Instructions
I get a lot of email. Most of it’s important, and many of them are from viewers and readers looking for advice or recipes. That said, I have a message for Slava from Romania – I really don’t need to know how to lengthen any part of my body by four inches, regardless of how many times you may suggest otherwise.
At the moment, as Spring’s bounty begins to weigh heavily on the branches of many suburban backyards, the most common request I’m getting in email is for ways in which to preserve the flavours of the season, so that we can enjoy them when the world turns cold once more, as it inevitably does. It seems that a communal sense of thrift and old-worldliness has crept in unnoticed.
It’s the ancient art of preserving, one of my greatest passions. In essence, folks just want to know how to stop the onward march of time. Simple, eh?
To capture the tastes of a season we traditionally look to the jams, pickles and chutneys for our preserving techniques, and with good reason. They’re effective, delicious and easy to prepare. But your choices are actually more widespread, and sometimes more rewarding.
Take fruit jellies as an example. They’re a simple idea – stabilise the perfect flavour of seasonal offering into a soft jellied mould, then cut it into pieces and coat each in sugar to create the most intense, sweet and more-ish encapsulation of the parent fruit tat you can imagine. It’s kind of like the fruit pastilles you may have had when you were in short pants and a school hat, but it’s a little more grown up than that.
‘Pate de fruits’, as the French call them, is not a lolly for kids, but in fact an elegant and sophisticated petits four that defines the skill of a true pastry chef or confiseur. The supple and yielding, yet intense and beguiling….actually hold on., that’s starting to sound like an ad for a chick flick!!!
The simple fact is this. Once you’ve learned the recipe for one flavour, you’ve learned the recipe for all of them. Regardless of what is in your shops or blossoming in your yard, you can prepare homemade sweets that will thrill your friends and family while celebrating your cunning as a cook!
Strawberry fruit jellies