5 minute read
Drink Bill Knott
which must be the best Asian restaurant west not just of London but of Asia.
The shock of this innocent back-street joint is still with me: dish after £8 dish of joy, made by Radhika Mohandas and Jollyon Carter. They won the national street-food awards in 2014, having built a huge following at festivals. And they have no interest in starting a chain.
So drive from wherever you live, stay at the sublime Seaside Boarding House at nearby Burton Bradstock, and divide your cocktails and dinners between the two.
Just inside the County Gates lies Dorset’s last treat: tiny Robin Wylde, in Lyme Regis. My friends Guy and Flora (she who swims 365 days a year) booked our nine-course dinner a month before.
The owner chef, Harriet Mansell, used to cook for Rupert Murdoch and the Qatari royal family – fortunately not at the same sitting. Born in Sidmouth, she is back to set the West Country ablaze.
Her rare gift is that her cooking is experimental without being irritating. Eel in nasturtium, garlic scape, smoked roe and sablé all found themselves on one plate, and the other eight dishes included Portland princess oysters served in a vermouth-and-herb butter, and a shiitake tartlet. It all goes to show that Dorset is light years ahead of Chelsea.
The Pig on the Beach, Studland B19 3AU; 01929 450288; www.thepighotel.com
Crab House Café, Portland Road, Weymouth DT4 9YU; 01305 788867; www.crabhousecafe.co.uk
Dorshi, 6 Chancery Lane, Bridport DT6 3PX; 01308 423221; www.dorshi.co.uk
Robin Wylde, Silver St, Lyme Regis DT7 3HR; 07308 079427; www.robinwylde.com
DRINK BILL KNOTT WHY I’M A CIDER DRINKER
What, do you suppose, are Brown Snout, Woodbine and Sweet Alford? Archaic brands of cigarette? And what links Prince William with the Fair Maid of Taunton?
They are all, in fact, cider apples. A good cider apple needs a high level of sugar (that is where the alcohol comes from). Cider-makers also prize bitterness and astringency, and a crafty combination of different varieties will give the finished cider a pleasingly rounded palate. Single-variety ciders are the exception, not the rule.
The process of making cider is about as simple as making an alcoholic drink can be, as I discovered, many years ago, during a weekend at a friend’s cottage in Dorset. It was October, his orchard was laden with ripe fruit and the cider man was due on Sunday afternoon.
Pleading a dodgy back, my friend retired to a deckchair, leafed idly through his newspaper and sipped chilled Mâcon, occasionally raising a languid hand to point out some apples I had missed as I flailed ineptly atop a stepladder.
The cider man arrived with a woodchipper, through which the apples – stems, pips, snails and all – were pulped.
We tipped the pulp into a pneumatic barrel press, pumped up the big black bladder in the middle and the juice gushed through its slats into buckets. Wild yeasts would do the rest, and by the following spring we would have cider. Or vinegar, as it transpired.
Charlie Newman, landlord and proprietor of the Square and Compass at Worth Matravers, on Dorset’s glorious Isle of Purbeck, makes cider just as traditionally but rather more professionally, pressing 200 tonnes or so of apples in the six-week season in late summer and early autumn, from his own orchards and elsewhere in the county.
All his cider is fermented until it is fully dry. Sat Down BeCider comes straight from big old wooden barrels, while his medium and sweet ciders (Eve’s Idea and Kiss Me Kate) are ‘back-sweetened’ in small kegs, so that the cider has no chance to start fermenting again before the clientele of the Square and Compass have happily necked it. More industrial ciders use non-fermentable sugar substitutes like xylitol and sucralose to avoid refermentation and prolong shelf life.
The Square and Compass is one of only a handful of pubs to have been included in every issue of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide since 1974. Charlie’s draught ales come from Hattie Brown’s Brewery near Swanage, and are excellent, light in alcohol but full in flavour.
And in a neighbouring field there is Charlie’s whimsical Woodhenge, a 12-foot-high sculpture made from 35 tonnes of tree trunks and modelled on the Salisbury Plain original.
Charlie’s main obsession with the past, however, is with things even older than Stonehenge. Walk through the pub’s main entrance, stop at the hatch (there’s no actual bar), buy a pint and a pasty. Then, on the left, you will find a small museum dedicated to fossils Charlie and his father Ray collected from the paleontologically plentiful Jurassic Coast. Spend a few minutes perusing and sipping. Then emerge back onto the pub’s front terrace to finish your well-earned lunch. Now that’s what I call a circular walk.
This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a terrific, classy fizz from Catalunya; a dry white that demonstrates how good Sicilian wines can be; and a Gamay from Burgundy that, for the price, compares very favourably with Pinot Noir. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Wine
Altopiano Bianco, Terre de Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy 2019, offer price £8.20, case price £98.40
100 per cent unoaked Trebbiano from Italy’s smallest DOP, in the heart of Abruzzo. Light and zesty.
Florão, Quinta da Fonte Souto, Portugal 2019, offer price £10.75, case price
£129.00 Arinto and Verdelho co-star in this dry white from the illustrious Symington stable: crisp, with hints of tropical fruit.
Aguaribay Malbec, Valle de Uco, Argentina 2017, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88 £131.88
Rich cherry and raspberry fruit, with smooth tannins and a long, savoury finish.
