Pursuits

Gardening David Wheeler Go Down To The Woods Today

I am overly, though justly, fond of the little woodlanders.

April is their month, and no garden is too small for a sampling – indeed, a window box or single flowerpot is all a few of the smallest ones require.

‘Woodlander’ is my shorthand for those mostly diminutive, early-flowering, shade-loving (or shade-tolerant) plants, whose moments in the footlights are brief. They behave like well-mannered dinner guests or sickbed visitors who know exactly when it’s time to leave.

Some – notably snowdrops and winter aconites – will have strolled onto the stage as early as January and linger on, lapping up what diminishing applause they can still muster. But, in the way of all invitees, they too will fade away, vacating ground for the emergence of their later-flowering cohorts, whose cue is the months’ warmer and longer days.

It’s Nature’s answer to the gardener’s skill of achieving ‘successive planting’ – a worthy practice whereby one plant or group of plants makes way for its natural replacement, like the string of arias that propel a Verdi opera.

The smallest of these mostly early woodlanders are classified as alpines and have their dedicated horde of admirers.

Many belong to the Alpine Garden Society, an international body founded in 1929 to promote the cultivation, conservation and exploration of alpine and rock-garden plants, small hardy herbaceous plants, hardy and half-hardy bulbs, hardy ferns and small shrubs.

Be sure to take a hand lens when you attend one of their shows. Detail is all.

To British gardeners, the most familiar of herbaceous woodlanders are pulmonarias (lungworts), pulsatillas

(pasque flowers) and brunneras (beefedup forget-me-nots in welcome shades of blue, emerging in some varieties from silvery variegated foliage). All are indispensable.

Supreme among the blues is matforming Corydalis flexuosa. Look out for the varieties ‘Blue Dragon’, ‘China Blue’ and ‘Porcelain Blue’. In variance to the predominantly mid-green fernlike leaves, there is the cultivar named ‘Purple Leaf’, which shows intriguing dark red foliar markings in winter’s depths.

Euphorbia robbiae (Mrs Robb’s bonnet), a relatively low-growing spurge, gives generously of lime-green flowerheads at this time of the year –doling out textbook contrast alongside any blue-flowering neighbours. The eponymous Mary Anne Robb (18291912), a somewhat uncelebrated botanist and botanical artist whose drawings are held at Kew, introduced this form of E amygdaloides from her travels in north-western Turkey in the early 1890s. I’m not sure I can live without it.

Tiarellas (meaning ‘little turbans’, which their seed capsules resemble) and tellimas, along with vincas (major and minor), provide attractive, evergreen, weed-supressing ground cover. They’re best used under and around shrubs, where they can be left undisturbed to display plumes of fringed bells (tellimas) and nine-inch-tall spikes of creamy-pink ‘foamy’ flowers (tiarellas) through to mid-summer.

Trilliums, challengingly tricky in cultivation in this country but a glorious ‘weed’ in the eastern United States, are the woodland aristocrats. I buy fresh bulbs (rhizomes) most years but have failed spectacularly to build up any notable drifts.

A closing word to those bereft of a garden. Auriculas. These primulas, bred and cross-bred for yonks, have legions of aficionados. They travel miles at this time of the year to specialist shows where, in their infinity, wondrous flower shapes, colours and textures are judged for fame and fortune.

Traditional terracotta Long Tom pots are still made by ceramicists. But many growers now prefer plastic containers (easily concealed in more aesthetically pleasing crocks) to lessen some of the potentially taxing bits of cultivation. Auricula-growing and -collecting become compulsive, bringing friendships and conviviality – aspects of gardening as vital as the plants themselves.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld Swedes

Unsurprisingly, the swede came from Sweden, where it was developed in the 17th century and known as Swedish turnip. Making its way south, the root vegetable found favour with the Scots, who dropped the link with Scandinavia and referred to turnips or neeps, which became an important accompaniment to haggis.

Elsewhere in Britain, and particularly in Cornwall, swedes are called turnips and are an essential ingredient of a pasty.

Since swedes take up to six months to mature, it is best to sow the seed in April, initially in trays or pots, or if outside no later than May. When thinned or planted out, the infant swedes should be about nine inches apart.

Keep the plants well watered and free of weeds during summer, and lift them from October when they’re the size of a cricket ball. Swedes can probably be left in the ground through the winter, though in hard weather the plants should be covered with straw.

Like other brassicas, swedes are prone to clubroot, which can be avoided if you add lime to the soil to make it more alkaline. Varieties such as Marian, Invitation and Gowrie claim to be resistant to both clubroot and powdery mildew.

I have read that in the Second World War German troops forced French farmers to grow swedes during the occupation. But I wonder if that vegetable was kohlrabi – like the swede, of the same family as turnip and cabbage.

In Ben Macintyre’s excellent recent book Colditz, he relates how that German vegetable did not go down well with the British prisoners. Would boiled swedes have been more palatable?

There are those who say that the orange flesh of swedes is an acquired taste; my wife unfortunately has yet to acquire it. But it is worth persevering.

Both the Swedish and the German turnip can be similarly treated – thinly sliced and fried, or mashed with cream and grated nutmeg. I have also enjoyed swedes with potatoes as a topping for shepherd’s pie, and a spiced swede soup is recommended for a cold day.

Cookery Elisabeth Luard Michelin Stars At Home

The disappearance of destination restaurants such as Noma in Copenhagen (three Michelin stars, five times best-onplanet) seems likely to continue.

This means that none of us will, for the sake of gastronomic credibility, have to scrape up the cash and book a year ahead for a mouthful of reindeer heart smoked over spruce needles.

Perhaps the era of superstar chef presiding over 20-course tasting menus is over. The legacy of the best of them, however, is a treasure trove of romantically illustrated cookbooks, some of which contain surprisingly down-to-earth advice. Celebrate April Fool’s Day – in France, poisson d’avril – with a nostalgic plateful, as served in El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Catalonia, still thriving.

El Celler is still going strong because chef-proprietor Joan Roca has a more realistic view of fine dining than Noma’s René Redzepi. Roca is listed third in the current list of the world’s best chefs, after Redzepi and David Muñoz of DiverXO in Madrid – basically, no slouch.

The restaurant business is not for wimps. Things can go belly-up at any time. Best stay at home with a copy of Cook with Joan Roca.

Billed as a culinary manual for trainee chefs but entirely suitable for the domestic cook, it’s magnificently illustrated with step-by-step instructions for roasting, grilling and boiling, with information on things chefs notice but the rest of us might not. I had no idea chickpeas should be started in boiling water and all other pulses in cold, or that parsley in the soaking water stops artichoke hearts from browning.

Here’s the great man on three basic sauces. It’s easy when you know how.

Hollandaise sauce

Ingredients: 250g butter, 2-3 egg yolks, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

1. Clarify the butter – that is, heat it gently to separate the water. Remove the scum that forms on the surface and decant the butter from the base. Keep it close to 65°C.

2. Whisk the egg yolks with the lemon juice, salt and pepper.

3. Emulsify the egg yolks in a bain-marie (bowl set over simmering water), with the clarified butter, stirring it in slowly.

4. Keep it warm enough to stop the butter hardening but not curdle the egg.

Mayonnaise

Ingredients: 200ml sunflower or refined olive oil, 1 egg yolk, lemon juice, salt.

1. Emulsify the egg yolk with a few drops of lemon juice and salt.

2. Whisk the egg yolk and slowly add the oil, continuing to whisk with an electric whisk on moderate speed.

Béchamel (white) sauce

Ingredients: 1 litre full-cream milk, 70g butter, 70g flour, white pepper, nutmeg, salt.

1. Boil the milk with salt, white pepper and a scraping of nutmeg.

2. Prepare a roux by mixing the butter and flour in a saucepan with a whisk. Mix over a gentle heat until completely homogenised and without lumps. It does not need to take colour.

3. Add the hot milk to the roux, little by little, and cook until the desired texture is reached. The flour will not react till it reaches a temperature of about 80°C, so you need to apply enough heat.

4. If you’re not going use it straight away, cool it quickly. To stop a skin forming, cover with clingfilm or a light layer of single cream or milk.

Restaurants

JAMES PEMBROKE

Very Fast Food

‘That dinner cost £4 a minute,’ said Bill Knott, The Oldie’s drinks correspondent.

Forty minutes after arriving at RedFarm, the Covent Garden offspring of the famous New York dim-sum restaurant, we had finished.

Bill was right. The waitress brought all our dishes so quickly that we had no choice but to leave and find comfort at the Lady of the Grapes wine bar, in Maiden Lane.

Confirming his epitaph (‘Never one to mince his words’), Bill expanded on his theme. ‘That’s about the same rate per minute as Marcus Wareing charges at the Berkeley.’

All I could think about was the meal deal I had bought at Sainsbury’s the day before: £3.50 for a sandwich, a packet of crisps and a San Pellegrino. I calculated that Bill and I could have 22 lunches together for the price of the RedFarm dinner, even if they lasted only eight minutes each. We could eliminate the time spent on travel by lunching on Zoom, and we could then go out for a proper lunch with other people.

Knott meal-timing is particularly applicable to Chinese restaurants. In spite of the massive culinary improvements made since the postwar era of ‘chop sewage’, there is still a deck-clearing urgency about the service in Chinese restaurants. I occasionally go to the excellent Lanzhou Lamian Noodle Bar in Cranbourn Street; dinner, from ordering to paying the bill, never lasts more than 15 minutes.

So, to stay put for two hours, just order one course at a time. Our dinner at RedFarm would have been sumptuous. We started with delicious multicoloured Pac Man dumplings. We followed these with a piquant pork-and-crab dumpling soup. We could then have had a breather before devouring their pork belly and Barbary duck ho fun.

I have to be honest: I always find the restaurants in Chinatown disappointingly slimy and earnestly proletarian. When Mao Tse Tung came to power in 1949, he dubbed chefs the ‘running dogs of capitalism’ and he’d have felt quite at home there.

I’d been recommended the Food House, but the carpet was so sticky we barely made it to the upstairs dining room – quite a journey for chicken dumplings with cabbage.

Wander into Romilly Street and things lighten and brighten. Baozilnn is all about Northern Chinese street food. The walls are bedecked with pictures of Mao and happy peasants sharing dumplings, as will you be. They are incredibly filling. So do leave room for their burgers.

If you want to find where the running dogs are cooking now, cross the road to Barshu, where Szechuan cooking is at its best: spicy and delicate. Take a group of four or six and order all the following, two dishes at a time: number 13 –smacked cucumbers; 41B – boiled sea bass with sizzling chilli oil; 58 – dry-wok twice-cooked pork; and don’t miss 95 –the Mapo tofu aka ‘pockmarked old woman’s bean curd with minced pork’; and 111, the legendary dan dan noodles.

At this point, I have to raise the flag for Wagamama which has been knocking out fresh Asian food for over 30 years. Take some young and ask for a table away from the music. Again, more numbers: this time, in the shape of calories. For £60, Adam and I had a feast of chicken ramen (698 calories), the freshest yaki soba with chicken and prawns (819 calories) and, of course, bang bang cauliflower (471 calories). All washed down with a lychee tonic water and a large power juice. Virtue-signalling worthy of Mao.

Drink Bill Knott My Sherry Amour

As I sipped a glass of Valdespino’s aptly named Deliciosa manzanilla, I gazed out at the fishing-boat-bobbing Atlantic ocean from a little beach bar in Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

Reluctantly opening my eyes, I was in wintry Soho, but happily ensconced in the Academy Club on Lexington Street, whose owner, my old friend Andrew Edmunds, died last September, as Tom Hodgkinson writes on page 38.

Andrew’s wine lists, both in the club and at his eponymous restaurant downstairs, were the most benignly priced in London, and they still are: my half-bottle of Deliciosa was a mere £15. It retails for around £9 – sherry is the best-value great wine in the world, as Andrew knew very well.

I wished only that he had still been around to chew the fat with me for a few minutes and help himself to a glass, as used to be his wont. I think my subconscious ordered a half-bottle, not a glass, in the expectation that he might.

Still in search of Spanish warmth, I scurried off for lunch at Maresco on Berwick Street, a quirkily brilliant seafood joint whose aim, as stated by its Scottish owner, is to ‘hijack the best Scottish seafood on its way to Spain’ and serve it with great Spanish wines.

In charge of the latter part of the offering is the estimable Naroa Ortega, who once worked front of house at the much-celebrated Basque grill restaurant Asador Etxebarri. I perched at Maresco’s handsome bar, hypnotised by Hebridean langoustines twitching on crushed ice.

She poured me a glass of something chilly and showed me the label. It was Valdespino’s Inocente fino. ‘When was the last time you tried one of their sherries?’ she asked.

Fairly recently, I replied, wanting neither to point out that an antediluvian club around the corner had been pouring it for years nor to sound like a complete lush.

To me, dry sherry is the apotheosis of Atlantic whites. Starting from Brittany, skirting the Bay of Biscay and heading south towards Gibraltar, these include Muscadet, Txacoli, Albariño and vinho verde, and they all have a profound affinity with the local seafood.

To accompany anything from a plateau de fruits de mer in Quimper to a plate of carabineros (red prawns) in Jerez, via the kokotxas (hake cheeks) and spider crabs of the Basque country, and the highly prized percebes (goose-necked barnacles) of Galicia, nothing cuts the mustard better than a lip-smackingly crisp white wine in a neighbouring ice bucket, the salty tang of sea spray never far from the nostrils.

I shuffled back to the Academy to drain the remains of my Deliciosa, and raised a glass to Andrew. As a wine-lover and a gourmet, a vintner and a restaurateur, he had the gastronomic equivalent of perfect pitch. Happily, at least some of his tastes, whether Soho’s new generation of restaurant folk know it or not, survive him.

Join Bill in Piedmont: see page 79

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a cricket-themed Chardonnay from Down Under to quaff in anticipation of this summer’s Ashes, a focused, vibrant Riesling from a top winemaker, and a fruity Chilean number versatile enough to drink on its own or with a roast. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Chardonnay ‘The Googly’, One Chain Vineyards, South Australia 2021, offer price £8.99, case price £107.88 Montrachet it’s not, but this Aussie Chardonnay from cool-climate vineyards is appealingly fresh and zesty.

Funkstille Riesling, Ferdinand Mayr, Niederösterreich, Austria 2021, offer price £11.75, case price £141.00

From the same winemaker as last month’s Grüner, a classy dry Riesling with hints of pear and grapefruit.

Merlot Reserva ‘Los Espinos’, Espinos y Cardos, Valle Central, Chile 2021, offer price £9.50, case price £114.00

Soft, juicy, ripe, plummy fruit with a long finish: very easy to drink, and great value.

Mixed case price £120.96 – a saving of £31.95 (including free delivery)

For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD

NB Offer closes 25th April 2023.

Sport Stenhousemuir Nil

A friend of mine’s mother had a childhood obsession with Stenhousemuir Football Club. As she grew up, listening to Sports Report on BBC Radio, it became a family preoccupation that the Scottish lower-league club always seemed to be announced by James Alexander Gordon in the day’s classified football results as not having scored a goal.

She even believed this was the operation’s full name: Stenhousemuir Nil. Some years ago, she mentioned her youthful fascination to her son and asked him the question that had been on her mind for so long. What on earth was it that lay behind the decision to name the club not United or City, Rovers, County or Town but Nil?

Having put her right, my friend decided the best gift for her imminent significant birthday would be to take her to a Stenhousemuir home game.

On arrival at Ochilview Park, the club’s modest ground near Falkirk, they discovered they were not alone in being drawn to central lowlands by Stenny’s reputation for parsimony.

Among the 300-odd crowd that day were 30 Norwegians who had flown over from Oslo. They shared a fascination with a Scottish Second Division club seemingly incapable of achieving the single most important purpose of the game: scoring a goal. Neither she nor the Norwegians were to be disappointed by the result that day: Stenhousemuir 0, Arbroath 0.

You wonder if whoever it was who decided that BBC Radio 5 Live’s Sports Report should no longer contain a reading of the classified football results is aware of stories like this. At the start of the season, it was announced that the comprehensive round-up – for generations a feature of the corporation’s output – would no longer be read out by Charlotte Green, Alexander Gordon’s mellifluous successor, or by anyone else.

They insisted that, in these days of instant access on the mobile phone, the listeners no longer needed anyone to read out the results. With the BBC pressed for time, because it had won the rights to broadcast commentary from the Premier League match that kicked off at 5.30pm every Saturday, the results were reckoned to be an unnecessary intrusion.

The outcry was significant and immediate. The BBC responded by suggesting no one complaining about the decision listened to the results any more.

Gary Lineker mocked the moaners on Match of the Day. Why worry? After all, everyone already knew the score.

But, as my friend’s mum knew full well, the glory of the classified reading lay not in the simple communication of fact.

As soon as the last note faded of Out of the Blue – Hubert Bath’s magnificent march of a theme tune – you could prepare yourself for three minutes of aural delight. This was less a summary of the day’s results, and more a piece of performance poetry – a confluence of odd names and unlikely numbers. Just as you can relish the Shipping Forecast without actually being on a boat, so the classified results created a moment of reflection.

And where else could you ever be confronted with the immortal line: Forfar 4, East Fife 5?

No more. Sadly, there will be no children growing up convinced there is a football club in Scotland called Stenhousemuir Nil.

But then Stenny themselves are doing their best to subvert that reputation. When my friend took his mum to a game there recently, they were taken aback by the score: Stenhousemuir 1, Dumbarton 1.

The club hasn’t been involved in a goalless draw since they played Cove Rangers in the Scottish Cup back in September 2021. As an indication of how everything changes, Stenny, it seems, are Nil no more.

Motoring Alan Judd

JAMES MAY’S ELECTRIC DREAMS

James May, one of the brightest stars in the Top Gear firmament, has had an EV (electric vehicle) since 2014. His current stable includes a Tesla Model S, a hydrogen Toyota and a Porsche 911. Writing in the Telegraph recently, he described himself not as an EV evangelist but as ‘an intrigued participant in the experiment’.

He enjoys his Tesla but for longer journeys uses his Porsche 911. The reason? Not range anxiety – he reckons the range of the Tesla and many other EVs is not a serious problem – but the ‘ball-aching inconvenience of public charging’.

Not only because there are too few public charging points but because it takes too long to charge. A lot of research goes into extending battery range, yet range is not really the problem. EVs won’t be fully deployable until they can recharge as rapidly as Mr May can refill his Porsche.

It took May three minutes to fill his Porsche at a 20-pump filling station, which could handle, he calculated, 200 cars an hour. There are about 33 million cars on our roads and, given that they’re replaced at an average of about two million a year, by 2040 more than half should be EVs. Some estimates put the current number of public charging points at 60,000 (though the government confesses to only about 37,000). They are said to increase by about 1,500 per month which, taking the more optimistic estimate, means about 366,000 by 2040, catering for 17 million-plus EVs, which is nothing like enough.

That doesn’t include home charging, of course, but it’s estimated that about 40 per cent of the UK’s 28.3 million homes have no off-street parking. So we’ll need millions of public chargers. Separately, McKinsey estimates three million chargers will be needed across Europe by 2030, up from about 378,000 in 2021 when they were installed at 1,600 per week. That will mean installing up to 10,000 per week. The fastest-weekly installers in Europe are France at 400 and Germany at 200.

It gets worse. The government’s insistence on banning sales of new petrol and diesel cars after 2030 not only discourages research on alternative and synthetic fuels which could potentially use the existing supply network, but may also lead to the demise of car-making in Britain.

From next year, manufacturers have to sell a set portion of zero-emission vehicles, increasing yearly up to 2030, rather than the current system of averaging CO₂ emissions. Lead times in the motor industry are often more than a year, especially during the continuing chip shortage, which has already reduced UK car production to a 66-year low.

Yet major car-makers here, such as Toyota, still don’t know what their portion of zero-emission vehicles will be, nor, in the case of hybrids, what the prescribed ‘meaningful zero-emission range’ means.

Then there’s the fact that manufacturers want to save costs by making expensive EVs close to battery-production plants. Such plants are popping across Europe, but here we don’t have enough to sustain the industry even in planning, especially since the liquidation of Britishvolt.

Governmental actions and inactions often run counter to governmental aspirations. The demonisation of diesel, for example (despite modern diesels’ emitting no more particulates than petrols), will lead to higher CO₂ emissions because petrols emit more than diesels. London mayor Sadiq Khan’s beloved ULEZ, which favours post-2005 petrols over pre-2016 diesels, may therefore be increasing London’s contribution to global warming.

As for 2050 and net zero, the clue is in ‘net’ – it’s achievable only with trade-offs, exporting your emissions or pretending they don’t count because of savings elsewhere. Sounds like a con.