Adventure 57: Pleasant Pubs, fantastic foraging and brilliant beer: Why - That’s Normal for Norfolk!

Norfolk, when I think about it, is probably my spiritual home. It has:

Beautiful views…

Salthouse Marsh

 

 

Horses at Weybourne 

 Cliffs over to Overstrand

The Norfolk Broads

Welcoming pubs…

 The Green Dragon, Wymondham

 The George, Cley-next-the-Sea

 The King's Arms, Blakeney

Good beer…

 Moongazer Gold at the Red Lion

 Asnacs drink at the Ship, Weybourne

Own beer at the Wellington, Cromer

And lots to forage...

 Me on the common to Cromer

 Bullace

 Beautiful Norfolk Countryside

I went there the last week or so of August with Levi and not to bore you, had a wonderful time, exploring the North Norfolk coast, catching up with Cambridge friends and revisiting our old haunts in Norwich (we lived the 2010-11). 

Pubs and Beer

There is an enthusiastic ale scene in the county. This is the home of Wolf Brewery and Humpty Dumpty after all. Particular highlights were: 

• The Red Lion Cromer -  My dad used to work here as a teenager, it’s a lovely Victorian interior, changed its beers several times while we were there, mostly local beers, nice views over the pier
  

• The George, Cley – ugly modern inside, but lovely garden over the road, an enthusiastic landlord and several nice local beers including Bullards No.1 East Coast Pale Ale 

• The Village Inn, West Runton – three pumps, all local, great big garden – had Oak Grain, Panther Red and Lacon’s Legacy when we were there 

• The Albatros, Wells – boring beer selection (Wherry), but it’s a big frigate – drinking on a boat with harbour views is fun 

•  The Shed, Wroxham – literally a converted boat shed, 7+ ales

•  The Eaton Cottage – our old local, still nice, well-kept Golden Jackal amongst others 

• The Fat Cat, Norwich – award winning, zillions of beers, interesting interior, cheap and had a very cool beer they make themselves called ‘Cecil’s Revenge’

• The Norwich Tap House - new since we were there - excellent selection of craft beer particularly by Redwells

•  The Green Dragon, Wymondham – 14^th century pub, poky cute interior like something out of Lord of the Rings, nice food, nice beer garden, four ales

 Foraging wise 

  

 Levi and I did lots of cliff walks while we were there – plenty of common mallow and tansy about.  Also saw some sad looking hedge mustard, mugwort, some water mint by the pond at East Runton and lots of sea buck thorn near Cromer and Wells (that tastes like tropical fruit - yummy - though I didn't pick any this blog here has an interesting jelly recipe for them)

 Tansy

  Water mint

  Mugwort

 Hedge Mustard

Sea Buckthorn berries

 Wild Sea Buckthorn

Horseradish is abundant round and about – was tempted to make horseradish sauce, but 1) didn’t think it would keep and 2) technically digging up roots is illegal unless you have the permission of he land owner. This root I found half dislodged already on the side of the road. Horseradish leaves smell so good and the root is really pungent and strong.

Tonnes and tonnes of bullace all up the back paths to Cromer. I know it’s a bit early, but I got a small box to take back with me. I have made sloe gin this early with it before, and it tastes alright (but not as rich, and slightly more astringent than if you wait until later when they’re fully ripe and the first frost has been. I’m determined to make Norfolk sloe gin later in the year. Also spotted lots of plums and got a small box of those too to take back.

Brewing back in Exeter 

And so I’m back in Exeter now. I’ve been busy busy, but as always have foraging and making things on the mind.

I have been eager to try another beer after my success with the Nettle Beer made from the Marks and Spencer’s book. I wanted to include something foraged in the ingredients so I decided to flavour a beer with Wild Cherries that I collected and froze in the middle of July before my wanderings. I looked up several recipes of how to do this including these ones here and here. This made me confident that this might work! I brewed my beer using a dark beer kit from Wilkos. I thought a darker beer would go well with cherries. It was easy to brew, once again not using complicated equipment, merely a sterilised bucket and a tea towel in the corner of the room. It took a week – and that’s ok. It’s best not to rush these things. I’ve left half of the beer to continue brewing in the bucket and the other half I have dumped my frozen cherries into the bottom of a sterilised demi john and have topped up with my beer with a bung and an airlock in the top where I plan to leave it for a month or two before bottling for secondary fermentation. Will keep you up to date in future posts. 

I am now back at school (hence the poor quality of this post…. Yup, it’s hard to be witty and unique when you’re busy updating assessment policies, dealing with bumped heads and already marking GCSE practice questions…) but I have still got a couple of days off a week so decided to go out on Tuesday and see if I could find some blackberries to make blackberry wine. It was quite a sunny day, and though this time last year the brambles were covered in blackberries, it was immediately clear I had left it too late. Most bushes were plucked bare and I managed a measly 120g… certainly not enough to make blackberry wine. I thought then I’d make elderberry and blackberry wine. But again, the birds and other people had already got there first – so again, I only managed 120g. Bullace, however, was plentiful and some of it is now ripe, so I managed a decent 260g of those and a small amount of haws (which I’ve frozen to make hawthorn jelly). I also spotted quite a bit of burdock but it was all decrepid and manky. Disillusionment began to set in. 

I got home with my meagre stash and pondered on what to do next. I flicked through a new book, Boots Home Wine Making & Brewing published in 1970 that I bought in a second hand book shop in Tomblands, Norwich, and felt inspired. It is full of really interesting recipes to try and as I have been so enamoured with the 1970s book from Marks and Spencer’s I am all up for having a go. I think it is quite funny that Boots in the 1970s was selling yeast and bungs and mashing bins in that era! I found a for Sloe, Blackberry and Apple I (p. 150). 

And in the spirit of experimentalism I decided to make up an investigational batch of Autumn Fruit wine using the following:

120 g blackberries

120 g elderberries

260 g bullace/sloes

500g plums(the ones frozen from Norfolk a few weeks ago)

800g sugar

3 ½ litres of water

220 ml of concentrated red grape juice

1/3 tsp Pectalose

Tsp citric acid

Universal Wine Yeast

Recipe adapted from the book:

1. Stalk and wash the fruit and pour 3 litres of boiling water on them. Cover and leave to cool.
2. Add the acid and pectalose and cover and leave for 24 hours
3. Stir in the grape juice concentrate and yeast and ferment on the pulp for 7 days, stirring twice daily.
4. Strain and press the fruit, stir in the sugar, pour into a fermentation jar, top up, fit an airlock and ferment to dryness.

Can I just say, sterilising all your equipment thoroughly with baby steriliser is a given – to keep the nasty bacteria out. So far so good, have followed the recipe with adapted ingredients (couldn’t find tannin in the shops, have to order it online – I’m willing to give it a miss this time). We’re currently on Day 3 and it smells very fruity and looks like this: 

Again, will keep you updated on my progress in the next couple of weeks.

If you can - do go to Norfolk sometime - its a lovely place - until then, as the days get shorter enjoy pumpkins, cold nights and cosy pubs!

Adventure 56: Queen Anne pricked a finger, and some sobering reflections on the reality of the Irish Famine

“You would have definitely have survived the Famine” said the mater, a couple of weeks ago as I came in to the cottage all soggy and damp in my great smelly wax jacket (at least two sizes too big) brandishing with pride several wild carrots, that I’d picked up on my walk around the bog near Derryfad, Co. Mayo, Ireland. 

I’d like to think that I could have had a good go at surviving the Irish equivalent of the Holodomor with my foraging skills, but one cannot underestimate the raw, lasting damage An Gorta Mor caused to the country, particularly in the West where we stay every year. I always knew it was bad - I'm no ignoramus in terms of the Famine. My granny always had stories passed down from her grandparents of people bleeding cows to make cake and whole families dying of the fever and the cottages being burned and pulled down to stop it spreading. 

 

 

 Left: a photo of my great great grandmother in her Cumann na mBan uniform, who fought in the civil war and visited women prisoners at Kilmainham Gaol. It is easy to see how her parents and grandparents' stories of the famine inspired her to fight for Irish freedom.  

Above: an Irish tenant eviction during the Famine

There are famine walls all up the side of the mountains, pointless building works to keep people occupied and many people died in the mountains in the Doolough Tragedy when they were refused outdoor relief in 1849. 

One million died and one million emigrated - its all sobering stuff. And to be quite honest, if the summers in the late 1840s were anything like this one, there would not be a great deal to find in the wild either. And foraging this summer in Ireland has in an entirely different way, to granny's stories, folk songs, history books and famine walls, brought home the grim reality of this human tragedy.

 We’ve had a very cold and wet summer in Ireland. The IrishTimes declared that it was one of the coldest July’s on record and personally mentioned my nearest town, Claremorris as having its coldest July since 1965 (an average of 13.1 degrees – WTF) and the third coldest since records began. And boy, did it feel like it too. I was eternally in jumpers and several pairs of socks, it rained nearly every day (there were two nice days right at the end of my fortnight there) and the days were so dark it was like eternal dusk. The minute it stopped raining (forget sunshine!) I would grab the dog lead, the smelly wax jacket and some plastic bags and wander up the little country roads near our house to see what I could find in and around the rolling sludgy green fields and the bogs. 

To be quite frank, the bad summer that had been had, showed in terms of the availability of foragable materials. There were plenty of docks and nettles (there always are) but where there should have been sloes starting to go purple, they were hard and green; where the blackberries should have been ripening, they were also small, hard and green; where the haws should have been starting to blush red as we move into the Irish Autumn, they were… you guessed it… small, hard and green.

I did have some small successes, however. I found a number of little wild raspberries in the hedgerows near Knockbrack, though they were extremely small and not well formed.

 

I also found lots of peppermint down by the bog and took a few small cuttings to plant back up at the house.

 

My biggest success though, was definitely the wild carrots. Queen Anne’s Lace is the official name for the plant. The name comes from the fact that it resembles lace and legend has it that Queen Anne pricked her finger whilst making lace and the spot of blood that fell, is why the plant has a small pink/red flower in the centre of the umbel. 

It can resemble other poisonous relatives such as hemlock and hogweed so there are some easy things that can help you identify it: 

• White umbel with a small pink/red flower in the centre
• A hairy green stem (not smooth, spotted purple like hemlock)
• Fern like leaves like carrot 
•  Leaves when crushed smell like carrot   
• Its flowers fold in on themselves to resemble nests in the Autumn (hence the nickname, Bird Nest plant)

 

It’s a biennial plant so the roots, being the plants storage system, can grow quite hard and woody. The roots I collected were creamy yellow and quite hard. When broken, they smell intensely of carrot. They can’t be eaten in a conventional sense I don’t get the impression from reading online but rather use the intense flavoured root for flavouring in cakes etc. I’ve dried mine for later use on this. Nonetheless, during my reading, I came across several different recipes for Queen Anne’s Lace Flower Jelly and was determined to make some.

A recipe for Queen Anne’s Lace Jelly

(Recipe from here)

• 5 cups of caster sugar
• 2 cups of Queen Anne’s Lace Flowers
• 1 packet of vegetarian jelly powder
• 4 ½ tbsp. of lemon juice
• 5 cups of water

• Boil the water and steep the cleaned flower heads in it for fifteen minutes until it has brewed into a marron coloured tea.  

• Boil the tea with ¼ cup of sugar and the jelly powder

• Scoop out any top sludge
• Once boiled add the remainder of the sugar and bring to the boil. Keep boiling for one minute

• Add the lemon juice (it will turn the maroon tea bright luminous pink)
• Take off the heat and put mixture into sterilised jars to set

It proved to be a successful endeavour and produced a sweet floral jelly, which was a bit like rose water in taste. I enjoyed mine on toast, my father enjoyed his with bacon (but doesn’t recommend it with sausages). 

I swapped a jar of it with my neighbours, Norma and Pat Jennings, for some gooseberries. Yes, I know my whole last post was about how you cannot find gooseberries for love nor money any more. And now, I know why – they’re all hiding out in the Jennings’ back garden in the West of Ireland. Poor Norma has made about 60 jars of jam with hers and several pies. Still, it was good fun on the last day (which was incidentally sunny! Finally!) shucking the gooseberries out the front with my mother and Emer so my mother could have a go at making jam after we’d left. 

 

 So, to conclude, had I lived in the summer of 1846, I would have managed some nettles and dock leaves, woody wild carrots, some peppermint for garnish, a handful of raspberries, some green haws, green blackberries and green sloes. It leaves me once again wondering how awful human beings can be to one another and yet another reason, why I feel the teaching of history in schools is so important – so that we can learn lessons from history. After all, there is still so much food inequality in the world today. We produce enough food to feed ten billion people, yet 770,000,000 people are undernourished. And this is inherently wrong. Not that, you readers need telling, but it is a sobering thought, nonetheless.

As Mahatma Gandhi once said: "How can men feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings?”

How indeed? 

Above: Famine memorial in Dublin 

Above (2): my cousin looks into the Famine Pot in Milltown - this 90 gallon pot was used for soup in the Workhouse during the famine