S. Worthen | Weblog

Yesterday's Chenonceau pumpkins reminded me of the bigger ones I photographed back in August at the Iowa State Fair. The winner of the fair's biggest pumpkin prize (the one on the right) weighed an impressive 1,323 pounds.

There was not a trick-or-treater to be seen on our street yesterday, but the candy shelves at the grocery store were cleaned out. I feel like I may have had this problem before: the grocery store expects me to be organized and buy candy a day or five in advance of Halloween. At some point earlier, it had put all the small, easily unitable candy on sale at half-price, and the shelves had been cleaned bare. So - all the candy gone, but no trick-or-treaters. Perhaps it's just the abbreviated days and pre-hibernation instincts which are driving local shoppers to stock up on half-price candy?

At the Valley Junction farmer's market today, I ran across an unfamiliar fruit: ground cherries. They looked like tiny physalises, but tasted rather different from any I'd had before. On the basis of a sample, I bought a punnet of them. We ate them for dessert.

They're small, perhaps a centimeter across, and clearly a physalis relative. The fruits themselves are densier, jammier than any physalis I've had, a sort of hazelnut-cherry combo of flavor with a touch of very ripe melon. The woman who sold them to me said they're frequently used in making jam.

This website says they might be Physalis pruinosa, also known as the husk tomato. Wikipedia lists an astonishingly large range of variations on the genus Physalis, most known by some variation of ground cherry. I don't know which kind they were. Not a cape gooseberry/physalis as I've met them but, indeed, a relative.

morganlf and I were going down the Thames, en route to Greenwich, yesterday when she asked me where the word "Limehouse" came from. Today I checked - it's from "Lime Oast", i.e. lime kiln, kilns for making quicklime. Quicklime is used in everything from mortar to plaster to slaking corn to pottery. Apparently, Henry III's navy blinded an invading French fleet with it.

Chalk is a kind of limestone, chalk such as the chalk of the Chalk Group, the stone underlying much of southern England, under the Channel, the Netherlands, parts of the North Sea, and down into Champagne. It's also the name of a town in Kent, Chalk, reading about which, thanks to a prompt from ladybird97, is what reminded me to check on Limehouse's origins today and started this whole chain of connections.

Later, yesterday, after seeing the North-West Passage exhibit at the National Maritime Museum (CanCon dealt with for the week), and coming back home to burn things, we sipped on a sparkling wine which proclaimed itself argillaceous. Today's lime-browsing reassured me that not knowing how to translate it said nothing about my French and everything about my ignorance of stratigraphy. Argillaceous rocks have clay content. Limestone can be argillaceous, as is the argillaceous chalk marl through which the Channel Tunnel was dug.

Marl is lime-rich mud. In French, it is marne, from which the river and the department in France are surely named - for that's where Champagne, of the chalk-rich soil and sparkling wines is.

Speaking of limes - one of the other kinds - we also wondered why yuzu has become such a trendy fruit in chocolate.

Two years ago, ewtikins gave me a quince shrub from her garden in one of her buckets. It reduced to a handful of sticks overwinter, and I was delighted when it came back to life again in the spring.

Yet again, the quince has returned to leaflets after a brief winter in stick-form. It has an island of grass beside it, still in the bucket, still inadequately drained. This year, ewtikins no longer has a garden, and I still have her bucket. But this year - if all goes to plan - I will have a garden of my own, a place to plant or repot.

If all goes well, next year will see much larger quince sticks overwintering.

(If she lacks bucket storage space, I'm happy to retain it until she has need of it again.)

Emergency folding chair shopping advice: John Lewis does not sell furniture. Well, it does, but the furniture physically present within its branches are for display only. They don't sell off the shop floor. Fortunately, they do sell furniture immediately from the discount corner (at least on the Oxford Street branch), and I could make do with only buying one folding chair.

A reason to move: Our apartment has walls made of plasterboard. This is the worst aspect of the apartment. Yesterday, when diligently attempting to replace a burnt-out lightbulb before dinner guests, I pulled one of the living room light fixtures out of the wall. The screws are stripped. The elegant candle-lit ambiance that evening was by no means our original intention.

Graking: Definition: time spent simultaneously grading and baking.

Quince, continued: Thanks to ewtikins' creative efforts, I now have a bottle of quince-flavored vodka!

Advent calendar update: Thank you to all who weighed in on the difficult subject of what advent calendar I should acquire. It arrived four days after the beginning of advent, and chamaeleoncat generously put it together for me. I went with the pink unicorn set - which looks like a rose-themed Versaille, to quote chamaeleoncat - and a full non-advent set of jousting knights. By request of cliosfolly, scenes from Yvain (and possibly other medieval romans) will be forthcoming.

If you find a quince
- say, for 99 cents -
then under the tap you should rinse
it. And then you must wait, since
a newly-plucked quince
is too dense both for teeth and for sense.
If some weeks in past tense
you that quince once did rinse,
then it's time to inspect it for dents.

If it's damaged, then brew it.
It's perfect? Then stew it,
and chew it with rue or with mince.

It's true that a stew with the dew of a quince
is a stew to review with a few friends, and hence
it will cue up a new demand too - at expense -
for your stew, and the crew will thank you like a prince.

Over lunch one day, I read Jane Grigson's chapter on quince in her Fruit Book. I knew nothing about quince. The name rang a bell, but the fruit was entirely unknown to me.

"People say that for the Greeks and Romans, quinces were the golden apples of the Hesperides..." "In the autumn as you go south, the sun shines on the fruit, which stands out as the leaves fall, like magic apples, gold and dazzling against the blue sky." "Bring the best [quince] into the sitting-room or bedroom, which they will scent with the most heavenly smell." "Quince is about the best flavouring for apple or pear pies and tarts." "Baked quince was Sir Isaac Newton's favourite pudding." Jelly, paste, pies, quail, beef, vodka... the fruit intrigued me with its versatility, its early '80s commercial rarity, its Mediterranean frequency, and the promise of sweetly-scented rooms.

In a city like Toronto, I felt sure I could find out what quince tasted like, and recruited some interested friends to join me. In the end, there was no fresh quince to be had. I called around to the city's top fruiteries, including places where fellow cooking school students promised they'd recently seen it. Its usual season is autumn, until January, and so we missed our opportunity to try the real thing until next year. Nevertheless, six of us gathered on Tuesday night to try a sampling of quince jelly, jam, and paste, both spiced and unspiced.

( Quince... )