Garden cooking
Denver ladies
Marika Hanbury Tenison
If you happen to be looking for a cure for obesity I suggest you follow my example and throw open your house to a group of lady American tourists for ten days. The experience was gruelling, extremely rewarding and reasonably lucrative. At the end of it I discovered I had lost no less than nine pounds in weight.
My garden had let me down and my boasts of fresh home-grown vegetables and strawberries from outside the back door turned to nothing. In the end I rushed to Covent Garden, loaded the car with fruit and vegetables (mostly imported from clement climes and some, indeed, from America itself), and then mixed them with a few of my own retarded asparagus, under-ripe strawberries and immature peas and beans. I filled the deep freeze with all manner of remarkable recipes: turning nettles into a good nourishing soup and the elderflowers into an unusual sorbet tasting of muscat grapes (make a straightforward lemon sorbet mixture but steep four flowering elderflower heads in the hot sugar syrup for twenty minutes), and assured my gardener Geoff that my guests didn't have to be carriers of the dreaded Colorado beetle just because they happened to come from the city of that name.
Being a hostess to seven American ladies was not, I quickly discovered, merely a case of shaking martinis or pouring out generous fingers of bourbon. My guests (they were, after all, paying for my hospitality) were a fairly demanding lot and I got off to a bad start when their twenty large pieces of expensive matching luggage would not begin to fit into the mini-bus I had hired. My carefully spring-cleaned spare rooms shrank to mere cubby holes when the ladies and their luggage were finally installed in them and there were cries of dismay when I had to admit shamefacedly that no I did not have either a tennis court or a swimming pool on the estate.
My guests had brought with them a rich offering of gifts: bourbon, exotic paper napkins, cookery books and the latest gadgets for the kitchen. They filled the house with voices from across the Atlantic and with requests for more hangers and their energy (and their capacity for ice) so alarmed me that I wondered whether this remote farmhouse on Bodmin Moor could really live up to their expectations of British Society life. Food and drink, however, did turn out to be the great softeners of all potential edges. Gin, vodka and bourbon flowed freely, and lovage soup, braised sweetbread patties and Brie ice cream sliPPed down very nicely indeed. It was a pity that the labrador ate two old-English raised pies filled with pheasant, chicken and pork which were cooling in the kitchen in readiness for an Edwardian picnic in the woods (fortunately he left the inside of one which. ' was quickly transformed into a terrine) afl? it would have been nice if the cats had" found their way to the mousse of fresh and smoked salmon which I had planned to serve with a mayonnaise flavoured with finely chopped, roasted pistachio nuts, 3 sorrel purée and a touch of cayenae, pepper. It was also a pity that my principal guest (a genuine example of British society) at a 'Strawberry Lunch' (spiced strawberry soup, chicken salad with celery: green peppers and sliced strawberries ana strawberries steeped in a delicious mixture, of caramel syrup, white wine, orange Pee and orange juice) was actually allergic strawberries and it would have been nice!' the main water pipes hadn't burst at 1 aill but then Claridges, I believe, also has its problems now and then. Visits to Cornish gardens, in the height of their azalea and rhododendron ginrY' palled after a few days and one guest Was heard to say that if she saw another '0°,d. damn bush with a Latin name' she'd ale but lunch at the excellent Horn of Ple,.,11tYt restaurant near Tavistock and a butre, meal at a quaint old English pub were greal successes and so was an evening around MY old piano which had been hauled by sts strong men from a nearby barn. My morning 'cook-ins' were also reward.: ingly popular and it's gratifying to that seven Denver ladies on the other side of the world will now be producing treacle tarts, brandy snaps shaped like waterlilies (shape the hot biscuits over the bottom of a small oiled bowl instead of round a sP00,111 handle and fill them with fresh fruit an" whipped cream), baby lamb roasted on a, bed of rosemary and a remoulade °Al fbilsan.ched celery combined with h c°°1(eu If you find it difficult to think of what: We have for supper every day then intagji having to work out menus for two foul; course meals and some five-course Mea for ten days — the strain was quite snal,ething but at least it did give me scope to t" out no less than forty-five new recipes.
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