Compendium 2: November 2024
Hello and welcome to November’s Compendium. Thank you for the comments, emails and Notes relating to October’s: I’m delighted it’s been so well received.
1: Good News
At the Garden Media Awards held at the Savoy Hotel, London, I won the Digital Gardening Writer of the Year Award.
This is because you turn up each week, read, comment, like, share and support it. The community here is everything - and I am hugely grateful you are here. Thank YOU!
The photo above is not an attempt to recreate the delights of a 70s soft focus Lady Chatterley’s Lover; it is thanks to the phone having been dropped into dessert.
Substack really is the place - the excellent
, and were among those shortlisted for their Substacks.This - along with the Guild of Food Writers, and Fortnum and Mason short-listings for online writing - awarded for writing Abundance, even before it even becomes a physical book, is an extraordinary thing, so thank you. There is much more to come.
2: Cafe Murano Book Club
Every last Sunday of the month, I host Cafe Murano Book Club alongside Angela Hartnett. Guest arrive at 6 for a cocktail and canapés, I interview this month’s guest for 45 minutes or so, with questions from anyone who has come along, followed by a two course supper from the author’s book, with wine. Books are signed and personalised and you’re off into the late evening by 9.30 or so, for a not-late night.
They are really special, warm, intimate evenings with a chance to here from and talk to a great food writer. Recent guests include Delia, Ravinder Bhogal, Jay Rayner, Georgina Hayden and Rick Stein.
The first 3 for 2025 will be announced in the next week.
I hope to see you there one of these Sundays.
Be the first to know and sign up to the newsletter here.
3: Eat
If you’ve been enjoying squash time of year but running out of ideas, try this North African pie1. It’s commonly made with meat or fish, but the spicing works beautifully with squash too.
Pastilla
Butternut is great here, but if you can get either Crown Prince or Ichi Kuri, you’ll be glad you did. The traditional warqa pastry is delightfully substituted here for the similar and widely available filo. While ras al hanout may drive the flavour, the key ingredients of this recipe are equal amounts of confidence and care: take your time with the pastry but don’t be tentative.
This is as good cold for lunch the next day as it is warm, 20 minutes out of the oven. A smasher.
Serves 6-8
1 tbsp olive oil
800g butternut squash, peeled, deseeded and cut into 2-3cm chunks
80g melted butter
2 onions, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 tsp ras al hanout
150ml vegetable stock (or use water)
1 tbsp tomato puree
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
75g chopped almonds or pistachios
75g dried dates, apricots or raisins, roughly chopped
3 eggs, beaten
A small bunch of coriander, finely chopped
5 large sheets of filo pastry
1 tbsp icing sugar
½ tsp cinnamon
Harissa, to serve (optional)
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease a spring form tin, approx 22cm diameter, with a little butter.
Toss the squash in 1 tbsp of olive oil and roast on a tray for about 20 minutes or so until tender. Meanwhile, in a large pan over a low heat, cook the onions in 1 tbsp of the butter for 15 minutes until soft. Add the garlic, tomato purée and the ras al hanout and cook for a minute more. Add the squash to the pan, along with the stock. Season, bring to the boil, and simmer for about 5 minutes. Stir in the dried fruit and nuts. Add the eggs and gently cook until it resembles loose scrambled eggs. Add the coriander, salt and pepper to taste and put to one side.
Take a sheet of filo pastry and brush it with melted butter. Drape it over the greased tin, gently pushing into the corners. Repeat with another sheet of filo, this time placing it at a right angle to the first. Repeat with a the next 2 sheets of filo to form a large pastry case with no tears.
Spoon the mixture into a round heap in the centre of the pastry, ease it towards the edge, then take the corners of the pastry and wrap it over the filling to encase it, pressing a little to persuade it into a slightly domed cake shape. Lay one sheet on top, brush with butter and tuck under any corners.
Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, until the pastry is a crisp and golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cool a little before dusting with the icing sugar and the rest of the cinnamon.
Serve with harissa on the side.
4: Ears
Thank you for so many comments, emails and messages about October’s playlists - there was one to soothe and another to lift: given the short days, here is another of each to add to your autumnal armoury. I hope you enjoy them.
To soothe
To lift
5: Eyes
John Lewis-Stempel’s The Running Hare
Published in 2017, this isn’t
’s most recent book but it just drew my hand when I was in the bookshop. It tells the story of the wild animals and plants that live in and under a rented arable field, from the labouring microbes to the patrolling kestrel above the corn, from the linnet pecking at seeds to the seven-spot ladybird that eats the aphids that eat the crop. Read it for the story and hope, but also, it is so brilliantly written, it’s a lesson to any writer.Elisabeth Luard’s Cookstory Substack
I first came across Elisabeth via her brilliant book European Peasant Food. I loved her 2012 book, A Cook's Year in a Welsh Farmhouse, and - just as I’d hoped - her Substack is full of superbly writing, great recipes and her characterful illustrations. She really is one of the greats.
6: Drink
Spiced rum
Make this2 now for Christmas presents to others, or yourself.
That first half term of big school, I let the slope take me, hands off the brakes for once, down the cutting of the old railway line, feeling like Evel Knievel: one sniff of dark rum and I remember what gave me such unusual confidence that afternoon. These days, the pleasure this brings is perhaps more gentle but no less welcome. The key to this Caribbean classic is to not go too large on any of the spices: too much cinnamon or cloves and it’ll taste like Christmas rather than the Cayman Islands, too little allspice and everything won’t marry just so. That said, it should be to your taste: try this beauty and embellish as you like. Golden rum is often the base here, but I like this blend of dark and white best.
400ml dark rum
200ml white rum
1 cinnamon stick
4 allspice berries, lightly crushed
1 clove
8 black peppercorns
1 lantern of mace
½ vanilla pod, split lengthways
1 good strip of orange zest
A liquorice comfit sized piece of ginger, sliced
Add everything to a jar, close the lid and shake to agitate the flavours. Leave to infuse for four days, longer if you prefer. Funnel into a bottle, using a fine sieve to catch the spices.
7: Garden
Jerusalem artichokes get a hard time - invasive, hard to get rid of, cause flatulence, yadda yadda. Never mind that, they taste so good - nutty, earthy, mildly mushroomy. More, their flowers are utterly gorgeous - ‘Jerusalem’ has nothing to do with their origins, but a lazy shift from the Italian ‘girasole’, meaning ‘sunflower’ the family to which they belong. Grow them for their delicious tubers and you get the flowers to admire where they are or cut for the house.
Like potatoes, you will have them return the following year if you don’t dig them all up - but that’s just free food and flowers as far as I’m concerned.
You can source Jerusalem artichokes from many nurseries: my nursery has red, white and (slightly) dwarf varieties, and if you are a paid subscriber in the UK you can get 25% off all plants and seeds.3
8: My other writing
Scribehound gardening start up offer
We are most of the way through the first month of 30 of the best gardening writers - including Joe Swift, Advolly Richmond, Huw Richards and Sarah Raven - writing about what they most want to, and it’s had a huge subscription sign up.
Subscribe, and once a day an email of brilliant gardening writing will arrive in your inbox to read or listen to. I wrote about yacon and the neighbouring badger who might be coming for it.
Click here to subscribe for £1 for the first month, half price for a year, and you can cancel anytime if it’s not for you.
Country Life: Salsify and scorzonera
My column for Country Life this month is about salsify and scorzonera - almost identical (though one is white-, the other black-skinned) long slim roots that taste somewhere between artichoke hearts, asparagus and distant oysters: the first thing I grew that I hadn’t tasted before sowing and I now grow every year.
Click here to read about them.
And if you fancy growing them yourself, click here and here- and don’t forget, paid subscribers in the UK get 25% off plants and seeds from my nursery4.
Sunday Times Food
Once a month, I come up with three recipes that are tweaks on the familiar - that elevate the usual with a touch of something special. My latest includes a twice baked jacket potato with rosemary creamed leeks, which led to the following exchange below in the comments…apologies, I couldn’t help myself.
It’s behind their paywall here.
9: Born To Do What They Do
I grew up with Alex Higgins lighting up the sporting world with his genius. This, an exhibition match with John Virgo, should brighten your day even if you loathe snooker: no-one else could’ve done this.
Absolutely shitfaced, pausing for a puff on his cigarette, he finished the game with two impossible shots, the final one predicted at the start: under his breath as he lines up the last shot, you can just hear him say ‘I’ll try to visual it…because if you believe, you can do allsorts’. Amen to that.
More soon…in the meantime, happy end of November
Mark
This is from my book SPICE/a cook’s companion: paid subscribers can get this for only £3.50 +p&p (RRP £25)
Also from Spice/a cook’s companion
Click the link in the footnote above
Many congratulations Mark. How you produce so much, of such quality makes me feel both admiration and personally inadequate! I just about manage to find time to skim the delightful writings of the 3 people (of whom you are one) that I follow. Discovering Substack is a bit like when I used to buy a Sunday paper but only read the best bits in the supplement.
PS. Sourdough bread goo gives similar photographic effect.
🤸♀️🤸♀️🤸♀️🤸♀️ Another wonderful feast from MD.