Another Food Blog

My favourite liqueur is Grand Marnier, created by Louis-Alexandre Lapostolle. It starts with a blend of fine cognacs aged in oak barrels. Then Caribbean Citrus Bigaradia oranges, grown on the family’s plantations, are harvested while their peel is still green to concentrate their aroma. The peels are dried in the sun and distilled slowly. The orange essence is combined with the cognacs by a family recipe, and the blend undergoes a second maturation in oak casks. The result is a wonderfully intense orange liqueur of depth and subtlety.

There are many ways to drink it. It’s pretty good straight up, warmed gently in the hand. Some take it ice-cold in a chilled shooter glass, and others like it on the rocks. It features in several cocktails, including the Grand Rouge with Campari and pink grapefruit juice, and the Grand Balalaika with vodka and fresh squeezed lemon juice. I like mine best mixed one for one with cognac and served straight up in a balloon glass, swirled gently in the hand to release the aromas. This is called a Lord Madsen, and cuts back the sweetness of the liqueur with the strength of the cognac. I never did get a peerage (because they’d sold out), but at least I got the cocktail.

It started with potato scallops with a gruyère fondue to dip them in. It’s been years since I encountered potato scallops, as opposed to sauté potatoes or those oven-baked in butter. They were nice, though, and unpeeled, giving them texture and taste. The main course was fish and chips, though of course they didn’t call it that. It was fresh Atlantic cod in Old Speckled Hen (beer) batter with chunky chips and minted pea purée (an up-market version of mushy peas). It was very good indeed, but the service was so slow that I had almost given up on it when it finally came.

The wine, which was all finished by the time the main course arrived, was a D’Arrenberg from McLaren Vale. Its idiosyncratic name was “The Hermit Crab,” a blend of viognier and marsanne grapes at 13 percent. There was a distinct tang of pears and tropical fruits, but it was thinner than expected.

Summer pudding is not difficult to make, but completely delicious. It consists of summer berries cooked briefly (to keep them fresh) and left overnight in a bowl with bread slices. Yes, that’s white bread slices. There are many recipes, like the BBC one and Delia’s version. The flavour of the fruit diffuses through, and you serve it chilled with cream or ice cream. It is very summery because the berries are those associated with summer, and its chill is perfect to round off the meal of a warm summer evening. At the graduate dinner at Gonville and Caius, the dessert was summer pudding with chantilly cream, and James (pictured) ate FIVE of them!

Crucially, it’s pronounced “Gonville and Keys,” or shortened to “Keys.” I was there for a graduate dinner, held in the gallery above the main dining hall where the undergraduates in the body of the hall worshipped the dons at the high table. We started with Angas Brut, an Australian sparkler made like champagne from chardonnay and pinot noir, and bottle-fermented. This was in the middle common room (where graduates meet).

We trooped up a narrow stone spiral staircase to the gallery, where the meal began with whitebait with paprika and lemon, which was not crisp enough for most tastes. The leek and stilton soup was adequate, as was the char grilled chicken with lemon & rosemary, plus broccoli & root vegetables with marquise potatoes. The vegetables were nicely done, with a fair amount of bite left in them. The white wine with this was a Chateau des Tours, Sainte Croix du Mont (13.5 percent)), which my host suggested tasted of “wet straw and farmyard scents,” and there was a de Bortoli Sacred Hut blend of semillon and chardonnay (13.5 percent). The red was a Heartland Stickleback blend of cabernet sauvignon, shiraz and grenache (14 percent) which was good. Dessert was a summer pudding made of mixed berries and their juices soaked into bread and served with Chantilly cream.

Conversation became more lively as the wine flowed, but all too soon the gong sounded and everyone stood up for grace and the dons at the top table far below departed. Then we renegotiated that narrow staircase down for port in the middle common room. It was a pleasant evening so many of us chose to stand outside in the quad in our black gowns, drinking our port and chatting late into a warm evening.

Reading about Jackie’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches set me thinking about bread. I rarely buy loaves, sliced or unsliced, and never, ever, buy sliced white bread! I use sliced bread in sandwiches, such as salmon and cucumber, but it’s always brown or wholemeal. I was once told by a house decorator that they use sliced white bread to fill cracks in plasterwork. If you squeeze it between your fingers, he said, you quickly turn it into a clay-like putty, rather like plasticene. When it dries in the crack, it hardens. Well, for walls, maybe, but not for me.

I usually eat filled rolls rather than sandwiches, again choosing wholemeal (for everything except hot dogs). When I’m offered bread in a restaurant I usually pass it up unless the food needs it. Then I notice that I usually pick bread with things in it, like olives, sun-dried tomatoes, or walnuts. My white bread seems to be mostly croissants (which in Britain are usually too bready compared with French ones). And there’s Italian bread like ciabatta. For many years I had an intolerance of wheat gluten and acquired a taste for substitutes, including rye bread used in Danish open sandwiches. Mostly it meant I simply got out of the habit of eating bread, and even though I can now eat it, I don’t eat much of it.