for winter
Apricot, orange and anise
Deep, golden fruit notes here. Rather delightful after dinner, with crisp, dark chocolate thins.
Enough for 20 small glasses
dried apricots – 500g
an orange
whole star anise – 4
brandy – 300ml
granulated sugar – 150g
sweet white wine – 300ml
Put the apricots into a stainless steel saucepan. Using a vegetable peeler, slice thin strips of zest from the orange and drop them into the pan. Add the star anise, brandy and sugar and bring to the boil. Stir until the sugar has dissolved.
Into a sterilised preserving jar, spoon the apricots and star anise, then pour in the liquor (breathing in at this point is highly recommended) and top up with the sweet white wine. Seal and place in a cool, dark place for a good fortnight (better still, a month) before pouring the golden liquor into glasses.
The fruit
Once the ravishing, honey-hued liqueur is finished (and you have dried your tears) you will no doubt want to use the plumped-up fruits for something. My first suggestion is to serve them, whole and fat with alcohol, in a beautiful glass with a jug of cream at their side. Even better, perhaps, is to serve a thick, strained yoghurt with them and a scattering of toasted, flaked almonds.
Figs with maple syrup and anise
Christmas pudding in a glass. Though perfect for Guy Fawkes too if you start it early enough. The remaining fruit – little bundles of joy, soft as a pillow, juicy as a xiaolongbao dumpling – should not be wasted.
Enough for 20 small glasses
granulated sugar – 250g
maple syrup – 100ml
dry white wine – 750ml
dried aniseed – ½ teaspoon
dried figs – 500g
vodka – 250ml
Put the granulated sugar into a medium-sized, stainless steel saucepan and add the maple syrup, white wine and aniseeds. Cut half the figs in half, then put all the figs into the pan. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and let the figs simmer for twenty minutes, until soft and plump and bloated with wine.
Spoon the figs into a sterilised storage jar, then pour over the liquor. Pour in the vodka, then seal and store in a cool, dry place for three or four weeks, or better still, until Christmas.
The fruit
Later, once the liquid is gone, you would be wise to use the alcohol-laden figs for something. Two or three hidden in the depths of an apple crumble are fun, as they would be in an apple pie. (I often have one or two, straight from the jar, as a treat when I have finished the ironing.) They also make a fine addition to a slice of plain cake, taken with coffee, mid-morning, and served as a dessert with a spoonful of deepest yellow clotted cream. The thick sort you can cut with a knife.
Muscat prunes
You can most certainly drink the mahogany-coloured liquor here, but I really make these marinated fruits as a little extra, something to serve alongside chocolate mousse or milky panna cotta.
Serves 6
prunes – 250g
golden sultanas – 125g
muscat or moscatel – 750ml
Put the prunes and sultanas into a sterilised jar, then pour over the muscat or moscatel. Seal tightly and leave for a month before drinking.
A treat in store
Once you have poured the liquor into glasses, you are left, happily, with a jar full of delicious detritus. You could put the sultanas and prunes into an elegant glass and serve them with a spoonful of vanilla-scented whipped cream and a tiny silver spoon. Or you could spoon the fruit over vanilla ice cream, or frozen yoghurt, letting its syrup trickle down the frozen ice. I wouldn’t exactly say no to finding a pile of these sodden fruits sharing a plate with some fluffy ricotta cakes hot from the frying pan on a Sunday morning.
We can get more adventurous with our little fruit bon-bons, using them to shake up a dish of stewed apple for breakfast; serving them alongside a slice of sugar-crusted sponge cake or with home-made vanilla custard. The wine-drenched fruits can be tucked into the almond filling for a frangipane tart or used in a trifle of layered crumbled amaretti, custard and mascarpone.
Possibly the best idea of all came about quite by accident. After a long day of photography for the book, James and I sat down with a glass of the apricot and fig liqueurs, accompanied by the plumped-up fruits. On the table was some blue cheese – a Gorgonzola, though it could just as well have been Stilton, Stichelton or any of the other blues. We nibbled. The marrying of the blue cheese and the velvety, wine-filled fruits was quite simply gorgeous.
4 NOVEMBER
The joy of stuffing
Goose-fat roast potatoes aside, I consider stuffing to be the most delicious of all accompaniments to the Sunday roast. A sausage meat stuffing made with browned onions, bacon, thyme and dried apricots; a couscous version with red onion, rosemary and raisins; another with minced turkey, lardo – the cured, herbed strips of pork fat from Italy – fennel seed and cranberries. I like my stuffings rough-edged, generously seasoned and deeply savoury. A little sweetness from dried fruits perhaps, but onions and herbs, much lemon zest and black pepper are essential.
There are two ways of cooking stuffing: inside and outside the bird. Each way has its disciples. Roasting the mixture inside the cavity of the turkey or goose means that the juices of the meat trickle down through the forcemeat as it cooks, imbuing the stuffing with the essence of the bird. The downside is that in order to cook the stuffing properly, it may mean overcooking the bird, and, should you pack it in too tightly, the heat will never penetrate fully, thus risking neither the inside of the bird nor the stuffing cooking thoroughly. Dare I mention salmonella?
Cooking the stuffing outside the roast, in the same roasting tin, means there won’t be enough of it, and its presence interferes with the gravy and roast potatoes. It’s pretty much a non-starter. The third way is to cook it separately in another dish. It works from a safety point of view, and you will get tantalising, crusty nuggets on the stuffing’s surface, but this method loses the opportunity of soaking it with the juices from the bird as it cooks. I get round this by spooning some of the fat and flavouring from the roasting tin over the stuffing as it cooks.
Stuffings, forcemeats, call them what you will, have gone out of fashion. I suggest that this is a disgraceful state of affairs. Imagine the flavour in a ball of sausage meat that you have seasoned with sweet golden onions, thyme and rosemary, lemon zest, chopped bacon and juniper, then spooned goose fat over as it roasted. Or a tray of stuffing made with minced turkey, bacon, lemon, parsley and Parmesan you have left rough on top, so the ridges and furrows brown crustily.
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