Taking time to live well
July
FRUIT
Giant jam tarts & cricket teas • Printing with petals • How to win at the fete Golden hour gatherings • Fan-tastic tales & Deco delights • Slumbering well Tomato leaf martinis • Why we love a car boot • Fish fritters & sea shanties
All out for tea
WITH CRICKET SEASON IN FULL SWING, PACK UP A PICNIC FOR A LAID-BACK AFTERNOON OF COUNTING RUNS AND SIPPING LEMONADE
Recipes & styling: KAY PRESTNEY Photography: REBECCA LEWIS
Aslice of pie, a bit of sunshine, a blanket to sit on and the crack of leather on willow – we can’t think of a nicer way to spend a summer afternoon. Watching a game of cricket, the only sport with an official tea break, and setting up for a picnic beside the pitch is a ritual that never gets old, although you can always rethink the snacks to make the players’ break even more eagerly anticipated Fill up with sweet potato and feta sausage rolls and an impressive veggie picnic pie. You could also try a new take on a traditional ploughman’s and dainty cucumber sandwiches, while a cake feels practically obligatory – a generous slice of lemon and raspberry cake will hit the spot, especially alongside a grown-up glass of homemade lemonade. Then leave the players to it, while you lie back, one eye on the scoreboard, to enjoy the match. Whatever the result, everyone is a winner at the end of a nice day out. »
Nothing beats the thwack of a cricket ball heading for the boundary… except maybe the sound of homemade lemonade being poured
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ADDING SUMMER HERBS AND FLOWERS TO FRUIT JAMS IS A BRILLIANT WAY TO CAPTURE THEIR FRAGRANT GLORY
Projects: RACHEL DE THAMPLE Photography: ALI ALLEN
Summer garden jam
A long and lingering kiss from the sun teases out the pollen from flowering herbs like fennel while also intensifying the sweetness of summer fruits. Marry sun-caressed berries or currants with heatdrenched herbs and/or fragrant blooms and you’ll have the taste of summer bottled and ready to go, ready for a rainy day pick-me-up.
Makes 2-3 x 200g jars
1kg raspberries, blackberries or currants (red, white and/or black) Large handful (about 7 sprigs) summer herbs or flowers, like rose petals or fennel blossom
500-750g golden caster sugar
1 Place the raspberries in a large (2-3kg) preserving pan or saucepan. Tie the herbs together into a bundle using butcher’s twine or any other food-safe string. If using flowers, pluck the blooms from any woody stems and they can go in whole. Add the herbs and/or flowers.
2 Place over medium heat and gently cook for 10-15 mins, or until the berries have softened, broken down, and have released their juices.
3 If using a herb bundle, pluck it out and scrape off as much of the raspberry juice and pulp clinging to it as you can – you can also press it through a fine mesh sieve for ease.
4 Weigh the fruit and add an equal amount of sugar. Return the sugar and berries to the pan and gently warm through for about 5 mins,
or until all the sugar has dissolved.
5 Once dissolved, set the pan over a medium-high heat and bring the jam to the boil until it’s set (see tips on how to test jam setting point).
Pour into sterilised jars while the jam is still hot. Seal straightaway.
Cook’s note: The jam will keep for up to one year. Refrigerate once opened and eat within a month.
of fresh berries and herbs to hand? Don’t get in a jam, turn it into something sweet to enjoy all year round
Jammy pairings
Our favourite combinations of fruit with flowers or herbs
l Raspberry, rose and lemon balm
l Blackcurrant and lavender
l Blackberry and fennel blossom
Plenty
F ILL YOUR BOOTS
THE CAR BOOT IS BOTH A MEETING POINT AND A MUSEUM OF THE EVERYDAY – ALWAYS FRUITFUL, INSPIRING, AND SOMEWHERE TO PICK UP A BARGAIN, SAYS ARTIST AND MAGPIE-EYE MARK HEARLD
Artist Mark Hearld
especially known for his prints and collages
describes his local car boot as “one of the best things about living in York”
The thrill of the car-boot sale is ideal to wake up to on a sunny Saturday morning: the search for treasure is incentive enough to get me out of bed.
But the car-boot sale is more than just retail therapy; its atmosphere is special, something of a jamboree en plein air – with bacon sandwiches – a meeting point for people, and a melting pot of sorts. The man in triple denim and a cowboy hat; the woman with two baskets and a fur-collared coat that sweeps the wet grass; a young man in leather perusing the vinyl; a group of people and their dogs exchanging pleasantries, all looking for their own particular kinds of treasure.
Each table is an island of surprises, some carefully set out, with gentlemanrelish tops, clay pipes and toothpaste jars (excavated from Victorian dumps), arranged with systematic precision, others frankly bizarre, surreal and unimaginable. A clinker-built dinghy in full sail, drydocked on York Knavesmire, anyone?
The amateur nurseryman with his table of succulents; the woman from Robin Hood’s Bay with her selected antiquities and curiosities, the prices noted, with rigour, in a carefully appointed book; rows of used gardening tools, their shafts lovingly waxed; the sheet laid out on the grass with knitwear and clothes, each labelled with a price written on the back of a playing card. Car-boot sales are transient museums of the everyday, as rich as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, brought together for one morning only and then tidied away again by midday. They are a fleeting ethnography of our times.
Artist and author Olive Cook wrote about the art of acquisition, and collecting objects most definitely has a relationship to creating them. I’d argue that, in order to design something new, you need to be a connoisseur of what already exists, and selecting an object from the multivarious array of artefacts laid out, hones the eye
FISHERMAN’S REST
A COASTAL HOME STEEPED IN HISTORY IS A CALMING BOLTHOLE BY THE SEA, FILLED WITH A LIFETIME OF TREASURES
Words: ASHLEY O’LEARY Photography: SIOBHAN DORAN
Bursting with history and characterful features, Elizabeth’s done very little to
the cottage, other than to open up the downstairs and make a feature of the stairs
