Mrs Stephenson's Cucumber Mousse

I know it's a bit late in the year for this light cool dish...but just serve it with hot brown bread toast! And there are still lots of delicious cucumbers in the markets. Perhaps the only vegetable that did really well this summer of lots of rain.

And it's really fun turning something out of a mold. Really cool!

The recipe for the mousse comes from Jane Grigson's cookbook "Jane Grigson's Book of Vegetables", but I have also seen it in the Salads volume of Time Life Good Cook series, edited by my favorite—taadah! : Richard Olney. I think the Salad book credits the Jane Grigson book but Jane credits this lady, Mrs Stephenson. She made the mousse for this restaurant café I remember going to as a young girl with my mother when we were in London shopping. (Sounds very posh, I know. I certainly felt a bit posh, at least for an American.) The restaurant called Justin Le Blank was cafeteria style. The food was great, sort of a rare occurrence in 70's London at the time. I remember it quite well and I think I even remember the cucumber mousse.

Here's the recipe and what Jane says:

Mrs Stephenson's Cucumber Mousse

This recipe comes from Mrs Victoria Stephenson, who makes a variety of mousses and slads for Justin de Blank's provision shops in London [I just remember one].

Sometimes we eat it on rye bread, witha bottle of white wine, at five or six in the evening [love the hour!], sometimes as a first course. It goes with cold salmon trout and whilemeal bread and butter, as the main course of Sunday lunch in June.

1/2 large cucumber, peeled, diced small

1 heaped tablespoon salt

3 tablespoons tarragon or wine vinegar

15 g (1/2 oz.) gelatine

6 tablespoons hot water

300ml (1/2 pint) whipping cream

1 lb curd cheese or 1/2 lb each sieved cottage cheese and cream cheese [I sometimes use a mixture of fromage blanc and cream cheese or goat cheese, anything I can find that gives the mousse richness but at the same time a tangy lightness to it as well]

black pepper

chopped chives, parsley, spring onion

Mix the cucumber, salt and vinegar in a bowl thoroughly. Then turn it onto a colander, put a heavy plate on top and leave for an hour at least. Then remove the plate and press the cucumber with a clean cloth to get the last of the liquid away.

Dissolve the gelatine in hot water and whisk the cream gradually until the mixture is smooth and very thick, but not stiff. Break up the cheese and add it to the cream. Mix in the cucumber.

Taste and add a little more vinegar and salt if necessary, but be careful to overdo neither. Sometimes a couple of pinches of sugar will help to bring out the flavor; this depends on how good the cucumber was to start with. Grind in plenty of black pepper and add an abundance of chopped chives, parsley and spring onion—enough to make a strongly speckled effect. Turn into a oiled decorative mold and leave overnight in the refrigerator to set. Turn out onto serving dish.

Always provide wholemeal or rye bread with the cucumber mousse, whether it is the only dish or one of several; the rich cool mixture needs that kind of flavor and texture to set it off.

So sorry it has so long

I guess I have fallen prey to that sad aspect of new bloggers—they fall by the wayside. But I am back!

This summer I brought a bunch of the wine for a family holiday on the beach. Basically I brought a bunch of my favorites: Clos Roches Blanches Sauvignon Blanc #2, their rosé of Pineau D'Aunis, Pépière Muscadet, Bisson Prosecco and two very different dolcettos: De Forville (wonderful picnic cherry and mineral and Brovia vignavillej (a "serious" dolcetto! who knew? Dark in the class yet not too heavy in the mouth but sort of brooding, Will from Rosenthals calls it "dark woods with dark plum. I like that.)

This is a picture of my parents Bob and Kathleen celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, August 22 1959.

To help usher in the next I brought a Magnum of champagne, Chartogne-Taillet NV Brut Sainte-Anne. It was delicious and I must admit to not being able to remember too much of it (shame shame damn damn) as I got all emotional with the thought of 50 years and all that.

We had a great time with lots of nieces, yes all the grandchildren are girls. I will admit that there were moments of stress: 6 parents, 6 little girls, 2 grandparents and me.

Lots of good wine drinking and eating helps smooth out any crazy muscle spasms (which actually did happen to me the first night. My pysche no doubt trying to get the worst over quickly and succinctly. Speedy recovery as I was down at the beach the next morning swimming with, well, near dolphins and lots and lots of fish.)

We made huge mounds of spicy shrimp and I made this great cucumber mousse to drink with that wonderful wonderful Clos Roches Blanches sauvignon #2. I will post the recipe soon.

Cantaloupe

Tonight smelled of cantaloupe.

Picnic at Caumsett State Park

Impressions of a picnic with Pineau D'aunis rosé

There was some wine left from the picnic, not big drinkers my friends, and so I finished it off. This time the rosé was fruity, watermelon and a hint of grapefruit? It was very different from what I had remembered at lunch the day before.

We were hot. The large leafy trees on the path we took to the bay only partly shaded us and insects buzzed around our heads.

As soon as we caught sight of the bay I wanted in. But my friend wanted a better picnic spot. Finally we found one and I went in the water. Not really swimming, more like a dunk to cool off in. Then we leaned against a big boulder sunk halfway into the beach sand.

The top of a short cliff with a forest of pine trees haunted at our backs while crumbly red dirt underneath the top seemed intent on pushing us, eventually, into the sea. PIneau D'Aunis 2008 Clos Roches Blanches on a rocky pebbly sandy and sea weedy bay beach on Long Island. We drank it with blueberries, a peach, some quinoa salad with corn and peppers, hummus, pita chips, some home made brown bread, cheddar cheese and mozarella cheese.

It was lovely and surprising. It had just enough fruit as to not be austere and had that distinct peppery earthy humus that I recognise as pineau d'aunis. But as it is a rosé wine the undertow of sobriety complecated things nicely. It was as if it were trying to tell us something else.

Sometimes I think maybe I read too much into the wines that I love, but maybe the wines I love have enough in them, enough structure, enough nuance that they inadvertantly create a place where one can hang one's thoughts.

Am I the only one who feels that pineau d'aunis is a somber, almost melancholic cepage? It does seem to me ancient.

Vielles Vignes Éparses 2005 Coteaux du Loir

That's right. That's the Loir, not the Loire. The Loir is a tributary river that runs to the north of the Loire and eventually feeds into the Loire river. It is one of the most northernly places in which vines are grown and wine is made and the wine is delicious. The varieties are chenin blanc for white and pineau d'aunis for red and rosé.

Domaine de Bellivière, Eric Nicolas is my favorite. Although admittedly it is hard to find Coteaux du Loir and Jasnières (a tiny part of C du L). This wine was being "closed out" by Chambers St wines. Because of the off-dry-ness of it Vielles Vignes Éparses were hard to sell. Well it was great for me. The wine is wonderful.

But hard to describe. Drinking it, and it was a couple of days ago, and then it was the third day the bottle was open but closed up with a cork in my fridge, an image of a dark silvery grey cloud hanging in a dark sky. It is not a sunny day but not cold. You can feel ions in the air. The wine is intensely mineral and austere. A wine for contemplation.

But greedily, not at all saintly, I wish I had bought more.

Clar de Castanyer 2007

Yesterday I made little neck clam pizza from a recipe from the NYTimes about Franny's in Brooklyn. I just had the pizza a couple of weeks ago at Franny's and it was so good I had to stop myself from going back there every night since then. In fact I am still holding back and now have another reason: I can't make it nearly as well as they do. I will try again, but honestly it was like a different pie.

But we drank a wine that wasn't on the list there and probably won't be because it's Spanish. What a weird funky easy to love wine.

It was this wonderful white wine that I bought at Chambers St Wines (my favorite wine store. I am so lucky to live near by) under the recommendation of one of the guys there. Wonderful Clar de Castanyer, 2007. I don't know why I thought it would be good with the clams though, well, it is white wine afterall. I think I was lucky.

The color was a golden bright yellow. (The photo I took has the wine already taken out of the bottle. Sorry. But there are other pictures of it on Flicker that do the wine justice.)

I held it up to my nose: what the hell was that aroma so distinct and persistant without tiring you? It had a richness like something made with nutty butter but there wasn't any butter. It smelt like a spiced pear tart. Definitely this champagne-like aroma of fermentation and patisserie. And it had enough weight to it to match the briny seafull clams, cream and that little spark of hot pepper flakes. I guess that sounds like a weird combination pear tart and clams. But there it is.

Richard Olney

I love the writing of Richard Olney, especially when he writes of wine. This is one of my favorite passages. It is from "Ten Vineyard Lunches". Inside he presents menus from all the great wine regions of France. (Except Champagne—he does make a kind of excuse for this). This book is very interesting especially for pairing wines with food. And you can find it for very little used online.) This passage is from the Loire Valley lunch.

The Touraine red wines — Bourgueil and Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil on the right bank, Chinon across the river and, adjoining Chinon across the border in Anjou, Saumur-Champigny — are the friendliest of wines: jubilant, frank and open, mingling herbal, grassy scents and flavors with an intense wild berry fruit that some define as raspberry, others as blackcurrant or bramble, and that may simply be the fruit of Cabernet franc.

When drinking one of these wines, cool, on a hot day in the mottled shade of the grape arbor, I have only to close my eyes to recapture a child's summertime sensation of lying face-down in the grass and cutting out the whole world except for vegetal and earthy scents and the lonely plaint of mourning doves in the silent air.