Sally Vincent’s Diary of Food and Life on a Devon Farm.
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Snow on the Way!
It’s Beef Stew and Dumpling weather, Lancashire Hot Pot, Chicken Pie weather, comforting food weather. The week has been clear, sugary, crispy, crunchy, cold, cold, cold. As the sun appeared slowly over the hill the grass began to steam and boil. Gradually the land turned green again but now it’s cold and damp and getting…
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Autumn Melancholy 2005
Relentless wind and rain have battered October. Even today’s crisp sunlight illuminating a transparent clear blue sky does little to lift my perennial autumn melancholy. It evokes memories of childhood solitariness and isolation, of boarding school at seven, of a strangely emptying world. I hate dark mornings too, shopping by streetlight, grey foggy days.…
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Normandy Pheasant
Normandy Pheasant This, without doubt, is one of my favourite pheasant recipes and is ideal for oven ready birds which have been commercially prepared. Pheasant like beef is better if it has been properly hung. If it is not it is inclined to be dry and dull when roasted. Apples and Calvados prevent the meat…
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Filling the Larder Sept 2005
As we reach the Equinox once more the autumn sun drops from our heavens into the southern hemisphere. It joins us later and later each day creeping up over the hill and, leaving earlier and earlier, soon slides away again like a huge red barley sugar. The golden autumn light seems to wraps itself around the…
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Salting Meat
The meat and fish are preserved in a dry cure of flavoured salt and saltpetre. Saltpetre is sodium nitrite and in these health conscious days regarded as unsuitable for human consumption. Its dubious origins and old stories of its early collection certainly make one wonder! However it is a good preservative and turns the meat…
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Elderflower Cordial
This year the lemony scent of elderflowers filled the farmyard as never before. Even after I had harvested so many flower heads the bushes looked untouched. I was given this traditional old recipe by a friend who was given it, in turn, by her grandmother years and years ago. My kitchen was filled with bowls…
