Being married to a teacher, I’ve got real end-of-term vibes. Even though I don’t have a six week break to look forward to. Alas. I will be taking some time off though so these newsletters will become slightly more sporadic until September. I hope you all have some fun summer plans too.
Saturday’s supper club went well and the short-but-dramatic rainstorm that accompanied the main courses only added to the party vibe. This week’s recipe is the for the red kraut that formed part of the griddled cabbage dish.
The second July date is sold out but there are still tickets for the events in August where I’ll be reprising a few of these dishes and introducing some new ones.
Slow cooked pork/smoky mushrooms, bulgar salad Griddled sweetheart cabbage, cashew cream, red kraut, caramelised seeds Greek orange juice carrots with preserved lemon and olives
Plum & anise Baked Alaska
Tickets are £45 each and include a welcome cocktail. Vegan/GF options available, just let me know on the booking form. The events so far have been wonderful so it would be great to see some of you on either the 5th or 19th August to round out the season.
I hope to do some events in the autumn too. Sign up to be the first to hear any news.
On which subject, I’m looking for suitable venues (preferably indoors!) and FoH collaborators. If you have or know of a suitable space then do get in touch, either in the comments or by replying to this email.
Recipe: Spiced Ruby Kraut
Makes approximately 750ml jar. Scale up or down accordingly.
This is the kraut I made to garnish my supper club dish of griddled sweetheart cabbage with cashew cream and caramelised seeds. It was so good I’ll be making it again in August but I wanted to share the recipe as it’s perfect for summer.
The tangy, umami, slightly spicy flavours went beautifully with the sweetness of the fresh cabbage and the luxurious nutty sauce but it would also be great in lieu of chutney on a picnic cheese board or as topping for a burger off the bbq (ideally with a bit of mayo and some crunchy little gem lettuce).
Ingredients
Half a large red cabbage (approx 600g)
2 medium beetroot (approx 200g)
1 red onion (approx 100g)
non-iodised salt
½ tbsp caraway seeds
½ tbsp fennel seeds
½ tbsp chipotle chilli flakes
Method
Quarter and core the cabbage (save the cores if you don’t have a pickle weight). Peel the beetroot and onion. Finely slice, shred or grate all the veg.
Weigh the veg and calculate 2.5% of this weight. Add this figure in salt along with the spices. Toss through to combine evenly. Cover and leave for between 20 minutes and overnight, depending on how busy you are/your tolerance for bowls of things cluttering up the kitchen. The veg will wilt and give out a small puddle of brine.
Pack the kraut into a clean jar and add the brine. There should be enough brine so that when you push down firmly on the veg, brine rises up around it and covers it. Use a glass or ceramic pickle weight, a plastic bag filled with water or the cabbage cores you saved from earlier to keep the veg submerged. Seal the jar.
Put the jar somewhere at room temperature but out of direct sunlight and leave it. Every few days open it up to let out any gas that has collected and to taste a little kraut. When the kraut has reached your preferred degree of tartness, move to the fridge. This will probably take about 10 days.
Notes
I used my Magimix to shred the cabbage and grate the beetroot. It makes for slightly smaller, more delicate strands than chopping by hand or even using a mandoline. For this kraut, I really liked the texture it gave: it made all the ingredients coalesce into something relish-adjacent which worked really well in the dish I created it for. When I make carrot krauts - which I usually eat on sourdough toast with hummus - I prefer the texture of matchsticking by hand which gives more crunch. I can’t always be bothered to do this but I’m always pleased when I do.
Some seeds wold be a really nice addition here. Sunflower or pumpkin maybe. I didn’t put them in because I knew I’d be serving it with a seed sprinkle but they’d be good in a different context.
Cultural Fun
A friend gave me A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story by Polly Morland as a birthday present and I’ve just finished it. It’s a follow-up of sorts to a 1960s classic that I’d never heard of - A Fortunate Man by John Berger which told the story of a Gloucestershire doctor called John Sassal, tending to and deeply entwined in the valley lives of his patients.
The woman now running Sassal’s country practise is unnamed but well drawn. She seems a sensitive, but no-nonsense type, striding around in all weathers, treating injured farmers and sick children alike.
For reasons of confidentiality we get less of her patients, just sketches and vignettes which, in any case, we’re told are of composite characters. This is slightly frustrating as you never get a conclusion to the stories that are introduced. I found Morland’s style a bit self consciously lyrical too, but still enjoyed the book and was moved by the doctor’s compassion for and understanding of the community she treats. More than anything it makes you realise that the rest of us lack this continuity of care from our GPs, a factor which isn’t just nice-to-have medical window dressing but genuinely saves lives.
If lots of couples have a song which transports them back to the heady early days of their relationship, James and I have a film and it is Mission: Impossible III. We watched it so many times that when we decided to name the tables at our wedding after important elements of our relationship there was an M:I3 there alongside Mudlark (the name of the pub where we had our first date), Saffron Walden (where we got engaged) and Chilli (our favourite thing to cook and eat together).
We love the whole MI franchise (apart from the second one, obviously). They do what they do exceptionally well. The plots may be MacGuffin-based but they’re always fun and Tom Cruise’s commitment to doing his own stunts gives the set-piece action sequences a sense of actual jeopardy that you never get from anything CGI generated. So we were super excited to see Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (a film with a clunky amount of punctuation in its title). And I can report it’s… fine. Enjoyable but maybe not up to the best of the franchise. The much-publicised motorbike stunt is genuinely thrilling and there are some other great sequences too but the tone is slightly off.
There was a funny joke with a politician getting confused between the International Monetary Fund and the Impossible Mission Force and some amusing scenes of people grasping at faces, assuming they were rubbery masks. But you can’t take the piss out of something like this too much as it undermines the whole premise. If they don’t take it seriously, why should we suspend our disbelief for two hours and 43 minutes. The other films have always included humour but not at their own expense.
Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw touched on the perils of irony in this piece about the (many, many) toy movies Mattel have in the pipeline. We enjoyed M:I - DRPO (and am sure you will too if you like that sort of thing) I just won’t be naming a table after it at our golden wedding celebrations in 2062.
Bye! See you soon!
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In Good Taste is a Sycamore Smyth newsletter by me, Clare Heal. You can also find me on Instagram or visit my website to find information about my catering work, cookery lessons and upcoming events.
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