“In the morning the house was warm from the stove, but when Laura looked out of the window she saw that the ground was covered with soft, thick snow. All along the branches of the trees the snow was piled like feathers, and it lay in mounds along the top of the rail fence, and stood up in great, white balls on top of the gate posts. Pa came in, shaking the soft snow from his shoulders and stamping it from his boots. ‘It’s a sugar snow,’ he said.” LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS LAURA INGALLS WILDER ROAST FIGS SUGAR SNOW WINTER FOOD TO WARM THE SOUL DIANA HENRY PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON LOWE CONTENTS Introduction RIPE AND READY cheese GATHERING IN chestnuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, and pecans EARTHLY PLEASURES pumpkin, winter squash, beans, and lentils FIELD DAYS winter vegetables TALES FROM THE HUNT game and wild mushrooms THE FAT OF THE LAND pork OF WOOD AND SMOKE smoked food APPLES IN THE ATTIC apples, pears, and quinces THE COLOUR PURPLE plums, damsons, and figs WINTER ON YOUR TONGUE herbs, spices, and sour cream FROM BUSH AND BOG cranberries, blackberries, sloes, and rose hips SUGAR SNOW maple syrup Index How to use this ebook Select one of the chapters from the main contents list and you will be taken to a list of all the recipes covered in that chapter. Alternatively, jump to the index to browse recipes by ingredient. Look out for linked text (which is blue) throughout the ebook that you can select to help you navigate between related recipes. “Snow is a poem. A poem that falls from the clouds in delicate white flakes. A poem that comes from the sky. It has a name. A name of dazzling whiteness. Snow.” SNOW MAXENCE FERMINE INTRODUCTION For me, food is as much to do with the imagination as it is with flavor. A dish is more than a collection of ingredients. It comes from somewhere, contains tastes that make you think of the sun or snow, and may be a classic of home-cooking prepared every day in some corner of the world. In short, food comes with associations, with history, and it can take us places. food comes with associations, with history, and it can take us places. My first book, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons , was about the enchantment of ingredients from the Middle East and Mediterranean – pomegranates, dates, saffron, olives – and how exotic I had found them as I was growing up under a cold gray northern Irish sky. My interest was fueled by stories such as The Arabian Nights , and Roast Figs, Sugar Snow has also been inspired by childhood reading, though of books set in a very different world. On dark afternoons, my high-school teacher read us the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the simple snowy world of the American Midwest found in Little House in the Big Woods , an orange and a handful of nuts in the toe of a sock on Christmas Day seemed as alluring as the seeds from a crimson pomegranate; fat pumpkins gathered in the fall and stored in the attic were fairy-tale vegetables. But it was the story of maple syrup that intrigued me most: how you could tap the sap of maple trees when there was a “sugar snow” (snowy conditions in which the temperature goes below freezing at night but above freezing during the day), boil the sap down to a sticky amber syrup, and pour it onto snow. There it set to a cobwebby toffee. Here was a magical food that you could get from inside a tree and make into candy. I got my first bottle of maple syrup soon after being read this passage and have loved it ever since. This book isn’t just about ingredients. It’s also about the weather and seasons, and the kind of food we want to eat and cook in colder months. I’ve always enjoyed fall and winter cooking more than summer cooking. I like the way you gradually turn in on yourself as the weather cools. Life slows down and so does cooking. Cold-weather dishes undergo slow transformations: alchemy takes place as meat and root vegetables, through careful handling and gentle heat, become an unctuous stew, a dish far greater than the sum of its parts. The techniques employed in the kitchen fug the windows and seal you in, and you find you want different foods. You can’t argue with your body as it craves potatoes and pulses: the winter appetite is about survival.