Nigel Slater - Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard

Some of the recipes in this book include raw eggs. When eggs are consumed raw, there is always the risk that bacteria, which is killed by proper cooking, may be present. For this reason, always buy certified salmonella-free eggs from a reliable grocer, storing them in the refrigerator until they are served. Because of the health risks associated with the consumption of bacteria that can be present in raw eggs, they should not be consumed by infants, small children, pregnant women, the elderly, or any persons who may be immunocompromised. The author and publisher expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may result from the use or application of the recipes and information contained in this book.

Copyright 2010 by Nigel Slater
Photographs copyright 2010 by Jonathan Lovekin

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain as Tender, Volume II: A Cooks Guide to the Fruit Garden by Fourth Estate, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, London, in 2010

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

First Ten Speed Press edition, 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slater, Nigel.
Ripe : a cook in the orchard / Nigel Slater ; photography by Jonathan Lovekin.
p. cm.
Includes index.
Summary: A comprehensive guide to growing and cooking with fruit, featuring more than 300 recipes for sweet and savory dishesProvided by publisher.
1. Cooking (Fruit) 2. Cookbooks. I. Title.
TX811.S58 2012
641.64dc23
2011043551

eISBN: 978-1-60774-333-0

Cover design by Colleen Cain

v3.1

And then there was fruit. I always knew that if ever I found a space in which to grow a few knobbly vegetables of my own, some of it would be set aside for fruit: wild strawberries with flowers like tiny, brilliant stars; amber and bronze apples with russet skins; dusky blueberries in old terra-cotta pots; maybe a black currant bush or two for jam. What I had not expected was to find myself with a virtually blank canvas, an opportunity to plant not only fruit bushes but some space for trees too, a row of raspberry canes, and even a vine.

Ten years on, permanently teetering on the edge of chaos, this garden creaks under the weight of my overenthusiastic planting. There is barely an inch of ground to spare. From white currants and golden raspberries to purple figs and red gooseberries, my pocket handkerchief of urban space is bursting at the seams. Give me a couple of feet more and Ill show you space for a crab apple with blossom the color of a loganberry fool.

There is a moment, sometime around the middle of September, when this garden, this diminutive hortus conclusus I have made in an 1820s London terrace, truly becomes the garden of my dreams. The leaves are turning from green to gold, amber, and rust, the last of the fruits hang crimson and smoky blue on the trees, the pumpkin-colored dahlias and Michaelmas daisies have collapsed like drunks across the gravel path. The garden darkens to the color of ginger cake, here and there a shot of saffron, brilliant ochre, or deepest crimson. The colors, I would guess, of the Vatican at prayer.

The last berries, apples, and plums, wet and almost rotting from the late sun and autumn rain, lend a mellow, alcoholic scent to the space, like the dregs of an abandoned glass of wine. The garden is falling asleep with an air of damp tobacco and wood smoke, but it is still abundant too, with late blackberries, damsons, and a grapevine at breaking point. Each year I race to get to those blackberries before the feast of Michaelmas, when the devil is said to piss on them.

Growing many, though sadly not all, of my own vegetables is a deeply pleasurable thing to do. Watering the tomatoes and the runner beans is now as much a part of my life as taking a shower, but although I produce far less of my own fruit than I do vegetables, curiously they give me even more joy. Walking round the garden late on an autumn morning, pushing past the spiders webs that festoon the pathways and plucking those last, wine-colored berries from their blackened canes is as good as life gets. A moment of intense well-being, and even more so when the time has been stolen from a busy schedule.

This space at the back of my house could so easily have been a lawn. Instead, I have ended up with a back garden laden with sensual pleasures. A bough of yellow plums the size of a blackbirds egg; an apple tree whose fruit is snow white flushed with rose pink; loganberries as dark and sultry as a glass of Pinot Noir; and grapes that hang outside the kitchen wall like bunches of jet beads. There are sherbet-sharp gooseberries and piercingly tart sticks of rhubarb; fat black figs and raspberries the color of a glass of Sauternes. Their pleasures are brief, and yes, there is always a struggle to get there before the birds and the squirrels, but it is hard to find a mulberry more exquisite than the one you have grown for yourself, a strawberry more sweet, or a fig more seductive.

While I cannot imagine my little garden without its cane teepee of runner beans and their scarlet flowers, or its chipped pots of random tomatoes, it is a simple truth that more of the gardens space is given over to fruit with each passing year. The potatoes that basked in the luxury of their own bed now share it with gooseberry bushes and three crowns of rhubarb; the beet patch is constantly invaded by ever more varieties of strawberry; the Jerusalem artichokes have, no doubt to everyones relief, been partly replaced by raspberry canes.

Vegetables remain at the heart and soul of this fifty-five yard (fifty-meter) plot but, as the infant plums and pears mature into fully grown trees and the loganberries climb up their blue steel wires, the focus of the garden is shifting toward being a slightly more fragrant and sensual place.

The supermarkets may carry more varieties of locally grown apples and pears than they used to but they are a long way off being as interesting as a farm stand or the apple stall of a farmers market as somewhere to pick up the weeks supply of fruit. The clinical, bright aisles of even the most user-friendly chain store can never hope to approach the sight and smell of a farmers market on a misty autumn morning.