Rice pud

Rice pudding is a dish full of memories for me. The best of all was at school in the sixties. The fifth form girls waited on everyone else at lunch time, dragging trolleys out of the kitchens loaded with piles of plates and dishes of hot food. The rice pudding the girls ate was nothing to write home about - sweetened rice and water - but the staff always had the option of a real rice pudding as dessert. The girls on waitress duty ate after everyone else, and if there was any staff rice pudding left, there were squabbles over it. Cooked in the bottom of the oven for at least two hours, it had a hide like a rhino, a creamy texture and you could stand a spoon up in it. The real deal!

Going fast!

Also from my childhood - Sunday lunch always finished with a tin of Ambrosia Creamed Rice between the three of us. Pleasant, but no skin (the best bit).

Rice pudding was on the menu at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham, only a few miles from my old school, when I was in for an operation a few years ago. I was really looking forward to that pudding, having not eaten for 24 hours before the operation, then being unable to keep any food down for another two days after the anaesthetic. Horror! It was sweetened with aspartame. Misery! Worst taste in the world!

At school, we girls all studied "domestic science". Everything - measures, temperatures, techniques - was exactly prescribed. It's engrained now - I find it really difficult to sling in a bit of this and a bit of that, or to measure using cups or coffee spoons. "A teaspoon" of something is 5ml, and "a tablespoon" is 15ml. These little measures come as a set, on a ring. I got my first set at the age of 11, when the manufacturers of Stork margarine gave a cookery demonstration. I still have them nearly 50 years later. Yes, I'm brainwashed. But I'm fighting it! It's rarely important for such precision to be at all necessary.

The changes in the recipe for rice pudding in our three copies of the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (GH) reflects the changes in cooking technology over the years, and the relentless rise of the exact measure. Tim's 1954 edition speaks of "a slow oven" - no gas marks or degrees, neither fahrenheit or centigrade. I got the 1965 edition in 1969, when I went to college, entirely in imperial weights and measures and fahrenheit. The 1976 edition in the longère kitchen dates from the interim period when direct translation of imperial into metric, rather than a truly metric recipe, was the norm, with unintentionally hilarious results. So the 1976 GH recipe starts off nicely metric...
45 mls round grain rice (three tablespoons)
30 mls of sugar (two tablespoons)
568 mls of milk (a pint - come on now! I haven't got a burette, should have nicked one from the chem lab when I had the chance)
Freshly ground nutmeg
A knob of butter

Heat the oven to 150 degrees centigrade / 300 Fahrenheit (we're doing OK)
Butter a 900ml ovenproof dish (that's a 1½ pint dish, can you find a 900ml one?).
Wash the rice and put it in the dish with the sugar. Pour on the milk (that's unpasteurised full cream milk from La Borde), top with shavings of butter and grate some nutmeg on the top. Bake for about 2 hours, stirring after half an hour.

Eat on its own or with jam, honey, bottled fruit .. also delicious cold. Serves four.

PS that pie dish is a whole blog entry in itself - we have a Grimwade Patent Perfection pie dish which does the job nicely.
PPS GH has recipes for both rice pudding (baked) and creamed rice (cooked in a saucepan on the hob). Ken's scrumptious recipe for gâteau de riz is therefore based on creamed rice, not rice pudding!

Cats in Clover

There are fussier cats than our two. I heard of one that ate nothing but freshly steamed chicken! Ours share a sachet of Felix "as good as it looks" per day, plus two scoops of assorted dried cat food, with water ad lib on the side. Bagger is rewarded with three cat treats for every rongeur he brings us, so long as the little squeaker is cleanly despatched. He will also "shake hands" for a treat (RonRon "gives us five" for a treat).

But the biggest treat of all comes out of a tin - Waitrose Special Recipe Chunks in Jelly. This is, according to the label, made in France. On the lid, before the Best Before date, the tin is stamped with a registration number (SITE number) FR6216050. A search on the internet revealed this on a list of "Usines de fabrication d'aliments pour animaux familiers agréées au titre de l'article 18 du règlement (CE) n°1774/2002" - factories for pet food manufacture registered under thus and so European regulation - to represent Continentale Nutrition (SA) Montebello of Boulogne sur Mer. I contacted both Continentale Nutrition and Waitrose, explaining that we were moving to France and asking where could I get a similar product.

Waitrose kindly explained that their product was to their own recipe and not available elsewhere as such.

Continentale Nutrition informed me that they made some pet foods for Auchan and Carrefour - tricky for us because we don't have either anywhere near - there's an Auchan in Chatellerault an hour's drive away. Picture us in Auchan turning over packages of tins and trying to look under all the emballage to find the SITE number. You can't buy a tin of catfood there, only a pack of six. Tough luck if the cats don't like it. Bagger actually eats most things - there's a way to put RonRon on a diet!

Hic Haec Hock

In the McAdam family, Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) was always the day for a simple boiled bacon joint, served with plain boiled potatoes, cabbage and parsley sauce. We've gone one step ahead in the era of the microwave, and cooked the bacon in advance. We got a jarret demi-sel from Intermarché - that to an English cook is a ham hock, or more universally a pig's ankle, preserved in a light brine. Four euros and 80 centimes got us 1.129 kilos of meat, admittedly including a big bone and the skin. We followed the "Good Housekeeping" timing (20 minutes per pound plus 20 minutes), and cooked it with a bay leaf and five white peppercorns in a pan of water frémissant. That lovely expression literally means "shivering", but look at a pan of water at a gentle simmer and you will see how appropriate it is.

Most people throw the cooking liquor away. This depends on the brining process, and you really have to know your butcher with this one. If they are heavy handed with the salt, cover the meat with water, bring it to the boil, throw that water away and start again. The demi-sel gave a perfect hammy - but not salty - broth which we loaded with chopped cabbage and other assorted veg that we happened to have to hand, a small tin of flageolet beans, a couple of handfuls of rice and the same of mélange de grains from the biologique stall at Grand Pressigny market. This made about eight servings of a lovely main course soup. Tim minced up the skin and scrappy meat from the cooked hock to add to the soup, which you could omit if you don't fancy it. You could go the whole hog (ho ho) and add boudin blanc, or confit de canard to make a garbure. I particularly love butter beans with bacon - those pois du cap that Ken mentions on his blog look like the exact right thing!

We'll probably get six servings from the bacon meat, fourteen meals in all. Good going for four euros and 80 centimes!

We're only here for the BIÈRE [part1]

....oh, and the wine too, of course! Oh...and cider!! And...

But this entry is about one of our local micro-breweries [brasseries artisinales].
Micro-breweries are growing fast in France - the first one we came across was the Brasserie Sancerroise, located at the bottom of the hill in Sancerre in the original 1920s brewhouse.

The Brewery Building [the range in 2002 is displayed on the little table]

When we made that first visit in 2002, they were using the pre-war equipment. The original brewery on the site was still running with this equipment until the 1960s.

Whilst Northern France still has a strong brewing tradition, people generally think of France as mainly a wine nation. But the tradition of brewing that remains in the North was far more widespread up to and shortly after the Great War. The region immediately around Sancerre had sixty-three breweries prior to this, which fell to less than thirty between the wars, ten after and by the mid-1960s....NONE!

The brewer, M. Dumas, has been trying to collect the bottles that the original sixty-three breweries used. All the bottles were different in either colour, printed ceramic Grolsch-style tops or embossed glass.... sometimes a combination of these. When we spoke with him, he'd managed to get sixty of the sixty-three, including variations from the same brewery; the whole collection being displayed round the clerestory window that runs around the entire brewery.

Just a few of the bottles.... visit the brewery to see the rest.

The hunt for that elusive trio has resulted, apparently, in an increase in the quality of the collection and variations of unrecorded type. He felt that the three missing breweries may have sold only in barrel [fût] in a brewhouse or used plain, unmarked and, therefore, unattractive and unidentifiable bottles. Whilst 'la France' has kept the records of the breweries, there is precious little record of these smaller breweries methods and advertising.

From the right in small [33cl] and large [75cl] the beers are Rose Blanche, La Drolesse and La Sans-Gen

Brasserie Sancerroise brews three main beers; nowadays using more state of the art, easy to clean stainless-steel plant [except for the original coppers!!]
These three brews...
Rose Blanche - a bière blanche [5° ABV] - Excellent, refreshing brew between a German 'weizen' beer and a Belgian 'Witt'. Great on a hot day, good with fish or fowl.
La Drolesse - a bière blonde [5.6° ABV] - A blond beer that is meant to resemble a Bavarian lager in style and taste. Good hoppy taste and again a refreshing glassful.
La Sans-Gen - la bière ambrée [6.2° ABV] - A ruby brew following the Austrian brewing style.. but also similar to a Trappist ale. Rich and warming, good for a cold evening.
...form the backbone, but also brewed are...
La Sancerroise: - a bière blonde [6.9° ABV] brewed using the "Lentille Verte du Berry" [Which we discovered at the Saffron Fair at Preuilly-sur-Claise.] I like this brew... complex, rich and different. Pollygarter doesn't... in fact she hates it!
We also had another... La Sanceroise de Mars - a light Spring time beer of 6.2%ABV.
And there is a final La Sancerroise which we haven't tried. La Sanceroise de Gruyt.
Check on their current website for their opening hours. The brewery is a worthwhile stop when visiting the Sancerre region for the wine. [The old 2002 website is here.]

Next time I'll write about the Brasserie Carpe Diem at Tilly in the Brenne.

To Quince or not to Quince

The French name for the quince is the coing. Tim reckons this is the sound made by a ripe quince hitting the roof of your car. A quince tree is a cognassier. We haven't yet decided whether or not to plant a cognassier. The tree resembles an apple tree, but with larger, scented flowers, and need no pollinator. A ripe quince is a beautiful yellow furry thing like a young rugby ball. But once the tree really gets going, it produces so much fruit you can't give them away (rather like walnuts) so if your neighbour has quinces, they'll be pleased for you to take some off your hands.

An alternative is a chaenomeles or Japanese quince, a decorative shrub happiest leaning against a sunny wall where it will be covered in scarlet blossom and then mini-quinces. If all you want is a few jars of quince jelly every year, Chaenomeles is ideal.

Crimson red poached quinces [we'll try the lemons too!]

On the other hand, quinces make a whole range of delicious puds. Raw, the fruit is inedible! The following recipe by Lucas Hallweg was taken from the Sunday Times of December 16 2007 and recommends an alternative to Christmas Pud - just as rich and luxurious, but not as stodgy. I've halved his quantities so this recipe serves 4.

Ingredients:
2 medium or one large quince
Juice of half a lemon
The other lemon half, halved again
300g sugar
1 cinnamon stick
1 clove
1 bayleaf

Preheat the oven to 150C/300F/Gas Mark 2.
Put some water into a bowl with the lemon juice.
Peel and quarter the quinces, or cut the large quince into eight. Drop the pieces into the lemon juice as they will go brown almost instantly.
Put the sugar and half a litre of water into a lidded ovenproof dish large enough to take all the quince pieces in one layer. Add the spices, bay leaf and lemon quarters and bring to the boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Drop in the quince pieces, bring them to the boil, put on the lid and put the dish in the oven. Cook for 2 hours, turning half way through, until the fruit is soft and deep pink. The liquid will be a rich crimson.
Serve cold with crème fraiche and some of the syrup poured over. We served ours with meringue from the local bakery, and crème crue from La Grande Borde. I didn't say it was a low calorie alternative to Christmas pud!

There is lots of luscious syrup left - follow this link to see Lucas Hallweg's suggestions for using it up!
[Update: 30/11/2013... you now have to pay to access the above link... unless you are already a paid subscriber to The Times or The Sunday Times]