The vegetable garden is feeding us handsomely with salads, roots and kale (the leeks are still rather small, but I don’t want to resign myself to ‘baby leeks’ until I’m certain they have stopped growing). Our dining room is always several degrees cooler than the rest of the house, and it doubles as a vegetable storage area, now well filled with squash, marrow, onions and garlic, cobnuts, apples and medlars.
Back in the summer, rather disappointed by a crop of Pea ‘Wegisser’, recommended as a mangetout variety, we left the pods to fatten and ripen on the haulms and harvested them when the cases were papery. They continued to dry in the dining room, and I just recently shelled them, soaked them overnight and simmered them for a couple of hours. They looked simply disgusting, mottled, muddy brown with little black flecks - if it wasn’t for Jim’s passion for historical recipes, I would have fed them to the geese. However, I persevered and once the peas had finally softened, I drained and mashed them, and added butter, cream, salt and black pepper. The resulting peas pudding was dirty brown and very unappetising to look at, but by common consensus, surprisingly tasty – just the job with strong-flavoured meats such as bacon or venison.
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