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Autumn is the season: quinces (the golden apples of Greek myth)

Bizarre though it may seem, when you next order a slab of membrillo to partner your Manchego at a tapas joint you are actually tapping into an English culinary wellspring that dates back to Tudor times and before.

Quince paste, which we associate with the Spanish kitchen (there’s also a French version called cotignac) was once commonplace and highly prized. Even as late as 1845 Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery is offering us a recipe for quince blancmange with almond cream.

But the quince fell out of fashion compared with its kin, the apple and the pear. Not helped by any image problem. So many varieties were merely ornamental with fruit too small to make use of. There’s one such in our garden.

Nowadays this glorious seasonal fruit is definitely undergoing a foodie resurgence.

The best place to find them affordably is a Middle-Eastern grocers. My first batch of the autumn was bought from a little shop around the corner from Levenshulme Station in Manchester. A quid each for some magnificent specimens. Yellow and downy, their scent permeated the train carriage on the way home.

Quinces are believed to have been the ‘Golden Apples’ stole from the Hesperides in the Greek myth, sacred to Venus (they are a backdrop to Venus and Mars in a section of Mantegna’s Parnassus), but it won’t be love at first bite. So resist the temptation to bite into your prized fruit, which has been picked slightly unripe; raw, it will prove hard, almost gritty and raspingly sour.

You will have to make plans for them, all of which will involve stewing of some kind or baking with sugar or honey. As it cooks it turns from yellow to a “cornelian pink’. A little will go a long way as in aromatically enhancing an apple crumble along with cloves and cinnamon, say. 

Moroccan tagines and any number of long simmered Persian lamb dishes will welcome the sweet/sour vigour a quince contributes (make sure you core and de-pip them thoroughly, though). Below is a dish I made with part of my haul – chicken with caramelised quinces from the great Claudia Roden’s Arabesque.

If this sounds on the exotic side let’s trace back to quince as the quintessentially English fruit via a historical cookbook I treasure – Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book. Published in 1986, it was a side project and obvious labour of love for Hilary Spurling, biographer of Matisse and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Her husband, the playwright John Spurling inherited the original handwritten book, inscribed ‘Lady Elinor Fettiplace, 1604’. 

From this stout tome, bound in leather and stamped in gold with endpapers made from scraps of medieval Latin manuscript, Hilary extracted 200 recipes that reflect the month by month workings of the kitchen at the Fettiplace home, Appleton Manor in Oxfordshire.

Elinor calls her quince paste quince marmalade but don’t let that fool you. The word derives from Portuguese marmelada, meaning ‘quince cheese’ or ‘quince jam’). The Seville orange version was the eventual breakfast table usurper. 

Boxes of quince marmalade had been the medieval wedding present of choice and, according to Hilary, “they remained a luxury gift for anyone from royalty downwards until well into the 17th century”. They commonly came in brick shapes – shades of membrillo.

So what is Mistress Fettiplace’s timeless recipe for membrillo? It is one of 15 she provides for this fruit, twice as much as for any other. 

Take your quinces and rost them, then take the best of the meat of them & way to every pound of it, a pound of sugar & beat it together in a mortar, & boyle it till it be so thick that it com from the posnet, then mould it & print it, & dry it before the fire.

Hilary Spurling interprets it (I’m paraphrasing) as first wipe the quinces with a cloth but don’t peel. Bake them, preferably in an earthenware pot for an hour or two until they are soft but not collapsed. Cool, cut up and core. Sieve the pulp and mix with an equal weight of white sugar. A posnet is a three-footed metal cooking pot; any thick-bottomed pan will do instead. Bring slowly to boil, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Gently cook for a further hour or two until the mixture begins to candy and leave the pan sides. Ladle it out into patterned moulds or in a half inch layer on a flat oiled tin. Dry in a warm place until the paste is firm. Wrap in greaseproof paper for storage.

Serve with Cheddar or Stilton since we have reclaimed quince paste for England. Better still a Rachel (goat) or Berkswell (sheep) unpasteurised farmhouse cheese.

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How the Rocket Man created a launchpad for my edible snail trail

Serendipity brings on a random snail trail. Flicking through the index of Brown and Mason’s magnum opus, The Taste of Britain, to clarify my thoughts on Kentish cobnuts – for the first of my ‘Autumn Is The Season’ vignettes – I encountered the Mendip Wallfish and was immediately intrigued.

Since when my mind has been roaming those Somerset hills from the days when the Romans mined for lead there and introduced edible snails to our land… to the 1960s, when a maverick rocket engineer put those Mendip molluscs on the menu of his pioneering microbrewery pub… to the current small scale renaissance in snail farming. Well, high in protein, low in fat, it is the ultimate Slow Food.

The picture above is of the last platter of snails I downed, in those peripatetic, pre-pandemic times. Escargots au beurre d’ail are a fixture on the menu of Le P’tit Castel in the hilltop Jura fastness of Chateau-Chalon, one of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France.

The escargots were beauts too, six chewy little buggers in garlic-flecked froth, equal to the ones I was served (with Pernod in the garlic butter naturellement) at Soho’s venerable L’Escargot, below, which also has a feuilleté of snails and morels on the menu. The Jura view was magnificent too. Burgundy, heartland of the dish, was a distant blue blur across Bresse’s vine-clad plain.

Location, location. I’m not sure The Miners Arms, Priddy, in the Sixties before they really became The Sixties, could offer the same je ne sais quoi at a crossroads in uplands scarred by past lead extraction. New owner Paul Leyton’s own homage to the miners was his variation on the Cornish pasty, the Priddy Oggie, containing pork, bacon and cheese. More challenging was his reintroduction of the mysterious Mendip Wallfish, a native snail dish that substituted cider and mixed herbs for garlic butter.

Why wallfish? It probably relates to snails’ ability to cling to walls, but the ‘fish’ part might be a way of transgressing the Catholic church’s prohibition of meat eating on Fridays.

That edict would definitely rule out dormice but the Romans’ relish for farmed, corn-fed rodents doesn’t appear to have transferred to Britain when they conquered it. Snails certainly did make the leap (sic) – notably the large Roman snail (helix pomatia), still popular in France and Italy. Below, is my colleague Joby Catto’s image of snails and citrus in Catania Market, Sicily. Giant African land snails are a whole different kettle of wallfish, of which more later.

C.Ann Wilson’s wonderfully scholarly Food and Drink in Britain (1973) charts Roman snail farming: “Snails had to be kept on land surrounded entirely by water, to prevent them wandering way and disappearing. They were fed on milk or wine-must and spelt, and were put into jars containing air holes for the final plumping up. When they were so much fattened that they could no longer get back into their shells, they were fried in oil and served with oenogarum (liquamen mixed with wine).

By medieval times snails had long been an essential foodstuff and remained so for the Somerset miners well into the 19th century. The resurgence of Mendip Wallfish 100 years on was all down to the restless mind of Leeds-born Leyton, who had forsaken an engineering career, as chief developer for Britain’s first rocket programme in the Fifties and  then a director of Black and Decker. With no catering background, he took a major gamble with the Miners Arms. One that paid off, receiving acclaim from Egon Ronay and The Good Food Guide. 

By 1973 when the pub had incorporated England’s smallest brewery, it was regularly attracting what we now call celebs. Did we then? The roll call included Delia Smith, Terry Wogan, Kate Adie, Malcolm MacDowell, Anthony Hopkins. How many ordered the wallfish, I wonder? Maybe Delia pronging into the shells with a cry of ‘let’s be havin’ you, molluscs’?

Leyton’s obituary in 2011 recounts that his “engineering background still shone through in the world of catering: first, with the design of an electric fence to keep up to 100,000 snails at a time in a disused swimming pool; and then, with the introduction of the freezing of prepared snails and other complete dishes. This led to considerable debate in gastronomic circles at a time when freezing was only considered suitable for basic ingredients.”

A tiny clip on British Movietone shows the ingenious Leyton stuffing snails with a device of his own invention. Plus there’s a period Pathe News report, with a wonderful Cholmondley-Warner style commentary, on his snail project, available via YouTube. 

The Miner’s Arms is no more. After selling 4,000 snails a year at its apogee the restaurant closed down in 2006. This recipe for the common brown garden snail, from Bob Reynolds who cooked at the Miners Arms, contains the key caveat: ensure you purify them thoroughly before cooking. Buy them ready prepared if you are squeamish.

Snails Priddy style

Collect snails, put into a container in which they can be kept moist and can breathe. Feed them on bran or lettuce or cabbage leaves for seven to 10 days. This cleanses them. Put in a sieve and dunk them in boiling water for a few seconds to kill them. Take the snails from the shells with a small fork, wash them off and then cook. To cook about a 100 you need a pint of water, ¾ pint of cider, a large carrot and an onion cut into pieces. Make sure the snails are covered in liquid. Bring to the boil and simmer until tender for about an hour – it may take a little longer. Rinse in hot water to clean off the bits of vegetables.

Meanwhile put the empty shells in a saucepan with salt and water and bring to the boil. After a few minutes rinse in cold water. Repeat to make sure the shells are clean. Dry the shells in the oven.

After which you will need a pound of butter for 100 snails. Then grind together herbs, fresh or dry – ½tsp of each of chervil, dill, fennel seed, basil and sage; 1tsp chives, 3tsp parsley and a pinch of cayenne pepper – and mix well into the butter.

Take a snail shell, put a little bit of the herb butter into it, then a snail and seal off the shell with more herb butter. Then put the snails on a tray and put into a hot oven. When the butter bubbles they are ready to eat. Serve with cubes of bread to mop up the herb butter. Enjoy.

Lyn Paxman of Somerset Escargots brings a new entrepreneurial spirit to snail farming

So where can you buy the best snails in the land?

An hour’s drive away from Priddy a serious renaissance in Somerset snail farming is under way at Somerset Escargot, founded in 2019. On a farm complete with electric fences, salt traps and herding pens Lyn ‘Queen of Snails’ Paxman and her partner specialise in petit gris, picked and prepare to order. The fresh escargot is then supplied cleansed and hibernated, which means they are the freshest possible when they are cooked. They cost £25 per 500g bag plus £4.90 delivery.  

Other UK snail operators include Dorset Snails, who supply Gordon Ramsay restaurants and L’Escargots Anglais at Credenhill in Herefordsshire, whose Helix pomatia are the base for Heston Blumenthal’s modern classic, Snail Porridge (see below). H & RH Escargots of Canterbury have long been the UK’s premier supplier of live snails. Ready-to-cook, they are delivered to you in cardboard boxes, with a plastic mesh so they can’t eat their way out!

You’ve got your snails. What else can you do with them in the kitchen?

Snail Broth

Marwood Yeatman is an eccentric national treasure. From his base in an old Hampshire pub in 2007 this private chef produced his magnum opus, The Last Food of England (Ebury Press), which is at its best when unashamedly nostalgic. He recounts how he was lent an old book of recipes by Roald Dahl’s wife Liccy that belonged to her mother’s family, the Throckmortons, Warwickshire confederates of Guy Fawkes. How to pot an otter and viper soup feature, but there’s also a recipe for Snail Broth, which sounds on the medicinal side.

Having slit and cleaned the slime off 50 or so… “Have ready a chicken cut in pieces with a little bugloss, agrimony and the leaves of endives, and so boil them in the broth. When the chicken is half boyld, put in the snails being clean wiped, so let them boil until all the strength is boiled out. When the broth is ready to take off put in either a little mace or rosemary, which her pleaseth the taste. Drink this a fortnight.”

Snail Porridge

If the above is too demanding of your foraging skills or spice cupboard, then you might fancy recreating this Heston Blumenthal special, which I’ve eaten a couple of times at The Fat Duck when I could (just about) afford it. The great man gives the recipe in an article he wrote for The Guardian nearly 20 year ago. The information on snail’s sex lives is eye-opening; so too is the amount of sweat and toil needed to prepare the dish, which is more like a vivid green oaten risotto. Good luck with it!

Dorset Snail with Bone Marrow and Toast

Dorset Snails continue a tradition of snail eggs or caviar that was on trend in the 1990s as gourmets sought an alternative to Beluga. They even featured in the title of a book, Snail Eggs & Samphire – by the best food journalist of the time, Derek Cooper. In it he recalls attending an outdoor ‘cargolade’ in Perpignan where 1,000 Helix pomatia (the wrinkled Roman Snail) are grilled in pork fat over intense heat. There’s  a separate chapter on the lucrative rarity value of the eggs, described by Cooper as like “pinky-beige, opalescent pearls”. Blumenthal compares the look to tapioca. Neither are fans. I’m a fan, though of the bone marrow treatment for snails, in Dorset’s recipe section. I have a stash of bone marrow; now I just need the molluscs.

Paella a la Valenciana

If your idea of paella is the seafood-led dish found all around the Spanish Costas, think again. In the Valencia region, spiritual home of the saffron-infused rice dish, traditional ingredients, especially inland, include rabbit and snails, the whole dish best cooked outdoors in one of those vast, flat-bottomed specialist pans. Claudia Roden, in her magisterial over-view, The Food of Spain (Michael Joseph, £25), quotes a Spanish expert on how the snails bring a taste of the rosemary they feed on. Every recipe in the book is tempting, the research exemplary.  The book is an essential Hispanophile purchase, even if you’re not pursuing edible snails.

 Pomegranate glazed African land snails

The most exotic snail dish I’ve come across is on our doorstep; well, Brixton Village’s. The acclaimed blogger Miss South included it in her celebration of the global diversity of food and folk in this South London market hall. I’ve visited; it’s a vibrant place, inevitable gentrification slowly creating a different vibe. The various traders and cafe owners contribute their favourite specialities to Recipes from Brixton Village (Kitchen Press, £15.99) with appropriate stockists. In this case the recipe is inspired by Viva Afro-Caribbean Food Store on 3rd Avenue, who provide the land snails (especially revered in Nigeria), with the pomegranate molasses for the glaze coming from Nour Cash and Carry on neighbouring Market Row. The author notes the shell alone of this particular snail can grow up to 20cm long, so it can be a challenge to open them. Next you scrub them clean with alum provided by the store. Hardcore food prep even before you start cooking in chicken stock with various spices. Not for the sluggish.

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Modern British Beer – through a glass brightly with Matthew Curtis

This is an epic pioneering tale of brave new frontiers versus folk settled in their ways. Of an award-winning beer named after a 2,000 mile trek in search of a new life… or its champion’s own 200 mile switch from Crouch End to Levenshulme and a kind of ale apotheosis.

The day I met beer writer and South Manc ‘incomer’ Matthew Curtis to discuss his new book, Modern British Beer (note the absence of the word Craft), Elusive Brewing’s Oregon Trail West Coast IPA had just been judged country winner in its category at the World Beer Awards and would represent the UK in the world finals. Cue much whooping it up in wild Wokingham, where this modest but progressive brewery is based.

Oregon Trail West Coast IPA uses Chinook, Simcoe and Columbus hops for “a resinous profile with a citrus undertone, the bitterness helping to balance the light caramel flavours of the malts,” according to Elusive. 

Curtis in his book is more hopstruck, and rightly so. “For me this style (West Coast) is all about using malted barley to construct a pillar of caramel sweetness, which is then adorned from plinth to pedestal with the most bitter, resinous and aromatic hops you can find.”

All at a quite reasonable 5.8% ABV, compared with the Elevator IPA at 6.5 I encountered at the Oregon City Brewery once upon a day. I still can’t work out why I was visiting the trailhead of the original 2,000 mile Oregon Trail that brought the settlers’ wagons west from Missouri. Yet the beers I tasted there, far from the hip urban centres, were a further confirmation that the land of Bud and Miller Lite offered a remarkable alternative – one that would be cloned elsewhere. 

The Elevator washed down a helping of Reuben dogs that could easily be on the menu at many of our own brew taps. Let’s call it all the transatlantic symbiosis of hopheads. In Washington State’s Yakima Valley I visited both a hop farm that supplies our own BlackDog and the rather fusty American Hop Museum (exhibit next to Oregon Trail can, above).

New wave UK beer writers such as Mark Dredge have codified the global beer styles that have been clarified/reinvented across America and then taken up over here. Matthew Curtis goes a step further and charts the creative melting pot of our own mash tuns and barrel ageing projects. Modern British Beer proves we are not just brewing lackeys; our own cask ale traditions remain the envy of the world, our own innovations the equal of anywhere. 

The seeds of his own own beer writing career were actually sown in the States, in 2010. “My Dad had just emigrated to Fort Collins in Colorado, which is home to an incredible bunch of breweries”, he recalls. “The Odell Brewing Co IPA just blew me away, after which I became obsessed with researching beer.” A blog followed in 2012 and he went full-time freelance in 2016.

Sign of changing times, Modern British Beer is published by CAMRA Books (£15.99pb). This new open door policy may rankle with the diehard stalwarts for whom cask beer is the only choice on the bar, but the brews they are ‘a changin’. The sheer quality of a new generation’s beers, cask, keykeg or keg, cannot be ignored.

So Curtis, region by region, picks an exemplary beer from brewers he deems ‘modern’ according to a manifesto in the front of the book. Some 90 breweries in all feature. Omitted are influential traditionalists such as Harveys and Timothy Taylor, only because they are not ‘modern’. In his opening chapter Curtis dubs the whole contemporary beer scene ‘The Broad Spectrum of Joy’, incidentally the name of his celebratory beer collab with Sussex’s Burning Sky, another brewery fave we share.

We met at Manchester’s own Small Chalet of Joy, Sadler’s Cat, formerly artisan-crafted The Pilcrow, perfect excuse for missing trains from nearby Victoria Station. Now under the aegis of Cloudwater Brewery, it is serving as a guest Track Sonoma on handpull, the stuff of long lockdown dreams. I can’t resist just the three as I quiz Curtis specifically on what makes the Manchester beer scene so enticing he had to relocate last November.

Cloudwater’s Double Hopfenweisse, for a start. How could you not live in a city, which can yoke a German wheat beer style with a modern double IPA? Groundbreaking in  different way is Cloudwater providing a platform for black and LGBTQ+ owned beer brands such as Eko Brewing, Rock Leopard and Queer Brewing via collab IPAs getting a national profile on the shelves of Tesco. Woke, of course, but the beer scene has moved on, hence the need for MBB as well as The Good Beer Guide.

Curtis has been living up here for the past 10 months. “It was a fresh start in a new city, Levenshulme felt like Stoke Newington 10 years ago and the beer scene was a huge draw.” It wasn’t the best time to relocate, he admits, but he has no regrets. His partner Dianne had been the driving force and he eventually acquiesced. As a freelance (check out the online magazine he co-edits, Pellicle) he could work from anywhere – and when they arrived she found a job, appropriately enough, as Cloudwater’s Unit 9 tap room manager. 

Manchester wasn’t new territory for Curtis. IndieManBeerCon, Friends & Family & Beer, CAMRA’s Manchester Beer and Cider Festival, Marble, Manchester Beer Week, had all been ‘magnets for Matt’. 

“Every week in Manchester is Beer Week,” he told me. “IndyMan was the blueprint for all modern beer festivals and I’m fascinated by Beer Nouveau recreating old beer styles. The city has a bit of everything, too. Classic old family breweries such as Lees, Hydes and Holts; incredible traditional pubs such as the Peveril of The Peak, City Arms and the Marble Arch.” 

His own local in Levenshulme is Station Hop, one of the bevy of craft beer bars that have sprung up in the past decade. Witness their shortlist dominance in the pub/beer bar category of this year’s Manchester Food and Drink Awards – the likes of Heaton Hops, Beatnikz Republic NQ bar, Reasons to Be Cheerful and Nordie (another Levy watering hole for Curtis).

If it had re-opened earlier, Sadler’s Cat would surely have been a candidate. The refurb has been a real refresher. It gets its name from the cat that accompanied pioneering 19th century balloonist James on his ascent and is curled away in Sadler’s Yard, off Corporation Street. 

Graeme Brown of Curators of Craft offers a compendium of ‘modern beers’ online

Of course, a major beneficiary of lockdown home drinking has been canning. Home delivery has allowed beer geeks licence (sic) to explore febrile, far-flung corners of the beer scene. With a huge turnover of one-off brews or seasonal specials it is exhausting, thirsty work. In my quest to locate specific beers spotlighted in Modern British Beer I checked out Curators of Craft, which mails out British and Belgian beer nationwide from its Calder Valley base. My order, as a local, came via electric bike. 

Graeme Brown set up the business in November 2019 and has stock from over 60 breweries, including stellar names recommended in the the Curtis book. But of the individual examples representing each brewery only one could I find. Yes, you guessed it, Oregon Trail didn’t prove elusive. And it’s a beer I’d settle for any day.

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Anchovy is of the essence – Garum, Colatura d’alici and Nam Pla

I noticed recently Mana was advertising for a ‘Chef of Fermentation’. That’s quite a specific job title in a hospitality marketplace that’s struggling to find sous chefs and KPs. But when you’re on a mission to net that second Michelin star it’s best to stay true to your culinary direction and gut feelings (sic). 

Garum will certainly be on the kitchen to-do list for the new recruit. It entered the conversation early on in my first visit to the Ancoats Manchester game-changer. I’d already been impressed by dishes such as smoked yakitori eel, glazed with roasted yeast and blueberry vinegar, and Dungeness crab baked in hay celeriac and masa.

Underneath that shell the oyster dish that leant on chicken garum

Chef patron Simon Martin had talked us through both. Next up was a raw oyster tucked taco style into a cabbage leaf with fudge miso, chicken fat, English wasabi, pine salt and chicken garum. In mid-explanation he was surprised by my knowledge of garum’s back story – the fermented fish sauce used as a condiment in the cuisines of Ancient Greece and Rome, not a million miles away from Thai fish sauce Nom Pla..

Simon had adapted garum to incorporate chicken. At his culinary alma mater, Rene Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen, they offer a whole palette of garums. Look at this beauty: rose and shrimp garum with a suitably rose-tinted description of what is essentially a whack of umami-rich funk. 

Rose shrimp garum symbolises Noma’s innovative take on ancient traditions

“We take shrimps, water and salt, with fresh roses and blend it. It is naturally fermented by the enzymes inside the shrimps. During the foraging season last year, the fresh roses were added and they have been fermenting together ever since. The garum is quite intense by itself but the roses bring balance to it with its floral notes and sweetness.”

There’s a whole chapter on garum in The Norma Guide To Fermentation (Artisan, £30) by Redzepi and David Zibler, the man he entrusted to run the restaurant’s Fermentation Lab. Another member of the team convinced them to diverge from fish as the base. Hence, chicken, bee pollen and grasshoppers. All made is temperature controlled cylinders, leaving nothing to chance in this stinkiest of production processes.

That would probably be heresy to John Niland, chef owner of St Peter in Sydney, Australia. His ethos, laid out in his cookbook/manifesto, The Whole Fish, is to use all of the creature. Like Nose to Tail meat cooking, the object is not to waste the 60 per cent or so of  a round fish that is routinely discarded in a western restaurant. Again one of the team (so democratic this new wave in the kitchen) came up with a sustainable garum.

“To produce the garum, start by adding 50 per cent of water to the total amount of heads, bones and scraps you have from small fish, such as sardine, mackerel, anchovies or trevally, then to this total quantity add 20 per cent of fine salt. Mix together, transfer to a mason (kilner) jar, seal and place in a circulator bath set to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Leave for seven days in the dark, stirring once daily. Make sure that the gall bladder is removed as it will make the finished sauce extremely bitter. This recipe is versatile and can be adapted to produce scallop, prawn (shrimp) or cuttlefish garums.”

In Niland’s follow-up book, Take One Fish: The new school of scale-to-tail eating (Hardie Grant, £26, to be published August 5) he goes one challenging step further with a recipe for custard tart, made with a sardine garum caramel made using the head, bones and scraps of sardines.

Imperial Rome was an enthusiastic consumer of garum (or liquamen)

Leaving aside today’s state of the art equipment, it is a method the Ancients would have recognised. Garum was a fermented fish sauce used as a condiment in the cuisines of ancient Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. Liquamen was a similar preparation, and at times the two were synonymous. It enjoyed its greatest popularity in the Roman world.

Pliny the Elder derives the Latin word garum from the Greek γαρός (garos), maybe a type of fish, and states that it was crafted e from fish intestines, with salt, creating a liquor, the garum, and a sediment named (h)allec or allex. A concentrated garum evaporated down to a thick paste with salt crystals was called muria – packed with protein, amino acids, minerals and B vitamins, so not far off today’s soy sauce.

After the liquid was ladled off of the top of the mixture, the remains of the fish, called allec, was used by the poorest classes to flavour their farinata or porridge. 

The finished product—the nobile garum of Martial’s epigram—was apparently mild and subtle in flavor. The best garum fetched extraordinarily high prices, and salt could be substituted for a simpler dish. Garum appears in many recipes featured in the Roman cookbook Apicius. For example, Apicius (8.6.2–3) gives a recipe for lamb stew, calling for the meat to be cooked with onion and coriander, pepper, lovage, cumin, liquamen, oil, and wine, then thickened with flour.

The traditional way of creating Colatura d’alici from salt and anchovies

And so to Colatura d’alici. I hastened to purchase a vial of this intense stuff (it translates fetchingly as anchovy drippings) after one of my favourite chefs, Jeremy Lee of Soho’s legendary Quo Vadis recommended it in Observer Food Monthly.

He  wrote: “Alici is the essence of anchovy and it’s a very precious condiment. It comes in a very small bottle, like a bottle of perfume. It’s not cheap, but it’s relatively easy to get, and a little goes a long way. It’s never gone off – well, not that it lasts long enough to find out. I get it from Andy Harris at the Vinegar Shed (£26.50) and use it sparingly. It’s an elegant variation on using Worcestershire sauce in something, but it’s not so overwhelming. There’s a softness to it that’s amazing, it adds a roundness. You just need a few drops.

“It’s extraordinary in braised lamb and hogget dishes – lamb and anchovy is such a fabulous combination. Pork too. I add the alici to porchetta tonnato as a final flourish, much as you would add a squeeze of lemon juice. I find the combination of alici and lemon juice incredible in all sorts of dishes. It’s an extraordinary ingredient and one I cherish.”

Colatura d’alici works well as a simple dressing for spaghetti

Like traditionally made Southeast Asian-style fish sauce, but with a much longer ageing process, colatura is concocted with just anchovies and sea salt. For colatura anchovy fillets and salt are layered in wooden barrels (chestnut is good) and then set them aside in a temperature-controlled environment to ferment for up to three years. The liquid exuded ages into colatura, which is surprisingly unfishy. Still a health warning – this is mega pungent. But worth it.

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Yucatán is going to be my ultimate foodie hideaway. Read all about it!

Yucatán or Oaxaca? Oaxaca or Yucatán? It’s a heavyweight contest. Celebrations of particular cuisines don’t come more comprehensive – and gloriously well illustrated – than two monumental, magisterial love letters to regional Mexico by David Sterling and Diana Kennedy.

Sterling’s Yucatán: Recipes From A Culinary Expedition and Kennedy’s Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy together weigh in at over 5kg. Both are published by the University of Texas, from a state that likes to think big. They’re beautiful too and immaculately researched.

Essex-born Diana, based in Mexico since 1957, is the doyenne of writers on Mexican cuisine. Even the Mexican government recognise her championing of their culinary traditions, often sadly debased – they gave her their highest honour for a foreigner, The Order of the Aztec Eagle. Oaxaca, her magnum opus, won Cookbook of the Year in the 2011 James Beard Awards. Similar US top table recognition for Yucatán arrived four years later; within a year its author was dead at the age of 65. 

Originally from Oklahoma, Dvid Sterling had a mega career as a designer before his chef talents saw him found, in the heart of the Yucatán, Mérida’s Los Dos – lauded as one of the world’s top 10 cookery school. That designer’ visual sense permeates a book that, like Kennedy’s, is the result of a lifetime’s intense research. Both could be seen as coffee table books but are so much more. I bought hers first and then found the courage to stump up the £48 for his.

This tortilla press has been a passport to a whole new world of tacos, burritos and enchiladas

The books became my lockdown lifeline. I dream one day of flying into Mérida, gateway to the beaches of Cancun and Turum but also a portal to visit the ruins that evoke the Mayan civilisation that flourished hereabouts. Or will Oaxaca 800 miles to the South West live up to DH Lawrence’s prose in Mornings in Mexico and the musings of Anthony Bourdain in Netflix’s Parts Unknown, where he encountered classic Zapotec (ie pre-Hispanic) cooking?

Pandemic restrictions gave me time and space to foster an interest in the regional cuisines of Mexico, as varied a those of Italy, say. It has resulted in a wooden box hosting 20 different types of dried chillies, a spice cupboard boasting epazote, Mexican oregano and achiote, a giant chaya plant prospering in a garden tub and a bright red tortilla press with bags of blue corn masa at the ready. Yes, I am also a devotee of Netflix’s Tacos Chronicles.

The watershed moment? The documentary Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy (available to rent on Amazon Prime for £3.49) tracks the now 98-year-old expat to her lair deep in the Mexican forests. This fiery, formidable cookery writer is the foremost champion of authentic Mexican cuisine and Elizabeth Carroll’s inspiring warts and all profile does her proud.

For over 50 years she has travelled the length and breadth of the country. The resulting books are light on illustration and design; the best the travelogue My Mexico: A Culinary Odyssey with Recipes. All that low key presentation is rectified by Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy.

Let’s be honest. Its sheer authenticity makes it hard to replicate dishes. There’s little chance I’ll be rustling up an iguana in a black mole sauce any time soon. For the uninitiated a mole is a rich chilli sauce with chocolate and nuts, not a wee underground critter.

Techniques cited too are equally intimidating. Her recipe for mole negro oaxaqueño calls not only for a specific type of clay pot (“it has to have a round base and a ‘collar’ around the top to hold in the heat”), but also for this pot to be cooked on a charcoal brazier. All this and I’m still trying to source an iguana (ready skinned).

Food preparation is labour-intensive in both Yucatán and Oaxaca

Kennedy’s ringing endorsement is on the dust jacket of Sterling’s Yucatán: “I know of no other book in print today, or in the past for that matter, that explains so meticulously the ingredients and history of the foods of Yucatán.” 

She herself had not given her full attention to this tropical peninsula, isolated from the rest of Mexico. Sterling makes up for it big time, exploring the three states it comprises – Yucatán, Campeche and Quintana Roo. The food is a melting pot of many traditions, Mayan, Spanish, Lebanese, French and more, all fuelled by remarkable abundance of raw produce. All these are catalogued in full colour at the start of Yucatán.

Chapters divide the book by geography — the market, the urban matrix, the fertile shores, the pueblos, as well as sections devoted to “pantry staples” and “kitchen technique.” 

At the heart of Yucatecán cuisine are the spice mixes called recardos, some powdered, some in paste  form, which you’ll find heaped up in every market. There’s no shame in using these essentially home-made bases for every recipe. Alas here you’ll have to make your own. Or travel to Yucatán. It’s on my post-pandemic bucket list.

It just pips Oaxaca because of a contemporary culinary cuckoo. In ultra-hip Tulum, south of suntan city Cancun, is Hartwood, New York exiles Eric Werner and Mia Henry’s restaurant between the jungle and the sea. Each provides the freshest wild ingredients to be transformed by the wood-burning oven that dominates the outdoor kitchen (I expect I’d pack insect repellent before visiting).

The food served at Hartwood is “addictive,” says Noma chef Rene Redzepi, adding, “It’s the reason people line up for hours every single day to eat there, even though their vacation time is precious.”

How do I know about it? I read the cookbook, of course,

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