A Dish of Apples

Photograph of page from Chez Panisse Fruit by Alice Waters
with illustration by Patricia Curtan

I photograph because I can't illustrate.  Given the choice I would almost always favour illustration, and food illustration doesn't come much better than the work of Patricia Curtan.  An artist, printer and designer, my first introduction to her work was more than 20 years ago when I was handed a menu at Alice Waters' iconic Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California.  Chez Panisse opened its doors in the summer of 1971 based on a conviction that food grown organically, locally and sustainably was worth striving for.  Paying a fair price to the growers for top quality, super-fresh produce and cooking it simply and sympathetically was central to their philosophy.  Such uncompromising ethics come at a price but it's one plenty of people are prepared to pay, me included.  The current trend for 'local, sustainable and fair' owes a huge debt to Alice Waters and all associated with Chez Panisse.

Patricia Curtan began her association with Chez Panisse working in the kitchen and producing letterpress and linoleum-block printed menus for the restaurant.  Cooking led on to consulting, menu and book design.  The connection with Alice Waters has continued for four decades, with Curtan's illustrations enhancing books such as Chez Panisse Vegetables and Chez Panisse Fruit, The Art of Simple Food and The Art of Simple Food II. The writing and recipes are outstanding but Patricia  Curtan's illustrations add so much to the desirability for me. Curtan's work encompasses simple monochrome line drawings and colourful studies of fruit and vegetables, which often burst through the boundaries of their drawn frame, as full of energy as their subjects.

These days you can buy a Patrica Curtan linocut print from her website. Once a drawing is made, linoleum blocks are hand-carved, a separate block for each colour, then printed one block at a time on a 100 year old 10 x 15 Chandler & Price platen press.  Fine papers are sourced, mostly from Europe and Japan.  There is one more book I covet.  Menus for Chez Panisse: The Art and Letterpress of Patricia Curtan - this link offers the best on-line view of the content.  The book traces the development of the artist over 40 years through 100 menus prepared for such luminaries as Merce Cunningham, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Diana Kennedy.  This is also the book which offers some insights into how Patricia Curtan works.

The softly blushing apple illustration which introduces the chapter on Apples in the Chez Panisse Fruit Book is a particular favourite.  In the English alphabet, A is always for Apple.  Yet the domestic apple tree is not native to the British Isles at all.  There is evidence that Malus (apple) trees grew wild in the UK in the Neolithic period but they would have been of the sour Crab apple variety.  Malus coronaria, native to North America, is an exception being a wild, sweet Crab apple.  Now that we can make them palatable by the addition of copious quantities of sugar, we value the crab apple for preserving, mostly as a jelly.

"God gave the crab apple and left the rest to man."

from Jane Grigson's Fruit Book

Discovery Apple
© Take One Dish

The domestic apple, Malus domestica, originated in Eurasia, thought to be in the Kazakhstan region. Cultivated apples can be broken down into the high-acid Cider apple; the tart, low sugar Cooking apple; and the ideally crisp, juicy, usually sweet Eating apple.  Known to have been cultivated in Arabia and Greece, it was the Romans who introduced the domesticated trees to the rest of Europe. Malus domestica reached the Americas with the early settlers.  A climate without extremes of temperature and adequate rainfall suits the Malus perfectly, making it the ideal fruit for the UK climate.  The development of new varieties reached its peak in the 19th and early 20th centuries and now numbers several thousand.  However, as Jane Grigson pointed out in her 'Fruit Book', in the case of many later varieties, flavour and texture has been sacrificed for uniformity of size and yield.  In the UK, Brogdale, which documents the National Fruit Collection, offers an A-Z of Malus domestica from the sweet, aromatic English Adam's Pearmain to the juicy, nutty German cultivar Zabergau Renette.

My favourite eating apple?  It would have to be the firm, sweet and juicy Worcester Pearmain, though the deliciously perfumed Discovery - always the first to market in the UK - is a close second .  There are so many recipes for apples I could have chosen but it's hard to beat a Tarte Tatin so here it is.  Purists look away now - I use rough-puff, not puff pastry and not just because it's easier to make.  It produces a pastry with 'bite' to perfectly balance the filling.  I must have consulted a recipe the fitrst time I made Tarte Tatin but it's so long ago I no longer remember who to credit.  Still, it's a classic and it's lovely and my pastry recipe is courtesy of the Roux brothers.

Tarte Tatin
© Take One Dish

Tarte Tatin
(Serves 4 or two greedy people)

You need 150g (6oz) Rough-Puff pastry
This makes double the amount you need but pastry freezes well:
125g (4 oz) soft plain flour
125g (4 oz) cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
Pinch of salt
60ml (2 fl oz) iced water

4 apples (preferably Braeburn or similar), halved and cored
60g (2 oz) unsalted butter
60g (2 oz) unrefined cane sugar

To make rough-puff pastry, add the salt to the flour and place on a work surface.  Add the butter and rub it into the flour.  When the butter cubes are small and half squashed, form a 'well' and pour in the iced water, gradually mixing with a knife until everything holds together - do not knead or your pastry will be tough.  Roll out on a lightly floured surface to a rectangle about 1cm thick.  Fold in three, bottom to mid-point, then top to bottom, and turn 90 degrees.  Roll out again to a rectangle and fold in three again.  You have now completed '2 turns'.  Wrap in cling film and refrigerate for 30 minutes.  (If you only want enough pastry for one tart, cut in half at this point and freeze the unwanted half for later and, when you want to use it, defrost, roll and give it 2 more turns).
Roll out the pastry to a rectangle again and repeat the folding process to complete two more turns.  Rest in the fridge for a further 30-60 minutes.
Roll out the pastry thinly (cut in two first if you decided to make two rounds) to a rough circle and cut a disc(s) of around 22cm/9".  Place on a lightly floured tray in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Heat the oven to 220C (Fan 200C)/Gas 7
Melt the butter in a 20cm (8") heavy-based, oven-proof pan.  Add the sugar and cook on a medium heat for 5 minutes to caramelise.  Add the apples, round side down, and cook for 5 minutes.  Top with the chilled pastry disc, tucking the edges down inside the pan, and cook for 2 minutes.  Place the pan in the oven and cook for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool for 4-5 minutes.  Place a serving plate on top of the pan and invert to turn out (take care not to burn yourself with hot caramel).

Good served with double cream or vanilla ice cream.

Sources:
The National Fruit Collection - Brogdale
English Apples and Pears
patriciacurtan.com

Take a Dish of Tea

Stoneware glazed bowl; made 1100-1299; Jiangxi, China

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

An early reference to a 'dish of tea' appears in William Congreve's 1694 comic play 'Double Dealer' when Lady Touchwood invites Sir Paul Plyant to "drink a dish of tea to settle our heads".  The scandalous aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in a letter in 1718 of visiting Greece and imagining how agreeable it would have been "when, after drinking a dish of tea with Sapho, I might have gone the same evening to visit the temple of Homer in Chios ...".  Then, in William Makepeace Thackeray's satire on early 19th century Britain, 'Vanity Fair', the Clapp family was still able, despite straightened circumstances, to "give a friend a dish of tea".

Dish (noun): "A shallow,  flat-bottomed container for cooking or serving food"

Oxford English Dictionary

Most ceramic collections refer to these as 'bowls'  or 'tea bowls' .  So, why the literary references to 'a dish' rather than a bowl?  Could it be that using the word 'dish' instead of 'bowl' was highlighting a British affectation?  But, enough of this.  The star of this piece is a wonderful Chinese tea bowl and the term hare's fur is so beautifully descriptive of the glaze.

Bowl (noun): "A round, deep dish or basin used for food or liquid"

Oxford English Dictionary

Our taste for tea came from China where the Camellia sinensis was first grown and the expertise to turn it into a delicious drink/food was born.  Tea was served in a handleless vessel, a custom which crossed borders along with the appreciation of tea drinking, and later the plant itself.  The handled cup we know today was being made in Britain by 1740, almost a decade after tea first arrived here.  Cups were more expensive to make and more difficult to transport to markets as they didn't stack so neatly, but it seems 'delicate' ladies fingers had to be protected from the heat of the bowl.

The Chinese had, by this time, been making tea for millennia.  By the 10th century, tea drinking tastes there changed from leaf tea to powdered green tea which continued for four centuries before there was a return to steeped leaf tea.  Drinking a steeped leaf tea from a green bowl was considered elegant and tasteful but a frothy whipped powdered green tea looked much more appealing when served in a brown or black bowl.  So began the manufacture of dark glazed bowls in the southern provinces of Fujian and Jiangxi in10th century China.  Manipulation of the glazing, firing and cooling processes resulted in effects including tortoiseshell, oil spot and hare's fur glazes.  The 'hare's fur' tea bowl, above, is in the possession of the V&A Museum in London.  Three flying Phoenixes further decorate the bowl.  These were created using the 'resist' method which was a speciality of Jizhou potters.  Paper silhouettes were applied between a dark brown first glaze and a second lighter toned one, the paper burned away in the kiln leaving outline impressions on the bowl.

With the exception of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who seemed to be serious in her pretensions - Her 'Turkish Embassy Letters' were published only after her death as she believed "a person of quality should never turn author"- the examples of the use of 'dish' I've mentioned are taken from satirical writing.  So, 'bowl' it is.  Despite the invention of the handled 'cup', some of us retain a fondness for ignoring the handle and enclosing the vessel in our hands.  Just to complicate things further we term it "cupping".  You've got to envy the man or woman who got to 'cup' this hare's fur bowl in their hands.

Tea-poached prunes & Buttermilk pudding

Here is a simple recipe for tea-poached prunes.  They're good served with double cream but they go well with a buttermilk pudding so I've given you a recipe for that too.  

Tea-poached Prunes (Adapted from Chez Panisse Fruit by Alice Waters)

250ml (10 fl oz) water
1 tablespoon loose black tea (Earl Grey works well)
140g (5 oz) pitted prunes
45g (1½ oz) caster sugar

Bring the water to boil in a small non-reactive pan.  
Remove from the heat and add the tea.  
Leave to steep for 3 minutes.
Strain out the tea leaves and pour the liquid back into the pan.  Add the prunes and the sugar. Stir to dissolve the sugar and heat gently for 10 minutes to soften the prunes.  
Remove from the heat.
When cold, pour the pan contents into a porcelain or glass bowl, cover tightly and refrigerate until needed (keeps up to 1 week).

Buttermilk Pudding

(Serves 6)
3 leaves of gelatin

150ml (5fl oz) double cream

70g 2½ oz caster sugar

1 vanilla pod, split
450ml (16fl oz) buttermilk*

Cover the gelatine leaves in cold water and leave to soften for 3-4 minutes.
Place the cream and sugar in a pan along with the scraped out seeds and pod of the vanilla. 
Bring to the boil, stirring constantly to dissolve the sugar then remove from the heat.
Remove the gelatine leaves from the water, squeezing out any excess, and stir the gelatine into the warm cream.
Remove the vanilla pod and stir in the buttermilk.
Pour the mix into small ramekins and place in the fridge for at least three hours or overnight.
When ready to serve, put a few centimetres of hot water in a shallow bowl and quickly dip the ramekins in for a 3-4 seconds to loosen the buttermilk puddings from the sides.  Dry the ramekins, place a plate on top of each and invert to turn out (you'll hear a distinctive 'slurp' sound - if not, dip the ramekin in hot water again for another second and repeat the process.

Serve with a few poached prunes and a little of the liquor.

Sources:
V&A Museum
“Drinking a dish of tea with Sapho": The sexual fantasies of Lady Mary Wortley Mongagu and Lord Byron by Alison Winch
Chez Panisse Fruit by Alice Waters

* Buttermilk is a by-product of butter-making.  It is the low-fat, milky liquid that separates off during the process.  I use "pasteurised buttermilk" rather than "cultured buttermilk" which is thicker and has a longer shelf-life but I haven't tested it in this recipe.

Three Pears

Paul Cézanne, French, 1839–1906: Three Pears (Trois Poires)

ca. 1888–90. Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on cream laid paper

The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum

Paul Cézanne was living in Aix-en-Provence when he painted Trois Poires.  He was isolated from his fellow impressionist and post-impressionist artists.  It must have been autumn or early winter when he selected his three perfect even-sized pears.  He arranged them on a plain dish set upon a table spread with a patterned cloth of curling blue flourishes echoing the fullness of the fruit.  The still-life was painted around 6 years before the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard held Cézanne's first one-man exhibition which featured this work in 1895.  Both Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir wanted to own Trois Poires and settled the matter by drawing lots - Degas was the victor. 

Around the mid-20th century the painting was in the hands of Henry Pearlman, a New Yorker who made his fortune in the cold storage business.  Pearlman's passion for late 19th and early 20th century art ran deep and over three decades he amassed works by artists such as Soutine, Modigliani, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renior, Manet, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec and lesser known artists.  I love the sound of Henry Pearlman.  His art collecting genuinely seems to have been based on true appreciation rather than sheer acquisitiveness.  The Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection is on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum and fifty artworks from the collection are in the touring exhibition Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection.  You can catch the exhibition, as I did, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford until 22 June 2014.  It then moves on, appropriately, to Aix en Provence before returning across the Atlantic to Atlanta, Gerogia and Vancouver, Canada, before ending its tour at the Princeton University Art Museum.  The stars of the show, for me, are undoubtedly the Cézannes; the still-lifes and landscapes in particular.

Pyrus communis "Jargonelle"

In London, the pear blossom came and went in the blink of an eye this spring.  Pink-tinged buds quickly opened to present pure white cups with delicate deep-red anther topped filaments. All too soon they faded, but what the blossom lacked in longevity it made up for in abundance.  A promising number of acorn-sized green fruits, tinged with russet-brown, jostle for position.  Espaliered against a south-facing brick wall, it's labelled Pyrus communis 'Jargonelle' - derived from the European or common pear.  I like the fact the gardener broke the planting rules with this pear - "A tip bearer, not suitable for training into cordons or espaliers".

Sadness at the withered blossom is replaced by the hope for a basket of ripe, juicy pears come September - even if they will be enjoyed by someone else.  By the 17th century 300 pear varieties were recorded and the French were the fruits main champion.  The Jargonelle, or Gergonell, is one of the few survivors of the wave of pear varieties which arrived in the UK from France in the early 17th century. It's an early pear, and the first to ripen are the worst keepers.  Decay in pears starts from the core so a perfectly good looking fruit may be hiding a shrivelled, brown heart.

The chances of seeing a Jargonelle pear on the fruit counter today are slim, I think, though you might come across one in a private orchard.  The mighty Doyenné du Comice, twice as weighty, is much more likely to end up in your shopping basket - but the Comice is undeniably superior.  Edward Bunyard in his Anatomy of Dessert writes on the storing of Comice pears "When the green colour begins to change to yellow the moment of watchfulness arises, and when the whole fruit is an even yellow the moment has arrived....... no day should pass without inspection, but not handling."  Cézanne's curvaceous trio of pears may well have been comice.  Bearing just a touch of green, Bunyard would doubtless have pronounced them not quite ready to eat.

Here are my favourite simple instructions from Jane Grigson for cooking pears.  Quantities are imprecise. It's intuitive cooking, the kind of dish you feel your way into, and in my view, the best kind.  According to Grigson "any ripe but still firm ... fragrant eating pear will do".  

Buttered Pears 

Allowing one pear per person, peel, core and cut into wedge-shaped slices, sprinkling them with lemon juice to stop browning as you work.  Fry them gently in clarified unsalted butter until golden brown then turn and sprinkle with caster sugar.  Cook until the juices caramelise.  Remove the pear pieces to serving dishes. Deglaze the pan with a little water, and a splash of pear brandy if you have it, boil down a little and stir in some cubes of unsalted butter.  Pour the sauce over the pears.

I cook apples similarly to this, adding a little cream at the end after taking the pan off the heat.  Worth a try with pears too, I think, when the "moment" arrives.


Sources and further reading:
Paul Cézanne
Three Pears ca. 1888-1890
Ashmolean Museum
FT article: Cezanne and modern masterpieces from the Pearlman Collection by Jackie Wullschlager
Princeton University Art Museum: The Pearlman Collection
The Pearlman Foundation
The National Fruit Collection, Brogdale
Jane Grigson's Fruit Book

Tintype Tomatoes

Green Tomatoes
Tintype photograph
© Tif Hunter

Until now I've concentrated on how food influences ceramics - from special pots for buttered char or ones for sweet and savoury custards to a jug for pouring vitamin C-laden lemonade.  It's time to broaden the scope of Take One Dish and this month I want to look at food's influence on the art of photography.

We live in an age when everyone is a food photographer.  Snapping away at our dishes with phone cameras and sharing the results with people who may, or may not, be interested.  Sometimes the shot is just to prove we've been there, done that; sometimes it's because the 'dish' we've been presented with is just so beautiful we couldn't help ourselves.  I plead guilty, though I hope I'm discreet.  For the professional photographer, food is a tasty market.  This post is about someone whose passion for food photography is far removed from his commercial work.  It's where he gets the shot he wants, and there isn't a stylist in sight.

Tif Hunter's studio is a calm, sparsely furnished space, with a mix of exposed brick and grey plaster walls, in the 'not yet fashionable' part of Bermondsey.  Housed on the ground floor of a unremarkable mews property, the light is muted and the atmosphere conducive to study.  Yes, I could see myself working here.  On entering the studio you can’t miss the beautiful 10x8 wooden camera with antique brass lens.  Tif had this camera specially made and it is the one he uses to shoot with Polaroid 55 film and to capture Tintype images like the one above.

Dating from 1856, Tintypes are a variant on the wet-plate collodion method invented by Englishman Frederick Scott Archer in 1851.  Although the process was not widely taken up in the UK, tintypes were valued in the USA into the early 1900’s, particularly for portraiture.  Tif was influenced by the work of John Coffer, the father of Tintype photography in the USA.  A unique photograph could be produced almost immediately which was affordable and durable.  A blackened sheet of metal is coated with collodion, sensitised in silver nitrate, and, whilst still wet, the sheet is placed in the camera.  Developing and fixing follow immediately after the picture is taken and the image is then washed, dried and varnished.  Each Tintype is a one-off.

These days the dominant 87 storey 'Shard' skyscraper towers over this part of South London.  Smart restaurants, bars and flower shops co-exist with market stall traders and independent butchers, bakers, greengrocers and cheesemakers who occupy the run of railways arches out of London Bridge Station.  Tif's weekly shop from these traders have provided him with some inspirational subjects.  The butchers, bakers and coffee roasters he has encountered have been immortalised on scarce Polaroid Type 55 film, whilst the produce they sell is captured using the Tintype process.  

"After a number of years of shooting only digitally I felt that I 

needed to return to the magic of the analogue and the darkroom.  

Embracing both the craft and the unexpected in these methods was 

how I had started in photography.  In the Tintype medium, the alchemy 

and physical textural qualities of the results is that much more amazing 

than the black and white methods that I had already known."

Tif Hunter

Since the Tintype is a camera-original positive, all the images appear reversed (left-to-right) from reality.  This is most obvious where the subject includes some text.  Then there's the colour deception.  The tomatoes in this photograph appear lusciously ripe, yet are quite the opposite being an unripe green.  The camera picks up the red pigment which is present even in unripe fruit.  The eye is unable to see it as the colour is at the UV end of the spectrum rather than the red.  These stunning Tintypes, and the Polaroid portraits, culminated in a Tif Hunter exhibition 'On Maltby Street 2011'  Do take a look.

Inspired by Tif's 'Green Tomatoes" how could I not give you a recipe using the fruit.  This recipe appears in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David.  She takes care to attribute it to the wonderful Edouard de Pomiane whom she called "Master of the unsacrosanct".  A biologist specialising in food chemistry and dietetics, Pomiane lectured at the Institut Pasteur in Paris for some 50 years, dying in 1964.  The recipe is simply tomatoes, cream and butter, and it's perfect.  A hunk of bread to mop up the juices is all you need with it.  Just make sure your tomatoes are ripe!

"… de Pomiane's … method makes tomatoes taste so 

startlingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes that any 

restaurateur who put it on his menu would, in all probability,

 soon find it listed in the guide books as a regional speciality."

Elizabeth David 

Tomatoes a la Crème

"Take six tomatoes.  Cut them in halves.  In your frying pan melt a lump of butter.  Put in the tomatoes, cut side downwards, with a sharply pointed knife puncturing here and there the rounded sides.  Let them heat for 5 minutes.  Turn them over.  Cook them for another ten minutes.  Turn them again.  The juices run out and spread into the pan.  Once more turn the tomatoes cut side upwards.  Around them put 80 grammes (3 oz near enough) of thick cream.  Mix it with the juices.  As soon as it bubbles, slip the tomatoes and all their sauce onto a hot dish.  Serve instantly, very hot."

Special thanks to Tif Hunter for his time and for allowing me to use his Tintype'Green Tomatoes' to illustrate this piece.

Sources:

Tif Hunter is an award-winning advertising and editorial photographer who has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, London. His extensive body of work includes a collaboration with Stephen Bayley on “Cars – Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything”.

In October 2012 Tif Hunter’s Tintype of a Romanesco won Best in Category for a Non-Commissioned Object at the Association of Photographer (AOP) Awards

Elizabeth David

Lemonade Jug

Wedgwood earthenware lemonade jug ca 1939; design by Eric Ravilious

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The shape of this Queen's Ware jug is voluptuously curvaceous.  The  Josiah Wedgwood and Sons 'Liverpool' shape was one of their most traditional forms.  It derived from the large cream ware and porcelain jugs of the same shape made in Liverpool in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  You can envisage how it would feel to grasp the generous handle in one hand, taking the weight of the full jug in the other, just below its wide belly, to pour the contents.  It's practical and robust; an everyday cream earthenware jug.

Tactile as it is, it was the Eric Ravilious design rather than the form that stopped me in my tracks when browsing the Victoria and Albert Museum's ceramics collection.  Transfer-printed in black and colour-washed, a barrel with garden tools and ivy decorate one side.  On the other, a cat sleeps while bees buzz around a hive and a wheelbarrow awaits the gardener's return from his break - all reassuring ideals of Britishness. 

Eric Ravilious is on my mind having last year attended an insightful talk by James Russell at London's Bankside Gallery and later catching the exhibition of Ravilious' Prints at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester in December.  

A number of contemporary British artists were commissioned to design ceramics in the 1930's in response to a growing demand for simplicity.  Eric Ravilious designed for Wedgwood between 1936 and1940 but wartime restrictions meant many of his designs did not go into production in any quantities until the 1950's.  Regrettably, Ravilious did not live to see it.  Made an Official War Artist in 1940, he was lost on active service in 1942.  In addition to ceramics, Ravilious designed glass for Stuart Crystal and furniture for Dunbar Hay.  He is best known today for his work as a muralist, painter, wood-engraver, lithographer, book-illustrator and War Artist. For me, his pastoral landscapes and rural interiors are love letters to the English countryside, frequently odd but ever enchanting.

So why a Lemonade Jug?  Our 19th century ancestors appreciated the value of lemons in the diet to combat the disease 'scurvy'.  Whether amongst sailors who had to subsist on dried foods for long periods, or people who lived on a poor diet lacking in Vitamin C, the arrival of the first lemons of the new season from the Mediterranean region was eagerly awaited.  In late winter, in the home, a lemon drink was made from them to "cleanse the blood".  The rich would serve their lemonade from crystal. For the rest, a ceramic jug would suffice.  The Wedgwood 'Liverpool' form earthenware with the Ravilious 'Garden Implements' design would be my choice.

This year the main Winter/Spring season brought really good, fragrant, zesty lemons.  These days, some of the trees in Liguria crop throughout the summer.   As I've offered you a Lemonade Jug as this month's Take One Dish, how can I not offer you a recipe for lemonade?  This one is adapted from Jane Grigson's Fruit Book.  For me, Jane Grigson was one of the best writers on British Food (though not exclusively British) so choosing her recipe seems appropriate.  The first stage of the recipe produces a cordial.  This can be bottled, and kept for a few weeks ready, to be made into lemonade by adding carbonated or soda water.

Lemon Cordial (makes 20fl oz/600ml cordial)

3 large lemons

6 oz/175g caster sugar

Wash and then peel the lemons thinly.  Place the peel in a heavy-based 18cm/7 inch saucepan and cover with 2½cm/1 inch of cold water.  Cover with a lid and put on a very low heat.  Bring almost to the boil (boiling will make the cordial bitter).  Lift off the heat, allow to cool for a few minutes, then strain the liquid into a jug.  Squeeze the lemons and stir in the juice and the sugar. 

At this point you can either pour the cordial into a sterilised bottle to preserve it or dilute it to make lemonade for drinking straightaway.

Lemonade

20 fl oz/600ml lemon cordial

Carbonated or soda water

Dilute the cordial in a ratio of around 1 part cordial to 4 or 5 parts carbonated or soda water, add ice and mint leaves or borage flowers

Sources:

The Victoria and Albert Museum
The Wedgewood Museum

Tate Britain
James Russell

Jane Grigson's Fruit Book (Penguin Books)

Further reading on Eric Ravilious: Mainstone Press