Perry – Cider With Maria

Dorothy Hartley: Verjuice

February 16, 2016Leave a comment

41zXLaljcLL._SX338_BO1,204,203,200_ I’ve been reading Lost World: England 1933-1936, a collection of essays by Dorothy Hartley, originally written for the Daily Sketch Newspaper. Dorothy was an eccentric, a wanderer, and a writer, whose prose style was that of a novelist or perhaps a literary naturalist, but (thankfully) not the dry analysis of an anthropologist. Lucy Worsley, in her foreword to the book, described Dorothy as, “a slightly crazy but utterly admirable figure, who broke free of a solidly middle-class background to become a roving reporter for rural England. To research her books and articles, she travelled the country, interviewing country folk who still just about did things ‘the old way’ before mass production and industrialization and mechanization changed farming beyond recognition.”

I read Dorothy’s writing and meet the kind of writer and explorer I would like to be. But Dorothy slept rough under hedges and was not afraid to wander alone in the remoter corners of rural England. I’m not quite so intrepid. The scenes, people, and lifestyles she captured represented the last gasp of rural life before the industrialization of farming. Her observations highlight the receding quality of this world. Reading them, one begins to see the deep attachment to rural nostalgia underpinning English culture as the twentieth century marches forward. But in Dorothy’s writing, that nostalgia is not saccharine or rose-colored. It is full of the raw material of old crafts and ways of life.

Dorothy’s writing is filled with the lexicon of another era. In the passage I share below, she refers to “beetles” and “hogsheads” as she talks of the implements of cider making. The recipe for verjuice that she provides calls for, “handfuls of damask rose leaves,” an ingredient I’ve never encountered before. Reading her prose, you experience cider not only as a constellation of tastes and smells, but a world of words, of knowledge, of the material experience of a way of life now past. The passage below is not one of her more poetic ones, but it is full of information. The source of her quoted recipe is unclear, but nevertheless, it is replete with detail:

….

From “Let us consider our drinks” in Lost World by Dorothy Hartley

Verjuice

Curiously, the Hereford cider and ‘Along-the-border’ cider are made after the old recipes for making verjuice. Verjuice was the sharp crab-apple juice, used in medieval cookery as frequently as the lemon is to-day. It probably had considerable effect in mitigating the massive meat diet and salted-pork-and-beans of those days. Here is the recipe for verjuice, because it is interesting in connection with the cider recipes:-

Gather your crabs as soon as the kernels turne blacke, and having laid them awhile in a heap to sweat together take and pick from the stalkes, then in long troughs with beetles for the purpose, crush and break them all to mash, then take a bagge of coarse hairecloth, as square as the press, and fill it with the crushed crabs, and press it while any moisture will drop forth. Turn it into sweet hogsheads and to every hogshead put half a dozen handfuls of damask rose leaves, and tun it up and spend it as you should have occasion.

Now in parts of the West the best cider makers look out for crabs, and crab trees figure among the hundred odd sorts of apple trees that various makers of cider import, and plant, and transplant, and acclimatize to improve their brews. Hundreds of letters and MS [manuscripts] are about cider apple trees.

Down South they made the cider through straw and the variety of the brews show the antiquity of the procedure. Cornish miners used to put hot sheep’s blood into it! Devon folks cream or milk! Kent writers mention the gum of cherry trees. Perry was never so popular, probably because the juicy eating pear, the Wardon, was prized for serving with cream and reverence, and the other pears were woody. Some recipes make a stew of them in cider.

Cider belongs to the apple-blossom South as surely as whisky belongs to the heather-land North.

Pheasants and Pear Trees

February 3, 2016February 3, 20161 Comment

IMG_6362a The end of January is the close of pheasant season in England. The Beater’s Shoot marks the day at the end of the season when the paying guns are done, and the beaters take guns in hand. At this point in the season, one takes aim at the wily fowl who have managed to survive not only foxes and dogs, but the other guns who’ve been at it since November. These are the birds who’ve managed to keep their feet on the ground, or who’ve won the lottery of the air.

I’ll tell you right now, that I’m a terrible shot, and my fumbling attempts with a firearm led me to the conclusion that I am left-eye dominant and right-handed – a physiology at cross purposes for the sport. But I preferred the work of the beater to the sport of the guns anyway. My eyes were better suited to sweeping the scenes of the hedgerows, searching out the silhouettes of trees. Old perry trees. The lone oaks settling in their centuries-old seats on the hills. The hawthorns and the blackthorns dividing the fields.

In England, one of my best friends was a gamekeeper for a small shoot on a local farm, and his sweetheart had an eye for good dogs and taste for good gin. Many of their circle were hunters and farmers and gamekeepers. Even my neighbour next door was gamekeeper. My social circle was the working edge of English Country Life, peppered with people in other professions: occupational therapists, farmers, conservationists, blacksmiths, repairmen, EMTs, and caterers. On the weekends, the working folks would gather for the working man’s portion of the country shoot: we were the beaters.

The beaters stalk the birds, flushing them slowly from their hiding places in the thickets and streams, along the hedgerows, chasing them carefully toward the edge of a hill, where they finally fly up and out, into the air where the gentlemen with guns are waiting to take aim.

On reflection it seems a bit unfair, chasing these dull birds to the edge of their small range of comfort, where they have fed and roosted all summer and fall, towards a trap of forced flight before a firing squad. But crawling through the hedges, and along the fields, the immediate feeling is a quiet rush, the thrill of stalking the quarry. The successful shot is more than the work of a trigger finger and an eye. It is the quick targeting, the end capture of a long slow ramble begun by the side of the road. Jumping out of an old truck, sweeping the landscape of its feathers, with a long brushstroke traced by wellington boots on the muddy ground, the beaters flush the countryside towards the moment of the shot. And it is almost an afterthought in the air to hours of feet in the mud, wading through acres of wheat and feed corn.

By the end of the season, I knew the paths well. We traced a pattern each time, along a series of field boundaries, scrambling across streams, quiet, so as not to scare the birds to an early flight. You must keep them scuttling across the ground till the last moment. And each time I retraced the path I loved it more. My favourite hedge was one studded with old perry trees. Who knows how old they were? Or if anyone had ever collected their pears? Had they been planted? Had they sprung up as wildings in the hedge? Who could say? I loved encountering trees this way, as signposts on my path, familiar sentinels in the fields, yet lonely, somewhat desolate in the midst of a wild undergrowth of young hedge. We were shooing the pheasants, birds we could rarely see until they flew, through their daily habitat among the shrubs and trees toward a brief and panicked vault towards the sky.

At the end of the first drive, we would end up on the edge of the Dabinette orchard and walk to my friend’s family home for a lunch of pork sandwiches and cider, and set out again for the afternoon. And at the end, tired, we’d walk the last stretch to the pub.

The memory is three years old now. But what I think what a pleasure it would be walk out again with my friends, stand on the headland overlooking the Wye Valley, with Ross below us, May Hill in the distance, and my friends ready with flasks full of home-made sloe gin tucked in tweed pockets to keep us warm from the inside.

We would wave our hands in the air to shoo the birds towards the guns if they took fright and flew. But from the top of that high hill, the escaping birds could see, like us, the Shire below, peaceful, settled into the grey quiet of winter.

I’m not so different from the pheasant. Who wouldn’t want to keep their heads under these quiet hedges? The trick is to keep your feet firmly planted on the ground.

Days later, after the beater’s shoot at the end of the season, I was in the air too, on a plane, flushed out of my beloved hedgerows by threats slowly pursuing me: the end of a work visa, faltering finances, the duty to return home to tend unfinished business.

It’s not the final shot that hurts – no – it’s the grief of letting your feet leave the textured, familiar ground of a beloved place.

Will the old pear trees still be there when I return, the oaks? They are long-lived trees, and I hope they will still be there to greet me, landing from another life, another textured ground in Ithaca, across the sea.

…

Pheasant Shoot

Written 2012,
For Toby, Kate, Howie, Ed, Mel, Laura, Will, Mark, Ru, St.John, and the rest of the Rascals

Brrhhhrrrhh, the roll of the tongue, Brrrhhhrrhh,
A rough coo tumbling into the cover of wheat
Where the birds barely rustle.

The roll of a tongue and the rasp of a stick on the wheat,
The rhythmic beat, and the rough-shod treading of feet
over the wet pasture, over the stile.

Beyond, in the next field over, the unsettled bleat
of a flock of Shropshires retreating from the din of the guns,
to the far side of their pasture.

And the rolling hum of the beaters,
driving their wild feathered flock
towards one last flight for the guns,

From the hedge studded with old perry trees,
From the swollen stream and the bramble-curtained low ravine,
From the pig’s wood, from the maize, from the corn,

Till finally, their long tails trailing them, they fly
Over the guns, and the shots pulse out,
a patter of lead falls, a tuft of feather rips out from a breast

The wings spread out – the bird spirals down
to the crest of a hill,
Where a spaniel gallops, retrieves, the kill.

A whistle blows. The keeper calls the beaters in
To the pub, where they warm themselves
With ale or gin, counting the braces of birds they’ve tied and hung.

We rattle home in an old car that spills Van Morrison out the windows,
softening the curves the lanes.
The pheasants left to grey dim light begin to roost,
climb the darkening air to their nightly rest.

Back at the Broome

August 22, 2013January 22, 2014Leave a comment

I have returned to Broome Farm for a visit about six months after my departure, and it’s almost like I never left. So lovely to slip right back into drinking some amazing cider outside the cellar with the regulars at the end of the workday. Folks report that, though the apple crop is not a bumper one as media reports have suggested, it is better than last year, and it is nice to see many of the apple and pear trees laden with fruit.

me in front of the Holmer Perry Tree at Broome Farm

One tree in particular, the old Holmer, is looking particularly laden with its tiny fruits. Standing under it the other day, I asked how old it was, as it is the oldest and largest fruit tree on the farm. Our friend John Teiser, cider maker (Springherne Cider), tree enthusiast, and orchard researcher, said it would probably date to about 1828. I was taken aback by such accuracy of date, and John explained that it was in the decade between 1820 and 1830 that Thomas Andrew Knight, a local Herefordshire gentleman farmer who pioneered fruit breeding in the 19th century, popularized the variety of perry pear he had discovered in the vicinity of the village of Holmer, north of the city of Hereford. According to John, many large old Holmers date back to this decade, as Knight convinced many people all over the county to plant them during that time. Mike said he remembers several other large specimens of perry pears standing nearby when he was a boy, but they have died out long ago. As we were admiring the majestic and craggy old tree, which has skeletal dead branches interspersed with the green boughs full of fruit, my friend Liz grimaced slightly and said it was the worst pear to pick up of all the pears in the orchard, due to its tiny size. But one can’t help but respect such an old tree.

Meanwhile, I spent the afternoon over at Much Marcle at Westons Cider. Somehow I had managed never to take their facility tour when I was here previously, so I decided now was the time. The tour guide was very lovely, and she took us all round the busy facility, stopping frequently to let the Westons lorries pass by. By far the most interesting part of the tour was the Vat room, where over 90 oak vats of huge proportions, some over 200 years old, stand holding vast quantities of cider during its aging process after fermentation. Each of them have names, a tradition started by the founder of the company. The vat room inspires feelings of awe and wonder, even more so than the equally massive holding tanks that loom outside over the distant Malvern Hills.

No, the vat room is dark, dank, and full of mysteriously huge and ancient vessels whose girth and age, not to mention their very names, seem to bestow upon them a sense of mythical and yet earthy personality. Titans of cider – the kind of creatures that preceded gods. You feel you have entered a temple inhabited by mischievious and montrous beings through which billions of litres of cider have flowed.

Well, after that, I needed a bit of a stroll, you know, to relax the mind. So I drove down the lane to the Helens to visit the avenue of perry pears, trees even more ancient and craggy than the Holmer at Broome. The avenue was planted to commemorate the coronation of Queen Anne in 1702, and some of the trees still hang on to life. I’ve admired these trees in the past, and last fall at the Big Apple festival, which is held on the grounds of Hellens Manor, I got to taste the perry made from these pears, the Hellens Early and the Hellens Green, and it was lovely. Somewhat sweet, with a honeysuckle nectar quality as I recall. One vintage had a hint of woodiness as well.

More to come on further adventures in perry, cider, Broome Farm this trip.

Avenue of Perry trees at the Hellens, Much Marcle