Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris & Recipe by Joanne Harris
I am thrilled beyond belief about this month’s read and recipe.
Why?
This month, both the read and the recipe are by one of my favourite authors, Joanne Harris.
Just in case you’ve never come across Joanne Harris before now, Joanne is the author of so many fabulously written top of the charts books, some of which have already been in the list of our monthly reads.
She’s also not a new choice for Foodie Book Club!
Not only is the lovely Joanne one of the best writers I know, she is also one of the most generous authors I know.
She’s always ready to support Foodie Book Club CIC and other book clubs (yes there are more out their ha ha) with shout outs on her social media and gifts of resources from her website.
The ever wonderful and truly generous Joanne Harris
Rather than have me twittle on, here’s a little bit about Joanne Harris taken from her website.
Joanne Harris (OBE, FRSL) is the internationally renowned and award-winning author of nineteen novels, plus novellas, scripts, short stories, libretti, lyrics, articles, and a self-help book for writers, TEN THINGS ABOUT WRITING.
In 2000, her 1999 novel CHOCOLAT was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp.
She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and is Chair of the Society of Authors.
Her hobbies are listed in Who's Who as 'mooching, lounging, strutting, strumming, priest-baiting and quiet subversion'.
She is active on Twitter, where she writes stories and gives writing tips as @joannechocolat; she posts writing seminars on YouTube; she performs in a live music and storytelling show with the #Storytime Band; and she works from a shed in her garden at her home in Yorkshire.
She also has a form of synaesthesia, which enables her to smell colours.
Red, she says, smells of chocolate
Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris
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Background to the book by Joanne Harris from her website
‘I finished Blackberry Wine before the publication of Chocolat. I’m relieved it happened that. way, because if I had been able to foresee the success of Chocolat I might well have ended up like Jay, completely frozen by his own achievement and unable to write anything serious again.
Fortunately I have rather more to keep me grounded in the real world than Jay-living wirth an eight year old is a terrific antidote to living in the past- and I tried nor to think too much about Chocolat as I was writing, knowing that literary successes are heavily dogged by the curse of expectation.
Having said that, Blackberry Wine ended up being a kind of companion piece to Chocolat after all. It wasn’t intended that way, but there are recurring themes (food/wine as an agent of transformation, magic, life in a small community) which link the two books. IN addition, the principle setting of Blackberry Wine is the same village used in Chocolat , and it seemed natural to have some of the same characters. It is not, however a sequel It is a relative – a second cousin, perhaps – a second cousin, perhaps – and therefore shares similar genes.
While Chocolat began as the story of my maternal great-grandmother (who turns up as Armande in the book, and as a photograph on the back cover), Blackberry Wine is very much about my paternal grandfather. The character Jackapple Joe Cox, gardener, Yorkshireman, ex-miner, amateur magician and seeker of wider vistas, is closely based on him, and it is he who forms the backbone of the story. He’s there on the back cover, too;, aged five or six, sitting on his fathers knee. Born into a coal mining family in the North of England, my grandfather was a natural gardener and loved growing things, although his own father saw much of it as a waste of time and only tolerated “useful” gardening) i.e: the cultivation of food). Following his father and brothers down the mines, he worked there for some years before finding a dream job as a head gardener in a local stately home. When the war arrived he tried to enlist the army, but was told that because of a hand injury sustained down the mine, he was unfit for active service. So he volunteered to return to coal mining, giving up the job he loves, and when the war ended, he discovered that he had unwittingly signed up for another thirty years.
On retirement, however, he went back to gardening. He and my grandmother has bought a corner sweet shop (where my parents lived for a while and in which I was born), and he had an allotment alongside, in which he used to frow all kinds of fruit and vegetables. My earliest memories are of his allotment and the plants which grew there in cold-frames built out of reclaimed junk, with the radio hanging on a tree branch and myself sucking rhubarb sticks and listening to stories. I remember my grandfather making jam and preserves, and how the house always smelt of things cooking or pickling or fermenting. Best of all o remember his wine. Much of it was experimental and therefore undrinkable (peapod, potato, or parsnip), but some was quite good. He kept it in demi-johns in the back bedroom, and rarely drank anything else. When I went to university he would always give me half a dozen bottles of his home made wine at the beginning of the tear, and my grandmother would send me fruit cake or jars of jam during the term. It was like a taste of home.
When my grandmother died, ten years ago, I picked up a few remaining bottles from the pantry. Jay was braver than I am – I still haven’t opened them.’ Joanne Harris
Keep up to date with Joanne Harris on her website here, Twitter here, Instagram here.
About the Book
What if you could bottle a year of your past? Which one would it be? Which time of year? What would it smell like? How would it taste?
These are the questions which began Blackberry Wine: the second volume of my “food trilogy” and the story pf Jay Mackintosh, a writer of pulp fiction with one literary success to his name and a dwindling grasp of reality. Trapped between an unresolved past and a humdrum present, suffering from writers block and the beginning of alcoholism, Jay has lost his bearings.
But the accidental discovery of six bottles of home-brewed wine, a legacy from an old and vanished friend, seems to hold the key to a new beginning, a means of escape, as a final reconciliation. For there is something magical about this wine, something which brings the past to life, and agent of transformation. Under its influence, time can work backwards and the dead return to life-as Jay finds, when, on impulse, he gives up his glamourous London lifestyle and escapes to a half-derelict farmhouse in a remote village in Gascony, where two mysteries await him; a ghost from the past whom no-one else can see and Marise, a reclusive widow with ghosts of her own… Joanne Harris
…..and me, I give this a 4 ½ egg rating!
I give it 4 1/2 eggs
Joe’s Blackberry Brownies
The recipe is also by the incredibly talented Joanna Harris and Fran Warde from it goes perfectly with this book. Its from Joe’s Blackberry Brownies The Little Book of Chocolate.
Rich and chocolaty with bites of zingy blackberry, this recipe is the perfect thing to be nibbling on when reading this book.It’s an easy recipe to make, and why not, those who say nice things need to be tricky to make should go hide under a bed!
Introduction
“Joe (and my grandfather) would have insisted on picking his own blackberries. Now you can buy them from supermarkets, of course; but somehow, those blackberries don’t taste the same as when they’re scavenged from a piece of wasteland or picked from the side of a country road …
This delectable brownie recipe takes sharp blackberries and combines with a rich dark chocolate base. Serve alone or warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.” Joanne
Find the recipe in the book The Little Book of Chocolate by Joanne Harris and Fran Warde. Find it here
The Little Book of Chocolate by Joanne Harris & Fran Wilde - Find it here
Ingredients
120g Dark Chocolate, broken into small, even sized pieces.
120g Butter
2 Eggs
225 Unrefined castor sugar
110g Self raising flour
150g Blackberries
Essential kit
You will need an 18 x 18cm shallow baking tin.
Blackberry Brownies
Method
Heat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4. Line an 18 x 18cm shallow baking tin with baking parchment.
Place the chocolate and butter in a large saucepan over a very low heat and melt, mixing frequently.
Remove from the heat when melted, then whisk the eggs and add them to the mixture, along with the sugar and flour.
Mix until smooth.
Add 100g of the blackberries and gently stir.
Pour into the prepared baking tin.
Scatter the remaining blackberries on top and cook in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes until just set and a crust has formed on top.
Leave to cool, then cut into 25-30 squares.
