Season of Mists
Changing seasons, Pumpkins and other cozy dishes, Haute honey, Māori Winemakers, and more!
Hello everyone,
We’re back at it with another newsletter. The seasons are starting to change, it’s time to bring out your inner ‘frazzled-English-woman’ and tuck yourself in for some hearty meals. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in an 1862 Atlantic article “As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting… October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.”
Revisiting this, Isabel Fattal suggests “maybe autumn’s red hue can brighten the year that was, helping us take stock of some of the joy and wonder within it”. I hope so.
This week:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Don’t waste your pumpkin
Māori Winemakers and Natural Wine
The laziest climate solution is trifle
Haute honey
An album and wine pairing
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness:
Pumpkins, squash, apples, figs, plums, quinces, brussels sprouts, pears, leeks, cranberries soup and roasts.
“The kind of food that makes you pause, slow down, and linger at the stove just a little longer”. If you are looking for inspiration on what to do with October produce, take a look at Sarah from a good table’s October substack post. She writes beautifully and inspires some affection in me about the season despite the growing darker days.
Don’t waste your pumpkins:
More on pumpkins. While you’re cooking some delicious pumpkin recipes from Sarah, remember to make the most of your pumpkins. Emily Gussin just published a book ‘Don’t Waste Your Pumpkin: Innovative recipes and projects, from stalk to base’ to give you plenty of ideas. Approximately over 1 billion pounds of pumpkins are thrown away after Halloween.
The Atlantic also has this article on what happens to all the rotting pumpkin corpses.
For extra recipe inspo, Nic Miller does an excellent job at compiling innovative pumpkin recipes and uses for your pumpkins to ensure this year they don’t go to waste.
Māori Winemakers and Natural Wine:
“In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori farming principles—which predate and go beyond biodynamics—are behind some of the country’s most exciting wines.”
Hilary Eaton’s piece in Punch Drink last month taught me a lot about the Māori Winemakers in New Zealand.
“Despite a rich spiritual relationship with the land for over 1,000 years, Māori have historically had little presence in one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest and most lucrative agricultural ventures: viticulture. Vines were first planted there in 1819 by missionary Samuel Marsden, and by 1840, when English officials and Māori chiefs met to sign the Treaty of Waitangi (a commitment to live peacefully and in equality for the development of Aotearoa New Zealand, together), European grapes had already firmly taken root on unceded Māori soil.”
While New Zealand’s winemaking is well-regarded, the industry is dominated by people of European descent. Recently, however, there are a growing community of Māori winemakers “who are working to decolonize the industry by integrating Māori-influenced farming methods and ideologies.” We know we have a lot to learn from our First Nations communities in all aspects of life, but particularly when it comes to caring for Country. Natural wine-making and biodynamic farming is an extension of this knowledge and worldview guided by “the idea of kaitiakitanga: a charge of guardianship of land, sea and sky for future generations”. Many of their practices actually predate typical European biodynamic farming.
New Zealand is also a world leader in sustainability in the industry but Māori-influenced farming exceeds the current standards. This includes practices of “spreading grape marc (returning the remains of the pressed grapes to the soil for their nutrients and antioxidants), planting inter-row cover crops (which support soil vitality and encourage beneficial insects) and grazing sheep in the winter (which creates and adds carbon- and potassium-rich matter back into the soil).”
Language is also especially important when talking about wines and farming with Māori winemakers. Native languages and cultures were suppressed and erased after colonization. Recently “the country has experienced a renaissance of te reo Māori, the original language of the land, which grew during the pandemic as isolation forced the country to look even further inward. From 2018 to 2021, the number of residents who could speak some basic te reo words rose from 24 percent to 30 percent.”
For Vanessa Reynoldses (Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, Te Waiohua, Ngāti Tahinga, Ngāti Hine) of the vineyard Tūāpae “it was really important to us to take our name through the trademarking process and have it put up before the Māori Advisory Committee for approval”.
Reynoldses, who grew up feeling disconnected from her culture and heritage, learning about tikanga (traditional knowledge and protocols) offered a way back to Māori culture.
The laziest climate solution is trifle:
Speaking of farming and eating sustainably, the newsletter Pale Blue Tart offered us a simple and lazy way to make dessert sustainably.
“Turning leftover ingredients into dessert is also superhero-level kitchen climate action.”
As Caroline Saunders writes “The food system is responsible for a third of global emissions. Food waste is responsible for half that amount, according to a recent estimate. And in wealthy nations, most food waste happens in households. That’s a big-boi-level climate problem with a solution we can all get in on just by using what we’ve bought. No new ingredients or baking techniques needed. Just ideas. So for every odd and end in sight, I say—whether stale bread, half a tub of sour cream, or a single yolk—let there be a dessert!
Leftover cake is one of the best odds to have, because its most fabulous second coming, trifle, is never farther away than the time it takes to plop together cake cubes and other stuff that’s probably already in your fridge.”
Here’s a simple fruit trifle recipe that is perfect for those last warmer days:
Ingredients
3 cups leftover cake cubes, without frosting
Macerated fruit
2 cups chopped summer fruit, like red berries
1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar or lemon juice
1 tablespoon white or brown sugar
Pinch salt
Whipped cream
⅔ cup heavy cream
¼ teaspoon vanilla
Haute Honey:
On the complete opposite side of the scale, you can always rely on the How To Spend It column of the Financial Times to give you insight into the lifestyle of another tax bracket. This week I learned about ‘Haute Honey’. “If you really want to know who’s well-connected in the wine world, then survey their breakfast table. A jar of honey from a top wine estate is the oenophile’s stealthiest status symbol.”
At Champagne Billecart-Salmon, honey from its top vineyard Clos Saint-Hilaire is reserved for a select few friends and lucky guests. As is the honey from Château Cheval Blanc in St Émilion, and the renowned Tuscan estate Petrolo. “Honey, like wine, tastes different, depending on the terroir. Its flavour also changes depending on the time of year.”
In a bid to improve biodiversity, more vineyards than ever now keep bees. And ironically at some of these top vineyards “the honey is even more of a unicorn than their celebrated wine.”
Oh, and I will share my favourite bit of bee folklore! There is a European folklore tradition of ‘Telling the Bees’(with origins in Celtic mythology) which says that for all important celebrations and events (particularly funerals), the bees should be told or the consequences could be dire.
That’s all for this week folks! Stay cosy!
Carlie xx