How memorable the morning I came away from Manchester Art Gallery clutching a packet of sea kale seeds from the gallery shop. I also carried with me newly purchased copies of Derek Jarman’s Garden and the polymath artist’s Modern Nature, the first an illustrated memoir of how he created his unique garden in the challenging terrain of Dungeness, Kent, the second his journals from January 1989 onwards, meshing his horticultural project inexorably with the AIDS-related complications that would eventually claim his life eight years later.

Derek Jarman Protest! is a remarkable retrospective of a multifarious creative career, on until April 10 2022 (free but you must book a slot). Alongside, from January 30, the 80th anniversary of his birth, all 11 of his feature films and a further 11 shorts will be shown as part of the collaborative Derek Jarman at HOME season at the city’s First Street arts venue.

 The whole package is the first time in 20 years the diverse strands of Jarman’s practice – as painter, writer, avant-garde filmmaker, set-designer, gardener, pop video innovator, gay rights champion, political activist – have been brought together. In truth, I’ve never hugely warmed to his cinematic output, even with the luminous presence of Tilda Swinton (pictured below in Caravaggio, my favourite because I love the artist) alongside a still from challenging final work Blue.

In contrast Jarman’s late return to painting, inspired by the jewels inside a seemingly barren landscape and in response to the emotional aridity of the Thatcher years, is sublime. So too his set designs. His writings will also last as a poignant record of what it was like to be a homosexual in times of persecution and plague. And then there is that garden… 

At the exhibition, to get to the apparent serenity of of a huge wall portraying a bucolic Prospect Cottage – albeit against its backdrop of Dungeness Nuclear Power Station – you have to pass through the most politicised aspects of Protest!. 

Here’ll you’ll find dark, deathly ‘Assemblages’ such as ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Lunch’, where the cutlery is stained with blood and scratched into the surface are the words ‘GBH promises, promises, promises, The Affluent Society’. Interpretations of the cryptic GBH include  ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’ or ‘Great British Horror’.

At first this artistic agit-prop and his residual gregariousness (he was crowned drag-tastic Alternative Miss World in 1975 for his Miss Crepe Suzette) seem at odds with the fisherman’s hut he retreated to, shortly after being diagnosed HIV positive in 1987. Yet around the distinctive black dwelling with its yellow window frames and John Donne’s great poem The Sun Rising emblazoned on an outside wall, he created a rustic work of art in its own right that has become a place of pilgrimage. When we visited a decade ago the great garden was still profuse but in 2018 when Jarman’s companion HB died all was placed in jeopardy.  

Thankfully, Prospect House was rescued for posterity by fund-raising £3.5m. We pray its current custodians, Creative Folkestone, can restore the garden to its to its glory – an unfenced riot of flotsam and jetsam, driftwood and flints, Japanese-like pebble patterns and the hardiest of plants. Jarman hated lawns and over-manicured habitats. So do I.

Sea kale – nature’s work of art I hope to cook and eat

Generally rare, Crambe maritima (cabbage of the sea) flourishes on the Ness as nowhere else in England and it was one of the plants that survived best on the saline shingle surrounding the blackened clapboard of his Prospect Cottage. 

In the Manchester Art Gallery shop there is a selection of nine seed packets for sale, each £2.75, ‘carefully hand-packed by Thomas Etty Esq’ , a Kent-based heritage seed supplier. Populating your own garden with the likes of sea campion, rock samphire, sea carrot and wood sage is the plan but I feel they may not necessarily thrive in my part of the world. And I’m never letting the invasive viper’s bugloss anywhere near my flower patch, however pretty.

Still as a tribute to Jarman I shall plant the sea kale seeds in my loamy Yorkshire raised beds this March. It will take patience as, after thinning the rows, you must allow a further year for them to acclimatise. Even then you must blanch by covering with a bucket.

One concern I will be spared is raised early in Derek Jarman’s Garden. “Crambe maritima are edible, but a radiologist told me that they accumulate radioactivity from the nuclear power station more than any other plant.” It’s just the slugs I’ve got to worry about. Or maybe not. According to Jarman with roots 20ft long, tough enough to resist caterpillars and snails, a sea kale plant can live up to half a century.

The symbolic importance to Jarman of ‘sage green’ sea kale is evident when it is the first plant name-checked in Modern Nature, but this rhapsodic Garden entry captures it best: “It is the Ness’s most distinguished plant… they come up between the boats. 

“They die away completely in winter, just a bud on the corky stem. In March they start to sprout – the first sign of spring. The leaves are an inky purple, which looks fine in the ochre pink pebbles, but they rapidly lose the purple and become a glaucous blue-green. 

“Then buds appear; by May these turn into sprays of white flower with little yellow centres – they have a heavy, honey scent which blows across the Ness. The flowers then turn into seeds – which look like a thousand peas. They lose their green and become the colour of bone. At this stage they are at their most beautiful – sprays of pale ochre, several thousand seeds on each plant. The autumn winds return, the leaves rot at the base, dry out and blow away; by November the Crambe has completely disappeared.” Until the next year.

Let me confess: I have little aptitude for beachcombing/foraging. If I go off, I first consult the essential Edible Seashore by John Wright (£14.99), fifth in the River Cottage Handbook series. This warns you off picking more than a few leaves from a sea kale plant in SSSIs (Sites of Specific Scientific Interest). Which is no hardship when you consider they can grow up to two metres in diameter.

What deters me in my quest to cultivate and cook it comes in Edible Seashore “How to cook” section: While it is possible to eat a mature cooked sea kale leaf, it may require a day or two to accomplish the task. It has the flavour and texture of a damp thick face flannel. As the Victorian horticulturalist, Charles McIntosh lamented, this kale cannot be too much boiled.”

They recommend picking when the leaves are purple and tiny. On the bitter side at this stage, it’s best to blanch. Better still try the young flower spikes, which taste like broccoli. Or you can dig up and steam the shoots (though this is counter-productive to having a crop next year!) The taste is said to resemble asparagus.

For an exotic recipe check out this combo on the Great British Chefs website – steamed Scottish sea kale and white sprouting broccoli with crab, smoked cod roe and seaweed. Find sea kale on the menu at any restaurant and it will be cultivated stuff not wild because of the picking restrictions. I know an asparagus farm in Scotland that sells a limited amount of Crambe wholesale and the irrepressible Raymond Blanc grows it in his walled garden at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, putting it on the menu in season, serving it like asparagus. Edinburgh chef Tom Kitchin has created a sea kale and blood orange salad.

Did Jarman himself ever eat sea kale? In Modern Nature he writes about gathering elderflower, frying it in batter and sprinkling it with sugar for supper, but food never seems a priority  

Those journals, which began with ecstatic lists of plants, end in a litany of the drugs that keep him alive. As he gradually loses his sight and his body shrinks he spends more time in hospital than at Dungeness, but a companion to the end at Prospect Cottage is sea kale.

February 10: “Replanted a row of sea kale in the back garden, my first gardening this year.

Then settled down to put the voice-over for the film (Blue, his last) in order. In the afternoon I walked to the sea and found the storms had washed away the shingle, exposing the sea kale. I gathered several very large specimens and replanted them in the front garden.”

May 6: “A week has passed without a cloud in the sky. At dawn the sea kale, a froth of white flowers, is covered with small copper butterflies drunk on nectar. They freeze as my shadow falls across them.” And on August 10 a last, frail mention of “bone-bleached sea kale”.

RIP Derek Jarman.

My wife is aiming for a new Kindle for Christmas. Helping to save trees. While I’m dreaming of a couple of fat tomes to occupy my stocking. Maybe not on the topics this website centres on. I’m not averse to fiction or books on German history. Hint.

Lockdowns saw me researching into some recherché culinary roads less travelled, hence of late I’ve purchased fewer new publications. So don’t expect any definitive overview from the 2021 suggestions below. Still much delight. In compiling my list I realised I had bookended it with two authors who have been with me most of my post-Beano reading life. Let’s salute two octogenarians who are the greatest living exemplars in their field – food scholar Claudia Roden, 85, and travel writer Colin Thubron, 82, both of whose books this year transcended all those feeble potboilers piled high around them. 

Med: A Cookbook by Claudia Roden (Ebury, £28)

On the cover of Roden’s first new book in a decade there’s praise from Yotam Ottolenghi: “To read Claudia is to sit at her table, with everything, simply, as it should be. Pull up a table for the food; stay at the table for the stories.” The author herself begins what is much more than a recipe book with the epigraph “Cooking is the landscape in a saucepan”. All of which neatly sums up the fault line, dotted with hummus, tabbouleh, baba ganoush and a 1001 other treats, that lead from her groundbreaking A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1969) to the post-Millennium dinner parties inspired by her disciple Ottolenghi’s own oeuvre.

The Med reflects the fact that she has never rested on her scholarly laurels. Egyptian-born with Sephardic Jewish roots, Roden tapped into Spain with her last book, arguably my favourite of hers, and her latest offers a distillation of all her magpie-like culinary excavations radiating from the Mediterranean shores. Travel to Gaziantep, a Turkish city on the border with Syria via a green olive, walnut and pomegranate salad or investigate her pumpkin soup with orzo and amaretti, finding a new use for the traditional pasta filling of Mantua in Northern Italy. All this accompanied by evocative, anecdotal detail ranging from early family life in Aleppo via exile to Britain to the contemporary culinary mores of Barcelona.

Ripe Figs: Recipes From The Eastern Mediterranean by Yasmin Khan (Bloomsbury, £26) 

Claudia Roden us a hard act to follow but many cookery writers have mined that rich Mediterranean/Middle Eastern seam. I’ve been a huge fan of Yasmin Khan since her debut, The Saffron Tales (2016), which is as much about charting the lives of contemporary Iranians as their exquisite cuisine. Its successor, Zaytoun, inpected Palestinian food through an acutely political lens as she journeyed through kitchens in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Raised in Birmingham, the child of a Pakistani father and Iranian mother, she initially worked as a human rights activist. This is fully evident again if you look behind the handsomely illustrated pages of her third cookbook. It covers the food of Greece, Turkey and Cyprus with a set mission – to explore how migration has shaped cultures for the better… with food a vital litmus test.

Hence Ripe Figs is filled with the stories and recipes from families that have lived in the region for generations but alongside, in the midst of the global refugee crisis, she finds positive contributions from the displaced in the Moria refugee camp on Lesvos and elsewhere. In Istanbul kitchens she cooks with Kurds and in Northern Cyprus explores the thorny British colonial legacy. Fascinating reportage but the book is also a  trove of sun-filled recipes that celebrate how the joy of food can bring us all together.

Sicilia: A Love Letter to Sicily by Ben Tish (Bloomsbury, £26) 

Food and joy to me are synonymous with Sicily. Well maybe not gagging on spleen sandwiches from the street stalls of Palermo. I’m thinking proper tomatoes, lemons, capers, olive oil, ricotta salata, scaccia bread, cannoli and, of course, seafood. The image fronting this article is of the remarkable gambero rosso red prawns from the island’s South West Coast. These particular specimens were served to me with an orange dressing and thyme, in one of my final meals out before the first lockdown, at Norma in London’s Fitzrovia. This homage to Sicilian cuisine, with an inevitable Arabic influence, was created for the Stafford Collection by Ben Tish. In his matching ‘love letter’ he puts his own light stamp on a culinary melting pot of so many influences. It’s worth buying the book just for the pudding recipes.

An A-Z of Pasta by Rachel Roddy (Fig Tree, £25) 

Subtitled ‘Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes’, this is an alphabetical exploration of the quintessential Italian food from the Rome-based home cook, whose evocative despatches appear in The Guardian every Saturday. Does it supersede my super-stylish long-standing pasta primer, The Geometry of Pasta by Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy (of Bocca di Lupo fame)? Neither can do full justice to the full range of Italian pasta shapes, estimated at over 500. She tackles 50, subdivided into six main categories, with 100 accompanying recipes to justify her claim that “pasta shapes are edible hubs of information”. if that sounds daunting just check out the recipes, most of which are eminently accessible. Tagliolini with datterini tomatoes and chanterelles? Or fresh capelli d’angelo with prawns and lemon. Pass the parmigiano, per favore.

To complete my Italian ‘course’ I’d like to recommend the pasta-driven Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci (Fig Tree, £20), but this eagerly anticipated prezzie is still being loaded up at Santa’s Lapland HQ, I’m hoping. There’ll be hell to pay if I’m not tucking into the Big Night star’s comestible memoir amid the messy aftermath of a roast goose dinner.

A Cook’s Book by Nigel Slater (4th Estate, £30)

What’s not to like about chapters entitled ‘Sometimes You Just Want Pie’ or ‘The Stillness of Cheesecake’? Slater’s Observer column readers, he tells us, didn’t want prunes in a chicken and leek pie, so he has left them out for this book of 200 tried and tested recipes, which plays to his strength – a close kinship with his readers. As the title implies, he is a cook, not a chef. As home-based as his near namesake Nigella, he does not share her ease on telly. Still he writes like a cosy angel, drawing you into the foodie diary of his life. Think Alan Bennett with a well-stocked pantry. The Stillness of Cheesecake may read like a riff on Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Soufflés, anyone?) but it offers the homeliest of advice, too, alongside a slavering appreciation of food kept simple. And I quote: “A slice of cheesecake arrives on a small white plate. Cool, calm, silent. A sour whiff of buttermilk, the caramel sweetness of vanilla, Your fork slides through with barely a sigh.

“The sweet, fudgy filling can cloy after a mouthful. This pale and graceful pastry needs a pot of jam or fruit to waken it, and us, from its vanilla-scented slumber. A tart fruit compote will work – gooseberry, plum or apricot – or a little mound of baked rhubarb at its side.”

No space to digress into his discovery in San Sebastian of Basque cheesecake. Never been a huge fan of this over-praised pud, but Slater’s advocacy makes me want to attempt it again.

The Beer Bible by Jeff Alworth, 2nd Edition (Workman, £30, also available in pb)

Beer really is more my thing than cheesecake and the ideal Christmas present for the ale lover in your life has to be this revised version of Alworth’s award-winning magnum opus, first published in 2015. Six years is a long time in the rapidly evolving world of craft beer and the Portland Oregon-based Beervana blogger has been perfectly placed to chart it. Take Manchester’s iconic Cloudwater Brewing – they were just starting out in 2015, fuelled by co-founder Paul Jones’ learning expedition to the American West Coast where Alworth mentored him in the hop-driven scene.

Now Cloudwater merits four pages in this massive, comprehensive work of reference that still has that personal touch in its appreciation of the world’s vast array of beer cultures. Even sake gets a look in this time round. What I particularly like about the book is its even-handedness, giving space to understand how mass market lagers might appeal. Manchester, too, is not just about Cloudwater and Marble (young head brewer Joe Ince makes the index) but traditional family brewers Hydes, Robinsons and JW Lees are also hailed.

Modern British Beer by Matthew Curtis (CAMRA Books, £15.99pb)

Another acclaimed beer writer liked Manchester so much he moved here permanently. Just after publication this autumn I met the LIncoln-raised writer/photographer at the Sadler’s Cat bar in the city centreto discuss its genesis – in a blog born out of a Damascene conversion to beer in Colorado a decade ago. In my interview/review I wrote: “New wave UK beer writers 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 Curtis format certainly does the contemporary UK beer scene justice. The book is divided into seven regions with up to 15 breweries from each profiled via a defining beer style. It has already sparked a number of thirst-quenching pilgrimages. Check out this one to Sheffield’s St Mars of the Desert.

Modern British Cider by Gabe Cook (CAMRA Books, £15.99pb

On the surface a companion volume to MMB and, by chance I also spent a fascinating day  in the company of its author. the self-styled ‘Ciderologist’. Not in a bar this time but in the orchards of Dunham Press Cider, a northern outpost of a drink more associated with Somerset and Herefordshire. Later that day, at a tasting at GRUB in Manchester I even encountered a Scottish cider among a remarkable variety of styles.

In my subsequent report I wrote: “Rather than an artisan polemic, Modern British Cider is a careful summation that makes you want to sample all the delights he flags up in ‘The Most influential British Cider Makers Today’ chapter. In particular, to consider the contrasts between West Counties and East Counties, ie. made from tannic bittersweet cider apple varieties on the one hand and from fresher, fruitier dessert and culinary specimens on the other.”

So is all lovely in the orchard? The book is a fine gazetteer of where to find the good stuff but doesn’t fight shy of confronting the challenges for a tipple saddled with tarnished perceptions from the past. And, of course innovative ‘new wave cider’ has its own responsibility to its traditions. My Christmas suggestion – order this book and maybe treat yourself to a fine Pomona or Oliver cider to accompany your turkey or (apple-stuffed) goose.

A Cheesemonger’s Compendium of British and Irish Cheese by Ned Palmer (Profile, £14.99)

Cider, like beer, is a great accompaniment to cheese. And we’re not talking the token Christmas Stilton here. In 2014 Ned Palmer, schooled at Neal’s Yard Dairy, set up the Cheese Tasting Company to proselytise about the golden age of British cheese (it’s now). Two years ago his A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles beguilingly explored the artisan wonders at hand and the doughty makers who provide us with an alternative to the slabs of pap that dominate the supermarket shelves. A rollicking read from Ned but this follow-up is the book to slip in your pocket as you seek out a Baron Bigod or a Stinking Bishop or ask to compare a Montgomery Cheddar with a Keen’s Mature. It codifies, via style (mould-ripened, blue, washed rind, hard etc) 158 native cheeses, one to each page with a drawing and a succinct story and tasting note. Highly recommended. Next move is  find a good cheese shop. I’m lucky enough to have the outstanding Calder Cheesehouse just a 10 minute walk away in our little mill town of Todmorden. They do online, too. Visit this link. There’s still time before Christmas.

Wines of the Rhône by Matt Walls (Infinite Ideas, £30)

Early in 2021 I caught up with last year’s Noble Rot: Wine From Another Galaxy. I’d been reluctant to join Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew on their ebullient adventures since I’d already read some of them in their Noble Rot magazine. They’ve been busy boys this year too, opening a second Noble Rot restaurant, in the old Gay Hussar site in Soho and wine retail website, Shrine to the Vine. In prose, they have their finger on the pulse of the contemporary wine scene, opening up new paths.

Less showy is the Infinite Ideas Classic Wine Library, sparsely illustrated, hugely comprehensive survey of countries or key regions, often written by experts with MW after their name. Matt Walls isn’t a Master of Wine but he is Contributing Editor to Decanter magazine, who uprooted his family to a village outside Avignon fo a couple of years In order to really get under the skin of France’s Rhône region, North and South. The result is a revelatory delight, a reference work full of wise judgements. As up to date as it gets and an inspiration for our Christmas dinner wine offering.

The Amur River by Colin Thubron (Chatto & Windus, £20)

It’s a truism that there is nowhere left on the planet to discover, making it increasingly difficult for travel writers to push the boundaries. Well, veteran explorer Colin Thubron, in his 83rd year, is not one to settle for the ‘we’re all tourists now’ get-out clause. Before reading this – in one transfixed sitting – I couldn’t pin the Amur on the map. Yet it is apparently the 10th longest river on earth, flowing 3,000 miles east from a secret source in the Mongolian mountains to the Tatar Strait. Thubron travels he entire length. What gives the book its tense socio-political edge is that much of the journey follows the highly fortified, much fought-over Russian-Chinese border. 

In his quest to chart how the Russian imperial dream died Thubron’s fortitude is astonishing. Early in the trip traversing fathomless bogs at a frantic trot he falls from his squat, primitive nag and twists his ankle badly. Later he brazens out an arrest by the local police. What transcends any sense of mere derring-do is his grasp of the Amur’s tragic history and, of course, his luminous prose. Witness: “To walk here is to wade through a tide of wildflowers: multicoloured asters, gentians, butter-coloured potentilla, peacock-blue columbines. Over farther slopes, swathes of blown edelweiss make a frosty pallor for miles.”

I’ve followed Thubron from his early books on the Middle East through his eye-opening explorations of Russia and China, but this arguably is his elegiac masterpiece. 

A Christmas pudding with custard is an unlikely adjunct to a Sunday lunch at a restaurant trumpeting its allegiance to ‘Modern Middle Eastern-influenced dining and bar culture’, but then a main of plain roast lamb hardly counts as a shawarma either. 

Yet who the hell cares about sticking exactly to the brief when both dishes taste so good? Michelin has been swift to recognise the talent of head chef Craig Rutherford and his Habas team, manifesting the long-term vision of Simon Shaw (below) to expand eastwards from his Iberian-inspired El Gato Negro and Canto.

The orangey, spicy pud was a seasonal special on a menu significantly short on turkey and sprouts, though the warm, exotically cluttered 200-cover basement would be ideal for a festive gathering without all the predictable trimmings.

Let’s call the Christmas pudding an honorary Levantine treat. After all, when the dish originated in the 14th century it was made with hulled wheat, boiled in milk, seasoned with cinnamon and coloured with saffron. Familiar spices from the Middle East to the fore and what started as a plain dish was soon augmented with mutton, raisins, currants, prunes, figs, ground almonds and further spices – savoury and sweet touches that feel decidedly Middle Eastern.

Lamb, not mutton, represents Habas’ Sabbath roast of choice for £17. Across the table it arrives as generous slices of seared half shoulder, tender and pink. The regional remit kicks in with the accompaniments. Labneh (creamy strained Greek yoghurt) brings a delicacy to cauliflower cheese, there’s a sticky oomph to the carrots thanks to sumac and orange honey, while the solid roasted spuds are lifted by black garlic and mint. Oh yes and thankfully not a Yorkshire pudding in sight.

Roasted squash and sautéed kale understandably replace cauli cheese as sides for my vegan alternative – harissa roasted cauliflower (£15). Sumac? Harissa? For those of you unfamiliar with the output of one Yotam Ottolenghi there’s a glossary prefix to the menu. Even I, a devotee of Persian dried black limes, barberries and golpar, have to double check what zhug is.

My daughter and I had kicked off with a £10.50 mezze platter that really did showcase the quest for authenticity that drove chef patron Simon Shaw’s recces in Lebanon and the cuisine-in-exile cafes of London. The hummus is as good as it gets with the  baba ganoush and whipped labneh not far behind. The breads were less impressive, the toasted lavosh brittle, the tiny pittas and the flatbread hosting crumbled halloumi and za’atar (a separate dish for £4) lacking a certain fluffiness.

Maybe Habas suffers in comparison with London big hitters in the field such as Palomar or Barbary but it has settled into the groove it promised. Likewise stablemate Canto in Ancoats, whose initial promise was Portuguese cuisine but which had to swiftly recalibrate as ‘Mediterranean tapas’. I loved my return recently. There is no such miscomprehension, I feel, about this latest Shaw project in the old Panama Hatty’s site. 

One guarantee at any of the restaurants: octopus will be done well. At Habas it was a toss-up for an ‘intermezzo’ between a long-standing fave, filo ‘cigars’ stuffed with feta cheese, wilted spinach and sunblush tomato, and the chargrilled octopus (£12), curled up inside a bed of smoked aubergine and tomato. Utterly gorgeous, it’s the kind of small plate, along with spot-on service, that must have impressed the Michelin inspectors inside five months of the restaurant (and its bolthole of a bar) opening. We’ll have to wait and see whether it will be garlanded with a Bib Gourmand like El Gato or a Plate like Canto. I suspect the latter.

It being lunchtime we snubbed the inviting bar and its cocktail list (Middle Eastern inspired naturally) in favour of a light red. Well, that was the plan. Our Ribas del Cúa Joven 2018 (£27) from Northern Spain offered a juicy riot of red and black fruits on nose and palate as you’d expect from the Mencia grape. As a Joven I anticipated it would be on the light side. Not so. 14.5 per cent, yet it didn’t feel a bruiser. Main supplier is the estimable Miles Corish of Milestone and all wines on the list are available by the glass in various sizes – apart from the show-off fizzes and the 1998 Chateau Musar, legendary red from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley (one of the staging points on Simon Shaw’s journey towards Habas, as it happens. 

£110 and the Musar is yours. Alternatively for Sunday lunch you may bring your own wine for just £5 corkage on all bottles. Another big plus from this obvious labour of love in difficult times. Fi sihtuk! (cheers in Arabic)

Habas, 43a Brown Street, Manchester M2 2JJJ. 0161 470 9375. Monday-Sunday 12pm-late; food service until 10pm.

The atmosphere will be eclectic at the upcoming Red Bank Festive Trail, the only slightly off the beaten track antidote to the fake jollity and craven rapacity of Manchester Christmas Markets. As 2021 draws to its uncertain close it has never been more important to support the city’s independents and I can’t think of any more indie stretch than the arches above the ‘Green Quarter’ (but don’t get me started on that nomenclature).

Contributing to the Festive Trail celebrations (Saturday December 4, 12pm-6pm) are The Spärrows, Blackjack Brewery, Beatnikz Republic, Popup Bikes, Base Bar, Runaway Brewery, Chapeltown Picture House, GFFdamian Dance Studio and admirable street food champions GRUB, who are the very definition of grass roots.

I’ve been along for the rollercoaster ride with founders Jason and Juliana Bailey from the start back in 2014 across a variety of pop-ups and venues, with a constantly shifting roster of vendors they have supported and mentored. It’s great to see them in a permanent home  now at the top of Red Bank – its bar, events space and street food garden a beacon of sustainability. 

In a Manchester scene where corporate developers pay lip service to ‘street food’ and ‘artisans’, hosting them for fixed terms to give cool cachet to their building schemes, GRUB is the real deal.

This Saturday afternoon may offer a promenade of brewery tours, live music, dance performances, street food, cinema screenings, fresh produce stalls and a record fair, but such vitality is not a one-off thanks to an eclectic (that word again) calendar of events and fairs GRUB generates. I recently attended a packed wine and cheese matching at their Red Bank HQ featuring Reserve Wines and Chorlton Cheesemongers.

GRUB have led the way in plant-based promotion, so no surprise to see they are hosting a 100 per cent Vegan New Year’s Party.

GRUB’S EXTRA FOR CONTACT

The Baileys’ events company also reaches out across the region in collaborations. Its latest project epitomises their approach. Following their major reopening earlier this year, Contact performing arts venue on Oxford Road has sought to reenergise its catering. 

GRUB have recruited for them a street food chef to watch – Michael Anderson, owner and creator of Tikka Chance On Me. Describing himself as “a gobby Irish Mancunian with a big belly and an even bigger mouth who loves life and lives to eat”, he quit his day job in 2019 and has since been creating ‘Northern’ dishes inspired by Indian ingredients, until recently from an Ardwick base. To match his culinary creations at Contact beers will be local, cocktails from the GRUB team. Opening hours will be 10am-8pm Monday-Friday, 12pm-8pm Saturday.

GRUB, The Red Bank Project, 50 Red Bank, Manchester, M4 4HF. Wednesday-Friday 4pm-10pm, Saturday 12pm-10pm, Sunday 12pm-6pm.

It has been an epic journey across time and space and I’m understandably nervous when I encounter a scribbled sign at the picket gate into the Brewery of St Mars of the Desert. Private function today? Shut by Covid scare?

Phew. ‘Please don’t let Grimbold the dog out’ with a silhouette of the jet black bundle of fun I get to pat once I step across the ‘Welcome To Mars’ threshold. Fun is a good word, indeed, for everything that greets me inside this colourful cottage of a taproom. My benchmate, who budges up for me, recommends the ‘SMODFEST’ Festbier for its soft maltiness, continental hop character and absence of excess carbonation that can bedevil a lager. 

OK, I’ve made him more eloquent than he was. Yet it is a great introduction to SMOD, who specialise in “hoppy koelship beers, foeder-soured stingos, rustic lagers, deep malty dark beers and Benelux-inspired creations”, according to their website. Koelship? Pronounced cool ship, it’s a long, slender, open top stainless steel vessel akin to those traditional Flemish/Dutch koelschips, originally made of wood, whose high surface-to-mass ratio allows for more efficient cooling of the wort in the brewing process. Won’t go into more detail – this is a nerd-free zone.

It’s the centrepiece of a modest scale brewing operation behind the taproom, where SMOD co-owners Dann Paquette and Martha Simpson-Holley, plus apprentice Scarlet, produce some splendidly niche and nuanced beers in the old industrial district of Attercliffe, surrounded by ranks of contemporary factories/depots.

Not the easiest place to get to, hence my ‘epic journey’ lead-off. On my last adventure in Sheffield my last port of call was meant to be here but my phone charge went dead and no local could guide me, even though I was within a couple of hundred metres. Even this this time, on a trek from a tram halt, I feel rudderless.

Once I arrive, then, I am in no hurry to leave, sampling in turn Clamp Koelship IPA, hazy and hoppy yet like all the beers very clean, Koel It! Jingly Bells, all my Christmases come early with oodles of hops married to a festive fruitiness and, finally, The Battle of Frogs and Mice, Dann and Martha’s ‘tribute to the original craft brewers of Belgium’. Artisan or what?

At 8 per cent, Frogs, a dark special brune, outmuscles the 6.3 per cent Mice, a Flanders golden bitter, but it is also smoother, fruitier and more complex. According to the SMOD beer menu it is “brewed with a recreation of the water profile of West Flanders”. Now that is an attention to detail.

Bizarrely, when the globally influential RateBeer site announced its 10 Best New Breweries in the World 2020, two of the three British breweries named had this Belgian resonance (SMOD and, understandably, Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire) and two had American founders/brewers (SMOD and Suffolk’s Duration, incidentally many of whose ales are farmhouse and saison, too).

Bostonian Dann met North Yorkshire lass Martha across the Pond and the pair ran the acclaimed Pretty Things brewery for eight years before embarking on peripatetic journeys across Asia and Europe. Along the way they fell in love with a smallholding near a village called Saint-Mars-du-Désert in France’s Pays de la Loire region, named after an eighth century hermit. 

Maybe but for the prospect of Brexit they might have set up there; after considering Leeds and Manchester they went for Sheffield and took the monastic moniker with them. After all it was monks who first consolidated the brewing industry.

The pair’s fascinating story is recounted in a Pellicle online magazine piece by Matt Curtis,  ‘Everything in its right place and SMOD is a featured brewery in his recently published Modern British Beer (CAMRA Books, £15.99). Read my review here.

It’s not just about the beer, though. The taproom faithful are a civilised lot, Dann and Martha host it all with real warmth and Grimbold is irrepressible.

St Mars had been on my radar since its inception in 2018. My yearning to visit has since become a catalyst for discovering a Sheffield beyond my Richard Hawley and Jarvis Cocker affiliations. This time around I was smitten by the diversity and raw vitality of The Moor Market and found Cutlery Works the most relaxing street food hall I’ve ever visited.

THE MOOR MARKET

Chicken livers, gizzards and hearts are all the same price – 90p a pound. The adjacent pig’s feet are priceless (in a nose to tail photoshoot way). Across the aisle a specialist Persian food stall offers ingredients I’ve only ever read about in Sabrina Ghayour or Yasmin Khan. On one fish stall I encounter a sturdy carp, not seen on most slabs. There is tripe and various intestinal siblings, feathered, ungutted game birds and a whole, skinned rabbit still defrosting I enquire about, to be told “it’s French, farmed, you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for the English, wild, fresh.” I loved all this from the moment I walked into find a fine bottle shop, Beer Central, to welcome me.

The building is less than a decade old, cost £18m and includes 200 market stalls and eight shops. Situated off a pedestrian precinct rammed with every high street name you can think of, what a relief to discover this haven of independent traders, offering an affordable, browsable, diverse alternative to control freak supermarkets. 

Its main northern rival, Leeds Market, benefits from its Victorian monumentality and better dining-in opportunities, but Sheffield’s really is hard to beat. Obviously not in comparison with the great markets of Spain, Barcelona’s Boqueria or Valencia’s Modernista-style Mercado Central. They reflect a whole different food culture. It has been interesting, though, to tick off across the Iberian peninsula the rise of markets morphing into food halls – in Bilbao, Madrid, Seville and notably Lisbon’s waterfront Time Out Market.

CUTLERY WORKS

That Lisbon operation is a showcase for the city’s Michelin-starred chefs. Sheffield’s stand-out food hall is an altogether more modest affair despite its claims to be the North’s largest. Set in a converted cutlery factory, in the post-industrial corridor that stretches out from Kelham Island, Cutlery Works offers 13 different vendors across two floors, ranging from China Red’s Szechuan sizzlers to chocolate counter Bullion and coffee roasters Foundry, taking in Thai, pizza, fried chicken, burgers, sushi and Mexican along the way.

Foundry provide bottomless batch coffee for freelancers taking advantage between 9am and 5pm of designated co-working spaces with plug sockets and 10 per cent food discounts. All very cool and relaxing in my mid-afternoon slot, it lacked the buzz of Manchester’s Mackie Mayor, which I still love – despite my general weariness with the whole food hall experience. 

The Guardian restaurant critic Grace Dent summed it up nicely: “I need to ask a very honest question here: are food halls ever a truly satisfying dining experience? I’ve no doubt they seem so on paper and in the marketing meetings, they’re fantastic for filling old, unloved but historically important spaces and they’re good news for downward-spiralling city centres. Yet in reality they’re noisy, unrelaxing and the food is often patchy, with the occasional gem hidden among the colossal choice of menus.”

That was in last month’s review of the GPO in Liverpool, as the name suggests, a post office repurposed into a food hall. She was unimpressed by Nama, a Japanese small fish plates counter, created by Luke French and Stacey Sherwood-French of Sheffield big hitter Jöro (my restaurant review here), who have also transferred their other new venture Konjö.

The original of this Korean-influenced, fire-based “Robatayaki” Kitchen was my choice at Cutlery Works. It’s the first vendor on the left as you reach the first floor – preferable to the ground floor if only because it boasts the proper craft beer bar, Boozehound.

I spent £30 at Konjö, mainly because I over-ordered in my eagerness (and a desire for ballast ahead of my beer destination). Don’t expect a spin-off from Jöro down the road. There’s no comparable finesse. And yet my combo was hugely enjoyable. A duck bao was basically a take on the old Peking/hoisin sauce stalwart while chilli beef was sticky and punchy. Sides of subtle kimchi and refreshing sesame greens provided perfect balance ahead of my journey  to Mars.

Brewery of Saint Mars of the Desert, 90 Stevenson Rd, Sheffield S9 3XG. The taproom is normally open Fridays and Saturdays 2pm-8pm.

Cutlery Work, 73-101 Neepsend Lane, Neepsend, Sheffield S3 8AT. Open Sunday-Thursday, 10am-10pm; Friday-Saturday 10am-11pm.

I’ve been taken to task for snubbing a potato dumpling. So cepelinai, I belatedly salute you. Russian pelmeni, Polish pierogi and all manner of Alpine/Italian cousins were spotlighted in a recent piece of mine on noodles and dumplings.

Absent, because I’ve never tasted it, was Lithuania’s national dish. Literally it means zeppelins because their shape resembles the rigid airship developed by Graf von Zeppelin at the turn of the 20th century.

Didžkukuliai was the original name for these sizeable dumplings made from grated and riced potatoes stuffed with ground meat, dry curd cheese or mushrooms. After boiling, the cepelinai (pronounced sep-elle-in-ay) are often served with sour cream sauce or pork rinds, apparently. I’m still seeking a restaurant that serves them; no hope of unearthing another traditional fave, deep-fried crow meat, on any menu soon.

In common with all Eastern European and Baltic states, Lithuania has a vast appetite for potatoes. In the global spud league table it trails troubled Belarus, but an annual average consumption of 100kg per capita is mightily impressive, some three times the world average. Few dishes are unique to one country. Similar to cepelinai are pyzi in neighbouring Poland, Norwegian raspeball, the Acadian poutine râpée in Canada and from Germany Kartoffelklöße.

It’s a sign of the times that the Lithuanians are developing lighter versions of their centuries-old signature dish.

Soured cream and bacon bits decorate a traditional dish of cepelinai

A release from Lithuania Travel https://lithuania.travel/en/ informs me: “Cepelinai used to be the perfect hearty meal delivering the necessary energy that our predecessors needed to endure the cold climate while working the fields. The times have changed, so has Lithuanian cuisine: over the last few decades, the local chefs have introduced foreign flavours to cepelinai and have transformed it to a healthy everyday dinner or lunch option.” Fillings now range from buckwheat to cottage cheese and mint, carrot and hemp seed.

New fillings are everywhere – upmarket Burna House in the capital Vilnius recommend their pulled duck and offer a pink dough version, using beetroot, another Lithuanian favourite. See the recipe below, but first a simpler more trad version… 

Lithuanian cepelinai 

Serves four

Ingredients

400g waxy potatoes; a beaten egg; one diced shallot; 250g minced pork; ½tsp ground caraway; one crushed garlic clove; 1tbsp plain flour plus extra for dusting

For the sauce:2tbsp dried porcini; 1tsp butter; two diced shallots; 200g sliced mushrooms; 200g crème fraîche.

To serve: two rashers smoked streaky bacon; chopped dill.

Method

Divide the potatoes into two batches. Chop one batch into chunks and boil for 15-20 minutes until tender, then drain and mash. Finely grate the remaining spuds and tip into a bowl lined with a tea towel. Squeeze tightly to expel any liquid; keep 2tbsp of this juice and discard the rest. In another large mixing bowl, add the reserved potato juice, the grated potato, mashed potato and half the beaten egg. Beat everything together, seasonand leave to cool, then chill while you prepare the filling.

Mix together the shallot, minced pork, caraway seeds, garlic, remaining egg with salt and pepper. Now blend 1tbsp of flour into your potato mixture and divide into 8. Flour a work surface and lightly shape the potato dough into flat round patties, approximately 1cm thick. Put 1 heaped tsp of the pork filling in the middle of each one, then gently encase the pork and form a dumpling. Roll them in your hands to achieve the signature zeppelin shape. Repeat with the rest of the patties and filling. Bring a large pan of water to a rolling boil, then reduce to a simmer. Gently lower in the dumplings, cover and cook gently for 30 minutes. The water must not boil or they might start to disintegrate.

Meanwhile, fry the bacon until crisp, then chop into small dice and set aside. To make the sauce, pour 100ml of boiling water over the dried porcini and leave to stand for five minutes. In a saucepan, heat the butter and add the shallots, frying gently until they are soft and translucent. Add the mushrooms and cook for a few minutes more. When they are cooked, pour in 1tbsp of the liquor from the porcini and discard the rest. Chop the porcini and add them. Fold in the crème fraîche, bring to a simmer, then season.

To serve, place two dumplings on each plate and pour over the mushroom sauce. Sprinkle the dill and bacon pieces over just before serving. 

Burna House Pink Cepelinai with Curd ‘Raudonieji Cepelinukai su Varške’

Serves four 

Ingredients 

For the potato mixture: 800g raw blended potatoes; 300g fresh potatoes (peeled); 100g finely chopped onions; 60g milk; 60g butter; 250g fresh beetroot juice; 40g potato starch

For the stuffing: 400g cottage cheese; 2g fresh tarragon; 40g soured cream.

For the white wine sauce with sundried tomatoes and capers: 400g heavy cream; 100g dry white wine; 80g sundried tomatoes; 10g capers; 5g cornstarch; 15g salt; 10g fresh thyme; 20g cooking oil

For garnish: chopped dill, spring onions and parsley; black pepper.

Method

Cook the freshly peeled potatoes in salted water and drain them. Heat the milk until it starts boiling, add it to the potatoes along with the butter. Mash until smooth. Mix the mashed potatoes with the raw blended potatoes and the beetroot juice. Add 5g  salt

For the stuffing mix the cottage cheese with the tarragon, sour cream, and 3g salt.

To form a single cepelinas take 50g of the potato mixture and pat it flat in the palm of the hand. Place 20g of the stuffing in the centre and, using slightly dampened hands, fold the potato mixture around the cottage cheese stuffing into a zeppelin shape, sealing well.

Mix 2.5 litres of water with the beetroot juice and bring it to a boil. Gently lower the cepelinai into the boiling water and juice mixture and cook for 15 minutes on low-to-medium heat.

For the sauce saute the onions on some cooking oil until golden brown. Add the wine and fresh thyme. Cook for 7-10 minutes until the alcohol evaporates. Add the cream, bring it to a slow boil and simmer for 15 more minutes on a low heat. Add the sundried tomatoes and the capers and bring it to a boil. To thicken the sauce, add the cornstarch.

Serve the cepelinaiwith the white wine sauce and garnish with fresh dill, spring onions, ground black pepper, and parsley.

Consume while watching Part Two of Jonathan Meades’ BBC polemic travelogue, Magnetic North (find it on YouTube), which features The Hill of Crosses, a pilgrimage site in Northern Lithuania. Dating back to the 1831 Uprising, this small hill in the middle of farmland holds up to 100,000 crosses of all sizes, from tiny wooden crosses to huge handcrafted metal specimens. Destroyed several times and suppressed by the Soviets, this UNESCO World Heritage Site is a symbol of the nation’s tenacious survival. Christians from across the world flock to pay homage, but it also eerily reflects Lithuania’s unquestionably pagan roots. 

I’d love to visit one day, first having feasted on didžkukuliai and Midus Lituanian Mead, naturally. And if you also plan to go down the fried crow route here’s a full-feathered report from the rather wonderful meateater website.

Many thanks to Lithuania Travel, Burna House, Vilnius and Andrius Aleksandravičius for the cepelinai images.

It’s that time of the year again when Bundobust is dangling its festive baubles, otherwise known as Sprout Bhajis. It’s a world away from all the crass foodie gimmicks of Christmas – pigs in blankets pizza toppings and the like, but then this burgeoning brand yoking Gujarati veggie street snacks to craft beer always does things with style.

So what do you get for your £4.75? Deep-fried bundles of Brussels sprouts, broccoli, onion, fennel and chilli, served with a dollop of cranberry chutney. Chuck in an extra £1.25 and it comes in a soft vegan brioche bun. Proof all their venues are a Scrooge-free zone, a quid from each Sprout Bhaji Butty goes to a local charity.

My Bundo destination of choice to snaffle a bhaji has to be their latest project – the Bundobust Brewery on Oxford Street in Manchester, where head brewer Dan Hocking is knocking out a splendid range of beers tailored towards the spice-driven food menu.

I was disappointed on a recent visit that my favourite of his beers wasn’t on. West is West is a piney and resinous, dank and bitter (in a good way) West Coast IPA. A perfect match for the setting, surrounded by the gleaming vessels of a working brewery, it reminded me of many of the taprooms I’ve visited along the US western seaboard. In San Diego, say.

Which brings me back, by a roundabout route, to Brussel sprouts. The tiny green cannonballs are definitely love or loathe over here with major consumption confined to Christmas. Our Brussels Sprouts Appreciation Society Facebook Group numbers under 700 members after five years in existence.

Vivid green healthy ammunition, but they are culinary anathema to many folk

Contrast this with California, where the foggy, coastal area south of San Francisco grows 95 cent of the American crop, and they are mega cool. A big help is they are not over-cooked to bland mushiness. Food websites in the States are packed with innovative ways to treat your Brussels, which are neck and neck with kale to be top green on menus. Apparently they are a good source of dietary fibre, folic acid, manganese, and vitamins A, C, and K. Sprouts date back to Roman times but were first grown in large quantities in Belgium – hence the Brussels tag – and French settlers brought them to Louisiana in the 18th century.

Flying kites for the much-maligned Brussels sprout in glorious San Diego

Yes, there are roasted sprout gumbos out there, but I’ve never tackled one. I vividly remember  tempura sprouts accompanying  shrimp tacos in one downtown San Diego taproom, their natural hint of bitterness in harmony with the hop. Bizarrely research has shown that genetically two thirds of folk may be wired against the bitter chemical PTC found in sprouts, broccoli, dark chocolate, coffee and even beer. 

Definitely count me out of that pool.

My top Brussels sprout dish is also Indian…from my favourite new generation cookery writer, Meera Sodha. This quick Keralan stir-fry is in Fresh India, her follow-up to debut Made In India (both are £20 from Penguin Fig Tree). Like so many of her recipes, it fuses her Asian culinary sensibility with the raw materials she inherited when her family made their home in rural Lincolnshire.

Shredded Brussels Sprout Thoran (Choti gobhi thoran)

Ingredients

2 tbsp coconut oil; 1 tsp mustard seeds; 12 curry leaves; one large red onion, thinly sliced;  2 cloves garlic, crushed; 1 red chilli, finely sliced; 50g coconut, grated (fresh, creamed, or desiccated); 600g Brussels sprouts, washed and shredded; 1/2 tsp salt; 1/2 lemon, juiced.

Method

Heat the oil in a large pan or wok. Once hot, add the mustard seeds and curry leaves and cook for a minute or two until they start to pop. Add the red onion. Cook until soft and starting to caramelise, about 10-15 minutes. Add the garlic, chilli and coconut and stir fry for a couple more minutes.

Turn the heat up. Add the sprouts, mix thoroughly, and stir fry for a few more minutes. Add the salt and lemon juice, stir, and then adjust the seasoning to taste. The lemon juice counters any bitterness from the greens, so add more if you’ve used quite large sprouts.

Bundobust has three other bar/restaurants besides the Brewery – the original in Leeds, Manchester Piccadilly and Liverpool. They are all taking Christmas bookings now.

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.

Priest Stranglers and Little Sparrows are not quite the odd bedfellows they sound. Both find common ground in the North Italian city of Trento (above), glorious gateway to the Dolomites. The Trentino has always been wrangled over by Italy and Austria; reaching its blood-stained apogee during the Great War. Witness the trenches and obsolete weaponry that still litter the mountain ridges. 

A benevolent legacy, though, is the intermingling of Germanic and Italian Alpine cuisines. That’s why you’ll find Strangolapreti (stranglers) and Spätzle (sparrows) sharing equal billing on the menus. The former, also known Strozzapreti, are usually a twisty pasta made up of just flour water and salt – but no eggs. Legend has it these were taken by the Church as tithes, leaving the peasants to fulminate against ‘priest-chokers’ or ‘priest-stranglers’ in anti-clerical hotbeds such as Emilia Romagna. Or maybe it’s just a reference to how you shape them by hand.

Up in Trento my Strangolapreti turned out to be a delicious local variant – spinach gnocchi. In truth, they weren’t a far remove from the Spätzle, noodles which do benefit from the presence of eggs. In the Swabian-German dialect the name translates as ‘little sparrows’, which they resemble in flight when shaped by a spoon in the traditional way.

From its South West German birthplace the dish has flown across all the Alpine regions, establishing itself everywhere and, most handily, is now nesting in a restaurant in Manchester, paying its own homage – The Spärrows.

Up on Red Bank chef/co-owner Franco Concli stays true to his own Trentino roots by making the Spätzle the traditional way, hand scraping them off the floury board and dropping them into simmering water. They are available both as savoury and, very apres ski, as a sweet, with cinammon, brown sugar and butter.

I like both the Spätzle and Gnocchi served simply with butter and sage (£7 for 110g), but on a recent visit chose the £9 version with guanciale (cured pork cheek), which was fabulously soothing. So too was a special of beetroot-tinctured agnoletti filled with ricotta and lemon. 

Russian style pelmeni dumplings with beef/pork garlic breadcrumbs (£8.50) were less satisfying. I should have gone for the Polish pierogi, little dumplings filled with melted cottage cheese and potato with soured cream and sauerkraut, a favourite from The Spärrows’ early days in a small archway near Manchester’s Victoria Station.

Since then the drinks list has gone from strength to strength under the stewardship of co-owner, Polish-born Kasia Hitchcock. It is as focused as the cool but cosy fit-out of a much larger arch space. A sake and spirits expert, she has been very canny with a wine list that majors in the very Alpine territory occupied by most of the food. Reds such as Lagrein, Teroldego and a Pinot Nero, are all there, from the Trentino/Alto Adige with their better known country cousin, Zweigelt from Austria. Its producer Sepp Moser also supplies the well-priced house white, a moreish Gruner Veltliner (the thinking person’s Sauvignon Blanc).

It all takes me back to Trento. I was in town for the annual Mostra dei Vini, the spring festival celebrating the wines of the Trentino region. After dark I mingled with the winemakers and was astonished at the variety of styles and local grape varieties used. Among the reds I liked the chunky Marzeminos, the more ethereal Pinot Neros and the flagship Teroldegos, with Muller-Thurgau outstanding among the whites. The delicate Nosiola, grown in a small corner of Trentino only, fared better as the base for the dessert wine Vino Santo (not Vin Santo, that’s Tuscan).

The jolly fest was held in the stunning Castello del Buonconsiglio. The original 13th century Castelvecchio (“old castle”) is in contrast to all the Renaissance add-ons in different styles erected to the glory of various Prince-Bishops who ruled here in the name of the Holy Roman Empire. Cardinal Bernardio Clesio, the greatest of these, was responsible for its vast artistic treasure house, the Palazzo Magno. I liked the earlier Gothic-Venetian loggia.

The castle also houses a grim reminder of the bloody Italian campaign during the Great War – the dungeon that housed patriot martyr Cesare Battisti before he was hanged  in the castle grounds. This was Austrian territory then and they regarded him as a traitor for fighting on the Italian side. A Battisti mausoleum tops a hill outside Trento. As I write this piece on our own Remembrance Day I’ve opened a bottle of Teroldego to salute the fallen on a front that most Britons have never heard of.

The Spärrows, 16 Red Bank (Green Quarter), Manchester, M4 4HF. 0161 302 6267. Word of warning: access is via a plain door with minimal signage.

It’s a 30 mile meander across the West Flanders fields from Dranouter in Heuvelland to Dottignies in French-speaking Wallonia. You’re always just in Belgium but aware that this is border country, in the hinterland of France’s fifth largest city, Lille. On a squally Saturday afternoon up on the Pennine Moors there’s a decided gustatory ley line connecting us to both these distant municipalities.

It’s all about food rooted in the Tyke terroir but with an undertow of new wave Belgian influences forging a bond with a powerful dark beer that similarly reflects the zest of a groundbreaking generation in that country.

In the bar of the Moorcock Inn at Norland there’s a well-thumbed copy of Kobe Desramaults’ eponymous cookbook. Moorcock co-owner Alisdair Brooke-Taylor was Kobe’s right hand man at his Michelin-starred In de Wulf at Dranouter, in a region poignantly dotted with Great War cemeteries.

When In de Wulf closed in 2105 Al and his sommelier partner, Aimee Tufford, brought back to the UK – among much else – an affinity with Belgian beer. That’s why if you look beyond hand pulls dispensing Yorkshire cask ales from Timothy Taylor and Vocation you’ll find a bottled beer list of dubbels and trippels, saisons, geuzes and lambics. Even different ages of Orval, if you’re lucky.

The Brouwerij De Ranke XX is on of my go-to beers in my quest for a true bitter finish. The hop freaks of contemporary Belgian brewing Nino Bacelle and Guido Devos have been brewing this 6.2 per cent pale ale since 1996. Unfiltered, unpasteurised, using only whole hops, not pellets. The only compromise is in the address. Dottignies, site of the brewery they built in 2004, is in Wallonia but the De Ranke official HQ is a mile or two away in Flemish territory.

• Listen to a Belgiansmaak podcast interview with De Ranke co-founder Nino Bacelle.

The XX is not on the Moorcock beer list but, to our surprise, there’s a limited edition 750ml sharing bottle of a De Ranke Back To Black, originally brewed for the 10th anniversary of another forward-thinking Belgian brewery, lambic specialists Moeder. Remarkable value at £16, it is billed as an imperial porter and it pours almost black. Brewed with seven different malts and aged in barrel for nine months, it is as complex as you’d expect, with a nose of oak (obviously), dark chocolate and figs/raisins, yet its smooth cherryish taste combines sourness and bitterness in perfect balance.

 Not quite what you’d expect but a Eureka moment. It is a quite perfect match for the Moorcock menu de jour (as they don’t say in the hills above Sowerby Bridge). When Kobe Desramault moved from farmhouse-based In de Wulf  to open Chambre Séparée in Ghent he took foraging and fire with him to an urban setting. The five-ton smokehouse and industrial-grade grill in the Moorcock car park seems a better fit here. So too, as the website proclaims, “250 acres of productive moorland, providing plenty of plants, berries, mushrooms and game”…. and an onsite organic kitchen garden.

Pick of the dishes off the blackboard were both fish-led. A mackerel tartare with preserved chestnuts and radish (£8), a combo I’ve never encountered before, tasted as distinctive as it looked – autumn on a plate, while the under-rated grey mullet becomes a star in treatment Al calls a ‘bouillabaisse’ that is a remove from the Provencal stereotype. Chunks of the line-caught fish are cooked en papillote with fennel and preserved lemon, both of which scent it marvellously. At £18 it is the second most expensive dish on a menu that usually contains only a couple of meat ‘mains’ these days. My companion is a vegetarian/pescatarian, so we veered in that direction.

The porter had a particular affinity with wood-roast kabucha (Japanese) pumpkin gnocchi (£13.50), strewn with a walnut pesto and curls of house ricotta. Not the prettiest dish and as substantial as it sounds, it felt a proper antidote to the inclemency of the weather.

Perhaps we were being greedy ordering the crispy smoked potatoes that are a Moorcock constant as well as a confit Jerusalem artichokes, wood-roast mushrooms in another intriguing marriage with laverbread and miso-pickled beans. I’m not quite sure this gelled, but then where else for miles around would you find any chef as consistently inventive. The drinks list put together by Aimee is equally special. 

Do make the trip up. On foot’s best for the sheer adventure. But definitely choose the right day! Captain Smidge (below) was the very definition of ‘wet dog’.

Moorcock Inn, Moor Bottom Lane, Norland, Sowerby Bridge HX6 3RP. 01422 832103.