Pursuits

Gardening David Wheeler Border Control

Call it May Madness if you like.

A hare seen spiralling around an adjacent field seemed similarly afflicted, as giant machines made silage, disturbing its equilibrium and, possibly, nearby nest.

My madness was of a different cast – the making of long herbaceous borders which I know full well someone else will have to maintain. Despite chronic back pain since major spinal surgery in 2018 and a life-changing cancer op just before Christmas last year (and trying to forget I’m approaching my ninth decade), I remain an incurable garden-maker – a creator, not a curator.

Hence the new borders –56ft of them, seven feet deep.

May Day proved a timely moment to lift the turf. The overall length is broken in the middle to form a grass path into the newly planted apple orchard. And each half has a central break to accommodate a south-facing bench – sitting awhile now being increasingly important.

The design makes four rectangular beds – a less daunting prospect than one unforgiving, lengthy monster. I have had two of them roughly dug, ahead of being turned to a fine tilth after an initial weeding. The other two are subject to a no-dig regime, in an unscientific attempt to gauge the pros and cons of both methods.

For height (unpruned, they’ll tower above my now round-shouldered six feet), I have planted two strong-growing, upright roses – Rosa moyseii ‘Geranium’ and its equally delightful kin ‘Highdownensis’. As the borders overlook a nascent collection of Japanese maples, chosen for their spectacular autumn foliage, the roses were selected more for their conspicuous late-season hips than for their early-summer flowers.

But the main reason for the borders is to billet my Siberian irises, hardy, easygoing, reliable, floriferous, variouslyblue-shaded (other colours are available), clump-forming herbaceous plants which give of their best in late May and June. They like damp ground, which southwest Wales bestows freely. Usefully, their flower stems (upwards of three foot in some varieties) are taller than their leaves.

Aulden Farm in Herefordshire (open days in June and September), close to where we lived until two years ago, held a National Collection of Iris sibirica. It was an annual treat to see its almost 200 different kinds, huggermugger, in regimented beds – where size and hue were assessed. Most of my plants came from Farmyard Nurseries at Llandysul, in the hills behind Carmarthen (open every day) and from the Gobbett Nursery near Kidderminster (by appointment or at numerous plant fairs until mid-September –see planthunterfairs.co.uk).

With so many sibirica varieties to choose from, I must forsake a completist’s approach. My preference is for those of an unfussy countenance –plants of ‘typical’ form, leaving the fancy, frilly-petalled ones to other buyers.

I have my favourites. Pale-blue ‘Papillon’ copiously graced our previous garden and a slip from one of its clumps is increasing here pleasingly. Of other blues, I treasure cerulean ‘Perry’s Blue’, velvety ‘Caesar’s Brother’, yellow-throated ‘Cambridge’ and greyish-blue ‘Sea Shadows’. To lighten the confection, there’s green-veined creamy ‘Chartreuse Bounty’, chalkywhite ‘Gull’s Wing’ and the 1970s-bred, bicoloured ‘Butter and Sugar’.

To avoid the dangers of monocropping, I must introduce other plants to interweave among the irises and to provide colour and interest, once these beauties have retired.

Sidalceas are a new pursuit and we reckon we have just the right (moistureretentive) soil for the larger types of lobelia – scarlet L cardinalis and guardsman-red L tupa, alongside the butterfly favourite, ‘Starship Blue’.

These summer bloomers will fill the gap nicely until the fabulous array of symphyotrichums (asters to you and me) take over. Stay tuned.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld Olives

Britain’s relationship with olives and olive oil began in the 1950s with Elizabeth David’s books on Mediterranean cooking.

As we have continued to associate the growing of olives with the warmer climate of southern Europe, some of us now think that olives should thrive in the changing climate and higher temperatures that are supposedly being experienced in this country.

In fact the British climate is already well suited to growing olives, because the trees need at least two months’ cold weather in winter to produce flowers and fruit.

However hot our summers may be in future years, we shall never produce olives that rival the quality and quantities grown in Spain and Italy. But there is no reason not to have an olive tree in the garden.

It can be planted in the ground now in a small, sheltered garden, but will be better off in a large pot which can be sited in a sunny position in summer and moved close to a wall in winter to avoid frost.

Having said that, I came across an olive grove the other day at Mottistone, near the west coast of the Isle of Wight. The trees were growing on a bank exposed to the wind and apparently did not suffer from salt blowing in from the sea.

Olive trees are hardy, self-fertile and pollinated by wind. A young tree planted now should bear fruit after about four years. Leccino is a Tuscan variety which tolerates a wide range of temperatures.

Regular watering, feeding and spring pruning are advised, which I may have neglected with our two olive trees on the terrace; this may explain why we have had no fruit.

I have seen a photograph of a 15-yearold olive tree in Devon, laden with olives which have turned black from green.

When harvested, they should be soaked in brine for several weeks to get rid of their unpleasantly bitter taste. But, even without fruit, an olive tree can be enjoyed for its silvery evergreen leaves, and the fact that it is a symbol of peace.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD JET-SET MEALS

Stay at home this summer with Daniel E Bender’s The Food Adventurers, a gloriously entertaining survey of gastronomic travellers’ tales from Toronto University’s Professor of Food Studies.

The story runs from the mid-19th century till the Instagrammers take over and we can watch from the safety of our armchairs as the late Anthony Bourdain swallows a cobra heart live on TV (sorry, folks!).

The author’s plan, post-Covid, in November 2021, was a round-the-world trip, following the 1922 itinerary of the Cunard Line’s flagship SS Franconia.

Since most of the world was still under lockdown, it didn’t happen. Instead, Professor Bender examines how culinary tourism has shaped the way we now eat.

Most of his informants are female. Lady-travellers notice useful things like dinner, leaving the men to explore important things like battlefields.

In 1852, Ida Pfeiffer witnesses cannibal dances in Sumatra. In 1928, Juanita Harrison sees (but doesn’t eat) grilled centipedes in Guangdong.

Once air travel cracks in with early mass tourism in the 1950s, Myra Waldo bakes salmon in coconut milk for Pan Am, while Conrad Hilton goes Polynesian in Trader Vic’s. Planter’s Punch in a hollowed-out pineapple with a tiny parasol, anyone?

Culinary appropriation was always political. Just as the curry house is a reminder of Britain’s imperial past, so the Dutch commemorate their colonial adventurings with the rice table, rijsttafel. This is a lavish interpretation of Indonesia’s modest midday meal, now considered a post-colonial relic in its land of origin. It’s a minefield.

Play it safe with a recipe for Sumatran chicken from Sri Owen, author of the definitive work on Indonesian cooking.

Spiced coconut chicken

Gentle stewing followed by rapid grilling ensures that a muscular little barnyard bird is juicy and tender. A useful recipe for a summer barbecue, since the basic cooking can be done in advance. Serves 4

1 small free-range chicken, quartered

For the spice paste

1 onion, skinned and chopped

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1-2 red chillis, de-seeded and diced

2 tsps chopped fresh ginger

½ tsp galangal powder (if you can get it)

1 tsp turmeric

2 tbsps peanut oil (or other seed oil)

The cooking broth

600ml coconut milk

600ml chicken stock or plain water

1 stem lemon grass, cut into 3 lengths (or lemon zest)

1 turmeric leaf (optional)

2 kaffir lime leaves (or a squeeze of lemon or lime juice)

Salt

Trim the chicken quarters and remove any stray bits of fat and skin.

Liquidise the spice-paste ingredients with a splash of water in a blender, transfer to a roomy saucepan and bubble up for a few minutes. Add the chicken quarters and a splash of the coconut milk, stirring to coat all the pieces. Add the stock, lemon grass, optional turmeric leaf and lime leaves, bubble up, turn down the heat, cover and simmer for 25 minutes. Uncover the pan, add the rest of the coconut milk and simmer for another 20 minutes. Taste and add salt.

When you are ready to serve, take the chicken pieces out of the sauce and grill or barbecue for about 6 minutes per side, or roast in a preheated oven till brown and bubbling. Gently re-heat the sauce – don’t let it boil – and serve with the chicken.

Accompany with plain-cooked rice, crisp lettuce leaves and a scooping salad of diced cucumber, pineapple, red pepper and tomato dressed with lemon juice, coriander and finely chopped chilli.

Restaurants James Pembroke Top Food Banks

We have long been used to the idea of high-street banks being transformed into chain restaurants with their canned atmosphere.

Yet 110 years ago, the opposite was true: the medieval taverns of London were converted into banks.

The first British restaurant critic, Lt-Col Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, recorded in early 1914, ‘The most famous of all the Johnsonian taverns, the Mitre, was another of the old houses to fall a victim to bankers … and was finally pulled down that on its site Hoare’s new Banking-House should be erected.’

However, a new and more pleasing phenomenon is nigh. The ground floor of the Byzantine pleasure dome that passed itself off as the headquarters of Andersen Consulting has become Toklas.

Andersen, the boys behind the Enron scandal of 2002, became just a little too handy with their paper-shredder: their worldwide clients and name disappeared overnight. Good news for us because those management consultants at 1 Surrey Street enjoyed the most enormous terrace looking down to the river.

I took Mandy, my art-dealer friend, for her birthday and she was blown away by the paintings. Little wonder, given that Toklas is owned by the people behind the Frieze art fairs. They chose the name after Alice B, who unbeknownst to me (and you?) used to host lavish dinner parties with her lover, Gertrude Stein, and published a cookbook in 1954, complete with a recipe for hashish fudge.

I never had our Gertrude down as a gourmand. It’s as unlikely as The Oldie’s discovery that ‘Bomber’ Harris was a fastidious amateur chef, prone to chastising Constance Spry about her soufflés.

Mandy and I launched with their pitch- perfect starters: artichokes alla Giudia, agretti with tomato and sea bass crudo (all around £10). Mandy eats like a bird. After their best-in-London sourdough, she couldn’t help me out with my rabbit and pancetta. Book a table outside tomorrow and bring a wheelbarrow to load up with their fantastic bread.

My other great find is Yeni, in Beak Street, Soho, whose mother ship is in Istanbul. Its chef/owner, Civan Er, reopened it a while back – but I always cycle by in a rush to Oldie meetings at Polpo. It serves the very best Turkish food you can get in London, in a very sexy, brick-walled, high-ceilinged room, complete with an open fire, over which they’ll roast you some Welsh lamb for £37 for two.

The small plates are where they excel, boasting the longest dish names in menu history. Anyone for ‘bulgur fritters, fresh herbs, macerated grapes, cumin, date molasses’? I certainly am.

Like so many restaurants, they boast a ‘constantly changing’ menu. Of course, I understand the desire for seasonal produce, but some of me (most of me?) yearns for the never-changing menus of yore, albeit with a special (or two) of the day, which gave us our own playlist of favourite dishes across the capital.

The anticipation of cottage pie at the Ivy or spaghetti carbonara at San Frediano would heighten the prelude, and the certainty of the menu also saved loads of time on ordering, especially on a large table. Many punters used to wave the menu away.

The look of those stained, handwritten menus is still with me, the text in a bluish black from over-photocopying. And those glorious Franglais names: ‘mussels marinière’, ‘gâteau cake’.

Sadly, my nostalgia belies the truth: Yeni and Toklas are in a different gastronomic league, and that is largely due to their passion for invention.

Drink Bill Knott Curry Sauce

I am not sure whether the Mumtaz Mahal, our local Cambridge curry house in the late 1970s, even had a wine list.

My father, a creature of habit, never wavered from ordering a bottle of Abbot Ale with his meat biriani. Not because he disliked wine – he was a valued customer at the Peter Dominic wine merchant next door – but because beer was what we drank with curry, and that was that.

How things have changed. The country’s best Indian restaurants, several of them boasting Michelin stars, now employ the gilded palates of wine consultants to compile their lists.

At the much-fêted Gymkhana in Mayfair, for example, you could nibble your chaat with a bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal 2009 (£720), savour a Château Lynch-Bages 1990 (£1,100) with a guinea-fowl pepper fry, and round your meal off with a pistachio and saffron kulfi and a half-bottle of Château d’Yquem 1989 (£620).

What a waste, you might think, and I would agree (unless someone else was paying, of course). Which is to say not that wine cannot work well with spicy food, just that asking your palate to process highly complex flavours from both plate and glass simultaneously is an exercise doomed to failure.

Gewürztraminer is perennially touted as a spice-friendly wine, perhaps because gewürz is the German word for spice, but I have never been convinced.

Partly, perhaps, because it is not my favourite grape. Its heady aroma is often compared to lychees and rose-water, or, as an old-school wine merchant once told me, ‘tart’s boudoir’. But mostly because it lacks the acidity to punch through spice effectively.

Riesling – dry or off-dry – is a much better bet. The bone-dry, lime-scented Rieslings from Australia’s Clare Valley and Eden Valley work especially well, while off-dry German Riesling is terrific with coconut-based curries. Austrian Grüner Veltliner performs similarly well, and dry sherry, perhaps the world’s most food-friendly wine, is always a good choice.

Many spices – particularly the woody ones, such as cloves, cinnamon and star anise – contain hefty amounts of tannin. So be careful when choosing a red, unless you want a mouth-furring double dose.

Avoid older, oaky wines and go for young, bright, fruity reds instead: Beaujolais-Villages is a good option, as is anything from the Loire: a strawberryscented Pinot Noir from Sancerre, perhaps, or a Chinon that has softened in bottle for a couple of years.

But my most exciting recent discovery is Grenache, with its soft tannins and a dusting of spice and cocoa. Invariably blended with other varieties in the Southern Rhône, it has now found its own voice in Spain. Known there as Garnacha or Garnatxa, it is responsible – wholly or partly, sometimes blended with Tempranillo – for a host of newwave, often unoaked reds that can stand toe-to-toe with a dhansak or a jalfrezi. Save the Lynch-Bages for the Sunday roast.

Wine

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines, none of them with even a whiff of oak: a crisp, seafoodfriendly white from the south of France, a complex, medium-bodied white from the north of Spain, and an unorthodox Rioja, full of crunchy red fruit. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Picpoul de Pinet

‘Ornezon’, France 2021, offer price £12.49, case price £149.88

Deliciously aromatic Picpoul with hints of citrus and peach, perfect with seafood.

Sense Cap Blanc, Celler de Capçanes, DO Catalunya, Spain 2021, offer price £11.20, case price £134.40

Garnacha Bianco and Macabeu from the Catalan hills combine to produce a focused, orchard-scented white.

Gatito Loco, Rioja, Spain 2021, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88

Lively, fruity, new-wave Rioja made from Tempranillo and Garnacha: great with rogan josh.

Mixed case price £138.72 – a saving of £22.19 (including free delivery) visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB closes 18th July 2023.

SPORT JIM WHITE

FOOTBALL'S CRAZY PRICES

A chap I met recently told me he had a season ticket for German football team Bayer Leverkusen.

His explanation was straightforward: he works in Bonn, just down the road, and, as a lifelong fan of Leeds United, simply enjoys watching live football. More to the point, he said, when it costs as little as it does to watch a game in Germany, it seems silly not to take advantage.

When he told me how much, I assumed I had misheard: 250 euros, he said (that’s roughly £215).

For that, he gets to see 17 home matches in the Bundesliga, paying roughly £12 a throw. What’s more, he can stand on the terrace, watching the game with a beer in his hand. You can understand his enthusiasm.

Particularly when you compare what he is paying with the price of sitting through an English Premier League game. The difference is eye-watering. At Chelsea, you fork out £76 for a match, or £940 for a season ticket for 19 home league games. And it gets worse if you want to throw in a bit of hospitality.

At Manchester United, you can pay up to £1,699 plus VAT for a single match ticket, albeit one with a glass of champagne, a pre-match meal and a visit to your table from a former player. Even at Oxford United in League One, I recently paid £25 for a seat. And that was to be largely frustrated and annoyed.

While it is true that everything in Britain, from a train ticket to a pint of lager, is substantially pricier than in Germany, the cost of watching live sport is ludicrously higher. It’s six times more expensive for us to watch a football match than for our German counterparts.

But it doesn’t stop us. Far from it. Crowds at English league games in the season that ended in May were the biggest in seven decades. More people turned up to their local stadium than at any time since 1948. Then, after seven years of war interruption, thousands were once again able to clack through the turnstiles in celebration of escaping from the carnage unscathed.

The upward momentum is extraordinary: average attendance in the Premier League this year topped 40,000 for the first time. When the league was inaugurated in 1992, the figure was 21,215. It is a nationwide surge, replicated all the way down the football pyramid. In the Championship in 1986, the average attendance was 7,688. This year, it was 18,787.

Even the National League, the professional game’s basement level, things appear rocket-fuelled. There, admittedly bolstered by Wrexham’s unexpected Hollywood intervention, this season’s average attendance has been 3,378. Games in the fifth tier in Germany are lucky to attract one man and his dog. And the dog usually doesn’t bother.

The cost does not deter us. Right in the middle of the toughest economic challenge in a generation, we are still turning out in droves.

Our national thirst to be at the heart of the grand event, which ensures that everything from the Coronation to Notts County against Boreham Wood plays to a capacity crowd, appears in full working order.

My contact in Germany admitted another thing about his cheap and cheerful days on the Leverkusen terraces: the football there is nothing like as good as it is in the Premier League.

However tough it is for us old-timers to admit, we are living in a golden age of live sport in this country. And the crowds are merely a recognition of that. Even if we are obliged to pay through the nose

Motoring Alan Judd Your Car Vs Russian Army

Richard Lofthouse, formerly an Oxford don and cultural historian, now an editor and motor-industry guru, is off to Ukraine. Again. This time he’s delivering a Cherokee Jeep.

Last time, it was a 2005 109,000-mile Ford Ranger Wildtrak, one of hundreds of thousands of usable vehicles about to become a victim of the Mayor of London’s controversial ULEZ extension.

Having just sold his year-old Toyota Yaris hybrid for almost what he’d paid for it new, Richard decided to do his bit for Ukraine and stumped up £3,500 for the Ranger.

After a flurry of WhatsApps with Harry Leighton of Yorkshire-based car dealers SUV Prestige, a regular contact point with car4ukraine.com, he drove to Calais. He was part of a convoy with a team from SUV Prestige and four other trucks and their donors: an Irish farmer, an English farmer, a Scot and a property developer.

It was snowing when they set off on their long journey through Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. The only mishap was a steering-column seizure on one of the trucks, causing a two-hour delay in Poland. By the time they approached the border with Ukraine, it was dark and snowing heavily.

Other traffic evaporated, leaving them the only vehicles on the motorway. Crossing formalities were efficiently conducted and they soon found themselves engaging four-wheel drive on compacted snow and ice along a lonely road running through snow-laden trees.

Ukraine is about three times the size of the UK. So they were far from the front line, though still within rocket range – and once past the border, they were not insured.

There was a midnight curfew and they were running it close when they reached a military checkpoint. But the soldiers had been warned of their approach and waved them through to their hotel.

The next morning, they were met by one of the founders of car4ukraine.com. He led them to a secret workshop, where volunteer Ukrainian mechanics work 24/7, fitting 10mm armour plating to donor vehicles. A second workshop paints them army green and modifies them to take mounted guns or rockets.

Then they go off to the front line. Once in service, a vehicle’s average life is reckoned to be about three weeks.

Favoured pick-ups are the almost unbreakable Toyota Hilux, followed by the Mitsubishi L200, Nissan Navarra, Isuzu D-Max and Ford Ranger. One Yorkshire gentleman recently donated his almost-new £50,000 Ford Raptor. These trucks are designed for one-tonne loads and can therefore take the extra weight of armour and armament.

SUVs are acceptable for ‘fast extraction’, provided they’re 4x4 and diesel, with Jeeps particularly rated for their strong parts supply. They don’t want any Land Rover models. About 80 per cent of all military movements are conducted in such vehicles with, surprisingly, a premium on British right-hand-drive trucks because they are thought to confuse Russian snipers aiming for the driver.

Richard Lofthouse has been sent a photo of his donated Ranger, now fully armoured and on active service in Bakhmut within a month of delivery. His contribution this time is a 2004 Jeep CRD, 170,000 miles and £2,200.

He leaves with a message for Sadiq Khan, London’s embattled mayor: why not take vehicles from the scrappage scheme aimed at softening the impact of widening ULEZ and send them to Ukraine? Well, why not?

Meanwhile, if you have an old pick-up or SUV you can do without, go to car4ukraine.com.

They’ll be pleased to hear from you.