Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (47 page)

MANGO SORBET 2

As above, omitting the cream and using one extra mango to make up the quantity. A little more lemon juice will also be needed.

Unpublished, 1970s

PERSIMMON SORBET

4 or 5 very ripe persimmons, 125 g (4 oz) of sugar, 150 ml (¼ pint) of water, the juice of a half a small sweet orange, 150 ml (5 fl oz) of double cream.

Having peeled away and discarded the skin of the persimmons, turn the pulp into the blender and purée until smooth. There should be 600 ml (1 pint) of purée. Boil the sugar and water for about 5 minutes, to make a thin syrup. Chill this in the refrigerator, and when quite cold amalgamate it with the persimmon purée. Add the strained orange juice. Immediately before freezing
give the mixture another whirl in the blender, adding the cream. Turn into the freezer.

These quantities make a little under a litre (approximately 1½ pints) of sorbet. A very delicious and pretty one, too.

Unpublished, 1970s

LOGANBERRY SORBET

500 g (1 lb) of loganberries, 125 g (4 oz) of sugar, 250 ml (8 fl oz) of water, the juice of 1 orange.

Boil the sugar and water to a thin syrup. Put the fruit into the processor bowl or blender goblet, pour in the warm syrup and purée the fruit. Press the purée through a fine sieve to eliminate the pips. Add the strained orange juice and chill.

Loganberries tend to be very acid, hence the rather larger than usual allowance of sugar for the syrup. Before freezing, check the sweetness and if necessary add a little more sugar, or a little cream to soften the taste.

Freeze the sorbet. There should be altogether 600 ml (1 pint) of sorbet.

Unpublished, 1970s

QUINCE AND HONEY SORBET

This is quite a trouble to make, but worth it to addicts of the strange flavour and wonderful perfume of quinces.

First bake 6 medium-sized ripe unpeeled quinces in a covered pot in a low oven (140°C/280°F/gas mark 1) until they are soft. Add no water. This preliminary cooking will take about 1–1½ hours.

Peel, slice and core the fruit, putting the parings and cores into a saucepan but discarding any bruised or damaged parts of the fruit.

Cover the cores and peel with cold water – about 1.2 litres (2 pints). Boil hard for a few minutes, until the water is well-flavoured and coloured with the quince parings. Strain through a fine sieve into a large bowl or jug. Return this quince water – there will be 750 ml (1¼ pints) – to the saucepan. Add the sliced fruit – there should be approximately 500 g (1 lb) – and let it boil for about 10 minutes until quite soft. Now add 8 tablespoons of
honey and boil until the juice has turned to a light syrup which just drops from the spoon.

Purée the whole mixture in the blender, and chill in the refrigerator. Immediately before freezing give the purée another quick whirl in the blender, adding 300 ml (10 fl oz) of whipping or double cream.

The quantities given will yield about 1.2 litres (2 pints) of mixture, too much for freezing all at once in a small-scale electric sorbetière, but since it is hardly worth cooking fewer than 6 quinces at a time, the best course is to divide the prepared purée into two parts, adding cream only to the amount to be frozen. The rest of the purée will keep for a few days in the refrigerator. Again, add the cream only immediately before freezing.

Note

Instead of double cream try using buttermilk, or half and half fresh home-made yogurt and cream. The flavour of quince is powerful enough to stand up to the acidity of buttermilk and yogurt.

Unpublished, 1970s

The Madeira Era

‘I was born saturated in Madeira,’ writes Noël Cossart in his recently published, wholly absorbing
Madeira: The Island Vineyard
(Christie’s Wine Publications). He is to be envied. He is also to be congratulated. His book is as rich with the lore of his subject as is his mother’s
bolo de mel
, the true cake of Madeira (good though it may be, the English one is an impostor) with candied citron, spices, almonds, walnuts, butter, and sugar cane honey, otherwise molasses or black treacle. The dough is yeast-leavened, and so in a sense is the book. Wherever you open it some fresh aspect of the subject becomes apparent. Crumb and crust are both uncommonly interesting and varied. Each chapter encapsulates a special story, a facet or a phase in the production of the wines of the island, their properties, their almost miraculous longevity – a century and a half of life is not in the least uncommon for a great single vintage of one of the island’s extraordinary wines. A
lifetime’s knowledge of Madeira’s history, its people, industries, agriculture, customs, architecture, fauna, flora, climate, above all his fifty years’ active experience of wine-making in the island, are shared by Mr Cossart with his readers in a delightfully easy manner and perfectly unpretentious language.

Madeira is the wine the world owes to the foresight of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), who in the first half of the fifteenth century decreed that malmsey vines, first brought from Crete to the Iberian peninsula, should be planted in the volcanic soil of the Atlantic island which was in his special care. So spectacularly did they flourish and so good was the wine made from their grapes that by 1588 the Portuguese Diego Lopes, calling at Madeira on his way to India, could declare that the island’s malvasia wine ‘is the best in the universe, and is taken to India and many parts of the world’.

European wines made from the malmsey or malvasia grape had long been known for their excellence. In renaissance Italy they were imported from Candia in Crete, and the vine, which had come originally from Monemvasia in the Peloponnesus, was planted in Romagna, Tuscany and the Campania. The rich
Greco
wines it yielded soon became the most prized in the peninsula. In England the native malmseys of Greece and Crete had been in demand ever since the crusading armies encountered them on their voyages to the Holy Land. ‘Wyne Greke’ was drunk at the ceremonial feasts of Plantagenet and Tudor kings, noblemen, princes of the Church. Malmsey gave its name to a richly spiced and brightly coloured confection of dates, pine kernels, wine, sugar and shredded chicken or pheasant called Mawmenee, recorded in 1390 by Richard II’s cooks – and has there been an English schoolboy for hundreds of years who has not heard of Shakespeare’s false, fleeting, perjured Clarence and the improbable legend of how he met his death in a butt of malmsey wine?

How fortunate it must have seemed to those European travellers, colonists and adventurers, who in the seventeenth century flocked to India and the Far East, when they found the noble wine of their homelands so conveniently available out there in the mid-Atlantic. They bought the best for consumption during the onward voyage, more for storage when the ships arrived at their destination. Beyond Madeira no wine was to be found. So it was that malmsey, and later other noble wines of Madeira made from grapes called Sercial, Verdelho, Bual, Terrantez, Moscatel,
became those common to the colonists of the vast Portuguese empire which reached from the Azores to India and Brazil; to the Dutch in India, Malaysia and the Moluccas; and to the British in Bengal, Madras, Bombay, the trading posts of China (in Canton the British traded Madeira for ginseng), the West Indian sugar plantations, the colonies of North America. Danish traders, who had their own East India Company, took a taste for Madeira back to Scandinavia, and today Denmark and Sweden are among the best markets for fine wines from the island. Early in this century Russia was absorbing 12 per cent of Madeira’s wine production, Germany 40 per cent, France 25 per cent. The French also consumed quantities of wines boldly labelled
Madère d’Origine
and
Madère de l’Ile
, which in fact were fortified wines from Tarragona or southern France. Eventually, in 1900, the Blandy brothers of Madeira won a lengthy lawsuit against a firm of French shippers who had been caught by one of the brothers unloading a cargo of Spanish wine labelled
vin de Madère
at Le Havre. Thereafter French imitations of Madeira wines ceased.

Readers hitherto unfamiliar, as I was, with the history of Madeira wines will be struck by the formidable list of British and Indian army regimental messes and clubs supplied at one time or another by Mr Cossart’s famous ancestral firm of Cossart, Gordon and Co. The list, drawn up during the early years of this century, appears to cover every mess in British India between Madras and the Punjab, every club from Bombay to Calcutta and from Ceylon to Rawalpindi. A special India Market Madeira, of superior quality, paler than the famous English Market London Particular (a catchy name poached by Dickens to describe the kind of pea-souper fog only seen nowadays in Sherlock Holmes films), was evolved by British Madeira shippers to suit the Indian climate. On the whole, though, the heavier after-dinner Madeira such as Bual, inevitably christened ‘bull’ by the troops, was preferred to the more delicate wines. The loyal toast was drunk in bull and a potent cocktail of half and half gin and bull, with ice, was a popular tipple. Assisting the mess secretary to bottle the pipes of wine – 44 to 45 dozen bottles to a pipe – was even one of the traditional duties of junior subalterns stationed in India.

It was through the eighteenth-century trade in Madeira to the Indies, East and West, that stories about the wines going round the world, and returning to their island of origin worth twice as much as when they set out, first started circulating. Substantially

they were true. Although the original Madeira wines were straightforward unfortified table wines, and remained so until the mid-eighteenth century, they had proved unusually sturdy, retaining their equilibrium even in the cruel summers of India. Often they were found to have improved and mellowed after the long voyage through tropical waters. At a time when so many of the wines of Europe scarcely remained drinkable after a year or two of life, those of Madeira showed rare qualities. All the same, there were times when the wine turned sour. The shippers began to realise that it would be no bad thing if, as one of them put it, they were to add ‘a bucket or two of brandy’ to every pipe of wine. Two or three gallons per pipe was the quantity advised. It
was a method of preservation, to be applied only to those wines judged the most worthwhile. A first stage in the development of Madeira as we know it today had been reached.

The mellowing of wine during long months in vessels making voyages to the East and the West Indies was effected partly by the motion of the ships, partly by the heat engendered in the holds. Noël Cossart mentions that Pliny and later Cervantes both remarked upon the latter phenomenon. Apropos the beneficial effects of motion on the wine, Mr Cossart also relates the endearing story of Leonardo da Vinci pouring his wine into shallow pans, then playing the violin to it. The vibrations set up minute ripples in the wine and the resulting motion, though barely perceptible, was enough to cause an ageing effect. Was there anything that Leonardo didn’t find time to experiment with?

Once the Madeira vintners had grasped the reality of the improvement brought about in their wine by the fortification process, backed up by voyages to the Indies, East or West, a substantial commerce in
vinha da roda
, wine which had done the round voyage, was built up. A pipe of West Indian Madeira sold at Christie’s in October 1783 fetched £83 16s od as against a price of £40 at best for a pipe shipped direct from the island to London. By 1820 a Lot of Curious East India Madeira from the stock of John Grant, wine merchant, fetched £6 7s od per dozen bottles. At about the same time a Sercial direct from Madeira could be purchased for as little as 25 shillings per dozen.

The prices and the reputation of the East and West India Madeiras were certainly high, and at the period the wines were at the height of fashion in England, as in America, but the shippers had long since discovered that sending them on those long journeys was a very costly method of ageing them. Normal wasting alone accounted for a loss of five per cent. Pilfering could bring it up to fifteen per cent. Total shipwreck or partial loss of a consignment, due to necessity to lighten a ship’s cargo by throwing casks overboard, would also have been ever-present risks. Seizure by enemy or pirate ships was another. Why not devise some method of reproducing the conditions of the voyage through the tropics without ever sending the wine to sea?

The next move in the Madeira wine story came from an observant abbot who had understood that heat from the sun’s rays filtering through glass – he must have been a gardener as well as a vintner – would effectively warm the wine during the day and
that the sharp drop in night temperature normal in Madeira would counteract the risk of cumulative overheating. Having constructed a suitable glasshouse and moved his pipes of wine into it, he directed his monks to simulate movement by perching astride the casks and stirring their contents with wands cut from laurel saplings inserted through the bungs. The spectacle presented must have been a genial one. How the abbot’s system of solar heating in his
estufa
or hothouse persisted in Madeira for many decades, how it was eventually superseded by the use of the
armazen de calor
or hot stores warmed by hot water pipes to a maximum controlled temperature of 50 degrees centigrade, how the system is currently used only for the finest of Madeira’s wines, how lesser ones undergo the
estufa
process in vast concrete hot-vats or
cubas de calor
, are details explained in Mr Cossart’s admirably clear chapter on wine-making. At what stages, and how different wines are fortified, what are the many processes, from harvesting the grapes to resting the wine following the heating or
estufagem
, how it is racked or fined, are all points made amply clear. They add up to a memorable demonstration of the unique complexity of these wines.