Final bottles of walnut wine

In an earlier article, I mentioned my production of walnut wine and my use of a siphon device. [Click here to see this article.] Today, I've been preparing the final bottles, using the wine in the lower half of the plastic cask. The closer I get to the bottom of the barrel, the more the raw wine looks like sludge. Concerning the last five or six soupy liters in the cask, I had in mind the advice of a colleague, who told me he simply discards them. After this afternoon's experiments, I accept his advice. I tried several techniques in an attempt to extract clear wine from the sludge: siphoning, paper filters and straining through a cloth that I was obliged to wash constantly. There's a delightful old saying in French, applied to things that aren't worth doing: Le jeu n'en vaut pas la chandelle. Literally, this means that the outcome of an operation does not cover the cost of the candles you need to light up the scene where the operation is carried out.

The sludge is heavier than the clear walnut wine, so it remains at the bottom of the barrel. But it remains suspended in the liquid, and never settles as a solid sediment. This suggests that there is no doubt a certain presence of solid matter — remnants of the green walnuts — even in the wine that seems to be relatively clear. And this is probably why the imbiber of a small glass of this beverage has the impression that it's a little like bitter medicine.

Funnily enough, here in the Napoleonic atmosphere of France where most matters are tightly controlled, the production of walnut wine remains a kind of do-it-yourself rural art, akin to gathering medicinal herbs to prepare archaic unctions instead of relying upon the local pharmacist. In any case, for those of us who live in the countryside of the Dauphiné region, surrounded by walnut trees, offering a glass of walnut wine is a traditional gesture of friendship towards visitors.

Squaring the circle

Tarts and pies, like pizzas, are generally round. So, it's not surprising that the ready-made pastry you buy in supermarkets is also circular. The other two ingredients in one of my favorite easy-to-prepare dishes also happen to be round.

The excellent cow's-milk cheese is a St-Marcellin, from the nearby town of that name. Out in Australia last year, I recall a celebrated local chef saying that he thought of it as one of the finest cheeses in the world. I wouldn't go as far as that, because there are many far more exotic cheeses in France than our everyday St-Marcellin, but it's certainly what you might call excellent basic cheese. I've always got a stock of them in the refrigerator, and I often devour a St-Marcellin between meals.

How do you go about using circular-shaped ingredients to make rectangular pasties? You don't need to be a rocket scientist to discover that it can be done by cutting the pastry into eight equal sectors and arranging the ingredients as follows:

You simply fold over the four edges to obtain a square-shaped pasty. After fifteen minutes in the oven, here's the result:

This is in fact a popular recipe from the town of St-Marcellin, where they refer to these pasties as marcellines.

Eating nostalgically

From time to time, memories of dishes from my adolescence spring into my mind, and I try to recreate them. When I was working with IBM in Sydney, I often used to have lunch on my own in a Chinese restaurant at the corner of Castlereagh Street and Martin Place. In those days, I was unfamiliar with Chinese cooking, and I always ordered the same dish: curried prawns, served with celery. The other day, seeing a huge pile of prawns in the local supermarket, I decided to prepare this dish.

The result was quite tasty, although it's unlikely that my Indian curry paste (produced in the UK) is the same kind of product they used back in the Chinese restaurant in Sydney.

The next morning, in the sunshine, I was intrigued to discover orange stains on my fingernails, even though I had taken a shower. Worse, there were even small patches of orange on the towel that I had used, the previous day, to dry my hands after shelling the prawns. I phoned my daughter to ask her whether she thought it feasible that prawns might be colored artificially. And Manya suggested that I should look up this question on the Internet.

The Wikipedia results enlightened me, but they'll no doubt discourage me from getting back to curried prawns for a while. A chemical product named astaxanthin is responsible for the red color of flamingos, certain fish and cooked prawns. Synthetic astaxanthin is a food coloring, indicated as E161 in the European Union's numbering system. Unfortunately, I wasn't sufficiently well-trained in organic chemistry to conclude, as a result of this reading, whether the cause of my orange fingernails was natural and harmless, or whether there might be cause for alarm. In any case, I learn that my fingernails are nothing compared to the pinkish down of seagulls in the vicinity of salmon farms.

When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike out to my friend Keith Weatherstone's place at Eatonsville, to spend the weekend on their farm. Keith's mother told me that their hens used to eat a peppery weed growing on their property, and the effect of this was that boiled eggs we ate for breakfast were automatically peppered. I saw that as a fabulous concept, capable of revolutionizing the food industry. If only we could find the right weeds to feed to our hens, they might get around to laying us eggs for cooking cheese or bacon-flavored omelettes. If I understand correctly through my rapid reading about astaxanthin (which belongs to the large family of organic pigments called carotenoids), the food industry is probably already capable of providing interested customers with eggs to make salmon-flavored mayonnaise. How about prawn-flavored candy? Ideally, it should be able to glow in the dark. That will soon be happening to us humans, I reckon.

Cooking and eating

Some observers might consider that a solitary man such as me is behaving hedonistically when he gets involved in fine cooking. Be that as it may, I like cooking, particularly in my well-equipped kitchen at Gamone. Besides, it means that I eat well, all the time. Over the last decade or so, the only time I recall eating junk food was out in Australia last year, when I was obliged to frequent a McDonald's because they had a wifi hotspot enabling me to connect to the Internet.

It's the asparagus season. This thin dark-green variety comes from Andalusia in Spain. After boiling them in water, I peppered them and soaked them in oil and balsamic vinegar from Modena in Italy.

This apple tart uses commercial pastry, because I'm lazy. There's a bottom (hidden) layer of raisins and poppy seeds, then slices of unskinned apples sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. When it's almost baked, I submerge the apples in a mixture of an egg, cream and milk, then I put the tart back in the oven for five minutes.

Talking about eating, there was an interesting article in yesterday's Le Monde about the major role of fruit and vegetables in the constant combat against today's notorious killers: cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular problems.

During my childhood, somebody brainwashed me into believing the popular dictum: An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

If there wasn't a constant stock of apples on my kitchen table, I would feel kind of naked, or underfed. Incidentally, the apples are stored here in an ideal container, made out of the bark of a cork oak, which appears to play a mysterious role in their conservation. Natacha gave me this delightful object when she was living in the Riviera region where these trees are to be found.

Now, it's six o'clock in the afternoon. So, let's stop talking about superficial things such as food, and get back to French politics...

Walnut wine

This plastic cask is full of walnut wine that has been aging for several years... mainly because I've been too busy, or too lazy, to finish processing the product. In fact, the wine in the cask is a bit "soupy" because it still contains the sediment of the green walnuts that were macerated in it for over a year. I've removed all the solid remains of these walnuts, leaving only a sediment.

Quite a lot of work has to be done before the wine is bottled and ready to drink. First, I have to siphon off the clear part of the liquid, and filter the rest through a cloth. Then I have to add a precise quantity of pure alcohol. Some producers of walnut wine use distilled liquor of one kind or another, whereas I have always preferred the solution of pure pharmaceutical alcohol. Finally, I add a certain quantity of sugar.

This is the instrument that I intend to use, at least in the beginning, to separate most of the wine from the sediment, which lies on the bottom of the cask. It's a siphon.

How does it work? That's a good question, and I must admit that it took me quite some time to grasp how to use this device. The clear plastic tube will be placed inside the cask, and the small silver nozzle will enter the neck of the big glass recipient that will be holding the siphoned wine. The flexible white nylon barrel is a little like a concertina, in that the operator can squeeze it flat, preferably using both hands. A naive observer might imagine that the operator simply pushes this concertina barrel in and out in order to pump the wine out of the cask and into the bottle. But that's not at all how the device works. There's an additional small detail that must be mentioned. The silver nozzle is in fact a kind of tap, which is normally closed. To open this tap, you merely have to push the silver nozzle back towards the black handle. So, here's the operating procedure:

— First, you squeeze the concertina barrel flat, and you stick the plastic tube into the cask.

— Then you release slowly the concertina barrel, which causes the plastic tube (but not the white barrel) to fill up with wine.

— Finally, you place the silver nozzle in the neck of the glass recipient and push the silver nozzle to open the tap. The wine then flows slowly from the cask into the recipient.

Elementary, my dear Watson!