Category: Food & Drink

Red-Veined Sorrel

Red-veined sorrel (Rumex sanguineus) is easy to grow, decorative and edible. Like spinach it’s rich in potassium which lowers blood pressure and I expect it to become very fashionable in gardens great and small.

Shoot Lunches

Durham University is a hot-house for lifelong friendships and (not always lifelong) marriages. A conspicuous success is John and Katie who live on their farm in Northumberland. Their daughter, Lucy, was brought up on good plain cooking and shoot lunches. Now she has spread her wings.

Château de Haute-Serre

Six grape varieties are allowed to make red wine designated Bordeaux: Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Malbec and Carménère. The last three are not household names, at least not in my cellar.

Summertime

The Mall is decked out for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting; Lancaster house is sealed off and has much tentage and Lord Lieutenants and their deputies are run ragged greeting delegates at airports.

Easter Sunday

The Elia Hotel is owned by George Digridakis whose grandfather played an important role in the Resistance after the German invasion in 1941. Today we are en fête and will celebrate Easter under his gaze.

Fox, Food, Fops

It was raining much too hard to take a photograph of this fine bronze of Charles James Fox erected in 1816. I was walking across the north side of Bloomsbury Square on my way to the British Museum and their Charmed Lives in Greece exhibition.

Booth

No doubt you make a Pavlovian association between Booth and gin. Well the link has been broken since production ceased in 2017.

Boots

“It was a lonely land then, the vast frontier held by the last scattered remnants of the once great armies that fought the Civil War. To such as these, all but forgotten, doing a dirty, thankless job, without reward or glory, the army was a way of life, the only one they knew or wanted.”

William Pickering

I have been given a bottle of port by a generous friend who found himself unable to walk past Berry Bros & Rudd without making a purchase. It is a twenty-year-old tawny labelled William Pickering – not a port house with which I am familiar.

York Scratchings

During WWII the domestic staff employed by the Dorrien-Smiths on Tresco were diverted into war work. The family have leased the island from the Duchy of Cornwall since 1834. The Mrs D-S of the day was asked if this wasn’t rather inconvenient. Not at all she said, I dress up in the maid’s uniform and… Continue reading York Scratchings