The Food Almanac by Miranda York

Author:Miranda York [York, Miranda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

AVIATION

50ml (2fl oz) gin

20ml (¾fl oz) fresh lemon juice

15–20ml (½–¾fl oz) Luxardo Maraschino Originale (and it must be Luxardo – avoid cheap imitations at all costs)

Shake with ice and strain into a frozen cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist and a maraschino cherry (or two).

Pick Your Own

by Anna Higham

‘I have a deep compassion for our own town dwellers who know so little of fruit at its best. How many of them have ever tasted a ripe cherry, one of those that we gather on a July day, so full of juice and tender of skin that it would burst at the very sight of a bushel basket?’

The Anatomy of Dessert by Edward A. Bunyard, 1929

When I first started working in the restaurant, it was the depths of winter. I kept hearing of the pick-your-own farm we would visit every week when summer hit, my excitement building with each conversation. And for the last six summers, I have driven out to a Kentish PYO farm to pick whatever is at its best. Each visit I explore further, each year I find a new favourite tree. I initiate other chefs and friends, witnessing the revelation when they taste a strawberry so perfectly ripe, still warm from the sun, and made all the sweeter by the toil it took to find and pick it. I know they, like me, can never go back to mediocre fruit.

Kitchen work is by nature physical but stationary: endurance without flow. At the farm, I discover a new physicality – aching thighs from squatting among the strawberries, skin scratched and embedded with tiny thorns from the gooseberries, raspberries and tayberries. I stretch to grasp the just-out-of-reach plums. My mind finds calm in its focus of finding the next perfect fruit and my eyes see nothing but joyful colour. I always return from picking weary but somehow refreshed.

The real trick at a PYO farm is to get inside the canopy of any fruit tree or bush. Don’t hover around the edges – fight your way through the branches to look out from within. Cherries are brazen, doing everything they can to be attractive, to be chosen. It’s hard to keep your concentration as your eye catches yet another flash of cerise. Mulberries, on the other hand, require more patience – they hide under leaves, maintaining their mystery.

When I return to the kitchen, the need to preserve the memory of the farm takes over. I fill the cupboards with jams, compotes and cordials, and the freezer with ice creams. I’ll wait until winter to prise open these sunshine jars and bottles. My belly is already full of stolen fruit, too perfectly ripe to be consumed anywhere other than within the idyll of the farm.

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