Staring me in the face - Elderflower Cordial

After failing miserably in finding Elderflowers, and harvesting a load of Hawthorn flowers instead, I realised that there was a bush in the back garden of my work!  After harvesting a load of flowers, pulling a few oranges and lemons our of my fruit bowl, and cadging some citric acid from my boss, I set to work making Elderflower Cordial.


Needing a quick recipe, I went to the BBC food website and found a very simple to make cordial by Lotte Duncan.

Ingredients (to make 2 litres)
Around 30 Elderflower heads
1.7 litres boiling water
900g Caster Sugar (I used granulated)
50g citric acid
2 Oranges
3 Lemons

The Theory
Rinse the elderflowers, picking out any bugs, leaves or bits of twig

Put sugar and boiling water in a bowl, stir until the sugar is dissolved and then leave to cool.

Add the citric acid, citrus fruit and flowers

Stir and leave in a cool place for 24 hours, stirring occasionally

Strain and transfer to sterilised bottles

The Practice
It pretty much went as planned.  Knowing that I was going to have to freeze this to last until Christmas (kept in the fridge, it lasts about a month or so), I filled it into empty 500ml plastic Coke bottles.  Sure, it isn't going to look good, but I can always defrost it and put it into a nice jug.  I filtered it through a fine sieve, but the resultant cordial still had the odd flower in, but not to worry - it looks a bit more authentic!

I expected the cordial to be a bit thicker, like you get from commercial cordial, but it wasn't.  With a consistency akin to orange squash, it is very refreshing when diluted with a bit of water.  I've picked some more elderflowers from the abundant tree so will be playing around with the recipe to try and make a slightly thicker cordial - a bit more sugar (1kg) and a bit less water (1.4litres).

WARNING
The roots, seeds, leaves, twigs and branches of the elder contain a cyanide-inducing glycoside, which means that if you eat too much of these parts, it can cause a build up of cyanide in your body when digested.  Infusions of the flowers and the ripe berries are safe to eat.

An accidental harvest - Hawthorn Flowers

So all of a sudden flowers are blooming in the hedgerows and at the beginning of June it is cordial making time.  I had hoped to pick elderflowers but lacking any bushes in the immediate area, I decided to pick hawthorns.  Actually, that is a total lie.  I went out and started stripping a bush of its flowers and thought 'hold on a minute, these don't smell very elderflowery' - got out my iPhone and Googled 'elderflower'.  Hmmm, what the hell was I picking?  These flowers were not elderflowers.  Not wanting to tip two carrier bags full of flowers into a ditch, I took them home and hunted out what I had collected, and it turned out to be hawthorn flowers. 

So what could I do with these?  I noticed that when the flowers are a little bit yellow they can smell a bit fishy, which isn't that nice, so I've avoided using these as I didn't fancy anything that smelled like fish.  I looked online and found a Hawthorn tea recipe.  Simply put a load of flowers into a teapot and pour over boiling water.  Apparently good for high blood pressure, this tea has a slightly numbing floral scent to it and a bit like a hot summer day hedgerow.  It is pleasant enough when sweetened with a little honey or maple syrup, but I'm not a fan of herbal teas so won't be going down this path again soon.

I reckoned that the simple, summery floral aroma would also be able to be made into a cordial - slightly lighter than Elderflower, but hopefully just as nice.  I typed into Google 'Hawthorn Cordial' and came up with several recipes, but one stood out.  From www.vintagerecipes.net, I found a very simple cordial recipe involving the flowers and brandy. 

Now obviously brandy is expensive and I wouldn't be able to go out and buy some, but I did have half a bottle sitting in my kitchen and thought i might as well make use of this and add it to the menu.  At least I now have something alcoholic for the end of the meal!

Hawthorn Boozy Cordial

Ingredients

Hawthorn Flowers minus any leaves or stalks

Brandy (make it something half decent)

A tablespoon of sugar

Simply, I put a lot of flowers (minus any stalks or leaves) into a glass bottle and a tablespoons of sugar.  Then poured in the brandy over the top and there I will leave it for the next three months.  In September, I'll drain off the flowers and pour it back into another bottle (having a taste in the process) and see if I've wasted some perfectly good brandy or not.

A month of reading and planning

 It has been a month since my last post, so you would be forgiven for thinking that I'd had an idea over Christmas and the reality of this challenge has been too much and I'd given up.  Far from it.  

After extensive reading of numerous books and websites, I've come up with my menu for the meal.  Obviously this will be flexible depending on what I manage to find and kill, but it is a good structure to create a plan of what I am going to do.  

I initially thought that basing a dinner around a Medieval Christmas feast would be easier due to the fact that all the ingredients would have been available in Britain.  All our current Christmas traditions stem from these ancient meals, with roast beasts, fruit and lots of fattier foods in abundance, so there would be a link to the current feasts we all know.  

The traditional Medieval Christmas dinner was rich and heavy as it had come after a period of fasting.  The Advent fast prohibited meat, chicken, milk, cheese and butter, so once the period of abstinence was over, everyone wanted to cram as much of these foods in as possible.  Sure, they had managed to eat some meat during the advent, as they reckoned that beavers, as they lived in water like fish, munching on their tails was a good source of protein.  Once they had had their fill of a month of fish flavoured to taste like meat and beaver tail, medieval folks fancied a bit of venison, pig, chicken or goose, with lots of fatty and sweet treats.  They also threw in lots of spices to their food, with gingerbread, spiced wines, mince pies and plum puddings, all things that are still commonplace today.  Although the medieval meal hasn't changed a lot, some of the ingredients have so I will be looking back in time to old recipes to try and find alternatives for a lot of our imported ingredients.

My amuse-bouche is inspired by the medieval love of land animals and fatty dishes and I will be making Wild Beast Terrine with chutney & toast.  I've deliberately kept things a bit vague here on the beast content, but it could include duck, pigeon rabbit, pheasant - anything really that I manage to get in the run up to Christmas.

The medieval feast was one of decadence and even though crabs and lobsters were once peasant food, they are now considered posh nosh so I will be making a Crab and/or Lobster consomme for a starter - hopefully that should embrace the decadence!

The main course is the highlight of the Christmas meal and again, being on the coast of Scotland with lots of migrating geese means that I'm aiming to have a couple of roast wild geese for dinner, and it is going very medieval as they too would have used this bird at Christmas.  You can't have a Christmas bird without stuffing, and taking inspiration from a River Cottage recipe for Bunny Burgers, I'm going to make Bunny Stuffing - packed with herbs and juniper (I've found a bush!).  I hope to be able to trade some shellfish for some venison that I will transform into Chipolata sausages (subtle hints have already been made for a Sausage maker for my birthday in June!) and instead of Cranberry Jelly, I'm going to have another go at making rosehip jelly to serve with the bird.  Root vegetables are going to come from homemade growbags, and my initial plan was to find some disused land and plant some potatoes in it.  Then I did some research.

Guerrilla Gardening is a growing past-time of the middle classes and, although illegal, has been going on for centuries.  Since the 17th century, when a group of people fought for the right to cultivate land for food, people have been planting in land that doesn't belong to them.  People are planting flowers on roundabouts and verges to stop the urban decay and brighten up our towns and cities with colour, others are putting down veggies in disused flower beds and all of this is often done in the middle of the night.  However, because I run a wine shop, I have to pass police checks to keep my license to sell alcohol.  Even though the chances of me being caught planting a few spuds up a farm track are slim to nil, I would have to write about it, and that would be me confessing to committing a crime, so I am going to have to borrow a bit of land somewhere for that.

Foraged Christmas Pudding is going to be made out of any fruit I can find and dry, as will the Christmas cake.  I should be able to get a supply of plums, so rather than make a raisin filled Christmas Pudding, I'll be making a Dickensian Plum pudding after harvesting and drying plums at home.  If I can find any other berries , I'll dry those out too for these desserts.

That isn't where the cooking stops I'm afraid, with as the Christmas feast continues with Mince Pies but that i've already got sussed.  My sister-in-law gave us a jar of homemade mincemeat for Christmas last year so I'm just going to continue feeding it with booze throughout 2012 and use that for some mince pies.  Another thing I'm cheating on is the damson gin that I made at the end of last year.  Infusing damsons with a bit of sugar in a bottle of gin is one of the easiest home made drinks you can make.  Of course it is unadvisable to make your own gin from scratch, but buying an inexpensive supermarket bottle of gin is a quick, cheap and easy way to make this winter treat.

Pickles and chutneys should be easy enough to make.  The vinegar is going to have to be bought out of the budget, but the vegetables that I need can be grown in containers and grow bags, but cheese is going to be hard to come by.  Any dairy I need is going to have to be bought, but when you start buying cheese, my £30 budget is going to be eliminated pretty quickly.

So those are my plans.  I've not been able to do anything towards this yet, but I've had a bit more luck and progress with the gifts side of things.  That will come in the next instalment.

Initial thoughts 2: Where will I get the veggies from?

It is pretty easy to grow vegetables for a Christmas dinner.  Carrots, Parsnips and Potatoes are all very simple.  You dig a hole in the ground, plant a seed or a tuber, cover them up, water and leave them to it.  They pretty much grow themselves.  The problem I have is that I don’t have any land in which to plant root vegetables and you can’t have Christmas dinner without roast potatoes so I need to figure out how I’m going to get root veg.  Another ‘must have’ on the Christmas table is Brussels Sprouts and I haven’t a clue how I am going to find them.  There are plenty of farmers on the east coast of Scotland that grow sprouts, so maybe that may call for bartering.

I have a very good book on finding mushrooms, called Mushrooms by Roger Phillips and have already found a place where I know Chanterelle mushrooms grow.  There are also many other fungi in woodlands and on trees so I need to learn what is edible and what isn’t.  Due to the desire I have to not be poisoned by a rogue toadstool, I have every intention of finding a guide who can help me positively identify every mushroom I pick.  I’ll then (after having a few of them lightly fried on toast) learn how to preserve wild mushrooms for either use in the feast or give out as gifts.

Seaweed is in abundance on the east coast of Scotland, and with the help of the internet and a few books, I want to explore this massively unused source of food.  I am sure that by drying and rehydrating, they could provide a suitable alternative to cabbage or other green, leafy veg.  I have also heard that there is a lot of samphire on the beaches too, and I hope that I can find out what to do with this plant, that appears to be a staple on all Michelin star restaurant menus.

Herbs are the things that I don’t have a problem finding.  Aside from the two (small) rosemary plants that are already in my tiny flowerbed, I have a thriving sage plant and am going to plant various herbs in pots and keep them outside my house.  Sure, some may get pinched by the occasional passing rambler, or peed on by a passing dog, but such is the way with growing food!  I have heard that there is some wild garlic growing in a park in St Andrews, so hopefully that should provide me with some much needed flavouring.

I also have a chilli plant in my kitchen window that appears to continuously be producing fruit.  I’ve frozen some chillies grown from this plant, so may use those in the autumn months when I’m making preserves and chutneys.

I reckon that with a bit of lateral thinking I should be able to provide the necessary veg for a Christmas feast, even if it does mean bartering with allotment owners or farmers.  The next thing I need to figure out is fruit.

The Challenge

I love watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage television programmes, as I want to have his life.  I want to have a farm of my own, bomb around the countryside in an old Land Rover, keep animals for the slaughter, grow vegetables, forage from hedgerows and cook all of this lovely native produce in my big farmhouse kitchen.

The lives most of us have, make such an apparently idyllic existence impossible.  I have to work day to day running a wine shop so I can’t spend every day out in the countryside looking for wild food.  I do live in a picture postcard cottage overlooking the sea (the damp and lack of central heating is the pain for the pleasure of a nice view), but aside from a small, yard-wide strip of flowerbed in front of my house, I don’t have anywhere to plant veggies, so can’t grow anything.  I also doubt that my landlady would be too enamored with me if I dug up the Fuschia and put down some carrots, so growing in the flowerbed (aside from the odd herb)  is out too.  Even if I did have the space to raise some chickens and a pig, I wouldn’t know the slightest thing about looking after them and they would end up scrawny and tasteless.

I decided that, the furthest I could go towards self sufficiency was to try and find some free food when I went on my daily walk.

In the autumn of 2011, I decided to try and embrace a little of the free food life and ventured into foraging with some mixed results.  My triumphs included one harvest of chanterelle mushrooms from a place I found late in the season and the discovery of some damson trees that netted a bumper crop that I turned into delicious jam.  My foray into rosehips ended in disaster with my nighttime harvest turning out to be rotten, and a plum jam batch that didn’t have enough pectin and failed to set properly.  With this varied success, it is clear that I’m not overly skilled in the art of foraging and cooking, so it makes the challenge I have decided to set myself, all the more difficult…

A few days ago I went to a supermarket to buy a selection of things for Christmas.  Nothing fancy as I was not hosting a Christmas dinner, it was simply things like pickled onions, ingredients for a River Cottage Beetroot Tarte Tatin, lemonade… the usual paraphernalia that you get into the house for Christmas and rarely eat the rest of the year.  The bill came to £45 and that was simply for things that are accompaniments to the main Christmas dinner.  I realised, I’d just wasted the best part of fifty quid.

I then read that the British public spend, on average, one hundred and forty five pounds on Christmas dinner alone, and we waste one fifth of that.  We also spend, on average, over £500 on presents every year, resulting in a average bill for Christmas of nearly £650 per family.  I have decided that, for Christmas 2012, I will attempt to make a full Christmas feast for 12 people, for the value of the food thrown in the bin – thirty pounds – and provide presents for twenty pounds.

This will mean I have to hunt, find, grow (where? I still haven’t a clue), barter or make everything in a traditional Christmas Dinner and provide a present for each guest for a tenth of what the average family spends every Christmas.

This blog is my journey, through embryonic stages of research, attempting test recipes, learning new crafts and skills, meeting experts who can help me and, hopefully, to the end result – a stressful Christmas Day 2012 making the Christmas dinner that cost me nothing.  I hope you can join me on this journey.