Martin Fone's Blog, page 134

Never Never Triple Juniper Gin

I should start out by declaring an interest. I worked with Tim Boast when he followed that well-worn path that Aussies do to Never Never and ended up in London. Working in financial services can be dispiriting and it is good to see that now back Down Under he is doing something useful. Together with friends Sean Baxter and George Georgiadis he founded Never Never Distilling which operates out of McLaren Vale in South Australia. Their mission is to remind drinkers that gin is a drink that is all about juniper, music to my ears.

I have long been arguing that the fundamental concept of gin as a drink is being rapidly debased by garish, sweet drinks where the principal constituent that defines it as a gin, juniper, is barely discernible. There clearly is a market for drinks of this kind, but it is not gin. The legal definition of a gin is that it must be made from ethyl alcohol and flavoured predominantly with juniper, and other botanicals, and must be bottled with a minimum ABV of not less than 37.5% The problem is that there is no legal definition of what predominantly means in this context, although common sense, never a good mixer with the law, suggests that it should be the most influential flavour.

Anyway, I am all in favour of anything that seeks to put juniper back into its rightful place. But Never Never Distilling goes one step, or perhaps that should be two steps, further with their Triple Juniper Gin in that rather like triple-cooked chips, they use three different processes for adding the juniper. First, it is macerated in the spirit for 24 hours before it is filtered out, then fresh juniper is added to the macerated spirit and distilled, and then the vapour basket contains yet more juniper. I close my eyes and think I have gone to Neverland.

Coming in a slim, clear glass bottle which looks like a small wine bottle, the labelling is distinctive, yet arresting. The cap is wood with an artificial stopper and at the top of the neck is a dark blue band with stars on it and the legend “Never Never” underneath. The labelling at the front takes the form of a diamond, the upper half an orange colour with the distillery’s name in white and the bottom half, an almost lunar landscape etched in white against a blue background.

The name, Never Never, refers to the vast unknown beyond the horizon – where I live it is just Basingstoke – but to the Australians a journey into the Never Never is to step into the unknown. It is this spirit of daring and adventure that is picked up in the verbiage at the back of the bottle which tells me that the guys of Never Never Distilling Co “embrace the journey into the unknown, the trail traversed by a daring few. To the star chasers and the wonder seekers, sate your thirst for adventure with our fearless spirit”. I have been warned.

It would be wrong, though, to characterise the gin as just a pure hit of juniper. It is surprisingly much more complex and subtle, using coriander, angelica, orris root, pepper berry, and cinnamon to good effect. Citrus elements are provided by orange and pomelo, which are detectable to the nose, giving the intense hit of juniper even greater depth. In the glass, the spirit is clear, and to my surprise the initial taste is that of citrus before the juniper steps in, with earthy and spicier notes provided by the traditional botanicals that have been selected. The aftertaste is long, full of juniper and slightly earthy.

With an ABV of 43% it packs quite a punch. My bottle, though, was only 50cl and so it takes enormous willpower not to recharge my glass. It is an impressive gin, well worth tracking down and once you have sampled this spirit which celebrates the vigour and distinctive taste of the juniper, it will change your perception of some of the concoctions that masquerade as gin. The revolution may be starting here.

Until the next time, cheers!

These Names Make Clues

A review of These Names Make Clues by E C R Lorac

Edith Caroline Rivett wrote her Chief Inspector Macdonald series – it ran to some forty-eight books although, sadly, many still are out of print – under the nom de plume of E C R Lorac, the surname an anagram of an abbreviated version of her middle name and a further twenty-three under another pseudonym, Carol Carnac. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that her fascination with word play and anagrams should prove the inspiration for a murder mystery story.

Published in 1937, These Names Make Clues, labouring under a clunky title that at least has the merit of describing what is in the tin, has been reissued as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series and is an enthralling, if somewhat overly convoluted, tale that maintains Lorac’s reputation as a fine writer of the genre, even if she does not hit the heights of some of her more distinguished and illustrious contemporaries.

Macdonald is surprised to receive an invitation to attend a party hosted by brother and sister, Graham and Susan Coombes. The theme of the party is a Treasure Hunt and each of the guests are assigned literary pseudonyms – Macdonald’s is Izaak Walton – and part of the evening’s fun is for the guests to unmask each other’s identities. Most are from the literary world and there is a frisson of excitement that a real-life detective will be pitting his wits against writers of detective fiction, about whose grasp of reality the earnest policeman had been somewhat scornful of in an earlier encounter with Graham Coombes, not realising he was an eminent publisher of works of that genre.

As the party gets into full swing, would you believe it, but the lights go out and once power is restored, the guest known as Samuel Pepys has disappeared, only to be found dead in the telephone room. Initially, it is thought that he had died of a heart attack, but it soon transpires that he was electrocuted when he broke a circuit rigged up in the bureau in the room. In a nice twist of irony Pepys is Gradien, whose speciality was writing thrillers which involved death from mechanical contraptions. Who killed him?

On the same evening, Elliott, Gradien’s agent and agent to some of the other guests, is found dead in his office. Was this murder or was it suicide and why was the pistol that killed him inside a grandfather clock? To add a further twist a couple of the guests thought that they saw someone looking like Elliott lurking around the party. Could it have been him, did he kill Gradien and then commit suicide in the comfort of his own office?

There are many twists and turns in a rather convoluted plot. The key to solving the mystery is in the title of the book, the literary pseudonyms given to some of the guests, if unscrambled, pointing a diligent sleuth in the right direction. Curiously, some of the attendees, as well as Macdonald, try their hand at solving the conundrum and arrive at the same point, as does Vernon, Macdonald’s journalist friend who seems to have swallowed a dictionary of Woosterisms. The motivations of some of the party goers in resolving the mystery are not necessarily aligned with Macdonald’s pursuit of justice.  

I had worked out who of the likely suspects had killed Gradien, before the reveal, but Lorac hardly plays fair with the reader, much of the information required to understand the motivation for the crime is not made available to the reader until Macdonald discloses it.

Elliott’s demise rather gets left in the background, as much there to sow confusion around Gradien’s murder as anything else, but it is explained and resolved as the book draws to a close. I’m sure Macdonald will be more circumspect as to which party invites he accepts in future. All in all, a clever, intriguing and entertaining piece of fiction.         

The Devil At Saxon Wall

A review of The Devil at Saxon Wall by Gladys Mitchell

I am working my way through Gladys Mitchell’s series of Mrs Bradley murder mystery stories and have now reached this, the sixth, originally published in 1935. What I have deduced so far is that with Mitchell’s fearsome, uncompromising, unconventional, saurian amateur sleuth and psychoanalyst, you are never quite sure what you are going to get, but that it will not be the run-of-the-mill who and whydunit that her contemporaries were writing at the time. This book is odd, at times unsettling, bewildering but with a bit of perseverance on the reader’s part becomes quite a satisfying read.

The story is set in Saxon Wall which is stocked with a set of rustic characters who would not be out of place in Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm. The countryfolk are superstitious, verging on paganism, simple and their language coloured with biblical references. It is not the haven of tranquillity that author, Hannibal Jones, thought he was coming to for rest and recuperation after suffering from nervous exhaustion. A spell in the country was what his psychoanalyst, Mrs Bradley, of course, had ordered.

It is a long, dry summer and the village is suffering from a water shortage. The only functioning wells are at the vicarage and at Neot House. The vicar is using access to his water supply as leverage to get the unholy villagers to church, but they are resistant and organise mobs to attack him, the vicarage and the church. They seem to be possessed by and in awe of the the devil who is said to live on the nearby hill.

While all this is going on, there is a bigger mystery to be resolved at Neot House which was hit by tragedy nearly ten years earlier. Constance Middleton died shortly giving birth and then just a few days later her husband died on the operating theatre. The child was sent away to be looked after, but there were two other children born around the same time, one of whom died. Were the surviving children switched and who is the real heir to Neon House. Matters are further complicated when Middleton’s brother appears on the scene and when he too meets his maker, bludgeoned to death, Jones knows the ideal person to get to the bottom of what is going on in the benighted village, Mrs Bradley. And so, the woman arrives.

The language Mitchell chooses to put into the mouths of the villagers complicates matters as do various plot twists and turns, but when you boil the book down to its bare essentials, it is a story of hidden or mistaken identities, witchcraft and madness. The duo of Jones and Bradley soon discover that the deaths of the Middletons ten years earlier were not as they seemed and, indeed, the identity of one of the deceased was not who they seemed to be. Nor was the mysterious brother bludgeoned to death. And which of the two boys is the true heir to the estate? And is the vicar really as mad as a box of frogs?

Mrs Bradley eventually makes sense of it all in her inimitable style, even if the reader is left floundering to see the wood from the trees. The End notes are particularly helpful to clear up any points missed along the way.

What I admire about Mitchell is her willingness to mix things up and experiment with a genre that can be a little constricting and predictable, like listening to a piece of atonal jazz when you have been used to trad. It does not measure up to The Saltmarsh Murders but it is well worth the ride. Hang on to your hat, though.

Beating The Back To Work Blues

With Christmas and New Year’s Day falling on Saturdays, for some there is an opportunity to extend festive break until January 4th. The prospect of returning to the workplace after such a long break can be daunting and a tad depressing. In the Middle Ages the Christmas break was even lengthier. It was not until the start of the Epiphany, a celebration marking the visit of the three wise men to the baby Jesus, that a return to work was even grudgingly considered.

Our Twelfth Night of Christmas falls on January 5th, as the Church of England includes the night of Christmas itself in its calculation. This is the point when decorations should be taken down, a hangover from an old belief that tree spirits lived in the holly and ivy that were used to mark the festive period. Releasing them at the end of the Christmas period increased the likelihood of abundant harvests and plentiful food supplies.

Confusingly, in many countries the Twelfth Night is the evening of the first day of the Epiphany, January 6th, counting from the evening of Boxing Day. Along with Christmas and Easter, the Epiphany is one of the three principal festivals in the Church calendar and, to this day, is marked by public holidays, feasting, the giving of gifts, and, for the brave, icy dips into the rivers and lakes of Eastern Europe.

From at least the late 15th century, it was not until the first Monday after the Epiphany that English agricultural workers would return work, their first task being to plough the land in readiness for the spring crops. This day was known as Plough Monday, which they saw as an occasion to celebrate with gusto and have some fun, an alternative and more attractive form of breaking yourself in gently. While the festivities associated with Plough Monday were prevalent in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia, they were less commonly observed elsewhere, leading some to speculate that their origins are older still, perhaps dating back to the Danish occupation of the area.

On the night before, ploughs were taken to the church to be blessed. A flame, the Plough Light, was lit and would be kept burning throughout the year to bring good luck to ploughmen and labourers. An inscription in the church of St Agnes in the Norfolk village of Cawston gives a sense of the aspirations behind the proceedings; “God spede the Plough and send us ale corne anow…”.

On Plough Monday itself, a decorated plough, either real or a replica, was dragged around the village by groups of young men wearing elaborate costumes, bedecked with ribbons, jewellery, and even horse brasses. On arrival at a house, some of the men, known Plough Stotts in Yorkshire and the North East, Plough Bullocks or Jacks in the East Midlands, and Plough Witches in East Anglia, would knock on the door and request a contribution of money, to help maintain the Plough Light and to supplement the incomes of the poor and needy of the area. Any monies donated would be handed to a man dressed as an old woman, “the Bessy”.

In some parts of the country the procession was joined by a Straw Bear, dancers, known as “Molly Dancers”, and musicians. Troupes of mummers would perform a special Plough Play. Although there were regional variations, the play, a tale of thwarted love, usually culminated in a fight between a “dame” and a Clown or Fool, her death and revival under the ministrations of a quack doctor.

Not surprisingly, the procession was an excuse for the consumption of copious amounts of ale, washed down with special fare. In East Anglia participants enjoyed a Plough Pudding, a sort of boiled pudding with a top made from suet pastry and filled with pork sausage meat, bacon, onions, sage, and sugar. It was the antithesis of fast food as it took some three and a half hours to cook.

Development Of The Week

After feasting your eyes on the wonders of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome what better way of rounding your experience than popping into the McDonald’s drive-thru next door for a burger and chips?

Plans have been scuppered after the Italian courts have ruled that the importance of protecting the city’s cultural heritage was more important than feeding someone’s burger habit. After all, there are 54 McDonald’s outlets in the city. Work, though, had started after the Ministry of Culture and the city council approved the project in 2016 but work came to a crashing halt when the then mayor, Virginia Raggi, intervened, causing the Ministry to make a U-turn. The courts upheld a previous ruling that the development should not go ahead.

The baths were built between 212 and 216CE and were at the time enormous, comfortably accommodating the six to eight thousand who visited it to avail themselves of its facilities every day.

It is good to see that McDonalds have been thrown to the lions.

Names Of The Week (11)

Naming a child is one of the most important things parents can do, but it is a fraught business. Do you play safe or show some imagination? If you are blessed with more than one child, do you adopt a thematic approach to naming them.

Belgian couple, Gwenny Blanckaert and Marino Vaneeno, named their firstborn Alex and their second child Axel. Realising that they had begun a theme, they named their other nine children using the same four-letter combination – Xela, Lexa, Xael, Xeal, Exla, Leax, Xale, Elax, and Alxe.

It is not clear whether they stopped at eleven children simply because they had exhausted the combinations that the letters a, e, l, and x offered.

Still, I bet they are good at Scrabble and Wordsearch.

The Ladies of Locksley

A review of The Ladies of Locksley by Francis Vivian

The Ladies of Locksley is the ninth in Francis Vivian’s Inspector Knollis series, originally published in 1953 and now reissued for a modern readership by Dean Street Press. Inspector Gordon Knollis is  very in the school of diligent investigation and painstaking testing of alibis, one who often comes up against a dead end and has to spend time reconsidering his preconceptions, before starting again. Often the resolution of the problem comes to him in the unlikeliest circumstances, after a period of quiet reflection, a visit to the cinema or, as here, from a chance remark.

The book introduces us to a fascinating character, Brother Ignatius, a man of the cloth with a conscience who is bound by the conventions of the confessional, but who also has a deep abhorrence of capital punishment. He is not prepared to betray confidences, but equally is not prepared to see an innocent person face the gallows. Knollis too is no fan of the gallows, although he sees it as the unfortunate end-result of his investigations. Vivian’s novel reflects a growing distaste of a form of punishment which was last performed only eleven years after the publication of the novel with the hangings of Peter Allan and Gwynne Evans on August 13, 1964, although legislation to ban it was not passed until 1965.   

Ignatius is an old friend of Knollis, but he frustrates the policeman by his unwillingness to share the extent of his knowledge, content to just give nudges, hints, advice, and the odd warning that he is going down the wrong path. The priest/detective combination is a powerful trope in detective fiction, the priest giving spiritual and psychological insights which assist the physical investigations of the copper. It is a shame Vivian hit on this combination so late in the series as it certainly opens up some intriguing possibilities.

The book opens with Ignatius and Knollis having a philosophical discussion on investigation and judgment. Their views are not completely in harmony and, although an unconventional opening for what is a conventional murder mystery, it does pave the way for the reader to understand that Ignatius is not just being obstructive later in the book and that his actions are driven by conviction.

There is a second meeting before the action gets going, one in which two of the principal ladies of Locksley, Marion Cartland and Kathleen Morley, lock horns, each trying to assert their dominance over the other. Again, although not directly related to the mystery, it does shed light on the tensions between the two, whose husbands are in business together. Both leading lights of Women’s Club, they invite Sir Edmund Griffin, an eminent criminologist, to address them on the perfect murder. Kathleen takes the talk down verbatim. I wonder why?

Roger Cartland’s body is found in a car which has crashed, albeit carefully positioned in a narrow gap by the roadside. The unfortunate Cartland, a hypochondriac with a fetish for new wonder pills, had been poisoned before he got into the car. Who did it and why?

It is a complicated plot, and the reader needs to concentrate or else they will find themselves floundering as several shoals of red herrings twist and turn across the pages. Knollis recognises that the key to the mystery is the timing of when the poison was administered, but the timing that the expert has given for how long the poison would take to act does not fit in with the timetable Knollis has painstakingly constructed to test the various suspects’ seemingly cast-iron alibis.

However, there is no such thing as a perfect murder and one little slip is all that is needed to give the game away. A better understanding of the type of pill through which the poison was administered leads to the case’s resolution and a confrontation with the culprit. Their death by suicide rather than an appointment with the hangman fitted perfectly the anti-hanging leitmotif of the book.

This was a sophisticated and impressive book, easily one of Vivian’s best, and a fine piece of entertainment to boot.

NAUD Gin

In the depths of winter is it possible to capture the feel of summer from the bottom of a gin glass? That is the challenge I set myself as I ordered a bottle of NAUD Gin from the ever-efficient folks at Drinkfinder. As someone who is fascinated by the curious, and the ginaissance seems to be a catalyst that sparks ever bewildering creativity from distillers anxious to make their mark in the crowded marketplace, there is a lot to be curious about with NAUD Gin.

Naud is French by origin, coming out of a distillery set deep in the heart of Cognac country, the distillery being an ancient grain mill in Pinthiers, still with its original paddle wheel. Surrounded by lime and willow trees, it is bordered by two arms of the River Seugne, which flows into the River Charante, effectively marooning the distillery on its own island. It was used as a distillery from 1923, when Emile Perrier produced a gin. He did not dare put it into commercial production for fear of upsetting the neighbouring distillers.

Jean-Michel Naud moved distillation away from the mill in 1999, audaciously producing the region’s first take on vodka, using neutral French wheat alcohol. The lure of the mill, though, was too hard to resist and in 2017, he together with son, Pierre, lit up the flames under the five pot stills there and began to produce their gin. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, they use their surname for marketing purposes to generate the slogan, Noble and Unusual Distillery. I am not sure that really works, but full marks for trying.

The bottle is also a curious affair. Made of clear glass, it is rather chunky with an indented section, ideal for handling, at its bottom third. “NAUD” and “Noble and Unusual Distillery are embossed in the glass at the front, just before the bottle’s shoulder and a plant of indeterminate origin on the rear. The neck is short, wide and is an almost luminous green colour while the cap, made of faux wood, is of the screw variety. The labelling is informative, albeit the print is very small, and with its use of gold, lime green, and black on a white background, it does not really stand out nor exude any sense of nobility. At least I learned that my bottle was No A 07776 and the recipe was No 8352.

Twelve botanicals are used to create the gin – juniper, accompanied by almond, angelica, bergamot, cinnamon, clove, coriander, cubeb, ginger, green cardamon, nutmeg and orris root. From that line up it is clear that I was in store for a sensory overload with a melange of floral, herbal and spicy elements battling for supremacy. On unscrewing the cap, I was not disappointed.

There was an enormous hit of pine and cardamom, with bergamot and ginger also making their presence felt. It seemed almost overwhelming. In the glass it was a perfectly clear spirit, and, in the mouth, I found it quite sour and quite spicy, as the peppers that have been selected run riot and unbalance the gin. The juniper and floral elements had to battle to make their presence felt and the aftertaste was long and peppery. There is nothing subtle about this gin, it is right in your face, and whilst the floral elements should have conjured up the image of a warm summer’s evening, the overall effect was one of being out in the sun too long.

A judicious choice of tonic, one that errs on the side of sweetness, does tone the overall effect down, but, frankly, that defeats the object of developing a gin. It is one of the more unusual gins that I have tasted and not one for the faint hearted. With an ABV of 44% it also packs quite a punch.

I suspect it will lurk in the back of my gin cabinet for some time.

Crampton Hodnet

A review of Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym

It is a brave step for an author to take, to spend time writing what would have been their first novel and then shelving it, not because they think it is bad but because time has moved on. This is what Barbara Pym did with Crampton Hodnet, which she completed in 1940 but which did not see the light of day until after her death when it was published in 1985.

It is easy to see why she shelved it. It is a delightful comedy of manners, but its timing was all wrong. Set in North Oxford, it is a world populated by spinsters, the clergy, and dons, who fill their time with gossip, some of which is mildly malevolent, and embarking upon unsuitable and ultimately doomed love affairs. It is a look of an England that once was and one that even in the late 1930s was rapidly disappearing. By the time it was ready for publication, the world had changed dramatically, Britain was in a life and death struggle with the forces of Fascism, and a rather twee novel, even a funny one, was clearly out of kilter with the times.

The passage of time allows the modern reader to take a different and longer perspective about its merits, stripping it of the context in which it appeared. It is also a slightly depressing book, in the sense that one of its principal characters, Miss Morrow, realises by the end that nothing will really change much. North Oxford society will function much as it has always done, even if the characters change. Clearly, though, the war was bringing with it a significant transformation of society, nothing would be the same again, whether it was a New Order or the reassertion of democratic values. The book’s slightly gloomy, resigned tone was out of tune with the patriotism and boosterism that the times demanded.

Pym’s labours did not go to waste, and she was clearly pleased with the novel, calling it “as good as anything I ever did”. She even resurrected two of its principal characters, Miss Doggett and Miss Morrow, in her 1953 novel, Jane and Prudence. However, it has a slightly unpolished, episodic feel about it, slightly uncertain where its sub-plots were ultimately going to take it.

That said, there are some tremendous passages, not least Mr Latimer’s disastrous attempt to propose marriage to Miss Morrow and Francis Cleveland’s mid-life crisis when he falls in love with one of his undergraduates, Barbara Bird, and they elope with a view to spending some time in Paris only to miss the ferry at Dover where the scales fell off both of their sets of eyes. Dover does that to one, I find. Cleveland returns to his home and life continues much as before. Latimer, after his rebuff from Miss Morrow, also goes to Paris while Cleveland’s daughter, Anthea, embarks on a doomed love affair – she is dumped by letter, the then equivalent of termination by text – but unlike her father is soon back on the dating scene.

Life has its ups and downs, but normality soon resumes. Even the bit characters are memorable, including the invitees to Miss Doggett’s horrendous Sunday soirees. I particularly liked the carefully observed camp duo and the young man who, to everyone’s astonishment, declares himself proudly to be a Socialist.

And Crampton Hodnet? It is a metaphor for an off-the-cuff excuse, the name of a village made up by Latimer to explain a mysterious absence. In their own ways many of Pym’s characters have something to hide, a mystery to cover up. Interestingly, Crampton was one of Pym’s middle names and Hodnet is a village in Shropshire, the county in which she was born and spent her early years.  

I enjoyed the book and will read more of her works.

Why Are Turkey Eggs So Rarely Eaten?

We are used to rating turkey meat but few of us have sampled a turkey egg. Why is that?

Early in the twentieth century the move towards the industrialisation of egg production led to the hen ruling the roost, thanks to a combination of biological and economic factors. The maternal instinct of a bird to sit on its eggs and incubate them, known as broodiness, a major inhibitor to large-scale egg production, had been successfully bred out of domestic hens while turkey hens still had a propensity to follow their natural instincts. Hens were also more prolific egg layers, producing in a year around three times more than the paltry hundred that a turkey laid. They also started producing eggs much earlier in their life cycle, after nineteen or twenty weeks compared with the seven to eight-month wait before a turkey began laying.

Then there is the relative size of the birds to consider. An average sized turkey tips the scales at around sixteen to seventeen pounds compared with a 3-to-4-pound chicken and is more expensive to feed. It also takes up more room, occupying the space that would accommodate eight hens. More costly to feed and accommodate and with a longer wait until they became economically productive, the turkey was an expensive proposition to be used solely as a source of egg production. For the farmer it was more profitable to incubate the egg and raise and slaughter the bird for its meat.

The pure economics of production has made the turkey egg, for the consumer, a rarity, and a costly one at that. Specialist turkey egg producers can command a premium, with the going rate the equivalent of the cost of nine free range hen’s eggs, the perfect treat, perhaps, for a Christmas breakfast.

Such has been the decline in the fortunes of the turkey egg that for nearly a century it has barely merited a mention in cookery books. Recipes blithely assume that the aspiring cook will have hen’s eggs at their disposal. Anyone seeking to invoke the spirit of Alexis Soyer has to remember that a turkey egg contains 60% more liquid than a hen’s, otherwise a culinary disaster may ensue.

Ardent Bucklandites may also want to consider a trip to Huntly in Illinois on the day before Thanksgiving, where last year (2021) the Parkside Pub held its 39th Turkey Testicle Festival. The event, which started in 1983 but was forced to have a year off in 2020 because of Covid restrictions, promised revellers 1,200 pounds of turkey testicles to buy and eat, along with other foodstuffs. About the size of large olives, they go well with a cocktail and can be prepared using any recipe for sweetbreads.

There is more to turkey than wings, breasts, and legs, it would seem.