Annabelle Davis is a pastry chef in Birmingham who runs her own business, Honey & Rye. On the evening of 20 October, with half the country flooded by the unrelenting Storm Babet and amid the constant unremitting deluge, it seemed of Biblical proportions, I set off for the Jewellery Quarter on a crowded 101 bus filled with damp passengers from Colmore Row to head for Spencer Street and Kaye Winwood’s GULP, a dining establishment currently highly placed in my affections, where Annabelle was collaborating with Kaye to render on to those who know their rewards for knowing - a feast described as “an edible journey through autumn …. the perfect way to celebrate the fruits of autumn, with a menu designed to bring the season to life” [despite Babet’s attempts to drown it].
The publicity noted that, “Taking inspiration from the orchard in Warstone Lane cemetery and surrounding areas, the menu will take guests on a journey revealing the deeper meanings and rituals behind some of the everyday foods we eat ! Expect foraged ingredients, locally seasonal produce, and heart-warming flavours to excite the senses! The vegetarian menu draws on themes of food rituals and symbology to produce a creative experience for curious diners”.
I can confirm that this really was a celebration of an English autumn. There’s something of a deeper magic and mythology about this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness in the middle lands where ancient gods were worshipped in groves and by rivers that you feel all around you at this time of year. You feel that this is the season when the Once and Future King could just appear in the autumnal dawn of a Mercian morning and you can almost hear the clang of Wayland’s forge in the distant Cotswolds which the dog and I were just visiting a couple of days ago. In Edgehill the ghosts of fallen civil war soldiers cross the brow of a hill and in Digbeth phantom smiths still lay the bellows to their forges to boost the flames that light up the dark late afternoons in the old town. Old Mrs Allday’s ghost is still serving up tripe in Union Street and Joseph Priestley’s phantom is busy fleeing once again from the rioters sacking his house in Sparkhill. Autumn indeed has its own special place in the total of our hours upon the stage and the deep, earthy, rich, umami flavours which accompany it have a special place in our culinary pleasures as the year moves on.
Kaye Winwood started off the evening with an exhortation to her diners to experience the textures and olfactory pleasure of an edible hand lotion she had made with sugar and oil and local herbs. Rosemary was the theme though no mention of remembrance was made albeit that autumn is the season of remembrance as the anniversary of the end of the Great War is commemorated, as ever, on Remembrance Sunday.
And so to Davis’ splendid food. We started off with Emmer grain bread with a lacto-fermented mustard butter - excellent - and labneh as a spread with burned lemon, the sweet hit of pickled blackberries and dried yarrow leaves. Autumn was already bursting out all over.
A main of exquisitely, perfectly al dente home-made tagliatelle, butternut squash purée and a remarkably successful dish of local wild mushrooms, deeply flavoured, full of earth and umami, all rounded off with locally foraged salad. Truffle may be everywhere at the moment - barely a highly placed restaurant is not offering it - but these more modest fungi gathered from under our Brummie noses, made for the most memorable mushroom dish of the year, and possibly the most delicious.
Autumn rosehips were used to give us a delightful and highly successful palate cleanser in the form of a rose hip sherbet accompanied by a pleasingly not over sweet biscuit and then another highly memorable dish of apple custard tart with a layer of crabapple jelly all soother with a restrained blob of crème fraiche. This was an immaculate piece of pastry making - crisp and light - it’s clear that Annabelle Davis really is a very fine pastry chef. I loved the autumnal crab apple jelly and the custard was smooth and pleasing.
Kaye Winwood had prepared an interesting - and soothing - infusion of foraged local herbs and there was a lovely petit four by Annette in the form of local wood ear mushroom, which only grows on elderberry trees, rehydrated in elderberry liquor and dipped in chocolate.
A very real celebration of an English autumn and the fare it throws up delivered to the diners present by an artist and a fine chef especially in the field of pastry. It’s such a joy to be presented with real pastry as a dessert rather than the usual hotchpotch which can appear as the final course. All served in the eclectic and moody GULP dining room through which you could just imagine the ghost of some ancient jeweller wandering at midnight on a dark, moonless autumn night.
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