Christmas at River Cottage - Lucy Brazier

I applied for a review copy of this book at work last year, and then gave up on it before it unexpectedly arrived on the 22nd of December - by which time it was a bit late to write about it. Tonight though I'm halfway through putting up my Christmas tree, and it seemed like a good time to get it out and dust it down for a proper browse.

The Christmas tree is turning into a bit of an epic undertaking. Early success with a tree the right size for surprisingly little at Sainsbury's Homebase has since been met with setbacks. (It's 7 feet tall, a skinny Nordman fir for £20, they're really helpful in my local branch, and it's perfect for the corner of my sitting room, Best of all so far no hint of the aroma that we think was badger urine that last years tree smelt strongly of. The dog appreciated it but the humans did not). Unfortunately, the trunk was too slender to fit into my tree stand so I had to wait until today to get some wedges. Currently, the poor thing is relaxing after a prolonged time trussed up in a net, and has got as far as having some light put on it. Further decorating will commence after work tomorrow. It's still early for a tree. 

According to Christmas at River Cottage (contains extensive notes from Hugh F-W as well as Lucy Brazier) it's about the only thing I am early for - and as a fan of the plan ahead approach that's a plus for me. There's no shortage of how to do Christmas books around, especially from food writers, and whilst I like having a few to choose from they do need a unique selling point to make the cut. 

For Christmas at River Cottage it's the way it ties Christmas to a year-round lifestyle. Planning ahead here means what you're growing and harvesting across the summer that will be good in December - chutneys, jams, and liqueurs are all a feature (maybe ask for a quince or mulberry tree for Christmas if you have space for one). And then there's the cake baking, mincemeat making, and pudding steaming activities of October and November. There are ideas for making things, including good advice on wreath construction, and good dried herbs to give as gifts. 

For the record, I'd be delighted to get a jam jar of dried lemon verbena, or indeed a wreath of rosemary, sage, and bay which I could hang in my kitchen and then store for later use. I'm a big fan of homemade mincemeat too - it's a lot nicer to cook with than the shop-bought sort, keeps well, and is an excellent way to use up leftover dried fruit from cake baking.

Lucy's thoughts on Christmas cake - don't save it for Christmas but enjoy it earlier in December is sensible - we've contracted 12 days of feasting into 1 maybe 2, there's a lot to get through and we should definitely do more to celebrate advent and the fun bits of the run up to Christmas to try and draw the season out again.

Beyond that, there are plenty of sensible recipes for parties, Chrismas day, boxing day, new year, and beyond. These include drinks (with and without alcohol) how to plan your events, use up leftovers, reassurance about asking for help and lots about reusing and recycling - all good stuff.

Altogether, I really like this book. It's reflect of you have, or want, an allotment. Plenty of no nonsense, cost conscious, sustainable ideas which don't feel like second best, and the whole thing is beautifully produced. Better late than never. 

Sylvia Townsend Warner - Short Stories

It's been a Sylvia Townsend Warner kind of week - which is always a good thing. The newly produced Faber collection 'Winter in the Air' came into work - I bought a copy minutes later, and karma rewarded my donation of unwanted Christmas decorations to a charity shop by dropping an old green-spined Virago Modern Classics edition of her selected stories in my path for only £2. I already had a copy of this, but my first one was falling apart, this one doesn't even seem to have had the spine cracked open. 

I've come to love Sylvia Townsend Warner in recent years, she's a joy I owe in equal parts to Handheld Press and Helen for the gentle steer in the right direction. The novels I've read have been great, but her short stories are something else again. They're precise and elegant with a  gentle melancholy about them, and sometimes a not at all gentle melancholy. 

She's also quite a hard sell in the shop which is a shame. In my own little corner of the internet, Warner is a much-loved name, but unfortunately and along with a few other writers I love, it's an uphill struggle to get people to take a chance on her. I'm hoping that the mini cloth-bound Penguin classics edition of Lolly Willows will lure in the Book tok and Instagram crowd and push a wider rediscovery - though again, for my money it's the short story collections which are the real gems. 

'Winter in the Air' is everything you could hope for from Warner, Handheld's collections of her fairy stories are magical, especially if you like a touch of weird - make it a Sylvia Christmas!

Hollywood Cocktails

It's the season for likely stocking fillers to start appearing at work, and as I'm a sucker for a vintage cocktail book I fell for this one straight away. It's a slim little thing with board covers that double its width but it promises 200 excellent recipes, takes up less space, and will travel more easily than my beloved Savoy Cocktail book, and had some promising looking things in it so here we are. 

The thing I want most from a cocktail book is simplicity. I know I'm getting Alice Lascelles 'The Cocktail Edit' for Christmas so I'm having to be patient about really exploring that one - but for a contemporary cocktail book it's absolutely the one to go for this year.

My home doesn't have the range of ingredients or equipment that a good cocktail bar would have on hand. I'm relying on good quality booze that I will use whilst it's fresh (vermouth, which I love, will lose its flavour the longer a bottle is open). I want 17 (or more) different takes on the same basic principle to keep it interesting, not 17 different bottles all with a single measure taken out of them getting sticky and gathering dust in my kitchen. Vintage books are excellent for having a lot of variations on the theme of french vermouth, Italian, and gin. Some will use brandy/whisky/rum etc, but you get the idea. All are brief on instructions (you shake or stir and that's about it).

Most of the recipes in here are definitely in the Savoy book, but there are a couple specific to famous Hollywood restaurants of the 1930s which are definitely appealing, and even when you discount the harder-to-find ingredients (Swedish punch for example) there's a lot here that only calls for things you'll find in any reasonably large supermarket. Aim for good, but not necessarily premium quality, bottles - I wouldn't use anything I wouldn't drink on its own, but I'm not putting the super glamorous £50 bottle of gin I was given in cocktails either.

Altogether a decent little book for some vintage inspiration, a nice add-on present with a decent bottle of vermouth or similar, good if you're staying with grown-up family that likes a drink, or want to party like it's 1933. 

Death of Jezebel - Christianna Brand

It's a while since I read a crime classic from the British Library and Death if Jezebel was a good book to dive back in with, although I think reading the earlier Christianna Brand in the series, Death in Green, first might have been an advantage. 

What I loved about Death of Jezebel was the slang and the sense of slightly tired post-war characters. While it didn't make a significant difference that I hadn't at least read Death in Green, it did sometimes feel like there were references going over my head and Inspector Cockrill could have benefited from a longer acquaintance. 

As 'impossible crimes' go this is every bit as ingenious as you might hope. The Jezebel in question is killed in full sight of a crowd, inconveniently for the police, all the possible suspects are also apparently in full view of the crowd and nowhere near the victim... The solution is cleverly hinted at, but amidst the general confusion and red herrings of the plot, it's only at the end that the pieces fell together for me. 

More interesting to me was the way the whole cast of characters has been damaged in different ways by the war and how they're leading their current lives. Isabel Drew reminded me of the anti-heroine in To Bed With Grand Music - the more or less stock figure of the scarlet woman that post-war it seems to have been important to disapprove of. Fair enough this one is a piece of work who deserves her comeuppance as much as any murder victim can, and a lot of the men don't come out of it much better. Overall there's a weariness about all of them, these people have mostly seen too much, and been unlucky enough to survive it. Fresh new starts seem unlikely, and altogether the sense of a Britain still in the grip of rationing and with the scars of bomb damage still everywhere as a bleak kind of place is unavoidable. 

Lots of slang, and a dark but definite sense of humour work as an excellent balance though, so overall this book is a lot of fun, both as a mystery and for its details, the cover is also particularly splendid - there may even be an oblique kind of clue in it! Give it a go.

Baking, Making, and Mixed Spice

I didn't realise how quiet I'd been here so far this month - it's been a busy 10 days of work, visiting family in Scotland, back to work, and managing to find the time to make Christmas chutney, cakes, liqueur, and mincemeat. I have a long-running disagreement with dad about keeping Christmas for December, and a general dislike for anybody who ever says such a thing. 

People who say keep Christmas for December almost certainly have other people running around sorting things out for them. they're the ones who pitch up in your shop on the 23rd of December indignant that you don't have whatever product they can't cope without and won't be getting another delivery so they can't order it. No substitute will do and no matter how many times it happens to them they don't change their shopping habits. 

They complain about the pressure and the stress oblivious to the idea that planning ahead cuts most of that out. Then they complain about the expense and how commercial Christmas has become - whilst buying their way out of the last-minute hole they're in. Complain about not getting Christmas cards but won't make the time to write them. These are not my people. 

I more or less post the same thing every year, but Christmas is the midpoint of winter, and I like a slow build towards it with time to enjoy the making and doing, and then a slow wind down afterward (people who complain about the boring time off between Christmas and New Year whilst I'm back at work processing endless returns of whatever celebrity biography everybody got at least 2 copies of thanks to last minute panic buying this year are another pet hate). Winter is my favourite season. A time to be doing sociable things, thinking, and enjoying home comforts.

Today has been the day for making Christmas cakes - which do bring an element of stress with them; will they be under or overcooked? I won't know until it's too late to do anything about it, two are destined to be presents. Fruit cakes are so dense that the skewer test isn't quite as reliable as I'd like (is that uncooked batter or hot prune?) and they'll carry on cooking a little as they cool. It's a worry. They smell good though and I must have made this recipe a good 40 times or more so I'm hopeful it won't catch me out.

I've also finally managed to make a quince inclusive mincemeat, and a cooked one at that which is normally something I avoid. Someone on facebook had mentioned that she kept grated quince in her freezer for adding to apple pies. I had left over quinces so grating seemed like a good plan, and then bought Mark Diacono's 'Spice' which had the perfect recipe for them. Well, sort of, I lacked several ingredients, so I'm assuming that his recipe is perfect - but the results with my substitutions, which include the quince ratafia from the same book in place of Krupnik honey vodka tasted great when I potted it.

I have an uneasy relationship with quinces. I like their scent, love the quince jelly I make every year, and mostly fail with them on every other front. On the other hand Mark's books have never let me down, and although I overlooked how ambivilent I am about anise as a flavour when I made the ratifia (which true to quince tradition is sitting in the bottle looking remarkably like a urine sample) the results are actually really good and will, I think, work well in place of pastis or absinthe in some cocktail recipes. The same for the mincemeat - although the grated quince has taken on a disconcertingly worm like appearance in the jars.

At least the whole flat smells appealingly of mixed spice at the moment, an improvement on the lingering vinegar of the chutney making. I'm also pleased to have a new mincemeat recipe to add to my repertoire. This one makes a modestly sensible amount compared to others I've mixed up, and again this is the perfect time to make it, so that it's got a few weeks to mature before I want mince pies. When you find a good recipe (Fiona Cairns is the other one I really like and is a no cook version) it really is worth making your own. Mincemeat is a flexible thing - as long as the quantities of fruit, fat, alcohol, etc are right the specifics don't matter so it's easy to adapt to what you have or like and an excellent way to use up any dried fruit that's leftover from the other baking. 

The Little Blue Flames and Other Uncanny Tales - A. M. Burrage

Until 'The Little Blue Flames' I'd more or less managed to resist this particular hardback series from the British Library - yes, I have 'Fearsome Faries: Haunting tales of the Fae' but that was a one-off. Was. A colleague from work actually messaged me an image of 'The Little Blue Flames' when it came in she thought it was so much up my street. I'd already requested it by then.

I can't resist a good ghost story collection and having occasionally come across A. M. Burrage in other anthologies I knew this collection was something I wanted. It has more than lived up to my expectations being just the sort of uncanny I relish. My preference is for things that make the ordinary feel unsafe rather than full on gory horror. The title story where a pair of brass candlesticks give their owner a vision of a past crime perfectly fits that bill. 

It's not hard to at least half believe in the possibility of the ghosts and hauntings that Burrage conjures, where half the work is being done by the imagination of his protagonists. Why shouldn't much-loved ornaments carry some memory of a previous owner about with them? When you hold something old and worn in your hands it's so very easy to imagine those who have held it before - and half the work of the ghost story is suddenly done. 

The same kind of thing happens in 'Smee' where a house party is playing a version of hide and seek when they start to feel there are more people in the game than there should be. Nothing awful happens apart from the narrator being forced to realise not everything can be quite explained, and all the implications for life and the afterlife that brings with it. 

There's nothing in this collection that's kept me awake at night, but plenty that's made me grateful for being able to draw the curtains against the dark, and pull the duvet up close. All of them remind me of a bedroom in the house I grew up in. It was a perfectly ordinary spare bedroom in an old house. It wasn't much used and had a faded kind of look about it. It also terrified me from as far back as I can remember. I hated to walk past it when the door was open, which it often was, and would avoid going in it if I could. I still sometimes dream about that open doorway with the same sense of discomfort, and if I'd ever had to sleep in there I would have scared myself silly (and probably still would) for no obvious reason at all. 

 That's the experience that Burrage speaks to - the superstitious, irrational reactions to things that we can laugh about, but can't quite laugh off. 

The next book in the series is Celtic Weird edited by Johnny Mains and it too looks great.