by Jenny Colgan
‘Godspeed,’ she murmured to the boats, and those who sailed on them, remembering once again Tarnie’s song:
I wish I was a fisherman
Tumbling on the seas
Far away from dry land
And its bitter memories
Casting out my sweet line
With abandonment and love
No ceiling bearing down on me
’Cept the starry sky above
With light in my head
You in my arms
Woohoo!
Acknowledgements
Thanks, first off and always, to Ali Gunn, OF COURSE, and absolutely to the stark-staring amazing team at Little, Brown, particularly my wonderful editor Rebecca Saunders; someone else’s wonderful editor Manpreet Grewal, whom nonetheless I pester fairly regularly; the sensational Emma Williams and the equally wonderful Jo Wickham and their teams; David Shelley and Ursula Mackenzie, a formidable duo; Charlie King, Camilla Ferrier, Sarah McFadden, Patisserie Zambetti, Alice, the board and my lovely friends and family, here, there and everywhere.
The more eagle-eyed amongst you might think, AHA! That grumpy lady’s name, Gillian Manse, is very much like that of esteemed novelist Jill Mansell – a bitter vendetta? And I will say nothing can be further from the truth: Jill is quite lovely in every way, and she bid to have her name included in the book in last year’s Comic Relief auction.
On that subject, there is a lot concerning itself with the sea in this book. There are two amazing organisations which help sailors in dreadful conditions: one is the RNLI, of course, www.rnli.org, who I’m sure you’ve heard of; the other is the Fisherman’s Mission, www.fishermensmission.org.uk, who do a simply astonishing job helping people in this treacherous line of work. Donations have been made to both of these organisations from the proceeds of this book.
And lastly, the song which is quoted throughout, ‘Fisherman’s Blues’, is by The Waterboys and I love it dearly, and if you’d like to hear it whilst you’re reading, it’s here: www.tinyurl.com/fishermansblues but I would also recommend their entire back catalogue.
As ever, all the recipes in this book have been tested by me – in the case of the easy bread, about once a week.
And do, please, get in touch: it’s www.facebook.com/ thatwriterjennycolgan or @jennycolgan on Twitter.
Very warmest wishes,
Jenny xx
EASIEST WHITE BREAD
Now here is an absolute starter for bread. It could not be simpler, is just the thing for a lazy Sunday when you’re just kind of flolloping about. It will allow you to flollop about whilst also giving you a real sense of accomplishment. If you have ever thought, ‘hmm, that is just not for me, that weird bread stuff’, then I really really hope you give this a go.
It is the easiest bread you can ever make. You can’t really go wrong and the second you taste it you will immediately realise why people like baking.
700 g bread flour
1 sachet dried yeast
400 ml warm water
1 level tbspn of salt
1 level tbspn of sugar
Sift the flour, then warm it slightly in the microwave (I do 600w for one minute). Add the yeast, salt and sugar, then the water. Mix.
Knead on a floury surface for a few minutes until it’s a nice smooth ball.
Leave for two hours whilst you read the papers or go for a stroll.
Knead again for a few minutes.
Leave again for an hour whilst you take a nice relaxing bath.
Heat the oven to 230 degrees and grease a bread tin.
Leave in the oven for 30 minutes, or until it makes a hollow noise when tapped on the bottom.
Leave to cool as long as you can stand it, then devour.
CHEESE STRAWS
Another easy-peasy, but delicious, savoury recipe.
Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees. Butter and line a baking tray.
Combine 120g of soft butter with 450g of cheese (I KNOW it’s a lot. These are for sharing and parties and things. I like extra mature cheddar but any hard cheese will do – the Dutch ones are fine. Nothing soft or blue).
Add:
250 g of flour
1 tspn of salt
chilli flakes to your taste
plenty of pepper
1 tspn of baking powder
Roll into plasticine snakes, just like at primary school. Size and dimension is up to you but if they’re too thick they will taste a bit stodgy.
Bake for 15 minutes or until crunchy.
SWEETCORN FRITTERS
These are my husband’s absolute favourites so he gets woken up with them on his birthday. Actually, I should make them more often now I think about it; they’re lovely and tasty and easy.
Beat 1 egg.
Add a tablespoon of water, 1 cup of flour, 1 small tin of sweetcorn (or half a standard size, or double everything else and use the whole tin) and 1 tspn of baking powder.
Season to taste (in our case, we use lots of salt and pepper).
Form into cakes and fry on a medium heat. Take off and drain on kitchen roll. Yum!
CINNAMON ROLLS
These are ACE, delicious, and will make the ones you buy in *cough* high-street coffee emporia seem rubbish.
1 cup milk
¼ cup butter
1 packet yeast
¼ cup sugar
1 beaten egg
3½ cups flour
½ tspn salt
For the inside:
1 cup brown sugar
1 tspn cinnamon
½ cup soft butter
For the top:
Icing sugar
Water
Grease and line a large baking pan.
Heat the milk, butter and sugar gently together in a saucepan, then allow to cool.
Combine with the yeast, egg, two cups of the flour and the salt. Then beat the rest of the flour in slowly.
Knead for five minutes, then leave for one hour to rise.
Mix together all of the inside ingredients.
Roll out the dough and cover with the inside mix. Then (this is the fun bit) roll up the dough and cut into slices, like a Swiss roll.
Leave these for another hour to rise (on their sides), then bake for 25 minutes at 180 degrees. Leave to cool (just for a bit; no need to deprive yourself any longer), then ice.
FOCACCIA
I once had a focaccia-off with a chef friend. He beat me hands down, OF COURSE, but we were lucky enough to be using an outdoor oven, which gave them both such a lovely flavour. Anyway, whack your own oven up; 220 degrees will give it a good taste (but watch out for burning).
500g flour
1½ tspn salt
325 ml hand-warm water
1 sachet yeast
2 tbspn olive oil
Cheese/rosemary/anything you fancy for the top
Mix the flour and salt.
Mix the yeast with the hand-warm water. Add this and the oil to the flour/salt mix.
Knead for ten minutes. Leave for one hour, warm and covered.
Stretch out the dough into a long shape, about 20cm by 30cm, then leave for another forty minutes.
Press your fingers into the risen dough to make little indents and cook for twenty minutes at 220 degrees.
Remove from the oven and add the cheese, herbs and some more drips of olive oil. Then give it another five minutes in the oven.
BAGELS
Bagels can be a little fiddly but they’re hard to find where I live and sometimes NEEDS MUST.
4 cups bread flour
1 tbspn sugar
1½ tspn salt
1 tbspn vegetable oil
1 packet instant yeast
1¼ cups hand-warm water
Mix the ingredients together to form a stiff dough.
Knead for ten minutes.
Cut into eight pieces and leave to rest for about twenty minutes.
Switch on the oven at 195 degrees.
Form into rings (you can stick the ends together wit
h a bit of milk if they’re being tricky). Leave for another twenty minutes.
Boil a big pot of water.
CAREFULLY dip the bagels into the water one by one for about a minute. I use a kind of barbecue fork.
Add any toppings – for example, chopped onion, raisins (not together obviously).
Bake for ten minutes, per side, in the oven.
SHORTBREAD
So simple, but so good. Use good quality butter too, but they’re delicious anyway. You can put chocolate chips in them but I don’t bother myself. This is a good one to do with children, although they find the ‘putting in the fridge’ bit torture. It is necessary though or they’ll go all crumbly.
150 g butter
60 g caster sugar
200 g flour
Line a baking tray and pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees.
Blend the sugar and butter very well and then add the flour till you get a soft paste. Roll this out, no more than 1cm thick, then cut it however you like: with a cutter, or just in little lines to be tidy.
Sprinkle with a little more sugar, then chill in the fridge for at least half an hour. By the way, if you’re anything like me I am always grabbing recipes and starting them and not reading them through properly. Then I get to the bit where it says ‘now marinate for four hours’ when I need dinner ready in the next twenty minutes. So let me highlight that bit in case you are at all like me: CHILL FOR HALF AN HOUR!
And then bake for 20 minutes, or until golden brown.
ENJOY AN EXTRACT FROM THE NEW FESTIVE NOVEL FROM
Treat yourself and your sweet-toothed friends to Jenny olgan’s heart-warming new novel. The irresistibly delicious recipes are guaranteed to get you into the festive spirit and will warm up your Christmas celebrations.
Chapter One
Lipton was quiet underneath the stars. It was quiet as the snow fell through the night; as it settled on the roof of the Isitts’ barn and the bell house of the school; as it came in through the cracked upper windows that needed mending at Lipton House; as it cast a hush across the cobbled main street of the village, muting the few cars that passed by. It lay on the roofs of the dentist’s and the doctor’s surgery; it fell on Manleys, the dated ladieswear boutique, and on the Red Lion, its outdoor tables buried under mounds, its mullioned windows piled high with the stuff.
It fell on the ancient church with the kissing gate, and the graveyard with its repeated local names: Lipton, Isitt, Carr, Cooper, Bell.
It fell on the sleeping sheep, camouflaging them completely (Rosie had made Stephen laugh once, asking where the sheep slept when it got cold. He had looked at her strangely and said, ‘In the Wooldorf, of course, where else?’ and she had taken a moment or two before she kicked him crossly in the shins). It fell on birds cosy in their nests, their heads under their wings, and settled like a sigh, piled soft and deep in the gullies and crevices of the great towering Derbyshire hills that fringed the little town.
Even now, after a year of living there, Rosie Hopkins couldn’t get over how quiet it was in the countryside. There were birds, of course, always, singing their hearts out in the morning. One could usually hear a cock crow, and every now and then from the deeper sections of the woods would come a distant gunshot, as someone headed out to hunt rabbits (you weren’t meant to, the woods belonged to the estate, so no one ever owned up, although if you passed Jake the farmhand’s little tied cottage on a Saturday night, the smell of a very rich stew might just greet your nostrils).
But tonight, as Rosie went to mount the little narrow stairs to bed, it felt quieter than ever. There was something different about it. Her foot creaked on the step.
‘Are you coming up or what?’ came the voice from overhead.
Even though she and Stephen had lived there together now for nearly a year, Rosie still wasn’t out of the habit of calling it Lilian’s cottage. Her great-aunt, whom she’d come up to look after when Lilian had broken her hip, had moved into a lovely local home, but they still had her over most Sundays, so Rosie felt that, even though legally she had bought the cottage, she rather had to keep it exactly as Lilian liked it. Well, it was slightly that and slightly that Lilian would sniff and raise her eyebrows when they so much as tried to introduce a new picture, so it was easier all round just to keep it as it was. Anyway, Rosie liked it too. The polished wooden floor covered in warm rugs; the fireplace with its horse brasses, the chintzy sofa piled with cushions and floral throws; the old Aga and the old-fashioned butler’s sink. It was dated, but in a very soft, worn-in, comfortable way, and when she lit the wood burner (she was terrible with fires; people from miles around would come to scoff and point at her efforts, as if growing up in a house with central heating was something to be ashamed of), she never failed to feel happy and cosy there.
Stephen had the use of Peak House, which was part of his family estate, a bankrupt and crumbling seat that gave Lipton its name. Peak House was a great big scary-looking thing up on the crags. It had a lot more space, but somehow they’d just found themselves more and more at Lilian’s cottage. Also, as Rosie was just about eking a living from the sweetshop and Stephen was in teacher training, they were both completely skint and Lilian’s cottage was substantially easier to heat.
Stephen may have scoffed a bit at the decor, but he seemed more than happy to lie on the sofa, his sore leg, damaged in a landmine accident in Africa, propped up on Rosie’s lap as they watched box sets on Lilian’s ancient television. Other nights, when the picture was just too grainy, Stephen would read to her and Rosie would knit, and Stephen would tease her for making the world’s longest scarf, and she would tell him to hush, he would be pleased when it turned cold, and if he wasn’t quiet she would knit him a pair of long johns and make him wear them, which shut him up pretty fast.
‘In a minute!’ shouted Rosie up the stairs, glancing round to make sure the door was shut on the wood burner – she was always nearly causing conflagrations. She was struck by the heaviness of the air. They hadn’t moved in to Lilian’s downstairs bedroom, all of them keeping up the pretence that one day Lilian might want to use it again, so they kept it pristine, the bed made up, her clothes still hanging in the wardrobe. Rosie kept a shrewd nurse’s eye on her eighty-seven-year-old great-aunt. Lilian liked to complain about the home, but Rosie could see, in the rosiness of her cheeks (Lilian took great pride in her excellent complexion) and her slight weight gain (this, by contrast, made her utterly furious), that actually, living somewhere with help on hand all the time, and company, was just what Lilian needed. She had lasted a long time by herself in her own home, trying to pretend to the world at large that everything was absolutely fine, when clearly it wasn’t. She might complain, but it was clear that it was a weight off her shoulders.
So they continued to sleep in the little attic, adapted years before as a spare bedroom for Lilian’s brothers. It was clean and bare, with views on one side of the great craggy Derbyshire fells, and on the other of Lilian’s garden, the herb and vegetable patches tended with surprising care by Stephen, the rose bower trimmed from time to time by Mr Isitt, the local dairy farmer.
It was utterly freezing up in the unheated attic. Rosie saw with a smile that Stephen was already in bed, tucked in tightly under the sheets, blankets and thick eiderdown (Lilian thought duvets were a modern intrusion for lazy people; Rosie couldn’t deny there was a certain comfort in being tucked in tight with hospital corners, plus it was much harder for your other half to steal the covers).
‘Hurry up,’ he said.
‘Oh good,’ said Rosie. ‘You’ve warmed up one side. Now can you shift to the other side, please?’
The shape under the covers was unmoved.
‘Not a chance,’ it said. ‘It’s brass monkey bollocks up here.’
‘Thank goodness I share my bed with a gentleman,’ said Rosie. ‘Move! And anyway, that’s my side.’
‘It is NOT your side. This is the window side, which you insisted, when we were stifling up here in the summer, was
making you too hot so you needed the other side.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Rosie, coming round the far end of the large sleigh bed. ‘Now budge.’
‘No!’
‘Budge!’
‘NO!’
Rosie began to wrestle with him, avoiding, as ever, his weaker left leg, until eventually Stephen suggested that if she really needed warming up, he had a plan, and she found that she liked that plan.
Afterwards, now cosy (as long as her feet didn’t stray to the far regions of the mattress; if she didn’t think it would turn Stephen off for ever, she would have worn bed socks), she felt herself drifting off to sleep, or she would have done if Stephen hadn’t been lying so rigid next to her. He was pretending to be asleep, but she wasn’t fooled for a second.
