In Good Taste #44: Ginger Beer

A fermented fizzy drink for summer inspired by Corfu; elderflowers and other things to be gathering now; latest theatre and cinema outings

Well, hello there! How are you?

Good I hope. Thank you so much for being here.

(Not up for the chitchat? Completely get it. Click the email title to go to a web-based version then jump straight to the recipe or Cultural Fun.)

I’m well, enjoying the sunshine* and excited at how light the evenings are now. Also the elderflowers are beginning to come out.

(*Sunshine correct at time of going to press…)

I was in Finsbury Park this morning, gathering a batch to make “champagne” for my June supperclub welcome cocktails. I shared my recipe for this floral tipple last year so I’m not going to devote a whole newsletter to it but here it is again. It’s lovely. You should make some:

In Good Taste #9: Elderflower "Champagne"

The flowers will likely be available for the next few weeks. It’s best to gather them on a sunny morning and not immediately after rain (which washes off the natural yeasts). Here’s a short video I made about how to make sure you’re picking elderflowers and not some other white flower. (TLDW: look for flat tops to the blossom structure, a creamy off-white colour, saw toothed leaves and a recognisable elderflower scent.)

sycamoresmyth

A post shared by @sycamoresmyth

Whilst you’re out, you might want to see if you can gather any pinecones too and then make yourself some mugolio which is even easier than the elderflower champagne. For the uninitiated, it’s a syrup made by layering the cones with an equal weight of sugar which, over time, draws out the moisture and becomes liquid. It may or may not ferment depending on the concentration of the syrup and what yeasts are on the cones. If it does you’ll notice bubbles on the surface and need to let the gas out every now and again.

Here’s some I made last year, it’s sweet and resinous and spicy-caramelly. There’s a lot going on. You could mix it into cocktails, drizzle it on pancakes like maple syrup or just enjoy over ice cream.

Use unripe cones of any coniferous tree. Not yew though. Yew is poisonous. Don’t eat it under any circumstances. The process is super simple. Mark Diacono has a recipe in his newsletter this week:

Mugolio, cedar cones, Mr Whippy and The Gherkin

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Corfiot Ginger Beer

Our main topic today is not elderflower champagne nor mugolio, but a different fermented drink. On our recent holiday to Corfu, James and I discovered that there are a couple of hangovers from British rule. One is cricket, still played by local teams on the Spianada, the grassy, café-lined central square with views of the Old Fort. And the other is ginger beer (called tsitsibira) which Corfiots ferment according to traditional methods.

(Incidentally, most British people (at least those of a certain vintage) can’t help appending the word “lashings” to any mention of ginger beer. There’s a misconception that “lashings of ginger beer” comes from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books but infact it was coined by the Comic Strip Presents… team in their spoof Five Go Mad in Dorset.)

This was the most widely available commercial version, well balanced between sweet and acidic, gingery but not fiery. I’m told lots of people still make it at home. The “tsitsi” in the name is supposed to be a reference to the sound of a bottle opening.

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Corfiot-style Ginger Beer

Makes 1 litre

The starter takes about a week to get going and then it’s a few more days for the ginger beer itself. Mine took four until it was at my liking but it will depend on your personal preference and the temperature of your kitchen. Scale the recipe up if you like and have big enough containers.

You’ll need a large jar for the initial fermentation and glass or plastic bottles for the secondary fermentation and storage.

This method is a combination of Rachel de Thample’s from the River Cottage Fermentation Handbook, what I could work out from the ingredients list on the bottles (there’s lemon in the Corfiot version) and various online recipes.

Ingredients (for the starter)

• 100g (approx) fresh ginger root

• 50g (approx) sugar

Ingredients (for the drink)

• 150g (approx) ginger beer starter

• 150g sugar

• 1 litre water

• 1 lemon

Method

1. Grate about a tbsp-worth of the ginger on a coarse grater. Keep the skin on. Put it in a jar or small bowl.

2. Add a tsp of sugar and a splash of water (only about 20ml, just enough to moisten the ginger and dissolve the sugar).

3. Cover the jar loosely. I find a piece of muslin or kitchen paper secured with a rubber band works well. Leave for a day.

4. The next day grate and add another tbsp of ginger, another tsp of sugar and another splash of water. Cover again and leave for another day.

5. Repeat these steps until there are visible bubbles on top of the ginger mixture - probably between four days and one week.

6. Once this has happened, put your water in a large jar and stir in the sugar until dissolved. Add the zest (optional - it will give you a bitter note) and juice of the lemon and your starter. (Keep a bit of starter back if you want to make future batches - you can store it in a sealed jar in the fridge for a couple of weeks.)

7. Cover the jar (our old friends kitchen paper and rubber band come in handy again here) and put it in a safe place. I’d advise this rather than using an air-tight lid, even if the jar has one. Last year when learning how to make ginger beer for the first time, the pressure of the CO2 produced by my starter cracked a Kilner jar…

8. Stir and taste daily. When the ginger beer is to your liking - it will get less sweet over time - strain and bottle it.

9. Leave at room temperature for another day or so for some fizz to build up then chill and enjoy.

Notes (If Ifs And Ands Were Pots And Pans…)

• Both de Thample and Jocasta Innes (in 1979 classic The Country Kitchen) suggest using corks to stopper your bottles so they can be pushed out by the gas if it builds up too much. This is a good idea to avoid cracked bottles or explosions. Or reuse plastic bottles as they have a little give in them.

• Some recipes recommend using filtered or bottled water. I found it worked fine with tap. I generally use filter water for pickle brine but don’t find it makes a difference here.

• You can add any other flavours you like. RdT suggests rhubarb and rose which sounds divine. I’m definitely going to put some elderflower in my next batch.

• If you kept some starter back, feed it ginger and sugar as above for a couple of days before brewing. Once you see bubbles again it’s ready for the next batch.

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Cultural Fun

We’ve been lucky enough to have two outing to the theatre recently. The first was to see Michael Sheen in Nye at the National.

I love Michael Sheen and he was great here, full of obstreperous charm as Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, the Welsh miner’s son who gave us the NHS. The staging gimmick is that Bevan is dying in hospital (an NHS one, of course) in 1960, slipping in and out of consciousness with his dreams providing a whistlestop tour through his personal and political biography (although we are given to understand those two things are really one and the same).

Apart from a couple of early scenes in which grown-ups played children (I can’t stand this, always so cringey) it worked very well. The whole thing was maybe a bit too whistlestop - the founding of the NHS was relegated to about 20 minutes in the second half - and presented as more a collection of scenes than a fully-fledged story arc. There wasn’t anything stand-out about the writing (I realised afterwards that we’d seen a previous work by the playwright Tim Price, Teh [sic] Internet is Serious Business, and absolutely hated it) but the whole thing was enjoyable and made one appreciate anew what a political miracle the NHS is.

Our second theatre outing was to see Billy Crudup in Harry Clarke. I was drawn to book this on the strength of Crudup’s performance on The Morning Show where he looks like he’s having the absolute time of his life as agent-of-chaos TV exec Cory Ellison. And he was incredibly impressive here, playing more than a dozen parts in 80 minutes.

It’s the story of Philip Brugglestein, a shy American who has been talking in an upper-crust British accent since he was an eight-year-old boy. Harry Clark is his swaggering, cockney- geezerish alter-ego who emerges and takes over as he infiltrates a wealthy family.

I would have enjoyed the bravura performance alone but the play is funny too. It’s definitely a good evening out but we found there wasn’t a lot to discuss after leaving the theatre. The central ideas of identity and self aren’t really explored in any depth and once you get past Crudup’s charisma, it’s not much more than a caper. A fun one though.

So two plays. Two enjoyable evenings out. Both good but not great. Perhaps a lesson about not being seduced into buying tickets for a play by celebrities in the cast?

We also went to see Challengers at the cinema which, again, I enjoyed but didn’t love. Maybe I’m just hard to please? The initial reviews were breathlessly positive (five stars in the times, four in the Guardian). All said it was sexy. Which it is. Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist both have very seductive smiles and they are used here to jolly effect. Possibly over used. As was the sweat. So much sweat…

The tennis-playing love triangle between the two men and Zendaya was pretty shallow. Her character, Tashi, has her career cut short by injury and turns to coaching, pushing her client/husband to greatness. But the dynamic of a relationship built on transferred ambition isn’t examined and nor is the idea of tennis as relationship, literally rather than metaphorically, which is floated early and never returned to.

The structure is clever though, each flashback upping the stakes of the match we come in on. So spoilers but if you’ve seen it then message me privately and let me know what you thought of the ending!

One thing that has pleased me wholeheartedly was the customer service from Pegasus Spiele. We’ve been playing one of their games, Dorfromatik, a collaborative tile-laying thing, fairly regularly over the past few weeks. Then we discovered we’d lost a small but crucial component. Oh no!

I Googled and found they had a spare parts service so I filled in the form, expecting a long wait for an answer and then a charge. Or no luck at all. Instead, just over a week later, a new little tile arrived in the post from Germany.

I was oddly moved by it. Isn’t it lovely when companies want you to enjoy their products even after they’ve got your money?

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Bye! See you soon!

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In Good Taste is a Sycamore Smyth newsletter by me, Clare Heal.
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