Everything tastes better with rum

Rum butter - rum nickies - Cumberland sweet pie - Cumberland pilaf

Although I was brought up in Cumbria, I wasn't brought up with rum butter. When I was about 11, a school friend gave me some for Christmas, and I ate it with digestive biscuits (which were thus much improved). Last time I hosted Christmas, I made rum butter instead of brandy sauce to go with the Christmas pudding, and that's now my tradition.

This year I added rum nickies to the tradition. The coin toss had dictated that my dad made mince pies and Christmas cake, and I made the pudding - but this meant no mince pies before the visitors arrived, and as our rule is no mince pies after Christmas morning (and there were rather fewer mince pies at work this year than when I worked in London!), it meant almost no mince pies. But rum nickies aren't mince pies so we could have them before and after.

Rum nickies have come to a certain amount of attention in recent years - not exactly sticky toffee pudding, but plenty of links to recipes and products, including rum-nicky-in-a-jar. I've now got five small books of Cumbrian/Lakeland recipes (two modern ones available in all good tourist bookshops, and three local publications from the 1960s-70s).

All but one include recipes for rum nickies, and all of them concur that:

• rum nickies are individual pastries, like mince pies
• the filling is currants (and only currants) soaked in rum and spices

All of the online recipes concur that:

• rum nickies are large shared pies, commonly with a lattice topping (rather than a sheet of pastry with nicks in)
• the filling is primarily dates, with candied stem ginger and sometimes currants, sultanas or even dried apricots, soaked in rum, and surprisingly, an absence of spices

I'm intrigued by this clear split. The dates and ginger sound yummy and I'll try those another time, but I went with the currants and mine were just fine.

One of the cookbooks is a 1960s WI cookbook from my Grandma's shelf. It doesn't show the date, but it's pre-decimalisation, pre-metrification and pre-Cumbria. Many of the recipes indicate which WI contributed them - Linstock, Dacre, Scotby, Moor Row, Newton Arlosh... We particularly enjoyed some of the Gamblesby contributions, which included two separate recipes for burnet wine - we imagined two ladies competing to get their recipe included. We're still not sure what these very plentiful burnets are, we're fascinated by the function of the piece of toast, and we prefer the recipe that ends "A little rum greatly improves the wine". The more of the book you read, the more you suspect that a little rum would greatly improve many things.

Gamblesby Burnet wine 1	Gamblesby Burnet wine 2
Fowl or foul?	Rook or yuck?

• Gamblesby (in Glassonby) or Gamelsby (by Aikton) is one of my favourite village names as it's so little altered from the Norse. I'm tempted to buy the Ikea Gamleby shelf purely for its name. When I went to Copenhagen some years ago, flying to an airport in the budget airport definition of 'near' and catching a train to the city, the similarity of the placenames meant I could have been on the Settle-Carlisle line. Although with newer carriages and more passengers. And our views are better.

One of Grandma's celebrated recipes was Boxing Day pasty. Every year, regardless of who was hosting Christmas, Grandma made Boxing Day pasty for our Boxing Day walk. A tray-bake mince and carrot pasty, ideally still a bit warm in the years when we had white Christmases (sledging over Devoke water, snow on top of ice), it was nothing special, but it was traditional. My brother having declared a wish to swim in the Solway on New Year's Day, some sort of pasty was going to be needed. Could I make Grandma's pasty? Or was it time to make my own tradition?

And then I read: ...Cumberland gave us rum butter to have with our Christmas pudding, and also from Cumberland came "standing pie" or "sweet pie", filled with chopped mutton, apples and raisins, the grandfather of the mince pie. Back to the historic cookbooks to find a recipe - meat and fruit together are quite fashionable at present and this one has to be tried. Although the recipes are clear that this is a large plate pie (i.e. pastry lid but not base), that wouldn't meet my need for an outdoor pasty, so individual handheld pasties were the way to go. I used the WI recipe with a cross-reference to Jane Grigson. I haven't made handheld pasties for years, and I overfilled them as usual (but I take heart from the note about avoiding headriggs from another recipe) and a couple exploded.

The recipe includes really quite a small quantity of meat to fruit, so I made double quantities, enough for nine handheld pasties, one large pie to serve 6-8 and one smaller pie for 2-4. Next time I make it I'll use more meat to fruit (tastes have changed) and include better meat and more fat (supermarket meat too lean and this needs something more to bind it and carry the flavour of the meat). And think about whether there's anything else that could bind the filling a bit more.

For example, could you use rice in a pie filling? I used a Diana Henry recipe for lamb pilaf to use up some of my roast goose glut, and then realised it was already quite close to being a recipe for Cumberland pilaf - just adjust the fruits and add rum!

Volcano hat, glacier hat, beck & foss hat

I've finally taken a break from the blanket projects (while waiting for new yarn to arrive) and started the volcano hat. Here's the initial sketch:

The colour version is in my head. It's a grey hat with lava flows from the top and down the sides. After yesterdays snowy fells, I think a glacier version is also possible.

I got some (quite scratchy) Noro yarn a year or more ago; now I think a few days enforced break from the blankets is enough for a hat, so for the first time I've made a gauge square* to check the pattern.

For the main body of the hat (US notation):
Foundation chain 38 chain on 4.5mm hook (or as required for gauge);
Row 1: chain 3 (counts as dc1), dc37;
Row 2: turn & ch4, [dc3tog, ch2] 11 times, dc3tog, ch1, dc into turning chain;
Row 3: turn & ch1, sc into ch1 space, [sc, 2sc into ch2 space] 11 times, sc, sc into ch1 space, sc into turning chain;
Row 4: turn & ch4, tr3 into third sc (into top of dc3tog), [skip two sc, tr3] 11 times, skip last sc, dc into turning chain.

Repeat rows 1-4 9 or 10 more times until rectangle measures c. 30 cm x 55cm. Pin or loosely attach short sides together to check it fits head comfortably and adjust if necessary.

Chain 1 and sc along long edge to neaten (this will be the top edge). Stitch as required to give a neat edge, likely to be 1sc into last stitch on each sc row, 2sc into each dc (or ch3) and 3sc into each tr (or ch4). Catch in any yarn ends along the way.

With right side to the inside, fold to make a tube. Chain 1 and slip stitch through back loop (the one nearest you!) of tr and back loop of corresponding foundation chain. (Using back loops only gives a very flat seam on the right side.)

Wrong side	Right side

Now for the lava (or ice, or water) flows. This could use 2-3 different yarns from stash (or it could be an excuse to buy single balls of fancy yarn in the sales), or one single yarn.

Firmly attach the flow thread to a ch3 or ch4 space on the lower edge and, using a hook appropriate to the yarn, make a foundation chain that is a bit longer than the height of the hat (each one will likely end up a different length so see what feels right - I started off about 10cm longer), turn and sc in second chain from hook and sc to end, sc round lower edge of hat, cut yarn and weave ends in. Thread the flow ribbon through the openings in the row it's attached to, keeping it loose and keeping any twistiness that has crept into the ribbon and varying the in and out pattern - missing some holes, meandering onto the next row etc. I didn't expect all my flow ends to go curly but it really enhanced the hat so I tried not let them flatten out when I wove them through the openings.

Make ribbons for each row of openings (20-22 in total) of varying lengths (and yarns if desired). When complete, bind the lower edge of the hat with two rows of sc, using slightly fewer stitches than the top edge. Finally using the grey yarn, make a ribbon of about 35-40cm in length and weave through a line of openings near the top edge - I took a couple of attempts and ended up using a line about 7cm from the top edge. Pull ends up and tie in an overhand knot.

Mad volcano hat, finished!

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*Gauge square - 14 stitches and 8 rows over 10cm square using yarn 50g=100m and 4.5mm hook.
Circumference of hat 55cm, height 30cm including explosion peak. I used about 230m of grey yarn  and about 135m of mixed orange yarns.

Searching for moonscapes, finding microworlds

Back in the days before free pixels, when I took 40 photographs in a fortnight, not an hour, when you waited weeks to see the pictures you'd taken, the first time I went to Fleswick Bay my photographs came back a month later with a picture of the moon's surface.

Being out west, I walked over St Bees south head to blow away cobwebs and look for moonscapes. I expected wind and got autumn sunshine, too hot in my fleece layers. The last time I was here, on a blustery November day with the carpenter, we huddled in the lee of the lighthouse, determinedly eating our picnic and taking our first ever selfie to prove it.

After a beachful of round pebbles, dog-walking families and sandcastle builders, a heavily eroded cliff path, a headland of miniature memorials, bright gorse and big, big views. The clifftop fairly busy with the dog-walking families, the new path inland from the collapsed one not wide enough for passing in gangs.

St Bees beach with Black Coombe	The old path
Bright gorse	Looking south beyond the Factory

To the west, the sea, Snaefell and the Isle of Man; to the north, Criffel and the Galloway hills; to the east the Western fells; to the south, Black Coombe and the Factory. This is where my parents grew up, the views they grew up with, there throughout my childhood but not ingrained on my mind - I can map the western valleys, but not the western fells. The post-industrial coastal towns are different from the eastern market towns in my mind, and I'm certainly snobbish in the way I think about them. When the Gap was open earlier this year, there was talk of the north-south divide in the county, but the east-west divide (with a dialect divide going back to the different varieties of Vikings) was more present in my childhood. As an adult I recognise the importance of the west - far more populous than the east, economically important, but harder to reach.

View south with gorse

Over the cliffhead and down to the beach, past an array of discarded plastic in which I can see little to collect, even as a frequent forager of other people's discards.

My Cumbria Coastal Way guidebook, published in 1994, says "Fleswick Bay was once the haunt of smugglers, and it is easy to imagine the small dark caves concealing kegs of brandy and bottles of whisky. The bay is a good place to look for semi-precious stones such as agates and has a wonderful sculpted sandstone shore."

Fleswick beach south	Fleswick cliff north
Fleswick cave	Barnacles

My moonscape is no longer in a cave - the cliff must have receded and the caves shrunk, leaving my moonscape outside. In what remains of the cave, 100-year-old public school boy graffiti, in elegant script, and just one moonrock.

Posh graffiti	More posh graffiti
Moonscape 1986 (approx)	Moonscape 2016

Limpets had gathered in the craters of one outside moonrock; back in the cave I arrange pebble eggs in the shallower crater cups of the younger indoor moonrock.

Limpets	Eggcups

And then out into the light for a quick look at the barnacle rocks, huge lumps of sandstone crusted grey with barnacles, barnacles on barnacles, barnacles on limpets. One rock has lots of inch-wide dark circles, looking from a distance like indentations, drip cavities, but with no cliff cover to provide the drips. But the darkness isn't shadow - each indentation is a mussel-nursery, two or three dozen tiny mussels crammed together in their cradle, protruding slightly, ready to open when the tide comes in. Some of the indentations are slightly larger, mussel-free, still with water. Something dark and spherical, like a large marble, below the water in one - thinking it might be a baby urchin, I gave it a prod and got an unexpected squidge. I'd forgotten about sea anemones. And as looked further the rocks were covered in slightly bigger pools, very round, looking manmade as though scoured in concrete. Something about the geology of the sandstone leads to very round pools and very round pebbles. The pools contain pink and green seaweeds, dark red anemones, indigo mussels, yellow-white limpets, and astonishing microworlds.



Next year, when I stop making things from other people's patterns, I'll make embroideries of Fleswick beach - barnacle rocks of linen thread on linen cloth stained with Egremont Red, and lots of dense French and bullion knots, and circular rockpools, tiny aquaria peered at through a light surface veil.

Winkles	Barnacle textures

I went over an eroded cliff to see the unexpected moonscapes that had amazed me as a child when the photos came back, and found an eroded cliff had exposed my moonrocks to the light. I walked over fallen pieces of cliff and found unexpected microworlds that amazed me as an adult. My world has changed and the coast has changed, and Fleswick Bay has new wonders to discover.

Harvesting in the hedgerows

Firthside we have hedgerows. Fellside, they have drystone walls. We have hedgerows because we don't have stones, just mud. Our houses are built from clay (on boulder and cobble plinths and with cruck frames and thatch roofs) or bricks. Their houses are built of stone - slate, old red sandstone, limestone. Our hedgerows have willowherb and meadowsweet, old man's beard and roses, blackberries, elder and haws. Their hillsides have mountain ash and bilberries, bracken, foxgloves and heather.

Two weeks ago as well as looking for art I looked for rowan berries. Most of the trees on my route were 'public trees' in town streets and on village greens, which I wasn't keen in picking from. Up the east fellside returning home there was a promising looking woodland which included many rowan trees - but unreachable behind a drystone wall (not to be climbed), a deep ditch, and a thicket of nettles. Finally two tall trees laden with fruit - one of them yielded well over a kilo of fruit, enough for rowan jelly and a fifth share of hedgerow jelly. Picked over they went straight in the freezer until the rest of the fruit was ready.

One week ago I was in London dropping off half a dozen jars of jam and replacing them in my luggage with a dozen limes to pickle (half the price in London greengrocers than in major supermarkets), half a dozen figs to eat, thin-skinned lemons for preserving and the unexpectedly elusive dill for the dill-pickled cucumbers that have been waiting their time for three weeks. The last week has been pickle week.

Raspberry vinegar, fig vinegar, pickled plums	Two sorts of pickled cucumbers, pickled horseradish	Cucumbers, preserved lemons, pickled limes, horseradish vinegar

I'd planned for a wet weekend with a long list of household tasks, but unexpected sunshine sent me out in search of the rest of the fruit for the hedgerow jelly - hawberries, sloes, rosehips, elderberries and blackberries. The west side of the road is hedged mainly with hawthorns, invaded from time to time by blackberries and occasional roses, whereas the east side is more varied and includes the elders and more of the roses. The hedges have been largely cut back - this road sees cows and sheep frequently walking down it, and the trimming is presumably for their benefit. With nettles and a wet ditch defending the hedges, much of the fruit is out of reach unless I can get into the fields. Hawberries are abundant and one bush yields the necessary quantity - the next 99 can be ignored. Elderberries are in short supply and it seems to have been a bad year for blackberries - it's not as though other people have been out picking first, just that the fruit didn't form properly to start with. As for sloes, after picking eight from a neighbour's hedge, there are no more to be found for an hour. Are we too close to the sea? I knew the mountain ash wouldn't grow down here but I didn't think sloes wouldn't. Eventually I find one small bush, but that's not enough. I may have to go down the manor field boundary later in case there are more there.

Abundant haws	Rosehips
Meagre blackberries	Solitary sloe
Firth with hedges	Fell with hedge

And then, on the way home, a sloe hedge on a neighbour's garden. About three foot thick, that means 18 inches depth is public, right? The sloes are not abundant in number, but they're the size of American blueberries. Quite glad that no one drives past in the time I spend almost inside the bush collecting what I need.

When I get home, my hands are purple and deeply scratched. The perfect moment to move the salted cut lemons that are a preserving work in progress from one jar to another - ouch!