Compendium 7: April 2025
A slice of Italian autumn, Ivor Cutler, a fine late spring gratin, an excellent playlist and more
Hello and welcome to the April 2025 Compendium.
This is the monthly place I share a few things I hope you’ll like, that I hope will feed your senses.
Thank you for the comments, emails and Notes relating to earlier ones: I’m delighted it’s being so well received.
1: Hello again
This is one of those springs that usually only shows up in a book - one of those where four children somehow row to an island with a cow swimming behind them. It feels like June much of the time, albeit with early April on the breeze in the shade.
I hope it is finding you well. I still find it impossible that it can be another season elsewhere, but if that is where you are, I hope it is being as fully that season as spring is here in the UK.
2: Join me on a food writing retreat in Italy
…and if you are a paid subscriber, save £50.
In October, I shall be teaching on a week long food writing retreat, as part of Bland Badger’s wonderful programme of retreats. If you have ambitions to write a book, want to find your voice and develop your writing style, we can help.
The ‘we’ is a multi-award winning trio of Molly Wizenberg, Felicity Cloake and me, and if that isn’t enough there’s Lucy Brazier and Charlotte Bland to throw into the mix too.
This will tell you more about what the week includes, here is where you’ll be staying.
I hope you can come.
It’ll be hard work - this is serious creative and professional development where you will be immersed in all aspects of food writing, from recipes to memoir to finding (and developing) your voice to the practicalities of recipe writing and writing a book proposal, and dealing with self doubt and allowing yourself to tell your story - but there will be pleasure, wonderful food, excellent company and it is a beautiful, inspiring place to be.
To get £50 off, just email me for the code before you book
3: Ears
I often think these playlists could do with more Killing Joke, Public Image or Gang of Four, but I spend so much time (happily) writing, and much as I love those noisy noises, they aren’t entirely conducive to a quieter mind or creative leaps. And so, not a particularly noisy playlist of what I’ve been listening to this month.
4: Eat
This is from Abundance - the book I’ve been writing here in instalments - this time last year. Here’s the original post. I make versions of this throughout the year, with chard or tenderstem, perhaps whole leeks or celery, cauliflower or broccoli stepping in for the sprouting broccoli and asparagus - the wide, shallow dish makes the seasoned cream more of a dressing than a classic gratin sauce, and goes perfectly with the crunch. And while it’s not essential, the flowers pop little darts of punctuation through this, and the pleasure of the simple harvest makes it feel; very much of the season and of the day.
Sprouting broccoli, asparagus and spring flower gratin
Serve with quartered little gems or a green salad dressed just with olive oil and salt.
Serves 3 as a main, or 4 as a side
2 fat leeks, trimmed and sliced into 3cm pieces
3 tbsp olive oil
300g sprouting broccoli
400g asparagus, tough base snapped off
20cm stem of rosemary, leaves only, finely chopped
Zest of one lemon, finely grated
220ml double cream
40g walnuts, roughly chopped
20g sunflower seeds
20g pumpkin seeds
2 tsp fennel seeds
35g parmesan, grated
Salt and pepper to taste
A handful of rosemary, three cornered leek and wild garlic flowers
Preheat oven to 200°C/180°C fan.
Stir the lemon zest, rosemary and a good scrunch of salt and pepper into the cream. Place the leeks in a single layer on a baking dish, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and roast for 15-20 minutes until cooked through and colouring in places.
Add the sprouting broccoli to a pan of boiling salted water, place the asparagus on top so only the base of the spears is fully submerged, and cook for 1 minute only. Drain.
Stir the walnuts and seeds together.
Arrange the broccoli and asparagus on top of the leeks, pour over the seasoned cream, and scatter with the nut/seed mix. Season with a little salt and pepper and bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes.
Remove from the oven, scatter with parmesan, the flowers and serve.
5: Eyes
Caroline Eden is one of the great food writers of our time. She is adventurous with her life and her words. Every word of her latest book - Green Mountains - does justice and more to the brilliance of the other two books in her ‘colour trilogy’, Black Sea and Red Sands, before it. Walking the South Caucasus, Eden journeys through Armenia and Georgia before closing the circle of the trilogy at the Black Sea. It’s a remarkable book, which I heartily recommend you add to your life. More here.
Caroline Eden’s Substack
For more of the same, much (but not all) behind her paywall (well worth your investment): take a look for yourself.
Cafe Murano Book Club with Caroline Eden
And if you are free towards the end of May, why not join Caroline and I at Cafe Murano Book Club, Bermondsey, London, for an evening of cocktails, canapés, two courses and conversation. There are a few tickets left, more here.
6: Drink
Lovage vodka
I am not infrequently accused of spending a fair proportion of my life submerging bits of herb or fruit in alcohol and dressing it up as work. I offer you this peculiar but excellent infusion as evidence that the time spent in research is at least occasionally fruitful.
This is perfect for Bloody Marys, but also just as it is as a livening nip served stone cold, or with tonic.
I wouldn’t leave this to infuse for long, at least the first time you make it: within a couple of days it will be bitterly pokey, with the sugar just settling it down a little.
Keep the leaves attached to the stem: there’s a pleasing touch of the reverse ship-in-a-bottle about retrieving them.
70cl vodka
150g caster sugar
20 leaves or so of lovage, still attached to the stem
Half fill a jar or bottle with vodka and add the sugar using a funnel. Invert and generally agitate to start the sugar dissolving. Add the lovage leaves, top with vodka, and leave somewhere cool and dark to infuse.
Remove the leaves when it reaches the flavour you want.
This is from my book HERB/a cook’s companion.
7: Garden
Sansho pepper
Almost everyone has pepper in their kitchen, on the their dining table - there may even be more than one kind - and yet so few grow their own. The familiar black pepper is a climber native of Kerala - if you retired from all other practices and dedicated your life to offering a plant of black pepper all the undercover heated mollycoddling it needs here in the UK, you might keep it alive. Harvests of peppercorns are the longest of long shots. However, there are a good number of peppers you can grow in our climate: any number of Szechuan peppers, Nepalese, and more besides. Sansho pepper, aka Japanese pepper, is one of my favourites. This week, alongside the emergence of new leaves, the first tiny flower buds: in a few short months, these will develop into highly aromatic, delicious peppercorns.
As good as they are, traditionally the leaves of the sansho pepper are the main harvest: dried and ground, they make a fine spice, fry them whole in hot oil, and so on. Once you smell them, ideas for the kitchen will Catherine wheel from your imagination.
If you fancy one for your garden, here you go.
Don’t forget, if you are a paid subscriber in the UK you get 25% off all plants and seeds.1
8: My other writing
Scribehound Food
You may know I am one of 30 writers - including Angela Hartnett, Tim Hayward, Noor Murad, Bee Wilson and more - working as part of a food writing collective: we each write once a month, so that you get one article delivered to your inbox and the app each day. You can read or listen. As an early morning, first coffee pleasure, listening to a writer reading the words they most want to write takes some beating.
My first article wondered at the madness of adults and their bizarre ability to enjoy not enjoying something even more than they enjoy enjoying it.
There has been so much to enjoy in these first three and a bit weeks, and you get to read or listen to whatever of it takes your fancy.
You can sign up for a first month for just £1, and if you are a paid subscriber here, you can get your first year of Scribehound Food - 365 articles - for just £21, a huge discount.
And of course, you can cancel at any time…but I suspect you won’t want to.
Email me if you would like to take up the offer.
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. This month’s column has three Easter recipes that are as good the rest of the year too.
Herbed loin of lamb, Asparagus, rhubarb, parsley and pecorino salad, and Chocolate hot cross bun bread and butter pudding.
I hope you enjoy them.
To read, click here.
9: Thank Heavens For…Ivor Cutler
For all the shortcomings of this occasionally ridiculous island, I don’t think Ivor Cutler could have been born anywhere else. Like many things, I was introduced to him via John Peel’s late night radio show: one of many right angled turns my mind owes to Peel’s brilliance.
More soon…in the meantime, happy end of April
Mark
Funny that. I kept company with the great Professor Cutler when I was general dogsbody n take-letter at Private Eye in the early sixties. We used to flog the mag together round Cambridge Circus - he wd roll up his trouser-leg and wave it at the traffic. When someone stopped and rolled down the window, I’d rush across and thrust in a mag. happy days!
It's not spring here in tropical Australia but you may be happy to know that black pepper is showing the new sprigs that will support pepper corns later in the year.