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Showing posts from September, 2012

Red currants

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We had several large slices of cold roast lamb which I wanted to use for shepherd’s pie. Rather than the traditional sweet/sharp enhancements like tomato, wine or Worcestershire sauce I decided to add some red currant juice. I found a plastic box of red currants on the fruit shelves of Sainsburys supermarket in St. Leonards. Round, red, translucent pearls with shining skins each with a small withered crown of calyx leaves at their south pole. Each fruit was attached by a short stalk to a central string that had once hung enticingly from a branch of a carefully tended bush. One of my long-held ambitions has been to grow a plant as a cordon on a shady north wall where the fruit can ripen slowly protected by some sort of cover from marauding birds. For my shepherd’s pie I took about one third of the currants and squashed the juice out into my meat and vegetable mix by squeezing and scraping them through a fine mesh steel sieve with a metal spoon. The following day I used the rest of the f