02 Jul Porth en Alls & Dreams of Clotted Cream
Porth en Alls, Clotted Cream & Raw Courgette Pesto Pasta
A year or two ago Blandbadger asked me if I would be interested in catering for a retreat they were going to host at Porth en Alls, a small, family-run estate at Prussia Cove which offers self-catering accomodation and camping in spectacular surroundings, just around the bay from St Michael’s Mount.
When discussing with my mum if she would be willing to come and do childcare while I cooked seafood spaghetti and scones for twenty or so hungry pilgrims, it transpired that she had already been there on a family holiday, when she was little.
I began scheming all of the things I could cook, having been brewing a Cornish cookbook (inevitably unpublishable) for years, and passed sleepless nights as my head swam with blurred dreams of clotted cream and crab sandwiches.
At last, an opportunity to cook all the things I love and grew up eating, toasted saffron buns bathed in salty yellow Cornish butter, cheesy Homity pies, proper pasties, aforementioned crab sandwiches and clotted cream and blackcurrant ice cream… thunder and lightning, Cornish heavy cake, nettle soup, Cornish yarg, potted crab, Cornish fairings…
Alas, the retreat was not to be, but my mum had the brilliant idea of booking our annual family reunion in one of the coastguard cottages. My younger brother is based in America, and my older one in France. I’m in Sardinia. We see each other once a year if we are lucky, and we all make a combined effort to bring our children together so that the cousins might have some kind of shared experience, however far away they are.
Last year we packed into a coastguard’s cottage and passed the rainy days at the Eden project (good for kids and surprisingly good pizza) and lighting a June fire, and the sunny ones throwing pebbles and poking about in rock pools.
This year we changed to the house on the hill which was split between 3 stories, and my dad and his partner Pam joined for English father’s day too.
The house had a pale blue hydrangea bush (I’m not sure why these always make me feel nostalgic about Cornwall but they do) and a rolling lawn in front of it, dotted with clover (and thus bees) which was perfect for kids asides from the occasional sting on the underside of a tender foot. The view was breathtaking, and the house itself smelt of damp and dust and was an odd and shambolic mix, redolent of a school, a chapel, an art gallery and an ark. Our room was in the attic, with pale primrose clapboard walls and a tapered ceiling, and two opposing low windows which were almost impossible to close or open. There was a low wooden window seat that we sat on every morning to look out at the view, listen to the seagulls and watch the bunnies hop about in the bracken.
The Tiny Saint, an animal lover already, developed an obsession with seagulls and bunnies, as well as ‘Crabbies’, mostly miniature ones which we caught under rocks by the dozen, to admire and then let go back to their weedy homes. My mum bought him a little cuddly rabbit which we named Gwythian, after the car park where we parked for a visit to the enormous Hayle beach. Mocaccino the monkey came from Sardinia for moral support, and there were slimy slugs from the village shop in Marazion (a treasure trove of oddities and excitements, including beach buckets, old fashioned boiled sweets like rhubarb and custards, silver, lucky pasty charms to keep in your pocket, crude postcards and clotted cream fudge).
Perhaps it was all the animals, or the wooden clapboard, or the low windows or the tapered ceiling, or the swathes of sea surrounding us, but up in our little attic room it felt like being in Noah’s ark, and although the Saint slept not a wink (too much excitement, too many baked potatoes) I grew very attached to our little attic realm.
The rest of the house was an eclectic mix of beautiful oil paintings, botanical prints, old scuffed and stained wooden furniture (hence the schoolish feeling) spartan bathrooms and handmade patchwork quilts. Nothing was designed to go together, but somehow everything did, and the whole was inescapably charming and bohemian, without being too self-conscious (not something easily achieved).
Porth en alls is a funny place, which is immediately evident from their website. Anyone who describes themselves in their introductory paragraph with the loaded phrase, ‘not mainstream’ makes you pause for thought. On the mantelpiece was a custom painted box of mini matches, the relic of a marital union between ‘Nancy and Fred’, in the bookshelves were classic volumes of Shakespeare alongside ‘The Indispenable Cat’ and a guide to keeping rats. In the corner by the fire was an entire nest of ants, busily dismantling the rotten window frame. The rugs were threadbare and dusty, the prints were hung at random, the cobwebs were commendable. Up the road an enormous Car Boot is held every Wednesday. There is a number on a post-it for the fisherman. They provide each guest with half a green scourer and jay cloth, both neatly cut down the middle, but no soap of any description.
It was, for many reasons, a holiday to remember, and as we get older and more distant from each other it seems ever more important to make the effort to spend time together, and for these three tiny people to experience a little of their cultural and culinary heritage. The Saint has come away with a love of bunnies, salted butter and buns which fills me with the expected warm and furry feelings. It is to these small (and now pinkly nostalgia-tinted) pleasures that I will forever cling. And to the memory of our little Ark bedroom with the seagulls wheeling overhead.
I have no recipes because all I cooked was simple kid’s pasta and risotto as usual, and my brother barbecued and we ate fish and chips from the chippy in Marazion, but here is a raw courgette, lemon and ricotta pesto pasta recipe I made when we got back to my mum’s, to use up the leftovers of our Cornish shopping, and it was really quite good.
And, one day, maybe I will write up the Cornish recipes I dream about too.
Lemony Raw Courgette and Ricotta Pesto Pasta
I’m not sure if it is very etymologically accurate to call this a pesto but the method of making it is very similar. There are, however, no nuts.
The raw courgette makes it fresh and extra lemony and nutty, and is a good way of getting kids to consume vegetables. You may well have thought that I had exhausted the combination of lemon, ricotta, and courgette but think again! The possibilities for this holy trinity are endless.
Serves 2
A handful of fresh basil
A handful of fresh parsley
2 small cloves garlic
100ml extra virgin olive oil
Salt
A small hunk of parmesan (about 30 grams plus exra to serve)
3 tbsp of fresh ricotta (from a tub is fine)
Zest and juice of 1 small lemon or half a large one
1 raw courgette topped and tailed and cut into rough chunks
220g of pasta of your choice.
Throw all of the ingredients for the pesto except the ricotta and oil into the food processor and blitz until a rough hash of pieces no bigger than dessicated coconut. Mix through the ricotta and oil and taste for seasoning, adjusting accordingly.
Cook the pasta until al dente, reserving some of the cooking water, then stir through the sauce and a splash of water, cooking and stirring over the heat until everything is creamy and amalgamated. Serve with extra parmesan if you wish.
