s all about a mix of meats in the ragu, I understand.

One of my longstanding favourites is a sausage pasta dish, inspired by the same man cooking something like this. I make it with fairly ordinary sausages, cut into slices. The real trick is understanding that you can cook pasta in tomato sauce.

The genius ingredient is a small pasta called gnocchetti sardi, which cooks fairly quickly, and is particularly comforting. Add some mushrooms too, and ideally a good grating of cheddar on top.

It’s probably less Italianate, but then that’s part of the fun of dishes you cook a lot – they start as one thing, and become your own in the making and remaking.

I still aspire to making my own pasta. My dad did an Italian cooking course one time, and made his own pasta – along with a purchased broom handle from which to hang the strands to dry. I understand a clothes horse works fairly well too, and will look for an opportunity to both make the pasta, and photograph it in situ.

Mainly, I like the infinite flexibility of simple ingredients – eggs, flour – to become something so varied, and so loved. I’m a theme and variations girl. And pasta provides a great leitmotif.

When there’s still a mound of cold meats to get through, post-Christmas, who you gonna call? Ghostbusters will ensure plenty of fun, but also rather a lot of melted marshmallow. So settle for the professional: mayonnaise.

Ah, good mayo, how I love thee. Particularly with chips. It’s a good European habit, and one I intend to keep, especially when the chips are good and the mayo homemade. But I will happily settle for jarred mayonnaise too – just keep the supply going.

Once upon a time, there was mayo, but it existed in other countries. The UK was ruled over by the iron fist of salad cream, and it looked like staying that way for a long time. At some point, mayo nervously made an entrance – and thank goodness it did.

Don’t get me wrong. I can do salad cream too. I did, for a long time, in packed lunch sandwiches for school. But mayo is in another class. It is thicker, creamier, better at mixing with things, even if it isn’t as piquant.

I am rather partial to Weird Al Jankovitch songs, and fear I am rather close to the mark when he sings:
‘I order all of my sandwiches with mayonnaise…’ Yes: I too am white and nerdy, though I pass on some of the other aspects of the song. Though I wouldn’t mind trying a Segway.

So, back to the food uses: mayo is what you want for potato salad. I have become keen on potato salad plus ie potato salad with various tasty ingredients. It’s great alongside frankfurters (hot or cold, up to you). But it also works well with fish. I think I’ve already indicated the mackerel and also smoked salmon options in other posts.

Recently, I rediscovered Russian salad ie with hardboiled egg, well chopped, and a mix of cold cooked veg like peas, little cubes of carrot, and so on. The egg afficianado of the house is taken with this. I generally avoid hardboiled egg, but I can just about take some of it in this form.

It may not be haute cuisine to say so, but mayo can give you a good quick sauce for pasta, if you think of adding some veg and/or meat or fish for taste. After all, mayo often goes in a pasta salad, so why not a hot version too?

Equally, if you’re doing your own sauce for prawn cocktail, it works just fine with mayo plus some ketchup – and maybe a little balsamic vinegar for a sharper twang? I guess Worcestershire sauce would also do here.

I do a few lunchy things with rice paper wraps at times – mayo comes in handy for holding the ingredients together before you construct your wraps. Or equally, go the route of soy and sesame oil, if you want to keep with the Oriental vibe.

I think you get the picture. And while we have a few dietary modifications to deal with at home, thankfully eggs are still in the picture, hence the usefulness of mayo. But part of me just loves the fact that someone worked out how to mix eggs and oil, and come out with such an amazing and versatile substance.

Time to stop. I think there’s a need for some sandwich busting.