Candles that have been in store sometimes develop a powdery coat, like a damson. This can be wiped off with a soft, dry cloth.
Burn rate
Look for candles with a long burn rate. It is usually marked on the box. This will tell you roughly how long a candle should burn for if burned continuously. Burning the candle in a draught will reduce its life.
A smoking candle
Occasionally a candle will produce plumes of black smoke. This is usually because the flame is being disturbed by a draught, causing the natural teardrop of light to distort and flicker. Rather appropriate if you happen to be reading a ghost story on a winter’s night. Annoying if not. Which is why candles on window ledges often burn less evenly than those on a table in the centre of a room.
Chilling your candles
I was brought up to believe that candles should be stored in the fridge, as a cold candle burns more slowly. Sadly, although based on truth, the wax warms so quickly once lit that the practice is somewhat pointless.
Incidentally, Fortnum & Mason department store, one of the capital’s prettiest Christmas sights, is, as Tom Parker Bowles says in The Cook Book, ‘a company built on spent wax’. William Fortnum, footman to Queen Anne, was allowed to keep the spent candles, which he then successfully sold on, before eventually teaming up with Mr Mason to open their eponymous Piccadilly store. Their selection of dinner candles remains dazzling to this day.
Roast cabbage with cheese sauce
Happy tweets and emails have been coming in today about my recipe for roast cabbage. There is something particularly heart-warming about this, especially as I wasn’t initially sure about the idea. I make it again, tonight, and sure enough, the readers are right, it is really good for a cold night. The Parmesan and old-fashioned sauce ensure its frugality goes unnoticed.
Serves 4
garlic – 2 cloves
olive oil – 2 tablespoons
lemon juice – 2 tablespoons
a small cabbage
Parmesan – 55g
milk – 500ml
bay leaves – 2
half an onion
butter – 30g
plain flour – 30g
bread, open-textured, such as ciabatta – a thick slice
smoked paprika – a pinch (optional)
sprouted seeds
Preheat the oven to 200°C/Gas 6. Peel the garlic and crush to a paste with a little salt. Put the paste into a small mixing bowl and stir in the olive oil and lemon juice. Season with a generous grinding of black pepper.
Slice the cabbage into discs about 3cm thick and place them, just touching, on a baking sheet. Spoon the garlic and lemon juice dressing over the cabbage and roast for twenty-five to thirty minutes. Turn the cabbage over, dust the top of each piece with a heaped tablespoon of grated Parmesan, and continue cooking for fifteen minutes.
While the cabbage cooks, bring the milk to the boil with the bay leaves and onion, then remove from the heat and leave to infuse. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour and cook over a moderate heat for a couple of minutes. Add the milk, strained through a sieve, stir until smooth, then leave to simmer over a very low heat for fifteen minutes, barely bubbling, while the cabbage roasts. Tear the bread into small pieces and grill or fry until crisp, brushing or trickling them with a little oil as they cook.
Finely grate the remaining Parmesan into the sauce and season to taste with a little salt (you won’t need much), some black pepper and, if you like, a little smoked paprika. Lift the cooked cabbage on to plates, spoon over some of the cheese sauce, and finish with the fried bread and some green sprouted seeds.
15 NOVEMBER
Frost fairs and braised brisket
I ache for snow. The last generous fall in this garden was in January 2013, when the yew hedges tilted drunkenly with its weight. I ache for silence, for the sound of my own muffled footsteps as I walk up the garden path. But most of all I ache for icicles. When I was seven or eight, icicles hung from every gutter on the house. Long glass stalactites hung down from the greenhouse roof like trickles of icing on a gingerbread house. They shone in the late afternoon sun. I snapped off the longest as a rapier for a mock fight with an imaginary friend, and galloped across the snow-covered lawn in a one-man jousting match. Before I went in for tea the other icicles met their fate, as a unicorn’s horn, a fencer’s épée and lastly a shimmering javelin.
I remember a winter in Paris when the fountains froze. One close to my tiny attic room near the Sorbonne had set into a vast, sparkling ice sculpture that stopped me in my tracks on the treacherous walk to cooking school. How I would have loved to be in London for the frost fairs on the River Thames.
Frost fairs were held on the river on several occasions – the Thames froze over twenty-six times between 1408 and 1814. In 1536 King Henry VIII travelled along the river from London to Greenwich by sleigh. Queen Elizabeth I practised shooting on the ice in the winter of 1564, and carnivals were held on the frozen river. The first recorded frost fair was in 1608 but it was the last one, held in 1814, that saw an elephant led across the frozen river near Blackfriars Bridge, and stalls, shops and funfairs set up on the ice. There was bull-baiting and horse-racing, carousels and puppet shows, skating and football matches. The fair held in the winter of 1683–4 saw the Thames frozen over for two months, complete with a shopping street built on the eleven inches of ice.
The cold winters were far from one big carnival. The ice on the river thawed unexpectedly on several occasions and many drowned. In January 1789 the melting ice dragged a riverside public house into the water, crushing five people. The winters were unimaginably cold, animals and birds died, plants and trees froze solid, people choked on the smoke trapped by the cold air and the homeless froze to death.
There is little likelihood of the Thames ever freezing again. The river was shallower then and flowed more slowly, the winters were considerably colder and any idea of global warming inconceivable. Yet the notion of a vast frozen river on which one could skate, roast a whole pig and travel downstream on a sleigh is still something I dream of seeing. Just as I dream of climbing through the back of my wardrobe into a snow-covered wood.
No sign of snow yet, but I need something warming today. A dark braise of a favourite cut of beef.
Braised brisket with porcini and onion gravy
You’ll need a spoon. The broth surrounding the beef has been in the oven for four hours, along with a handful of caramelised shallots, black peppercorns, thyme sprigs and bay leaves. I could have used beef stock, but preferred to make a broth out of dried mushrooms. A dark-coloured, bosky liquor in which to coax a cheap cut of meat towards tenderness. The brisket was bargain enough, as you would expect from a cut situated at the front of the belly, a piece of meat that works hard throughout the animal’s life. I asked the butcher to leave the fat on my brisket in place, so that it would soften to a quivering mass and slowly enrich the gravy during its long sojourn in the oven.
I cut the meat into thick, wobbly slices and laid them
