thatch ale

There has been much brewing activity here this weekend — and I am very excited to report that the latest breakfast-themed dark ale involves the last minute addition of. . . a cup of yorkshire tea! (milk free, of course). Anyway, here by request, is the recipe for last week’s brew — the tried and tested hoppy delight that is Tom’s Thatch Ale.

Thatch Ale

Ingredients:
Yeast: Thames Valley Wyeast 1275

Malt:
2.6 kg maris otter
1.5 kg lager malt
500g malted wheat
120g pale crystal malt
28g black patent malt

Hops:
Bittering: 32g hallertau / northern brewer hops (8.5% alpha acid)
Flavour: 28g Perle hops (8.2% alpha acid)
Aroma: 24g perle hops, 9g elderflowers, 9g mount hood hops (4.4 % alpha acid)
Dry hop: 12g perle, 9g elderflowers, 9g mount hood

Instructions:
Smack Wyeast starter pack, leave overnight.
Make starter:
Combine 1 litre water, 120g extra light dry malt extract + handful of mount hood hops.
Boil for 5 mins and strain into sterile bottle.
Leave to cool to 21°C. Add yeast from smack pack. Leave for 48-72 hours
Time to brew:
Heat 10 litres water to 77°C and add to malt (excluding black malt) in mash tun. The mash should stabilise at 66-67°C, add more hot/cold water to adjust temp as necessary.
Mash for 45 minutes, adding black malt in the last 5 minutes. Sparge slowly into brew pot with 15 to 17 litres of water at 78°C to a final volume of approximately 5 gallons. Gravity at run off = 1021.
Return wort to the boil. Add bittering hops (32g Hallertau / northern brewer). Boil for 45 minutes. Add flavour hops (28g perle) and boil for further 15 mins. Add aroma hops (24g perle, 9g elderflowers, 9 g mount hood) and boil for 2 more minutes.
Strain hot wort into sterile fermenter and cool to approximately 21°C.
Meanwhile prepare ingredients for dry hopping:
Take one of Kate’s old stockings, and fill with 12g perle, 9g elderflowers, 9g mount hood. Tie at both ends and steam for 3 minutes. Drop into cooled wort and pitch yeast starter. Taken original gravity reading (OG = 1038).
Ferment at 19 – 21°C for six days.
Rack into secondary container removing yeast sediment and dry hops. Leave in secondary until yeast drops out (5-14 days). Bottle when ready.

Enjoy!

more neeps . . . more beer

In a mysterious repeat of last week’s missives, today we have more neeps . . and more beer. If I am now inhabiting a turnip-and-beer filled time warp, there are probably worse places to be.

Here you see my entirely non-literal rendition of the turnip tops

and here, how the turnip roots feed down into the soil . . I mean, ribbing.

I am absolutely loving the Jamieson & Smith 2 ply. The colours are so rich and saturated – but subtle too. I spent a very long time admiring their shade card and selecting colours — my favourite here being the lovely mutating golden green (shade fc12) which works really well with the more solid green of shade 118. And look at its feathery soft halo! Hurrah for Shetland!

As with the dollheid, I found myself interested in the effects of a decreasing repeat – that is, in the way the several segments of the crown resolve themselves into circles. With the stems, section divisions, and decreases forming solid lines, the crown of the tam has a simple, formal element to it, which to me is reminiscent of the early styles of 2-colour Scotch bonnet that one often sees in museum collections (I’ll find a photograph at some point to show you). I also enjoyed playing the four colours against each other to create different neepy effects, and particularly like the way the purple shade (fc56) is quietened by the grey (27).

Here in another rather dimly lit shot (taken late yesterday evening after greenhouse watering), is the neep in situ on its allotment, surrounded by other neeps.

The pattern (which I am now working on), will of course be called neepheid. (I have ravelled the project here, and hope to have things ready to go in a couple of weeks time).

Now, in our house, swede is a favoured synonym for head (“look at your big swede” “your giant swede won’t fit through that door” &c &c), and I did wonder about the wisdom of a near-tautological name…but I like neepheid, so neepheid it is.

We are all familiar with the associations of heads with vegetables–we’ve all seen Arcimboldo’s fabulous creations. But turnips seem to be particularly linked to daftness or eccentricity, and this interests me. Do the roots (ahem) of this association this lie in the enthusiasm that surrounded the the four crop rotation system in the eighteenth century? I was thinking about some of the ways that William Cobbett was satirised, and of Pope’s account of Lord “Turnip” Townsend . . . and then I recalled a passage in Mark Twain’s Roughing It about the unfortunate affliction of Mrs Beazley’s son, William:

“Turnips were the dream of her child’s young ambition. While other youths were frittering away in frivolous amusements the precious years of budding vigor which God had given them for useful preparation, this boy was patiently enriching his mind with information concerning turnips. The sentiment which he felt toward the turnip was akin to adoration. He could not think of the turnip without emotion; he could not speak of it calmly; he could not contemplate it without exaltation. He could not eat it without shedding tears. All the poetry in his sensitive nature was in sympathy with the gracious vegetable. With the earliest pipe of dawn he sought his patch, and when the curtaining night drove him from it he shut himself up with his books and garnered statistics till sleep overcame him. On rainy days he sat and talked hours together with his mother about turnips. When company came, he made it his loving duty to put aside everything else and converse with them all the day long of his great joy in the turnip. . .”

The comedic nature of the turnip interests me here. And a similar kind of comedy operates to slightly different effect in the character of Uncle Monty in Withnail and I . I am mulling over various thoughts about this, but in all the examples I can think of, vegetable obsessions seem to be a symptomatic of a particularly masculine eccentricity*. But I am a woman, and am proud to declare myself a turnip obsessive. I have much sympathy with William Beazley’s view of the “gracious vegetable”. What’s not to like? You can eat both the roots and tops, they are easy to grow, and they are a tasty crop pretty much all year round! I love turnips in all their neepiness, and shall sport my neepheid with pride!

Ah yes, beer: I was going to talk about beer. Tom has been doing more brewing, and has also written up a recipe for you. We’ll save that for the next post.

*I would be very interested to hear of women turnip obsessives, in fact or fiction, if any spring to your mind.

if you brought a big brown bag of them home

. . . I’d jump up and down and hope you’d toss me a carrot.*

No prizes for naming that tune. Or for guessing which vegetables are inspiring my knitting.

*a clue: during one session, percussion was notoriously provided by Paul Mc Cartney chewing a stick of celery.

experiments

#1. Jam. I blame Sarah. She brought a jar of her homemade jam round for lunch, and it was so damn fine I had to try my hand. These jars combine the last of our allotment raspberries with some extra from the farmer’s market. Jamtastic! It set, and everything. We have already guzzled our way through one of the six jars.

#2. Baking. I blame Felix. She turned up here a few weeks ago with a jar full of sourdough starter, and her characteristic culinary enthusiasm. Since, then, I’ve not been able to stop baking. I’ve made several loaves, flatbread, a victoria sandwich, scones, a marmalade cake, and, um, buns . . . with varying degrees of success. The less said about these buns, the better.

#3. Technique. I am researching knitting accessories, and since acquiring one of these am keen to discover exactly what using it involves. As my own experiments have been rather clumsy, I defer to someone with superlative expertise, who is here pictured mastering the makkin, and knitting with two strands in the right hand, Shetland style.

#4. Colour. I am completely obsessed with colourwork, and blame the current depth of my obsession on Alice Starmore’s Hebridean 2ply, with which I knit this experimental hat a few weeks ago. My experiment was not entirely successful, but it has certainly whet my appetite for further experimental forays with this yarn. To make the hat, I simply selected four colours that I liked, measured my head and my gauge swatch, picked out a few 10 stitch peerie patterns, and cast on. (I didn’t cast on in icord — but found that I had to add some later — I just couldn’t stop myself . . .). Now, while the palette I chose is perhaps too muted to be successful, and while the crown shaping is certainly not quite right, I really learnt a lot when knitting this hat: about colour behaviour and placement, and about the relationship between colour and pattern. I also finished knitting it with a confirmed sense of Starmore’s genius. Her colourways really are amazing. For example, ‘pebble beach’ – the pale colour that I tried to make pop out of the centre of the first few sets of peeries — is a truly gorgeous mercurial shade. It looks greenish here, but its colour dominance shifts dramatically depending on its placement. I’ve tried it in other combinations since, and against different colours it can look fawn or mauve, gold or pink (much like the pebble beach behind me, in fact). These shifting tones are apparently produced by a blend of more than thirty shades. The funny thing about this hat is that, despite the fact that it is a sort of large swatch with several design deficiencies, I have developed a deep fondness for it. I brought it to Islay, and I barely took it off my head. I think the precise and thoughtful relationship of Starmore’s palete to the Hebridean landscape has a lot to do with my affection. Anyway, my peerie-sampler-hat-experiment is ravelled here, and the colours I used were capercaillie, fulmar, pebble beach, and driftwood.

I am now knitting experimentally with an allotment-inspired colour pallette. I also find Felix’s wise words about knitted vegetables very inspiring. More soon!

tea and knitting

For many of us, tea and knitting go together like . . . well, like tea and knitting. Personally, I can think of no better beverage to accompany the activity of knitting than what Dr Johnson (a great tea drinker) would have referred to as a dish of fine bohea, (or in my case, Yorkshire). Knitters love tea. Like many other shops, my local yarn store also serves tasty pots of tea, and does what can only be described as a roaring trade in tea cosies. This connection between teapot, yarn, and needles seems so self-evident to knitters that it has even inspired a recently published book of patterns (which I have not seen, so can make no remarks upon).

But I’ve been pondering the connection between tea and knitting in a rather different context of late, while reading about the knitters of nineteenth-century Shetland. We have all probably absorbed one stereotype of such women, from these frequently reproduced images of creel-laden figures, knitting while walking, and gathering fuel.

(postcard, c. 1910).

Through the second half of the Nineteenth Century and into the Twentieth, such postcards lent Shetland workers the status of picturesque curiosities (in a manner not dissimilar to those depicting Welsh women with spinning wheels and stove-pipe hats). Yet despite the novelty-value of such images, they reflected a certain reality, while also suggesting a (largely positive) notion of the women of Shetland as models of virtue, industry, and physical capability. This image of the Shetland knitter as an indomitable multi-tasker perhaps still persists, but far less familiar today is another stereotype — just as persuasive and pervasive in depictions of Shetland — of the women of those islands as inveterate addicts of tea.

In 1840, Edinburgh children’s author, Catherine Sinclair wrote about the “marvellous excess” of the tea drinking she had encountered on Shetland. Sinclair’s writing was generally lively and emotive, but on the subject of tea-imbibing working women particularly so: “the indulgence amounts to an absolute vice!” she remarked. Sinclair followed up these histrionics with a few examples of Shetland’s purported tea excess, including the story of “a poor man in the parish of Bressay, who had the expensive affliction of a tea-drinking wife, and was cheated by her secretly selling his goods to obtain tea.” For several decades after her book appeared, Sinclair was cited as the principal source of evidence for many other publications making similarly misguided claims about the crazed-tea-dependent women of Shetland. For example, her “poor man of Bressay” appears in Chambers’ 1854 Compendium, his story embellished as follows:

“Although intemperance in the use of intoxicating liquors could be cited as an unfortunate feature in some departments of the population, Shetland is still more remarkable for the ineconomic use of a beverage which is ordinarily considered the antagonist of intemperance -– I allude to tea. No kind of beverage is so much relished by the female peasantry of Shetland as tea. To get tea they will venture as great and unprincipled lengths as any dramdrinker will go for his favourite liquor.”

A couple of years later, Sinclair was cited again, backing up the claims of the Statistical, Topographical and Historical Gazetteer of Scotland that: “A passion for tea, to the extent of feeling the narcotic influence of the herb, seems so strong and general as to threaten that country [Shetland] with serious disaster.” In Sinclair’s tour, and in the host of other publications that followed her lead, the working women of Shetland were described as obsessed with, addicted to, and ruined by tea. Women had, in fact, made tea “the curse of Shetland.”

Tea was indeed the curse of Shetland, but not as Catherine Sinclair would have it. It was at the heart of the islands’ pernicious truck system, a legacy of the Dutch fishing trade, in which labour and goods were bartered rather than paid in cash. The merchants and shopkeepers of nineteenth-century Shetland had transformed tea into specie: the currency which women received in payment for their hard work — and that hard work was, of course, knitting. The fine hosiery and shawls that Shetland knitters produced were valued in tea, and paid in tea. Thus the claims of Sinclair and others that, “excessive indulgence [in tea] keeps the Shetland peasant lower in the scale of poverty,” completely missed the point. In fact, what reinforced the poverty of Shetland knitters was not tea-addiction or indulgence, but the fact that they received no other form of payment for their work. In the words of Lynn Abrams (to whom my discussion here is indebted): “The consequence of this system of payment was that hand knitters were forced to spend much time and energy turning the payment they received for their hosiery into items they needed, or into cash – – a family could not live on tea alone.”

Image courtesy of Shetland Museum and Archives, © R03026.

Truck had been illegal in Britain since 1831, but the law had proved notoriously difficult to enforce. In 1872, the UK truck commission visited Shetland, and their report makes sobering reading. Shetland women spoke articulately of the tyranny of knitting, and the baleful economic effects of payment in tea. Despite the findings of the commission, truck persisted in various forms on Shetland for several decades, and women continued to receive no other remuneration than undrinkable quantities of tea that they were forced to sell on to their neighbours at a loss. No wonder then that, in the words of Lynn Abrams again: “knitting evokes little sentimentality among Shetland women for they are conscious of its alternative symbolism — of the exploitation of women’s labour and skills by merchants.” Tea and knitting are one of today’s happy luxuries. But I’ll remember before I stick the kettle on that they were, in living memory, also the agents of women’s economic oppression.

Further reading / viewing:
I strongly urge anyone with an interest in Shetland knitting to read the chapter on ‘work’ in Lynn Abrams incisive and insightful Myth and Materiality in a Woman’s World: Shetland 1800-2000. (Manchester University Press, 2005). You can ask your library to order it, or acquire it on interlibrary loan if it isn’t locally available.
Alice Starmore, Book of Fairisle Knitting (1988). Happily for everyone, soon to be reprinted.
Catherine Sinclair, Shetland and the Shetlanders, or, the Northern Circuit (1840).

Also see:
Rosie Gibson, “The Work they Say is Mine” (1986). Award-winning documentary about Shetland working women.
Jenny Brown (Gilbertson), “Rugged Island,” (1934). Both films are available through the BFI.

help me to win an egg cup

Clearly I have gone blog-post-crazy today, but I just noticed from my all-seeing ‘blog stats’ page that some lovely person (who? who are you?) has nominated me for a Dorset Cereals blog award. Now, generally, I don’t pay much attention to such things, but I like Dorset Cereals and this award involves some homely merchandise (vaguely reminiscent of the stuff I used to be able to acquire with my lost and beloved Yorkshire Tea tokens, ah me), among which is the ultimate, coveted prize of a Dorset Cereals egg cup. My competitive streak has emerged. I would like to win that egg cup. If you would like to help me win it, please support me and vote by clicking on this widget thingy:

If that doesn’t work, just follow this link and look for ‘needled’ (on the first page of nominations, towards the bottom). I will be extremely happy if I win that egg cup and can promise much ludicrous enthusing in the happy event . . .

edit: apparently, if you vote, you may win a “case of Dorset cereals.” Imagine!

fruitful

Felix is here. It has been a fruit-full weekend. Yesterday morning there was knitting to be done and treats to be found at the farmer’s market.

And then we made the most of a sunny afternoon and had a great walk along the Clyde from New Lanark. The lush woodland around the falls is utterly glorious at this time of year.

Along the river bank we discovered masses of bilberries (or blackhearts if you are Thomas Hardy) at just the right stage of ripeness. We also found beautiful ripening hips and sloes, which I took note of for later autumn months. We gathered up the berries, wrapped them in Felix’s handkerchief, and took them home where they joined raspberries from our allotment, and currants and gooseberries from the farmer’s market in a giant soft fruit crumble. We cooked this up and ate it with some gusto.

The best drink to accompany such magnificent summer fruitfulness is, of course, a glass of Tom’s home-brewed raspberry and elderflower mead, which we bottled up a year ago. It is tasting mighty fine.

slainte!

just a couple of things

I’ve been meaning to mention:

After writing about station bars a few weeks ago, I felt compelled to visit the one at Manchester Victoria for old times sake. The view above eye level was just how I remembered it. Below, though, I encountered the evil Pumpkin. When I asked the barman if he had any ale on draught, he rolled his eyes and pointed to the bottles of Newky Brown in the fridge. Oh dear. The Centurion this was not. Thankyou, Lisa, for the link to this article, which sums up the sad situation in this beautiful space.

Also, following on from my chat with the marvelous Mrs Sew and Sew, I had to show you this fabric design I discovered in Drucilla Cole’s 1000 Patterns book. Look closely: those ’66’s refer to the annual ration allowance of clothing coupons, and the numbers beside each garment (ostensibly) refer to their respective coupon-cost. If the design is from the ’40s (as a reference in Cole’s book suggests) then this jolly fabric would itself have carried a cost in coupons . . . Cole doesn’t say much about it (her very good book is mostly an exposition of pattern design) and I am very intrigued by this fabric. If anyone knows anything at all about it, I’d be very interested to hear.

Thanks for all your entries in the bee-bag giveaway — I was particularly excited to see the comments of those who actually keep bees. How I wish they allowed hives on the allotment . . .

York Craft Tour

(Felix in Duttons).

I am busy. I do not find long working days particularly good for either body or soul. During periods of insane activity, one must always find a little time to spend in the restorative presence of friends, and it was great to meet up with Felix the other day. We spent a lovely, crafty few hours in York, highlights of which included a cake shaped like a cauliflower, and these amazing tea-cup buttons that Felix found in Duttons (of course).

(very Felix buttons)

After this, and my earlier button pilgrimage with Ysolda, I thought it might be a good idea to produce a map, linking together my favourite York crafty locations. You can click each map-marker to see my notes on each location, or click on ‘larger map’ to zoom in and see the full thing in much more detail.

View Larger Map

Each marker takes you to one of eleven craft hotspots. In no particular order, they are:
1. Duttons (for Buttons)
2. Betty’s (tea. baked goods. confectionery.)
3. Viking Loom (embroidery, quilting, beading)
4. Sheepish (best place for yarn)
5. The Japanese Shop
6. York Beer and Wine (and cheese and cider) shop
7. Priestley’s Vintage Clothing
8. Quilter’s Guild Museum
9. York Castle Museum
10. York Brewery
11. Monk Bar Chocolatiers

(Betty’s. Yorkshire delicacies indeed).

This list is entirely personal, and a bit idiosyncratic. For example, I like ‘Sheepish’ for Yarn, and the ‘Viking Loom’ for embroidery supplies, and I prefer both to ‘Craft Basics’ on Gillygate. On my list you will find beer and cheese, wool and cakes, the finest local produce and ingredients, and (perhaps incongruously) some lovely stuff from Japan. There are also two brilliant museums: the York Castle Museum (chock full of fabulous textiles and intriguing domestic objects), and the museum and archive of the UK Quilter’s Guild (now happily housed in their new home in St Anthony’s Hall). Check their websites for opening times and listings of current exhibitions.

(Ysolda by the River Ouse).

One of the best things about York is how compact and pedestrian-friendly it is. All of the craft hot spots on my list are within or near the city centre, and all are in in easy walking distance from each other. Walking around York is aided by two of the city’s unique geographic / architectural features: its rivers and its walls. The city is bisected by the rivers Foss and Ouse, the latter of which is lined by a lovely Georgian path known (then and now) as the “New Walk“. As well as being a genuine pleasure in itself, a quick walk along the “New Walk” takes you to the haven of refreshment that is the York Beer and Wine shop. A York organisation has produced this great guided tour of the New Walk, which I strongly recommend reading. (I used to live in the first location on this tour many moons ago when I was a student. Ahem.)

(The New Walk in 1756)

The Romans built the original walls around the city they named Eboracum. These defensive walls have been rebuilt several times since over the centuries, and today you can walk almost the whole way round the city centre along well-maintained wall paths which, according to York City Council, are tramped on by around a million people a year. Several of my craft hotspots are near to the bars (or gates) which form the stopping-off and getting-on points for wall-walkers. These include Monk Bar Chocolatiers (located, unsurpsingly, by Monk Bar) and The Viking Loom (close to Bootham Bar).

(Felix walks along the city walls toward Bootham Bar).

As I said, this list is entirely personal, but if any of you Yorkshire folk feel I’ve missed a really vital craft hot spot, do tell me, and I can make additions (or amendments) to the map. Hope you enjoy it! Thankyou!

(tree of knowledge on the doorway of York Minster).

eggsacting

We were excited. My Ma had given us a basket of treats, chief among which were some KAKE BRAND moulds, exactly the same as those we had when I was a kid. She found them on ebay (where she finds everything), complete with their original foil wrappings and instructions.

I cleaned the moulds.

Tom was the Master Chocolatier (said in Lindt voice)

and I formed chocolate creations to the same exacting standards I’d used when eight years old.

ahem.