Compendium 9: June 2025

Sweet and sour apricot upside down cake, a very refreshing drink, daylilies, a most excellent playlist, and more

Hello and welcome to the June 2025 Compendium.

This is the place where once a month I share a few things that have held my attention and/or suit the time of year that I hope will feed your senses. Things to eat, drink, listen to, and more.

Thank you for the comments, emails and Notes relating to earlier ones: I’m delighted it’s being so well received.

1: Hello again

I have been in South Devon for a few days - yes, a whole 90 minutes from where I live, but is it not a summer holy grail to be transported to somewhere very different and entirely gorgeous without the tedium of queues and losing a day at either end.

I ate very well, I walked very happily and there were pints within peeing distance of the tide. I heard a couple of my favourite birds. It was all rather good.

I shall almost certainly write more about it. Give me a few days.

In the meantime...

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2: Eat

I always enjoy

Mark Thomas

’ Substack. If you aren’t familiar with it, do take a look. He started it a novice in the kitchen and at the keyboard, and rather than - like most of us would have done - awaiting some imaginary person’s permission to start, he launched openly and honestly, sharing his adventure. None of that snake and mirrors horseshit of pretending you are someone you are not, and so much more enjoyable for it. A couple of weeks ago he made the Sweet and sour apricot upside down cake in my book SOUR. Upside down cakes can be a nuisance - they seemingly randomly stick, it’s not hard to burn a corner that refused to let go of the tin, and so on. He nailed it of course, and I thought I’d share the recipe with you in case you wanted to follow in his footsteps.

It’s a two step recipe, with the apricots below really something just with yoghurt, cheese or sausages too.

Sweet and sour apricots

Everyone needs a simple, repeatable, adaptable sweet and sour recipe: here is mine. It’s so good, I find all the excuses to eat it when I can: with pork chops, in upside down cake (see below), and with porridge for breakfast, I kid you not. Do try this with other stone fruit when in season.

320g apricots, 8 or so, halved and stoned
60ml cider vinegar
60ml medium-dry cider
50g soft light brown sugar
20g dark brown sugar
50g honey
Good pinch of ground coriander
Good pinch of Aleppo pepper, or other mild chilli flakes
1/2 tsp yellow mustard seeds
1 star anise, broken into its spokes
A few stems of lemon thyme
seeds from 3 cardamom pods

Preheat the oven to 170°C fan.

Place the apricot halves in a single layer on a tray and shower with vinegar, wine and sugar. Scatter the coriander, pepper and mustard seeds over, lay the thyme on top and drizzle with honey. Roast for an hour and a half, carefully basting the fruit occasionally, and checking half way through to taste (by all means add a little sugar or vinegar if needed). The apricots should have surrendered their vigour but not so much as to have fallen to pieces. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Sweet and sour apricot upside down cake

The thrill of an upside down cake is all in the reveal: has it stuck, or am I a genius? This has another reveal the first time you make it - will sweet and sour really be nice in a cake? Allow me to coax you, eyes like Kaa, into trying this once: it’s all it will take.

Serves 8

50g butter
100g light brown sugar
150g plain flour
1 tsp ground cardamom (or use cinnamon)
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
½tsp salt
150g caster sugar
4 eggs
100ml sunflower oil

Sweet and sour apricots (see above)

Preheat the oven to 180°C and line a 25cm cake tin with parchment paper.

Melt the butter and the brown sugar together in a pan over a moderate heat, stirring to combine.

Sift the flour, cardamon, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a bowl and mix in the caster sugar and put to one side.

Pour the sugary butter into the cake tin and place the apricots on top, cut side down.

Whisk the eggs and sunflower oil, then combine into the dry ingredients. Pour the batter over the apricots in the cake tin, place in the centre of the oven and bake for 40 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

Cool on a wire rack for 5 minutes, then place a plate on top and carefully turn the cake upside down and out onto the plate. Serve warm or at room temperature, with whichever cream or yoghurt takes your fancy.

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3: Ears

And so, a playlist of things I’ve been listening to this month - some old, some very new. It’s getting on for three hours, so why not pop it on and let it take you where it will.

I hope you enjoy it.

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4: Join me and others around the world on the Abundance Writing Course

Once a month, I run a live gathering, using Zoom, where we’ll take one aspect of writing and focus on developing your skills and confidence in it. For more info, click here.

This month it’s all about agents - what do they do, how can they help, do you need one, how to find one, and more. You don’t have to have been on previous gatherings to come on this one, and in time I imagine I will repeat at least some of the ones already held, so you can always do them then if it appeals.

Why trust me to help?

Because no matter what the jury on my shoulder might still say, I’m objectively not rubbish at this - I’ve written 14 books, won 23 writing and photography awards (including Food Book of the Year and Garden Book of the Year twice each), been shortlisted for a James Beard Award - and because I’ve helped many writers in groups and 1-to-1.

More on this month’s gathering, below.

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5: Eyes

I mentioned Adam Nicolson’s latest a couple of weeks ago, and despite being a reader slower than molasses in January I am making progress through this special book. I know Adam a little, and have loved his writing since Perch Hill, read at the perfect moment as the two fields that were to become Otter Farm came into our lives. He is one of the brightest, most lively-minded people I know, always asking (of himself as much as anyone) the big questions, the interesting questions, and having an open inquisitive mind to any topic and person. It comes out on the pages of anything he writes. He gave me a dusk tour of the Sissinghurst gardens, the White Garden at greatest length, and I couldn’t have been more bowled over. I guess what I’m trying to say is his books always reward and stimulate, and this every bit as much as others.

Catherine Phipps’ Substack

Catherine is one of our very best food writers - the perfect mix of helpful, inspiring, and on the money: go and buy all her books (Leaf and Citrus, especially). She is the queen of pressure cooking, which her Substack currently focuses on (and which even if you think you don’t need, you do), but I’m trying to persuade her to write more widely on it…she wisely ignores me most of the time, but do take a look at her substack for yourself.

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6: Drink

Black limeonade

On the first day of the year where I get in the car to be welcomed by the smell of sun-warm interior, I make this most refreshing of sunny-weather drinks. The triple sours of black lime (in the spice aisle of many supermarkets now, otherwise online), citrus and hibiscus (online here if you are struggling to find them locally) make for a beautifully complex lime-lemonade that never oversteps the mark. If you were to try an equal measure of gin to limeonade, and tonic in place of the sparkling water, you may find that your disposition improves.

Makes 400ml

400ml water
250g sugar
2 black limes, punctured
zest of 2 lemons
zest of 1 lime
6 dried hibiscus flowers

sparkling water and ice, to serve

In a medium sized pan, bring the water to a simmer and stir the sugar in until it has dissolved. Add the black limes, citrus zest and hibiscus flowers and gently simmer for 15 minutes. The liquid should have become more syrupy, and the colour a pleasing crimson. Allow to cool a little, strain through a sieve into a jug, before pouring into a sterilized bottle - use a funnel if you are as messy as I. Once cool, refrigerate.

Serve diluted with sparkling water: 1:5 limeonade to water is a good place to start. And when the weather is less than special, a similar ratio of limeonade to boiling water works wonders. In the unlikely event that you don’t finish this within a day or two, it will keep for a couple of weeks in the fridge.

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7: Garden

Daylilies

Daylilies are part of the Lily family, but are not true lilies - they belong to the Hemerocallis species, originating in eastern Asia where they have a long history of kitchen and medical use. You’ll find the flowers sold as gum jum (or ‘golden needles’) fresh or dry throughout the region where they are commonly used in soup (especially hot and sour soup) and pork dishes such as moo shu.

Daylilies are far more than gorgeous, delicious flowers. You can eat all parts of the plant and they’ll offer you something edible for months. The early leaves in spring, the summer buds as well as the flowers and then the rhizomes when the cold weather comes. As well as daylilies’ ability to take to most soils, this steady supply made them such an attractive proposition to early settlers to America.

They are extremely easy to grow, and if one for your garden, Stella D’Oro, Crimson Pirate, Sammy Russell and Red Rum are all really good varieties.

Don’t forget, if you are a paid subscriber in the UK you get 25% off all plants and seeds.¹

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8: My other writing

Scribehound Food

Once a month, I write on Scribehound Food - subscribers get one piece of new food each day. This month, I wrote about the pleasure of butter, toast, more butter, Dairylea, and painting Airfix planes.

Click below to read: I hope you enjoy it.

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The Sunday Times Magazine

Once I month, I create three recipes for The Sunday Times Magazine food pages, and this month I sang about the brilliance of tarragon - on as many days as not, I think it’s my favourite herb. Three recipes that make the most of it are yours by clicking below.

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9: Thank Heavens For…Brian Wilson

I loved the Beach Boys as a kid - that California Girls exuberance and the chug chug chug of Do It Again weren’t hard to like. I got older and heard Pet Sounds spoken about as the greatest album of all and other than the loveable headlines of Sloop John B, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, and (possibly the greatest song of all) God Only Knows², I didn’t get it first time round. I wasn’t ready for it. I didn’t get music that leapt here and there, that dragged you off down the weirdest of alleys before depositing you back where you started, scratching your head wondering what had just happened.

When I was ready it stuck, it really stuck. I got the Smile bootleg, I dived around and soaked it all up. Wilson was still too much for my tiny mind to take in - I mean how and why would you dream up sowing the elements that make up Good Vibrations or Heroes and Villains? His music still feels like a wave I can only catch so much of at a time, but that’s ok with me.

The impossible happened: rescued from the depths of wherever the years of drugs, isolation and a lack of neurodiversity understanding had taken him, he was to tour. I got to see him early in 2004. The band was extraordinary, Wilson present and enigmatic in equal measure. His greatness filled the room - a proper Mozart of a genius who heard entire arrangements in his mind, and there he was, a handful of yards away. You may not feel the same about the Beach Boys, and fair enough, but it’s is very likely that without a few intense years of Wilson’s luminous brilliance, you and I wouldn’t be listening to much of the music we love today.

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More soon…in the meantime, happy end of June to you

Mark

1. More info about how to do this here.

2. If you are even vaguely interested in the musical genius of this perfect song, the ever interesting Rick Beato provides a lovely window into it here