Apricot and pistachio clafoutis

Old Sauternes and a meddlesome ghost

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”An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.”

Charles Dickins 1812- 1870

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Oxfordshire, June 2025

Firstly, any recipe that begins by asking you to rub your dish with butter and then to coat it well with demerara sugar, is likely as good as any recipe is going to get to begin with.

It sets a tone don’t you think?

In a second piece this weekend for my paid subscribers, below you’ll find my recipe for an easy pudding for any day of the week that involves, apricots, vanilla, custard and almonds.

That along with a story of my being terrified at night by a meddlesome ghost who was probably annoyed that I drank his wine..

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Delicious

A thickly set, custardy cake, crusty at its edge, slightly caught by the oven as the sugar caramelises, the apricots steeped in sugar and a good splash of very old Sauternes.

Delicious

I once spent a few weekends cooking for some awfully grand chap and his very skinny wife in a large old stone house miles from anywhere in the countryside.

Apart from the couple, their dog, myself and what seemed like a handful of meddlesome ghosts that kept me awake and terrified every night that I spent there, shutting doors loudly at three in the morning and running around in the dark, the vast house was apparently empty, and I was left to my own devices to come up with what I would cook them over the weekend. I was kindly told to help myself to anything I fancied from the wine cellar if I fancied a drink or for any cooking, the chap confessing that there were a few bottles in there of ‘some merit’ but they had belonged to his late father (who was incidentally buried under the front lawn), and since he’d inherited the house, he didn’t drink much anymore and his very thin wife, who gave off an air of being slightly unhinged if I’m honest, only drank vodka and soda. Taking a left turn off the passage next to the kitchen in the huge basement of this magnificent Georgian pile with its lofty stucco’d ceilings, ornately carved balustrades, cold stone floors and creaky wooden doors, I stumbled into what I can only believe to be the most astonishing cellar to have chanced upon.

I think it fair to say, that it seemed quite probable that no one had likely set foot in there for a decade or so, such were the cobwebs that hid all manner of horrible eight-legged creatures who had likely spent the years eating each other and getting bigger and what with the centimetre thick dust on what apparently seemed like racks of over one thousand bottles of old classed growths of Bordeaux and what I also discovered upon examination to be a section devoted to very old Sauternes. Stuff from the early 1900s through to the late 1980s, and lots of it. I think the late old boy whose wine it once was, most definitely was watching me from another realm as I carefully plundered lifted bottles of wine that he had likely placed there half a century ago and that nobody had bothered with since.

And I’m in no way suggesting that you should use a Château d'Yquem 1959 to make this cake as I did, though I firmly believe it was better for it.

I certainly was, as I enjoyed a chilled glass whilst I made it, very likely watched over by the ghost of its rightful owner. And although he himself was never able to enjoy his 1959 in life, perhaps he caught a spiritual whiff as I polished it off.

Perhaps that’s why he would slam the door so loudly.

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