I blame Chaucer

(Image from Chaucer Parlement of Fowles)

   On every bow the bryddes herde I synge         On every bough the birds I heard sing

   With voys of aungel in here armoyne              With voice of angels in their harmony

   Some busied hem hir bryddes forth to brynge Some busied themselves birds forth to bring

   The litel conyes to here pley gonne hye          The little coneys to here play did hie

   And ferther al aboute I gan espye                   And further all about I could see

   The dredful ro, the buk, the hert and hynde     The dread filled roe, the buck, the hart and hind

   Squyrels, and bestes smale of gentil kynde     Squirrels, and beasts small of gentle kind          

                                            (Image, Carl Wilhelm de Hamilton 1668-1754)

  So, - Valentine's - all was fine until 1328 when Chaucer finished his poem A Parlement of Fowles on 14th February. February has traditionally been seen as the month when the birds choose their mates, and Chaucer's poem has all the birds but one finding love. From this date the concepts of courtly love and romance were born. Love tokens, trysts, secret passions and exquisite seductions.

In the spirit of the bitter sweet, and the complex nature of love, Mother's Ruin has been brewing up some cocktail bitters and these are almost ready for public consumption. they should be on sale in The East London Gin Palace within a month.

Not everyone has the stomach for the sugary confection that Valentine's day has now become and for those needing dark solace a tiny playlist,

Lou Reed Pale Blue Eyes
Joy Division  Love Will Tear us Apart
The Cure  Close to Me

And a strong drink...

Grounds for Divorce:
2 oz Bourbon,
1/2 oz Amaro, Averna
1/2 oz Sweet vermouth,
1/2 oz Campari

Dash of Aromatic Bitters
Stir / Coupe
No Garnish

                                                                                   Mother's orange bitters macerating

                      

Mother pans for Spanish gold

Deep in the January slough with Christmas and new year done, the days dark, the rain biblical and seemingly endless - there is a gift from our dear Spanish friends. The Sevilles are here! Turning up slowly at first with just the odd box at the more specialist fruiterers at New Spitalfields market,

but now here in large towering heaps, a brief bittersweet glut. A brutal 5am trip on the W15 bus has got me 35kgs of the rough knobbly wonders. Seville oranges, one of the few fruits left that are truly seasonal. And a short season at that, running from early January to the first week in February at the latest. All the way from Andalucia here they are on a cold and wet East London morning - here as they have been each winter since the fifteenth century to fulfill the British passion for marmalade 

And now filling my kitchen and dining room with their heart warming brightness as I knock up this year's batch of Bitter Orange Rum . This week has been spent boiling, zesting and chopping fruit as the house fills up with orange scented steam.

I won't tell you lies about how quick it is to make your own marmalade having stayed up into the small hours awaiting the perfect set myself. But it will taste divine.


As if marmalade and orange liqueurs weren't gifts enough the blossoms of the Seville orange also make orange flower water a key ingredient in the Ramos gin fizz. A delicate and restorative cocktail for these mid winter days. Close your eyes, imagine warm to your bones, imagine flower scented air.  

Ingredients
50 ml Gin
30 ml fresh lemon juice
20 ml Sugar Syrup
20 ml fresh cream
1 egg white
1 barspoon Bitter Truth Orange Flower Water
20 ml Soda Water

Shake all ingredients except soda water vigorously with ice and strain into a highball glass. Top up with soda water and garnish with a slice of orange.

Wassail Wassail 2014

Even when the year is at it's quietest there is yet much to be done. The first thing is to wish happy new year to the nieghbour's bees, sleeping in their hives in the hedgerow of the lower field, and to remind them that when the spring comes we will need them up in the orchard. The English bee keeping tradition of telling the bees says that the bees must be told all family news, and to this end I wandered down to pass a quiet minute chatting with them about plans for the coming year. Bees attended we then turned to the trees and the winter pruning of apples and damsons.

  

After consulting John's ancient copy of The Pomarium Brittanicum on orchard care which recommends a gentle winter pruning to remove, crossing branches, dead wood and suckers, we set out amongst the trees. 

A careful cut here and there to strengthen the tree and hopefully encourage heavy fruiting.

All that is left to now get the year off to a good start is to wassail the orchard to wake up the trees.

"Wassaile the trees, that they may beare

You many a Plum and many a Peare:

For more or lesse fruits they will bring,

As you do give them Wassailing.”

Crook Morris will be wassailing the damson orchards of the Lyth Valley this weekend. If you want to hear a joyful racket, watch a neat footed dance and toast the trees with some potent damson beer, (- and who wouldn't want such fun?) be in the Lyth Valley Hotel car park at 11.30 on Saturday 11th Jan. And for wassailing  E17 style catch the Walthamstow Wassail which will toast and sing to the bee hives of Bee17 and fruit trees as it makes its' way from the Nags Head 2pm, via Chesnuts Farm allotments and on to the Rose and Crown for 8pm.

A Hot Wassail Punch

Ingredients; 4 pints of cider, 1 pint of cranberry juice, 1/2 tablespoon of bitters, 2 cinnamon stcks, some allspice berries, an orange studded with some cloves and a cup of fine dark rum

Combine all and heat gently, serve hot from a Wassail cup, and hold in cold hands whilst stamping your feet and singing loudly. (Image by Pauline Baynes )

The mid-winter feast approaches

Winter comes to Walthamstow marshes, pearly and frozen. The days shrink down, and those anxious that the warmth may have disappeared for good bring the green indoors and plan grand winter feasts to comfort the soul and entice the sun to make its' return. 

The Lord of Misrule is appointed and for a few giddy days the world stands on its' head in an ancient festival of foolish delights. Mummers take to the streets in a rowdy straggle. The powerful are to be mocked, the profane is sacred. Drunkeness is sobriety. Mother takes her duties most seriously at this special time of year and the Gin Palace has extended it's opening hours to include Sundays. Come by for magical winter potions to illuminate the long nights.

Local vegan bakers and soup goddesses Norman Loves are preparing for the feast by putting together hampers including bottles of Mother's Ruin. In a storm of publicity they have hit the front page of the Jellied Eel  organ of London's ethical food scene. If you look very closely a bottle of Mother's best sloe gin is quietly trying to steal the show.

Courtesy of Grey Goose a Solstice cocktail

Ingredients:

1 1/2 parts Grey Goose L'Orange

1/2 part Disaronno Originale

1/2 part simple syrup

3/4 part fresh lime juice

1 pinch powdered ginger

to garnish: sesame oil, sugar, star anise powder, star anise whole

Using your finger, rub the outside edge of a martini cocktail glass with sesame oil and then roll in sugar to coat rim.

In a cocktail shaker filled with ice add Grey Goose L’Orange, Disaronnno, simple syrup, lime juice and ginger. Shake vigorously, and strain into the prepared glass. Grate a pinch of star anise over the top, and drop in glass for garnish. Let the festivities commence.

Mother's Italian Job

Just before the Christmas rush starts to bite, I squeezed in a quick trip to Italy just in time for the olive harvest. We spent three days up, under and amongst the trees and gathered 164kg. Evenings, we took hours to carefully remove leaves, twigs and beetles. Then we took our bounty to the Oleificio Rosini  olive press, where they have a special vibro-thingy machine which shook out all the dross for us after all, (ah industialisation how I love you...) and a slow grinding press that made us some oil that was vivid, grassy, delicious.

In between low key labouring (chatting) in the olive grove I sampled a fantastic liqueur, purely as part of Mother's ongoing commitment to her international alcohol cataloging project. It's research. Visciola, ruby jewel in the crown of Le Marche  made from small sour wild cherries, wine and sugar. Bloomin' luverly.

If you are lucky enough to be able to get hold of these cherries and have about 2 months of sunshine on your hands, here you go...

Take equal weights of visciolo cherries and white sugar, place in a jar in the sunshine and leave for a couple of  months. This will ferment, so allow for the escape of gas, otherwise the lid is likely to blow off.  You could try one of those winemaking bungs. After a couple of months drain off the liquid and filter it through some fine muslin to clear it of sediment. Add equal parts white wine and bottle. Leave it another few weeks to a month in a cool dark spot just to settle in nicely and Bob's. 

  

Continuing in the Italian vein, back in London I have been bottling and labelling the Christmas pudding spiced rum in readiness for the Eat or Heat benefit from an original recipe courtesy of Nat di Maggio's Italian dad.

The rum will be available by donation only at the piano recital at St Mary's Church in Walthamstow. The dried fruit that had been flavouring the rum has been now been used by the Aura Rosa bakers to make some drunken Christmas cakes. The cakes will be attending the recital to hear a little classical music and then be sold for charity.




Finally in celebration of the mighty olive;

The classic Martini

(courtesy of Kindred Cocktails)

Ingredients

2 1/2oz gin

1/2oz dery vermouth

1drop orange bitters

olive to garish

Stir, strain, up, cocktail glass, garnish with a twist or olive

Ratios of Gin to vermouth vary widely. Many enthusiasts prefer much more than the capful or whisper sometimes used. The inclusion of orange bitters is a relatively recent revival of an original ingredient. Use only good, fresh vermouth.

King of the Orchard

There's a fine young tup in the orchard, bold and bright eyed. His flock is only small so he's casting about for new ladies and dreaming of all his young lambs to come in the spring time.

And yet, there is the winter to be got through first and the weather is drawing in.



 Between putting the orchard to bed and avoiding Zach's amorous advances we walked over Whitbarrow scar getting caught in a wild stinging hail storm.

Back indoors there is lots of bottling, labeling and preparation for the coming two weeks when there are two local events coming up.

The first is the E17 Designers' Christmas Fair on 29th Nov at 7-10pm. Mother will be hawking her fine liqueurs and dispensing gin related wisdom along side fellow designers and makers.

The E17Designers Christmas Market is in Time Out's top 10 fairs. So do come by and see what the hype is about, and get some of your present buying done and dusted before the pressure ratchets up to an unbearable levels. Have some cake, a beer or two from the boys at Wild Card. See, there, Christmas shopping isn't so bad after all.

The following day it's Eat or Heat's  Christmas Fair and in the evening a piano recital, with proceeds going to local food bank charity Eat or Heat. Mother will be there in the evening launching some specially commissioned Christmas pudding spiced rum, with her dear friends from Aura Rosa cake makers extraordinaire, and partners in crime for local Movember moustache growing competition.

Dream on Gio, mine is definitely bigger than yours!

And for Moustachioed gunslingers and lovers of spiced rum everywhere here is;

The Derringer (by Laura Cloer )

Ingredients:

1 1⁄2	oz	Kraken Spiced Rum
4	ds	orange bitters
1	bsp	Ginger juice
1	oz	lime juice
1	oz	agave syrup
1	spl	ginger ale

 

Shake & strain into a Collins glass over ice. Top with ginger ale. Garnish with lime wheel.

Stormy Weather

It's been a windswept week here at Mother's Ruin with gale force winds and driving rain. Mother's Ruin HQ has remained resolute and upright  throughout the tempest.

There was lots of local storm damage though, the worst being that the 200 year old mulberry tree that provided the fruit for this year's mulberry gin was hit by a falling bay tree and lost about half of her crown.

Tree surgeons have been summoned to the scene, and hopefully the old girl will make a recovery. Though Mulberry gin may be in limited supply next year.

Indoors the bottling of the Seville orange rum has begun. The colour of warm slightly cloudy honey with the dark and bitter sweet taste of marmalade. I'd made it as an attempt to create a Cointreau type liqueur, but it is it's own tawny miracle.

Seville oranges tart, deeply aromatic and in season at the darkest and coldest part of the year. Just when thoughts of Southern Spain and its golden heart might be the only thing to pull you through the dreich  grey British winter to spring time. And here packed with vitamin C to ward off seasonal ills, I bring you...

Mother's Cuban Hurricane

Ingredients: (per person)

• 2oz Seville orange rum                          
  
• 2 oz dark Cuban rum
• 2 oz passion fruit juice
• 1 oz orange juice
• Juice of a half a lime
• 1 Tbsp grenadine
• dash or two of orange bitters
• orange zest to garnish

Preparation

• Squeeze juice from half a lime into a cocktail shaker over some ice.
• Pour the remaining ingredients into the cocktail shaker.
• Shake well.
• Strain into a long glass
• Garnish with a curl of orange zest.