by Libby
'Muffins?’...‘... a special tribute to Jane called “Charles de Mills”.’
And with that Gabri disappeared and reappeared a moment later with a platter
holding rings of muffins marvelously decorated with fruit and roses...‘You
mentioned the Charles de Mills rose.’ ‘Jane’s favorite. He’s not just
any rose, Chief Inspector. He’s considered by rosarians to be one of the finest
in the world. An old garden rose...That’s why I made the muffins from rose water,
as a homage to Jane. Then I ate them, as you saw. I always eat my pain.’ (Still
Life, Kindle, p.84, 86)
Funny how we connect
to people, events, times and emotions through our sense of smell. Gabri's
memory of and love for Jane Neal will always be tied to those roses, their
fragrance and rose-scented muffins.
While I could
understand Gabri eating his pain over Jane's death, the connections made to the
fragrant roses and scented muffins were stronger for me. Amy and I laughed
about our different perceptions and interpretations here. I enthused over the
sensory world of rose-scented muffins and the decorated platter, while Amy
related to and then wrote insightfully about Gabri eating his pain (Sept 13,
2015 post). It's a reminder of how we can see the same things differently,
based on our respective experiences and biases.
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Lorraine Lee, a deeply fragrant
Australian cultivar
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Mention a rose and I think of fragrance, with
pleasant memories evoked. For me, it is two roses (Lorraine Lee and Cécile Brünner)
from my childhood that I grow in my garden today. Drinking in their fragrance,
I am transported back to my parents' garden with feelings of comfort and the
nostalgia of simpler, sweet times.
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Cécile Brünner, an old/heritage fragrant
French rose
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Charles de Mills,
old/heritage very fragrant bush rose
http://paulbardenroses.com/gallicas/demills.html
Some smells we just love
and our spirits lift as we breathe them in. For me, the
smell of drifts of autumn leaves,
promising the compost that they will become, springs to
mind. But some smells transport us
to another time, remind us of a place, a person, something long forgotten or tucked away in
the back of our mind. And
this can be accompanied by all sorts of feelings; joy, comfort, calmness or disquiet, melancholy, distress. Emotional responses to scents are, of course, a very personal
thing. Just as a scent can trigger pleasant physical and emotional responses in
one person, so can it trigger negative responses in another. While someone else
might have no response at all.
The associations between smells, memories and
emotions has been pretty well established. Some behavioural studies suggest
that our sense of smell is more strongly tied to bringing back memories, and
associated emotions and feelings, than any of our other senses. These
odour-evoked memories tend to be from earlier in life. On reflection, most of
mine are from early childhood into my teens. The smell of fig leaves has travelled with me since the very young age
of two when I first visited my maternal
grandmother's home, on the other side of the country, with my mother.
Inhaling the scent of those leaves
always gives me vivid glimpses of being in my grandmother's garden, and my first sense of being in the company of
women who cherished me.
There are writers who propel us into sensual
worlds. Louise Penny is one. The sensory elements that she uses so richly in her writing, makes it very real. I love the
way she engages our senses and draws us in.
The place felt like what it was. An old kitchen,
in an old home, in a very old village. It smelled of bacon and baking. It
smelled of rosemary and thyme and mandarin oranges. And coq au vin. (How the Light Gets In, Kindle, p.109)
The chapel smelled like every small church Clara
had ever known. Pledge and pine and dusty old books. (Still Life, Kindle, p.52)
Inside, the room smelled of wood smoke and
industrial coffee in wet cardboard with a slight undercurrent of varnish and
that musky aroma of old books. Or timetables. This had once been the railway
station. (Dead Cold/A
Fatal Grace, Kindle, p.142)
This kind of sensory experience is deeply appealing
to me. It adds so much to setting and place and our understanding of characters,
or how we connect to them. The way the characters relate to scents, sights and
sounds, as we all do constantly every day, makes them believable. We can identify with them and understand them more deeply through what they
notice and how they respond.
Inspector Jean Guy Beauvoir looked round their
new Situation Room and inhaled. He realized, with some surprise, how familiar
and even thrilling the scent was. It smelled of excitement, it smelled of the
hunt. It smelled of long hours over hot computers, piecing together a puzzle.
It smelled of teamwork. It actually smelled of diesel fuel and woodsmoke, of
polish and concrete. He was again in the old railway station of Three Pines,
abandoned by the Canadian Pacific Railway decades ago and left to rot. (The Brutal Telling, Kindle, p.42)
Now this is a familiar, work-focused Beauvoir on the case.
But later we see another side of him with new and deepening sensibilities
emerging. It's a surprising and wonderful contrast.
She’d leaned in and whispered into his ear, and
he could smell her fragrance. It was slightly citrony. Clean and fresh. Not
Enid’s clinging, full-bodied perfume. Annie smelled like a lemon grove in
summer. (A Trick of the Light,
Kindle, p.8)
I'm easily drawn into a work by these sensory
experiences. It helps me to relate to characters and understand how
they're feeling, see them in very real terms.
Closing his eyes he breathed deeply, smelling
the musky scents of the library. Of age, of stability, of calm and peace. Of
old-fashioned polish, of wood, of words bound in worn leather. He smelled his
own slight fragrance of rosewater and sandalwood. And he thought of something
good, something nice, some kind harbor. And he found it in Reine-Marie, as he
remembered her voice on his cell phone earlier in the day. (Bury Your Dead, Kindle, p.14)
Louise Penny never fails to take us a little
further, into our own emotional landscape. She understands how smell can be
very powerful in unlocking forgotten memories. Who couldn't relate to these
reminders of emotions and feelings experienced in another time and place? It
makes us think and remember too.
The sounds were familiar, voices bouncing off
metal and concrete, shoes screeching on hard floors, but it was the smells that
had transported her (Isabelle
Lacoste). Of books and cleaner, of lunches languishing
and rotting behind hundreds of lockers. And fear. High school smelled of that
more than anything else, even more than sweaty feet, cheap perfume and rotten
bananas. (The Cruellest Month, Kindle, p.324)
It had been a long while since Inspector
Langlois had been in a library. Not since his school days. A time filled with
new experiences and the aromas that would be forever associated with them. Gym
socks. Rotting bananas in lockers. Sweat. Old Spice cologne. Herbal Essence
shampoo on the hair of girls he kissed, and more. A scent so sweet, so filled
with longing his reaction was still physical whenever he smelt it. And
libraries. Quiet. Calm. A harbor from the turmoil of teenage life. (Bury Your Dead, Kindle, p.58)
I felt like I was stepping back with Lacoste and
Langlois. These experiences resonated; some of them fond, some cringeworthy or disturbing
for the awkwardness, uncertainties and fears of those years. Not
only that...I'd always shamefully thought it was just me with the grotty habit,
of letting cheese and 'something' sandwiches, and bananas, go mouldy in my
locker! What a relief!
The
heady smell of oil paint and pure
turpentine never fails to take me back many years to when I was first studying
painting, starting the journey of mastering technique and struggling with ideas
in a visual medium. And one day, after a long time of saying not very much at
all in a way of ignoring me, the lecturer says, out of the blue, 'Your
work is very expressive. And you have a wonderful sense of colour.' And from
the shock of it, a feeling emerges that maybe there might
be something there worth pursuing. A small nudge onto the pathway towards
self-belief?
Now, however, I am lost in the heady perfume of
rose syrup as I delight in the preparation of a dessert of rose-scented
muffins, inspired by Gabri, to share with two girlfriends coming to lunch.
Rose-scented muffins
What better way to scent a muffin than drench it
with a wonderfully fragrant rose syrup! There are certain scents and flavours
that just go together. Rose water, honey, lemon and pistachios are made for each
other, so they are the basis of this recipe. The way they come together (and
it's really very simple) elevates these muffins into quite the dessert!
The trick is to generously add the rose syrup to
the pistachio muffins as they emerge from the oven. The freshness and potency
of the rose flavour is ensured if it is added after baking. And what could be
easier, and quite simply beautiful, than decorating them with fresh rose buds.
Served with more syrup and crème fraîche, they are seriously delicious. We made
a bit of an event of lunch and I served a rose cocktail with our dessert. I
muddled strawberries with
home-made rose petal liqueur and grenadine, vodka and cranberry juice,
shook it all with ice and strained it into cocktail glasses. I floated a few
small rose petals on the surface. We had a really good time!!
Muffins are a mix of wet and dry
ingredients and it is best done gently by hand, for a light result. Make sure all the
wet ingredients are at room temperature. The rose syrup can conveniently be
made ahead of time.
Rose syrup
half a cup of honey
100g/half a cup of sugar
120ml/half a cup of water
1-2 teaspoons of rose water (a pure distillation
of rose petals is best)
1-2 tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice
1. Heat the honey, sugar and water gently in a
saucepan, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil and allow to
reduce for one minute. Remove from heat and cool.
2. Add one to two teaspoons of rose water and one
to two tablespoons of lemon juice, tasting to get a balance between the two
flavourings.
Pistachio muffins (makes 12)
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| Wet and dry ingredients |
Dry ingredients:
200g/one and a half cups of plain/all purpose flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
half a cup of caster/superfine sugar
150g/5oz pistachio nuts (unsalted), chopped
Wet ingredients, at room temperature:
2 large eggs
113g/half a cup of melted, unsalted butter
(cooled)
3/4 cup of whole/full cream milk
1. Place a baking sheet on the shelf of the oven on
which you will put the muffin tin at the time of baking. This keeps the base of
the muffins from browning too much and drying out.
2. Pre-heat the oven to 220C/425F. The muffins will
be baked at this temperature for 5 mins only, to ensure a good rise. Then turn the
oven down to 190C/375F for the rest of the time (13-15mins).
3. Line muffin tins with patty pans or grease with
butter.
4. Sift flour, baking powder and sugar into a large
bowl.
5. Mix in the chopped pistachios, except for 3
tablespoons (reserve for sprinkling on the muffins).
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| Wet and dry ready to fold in together |
6. In a medium bowl whisk together the eggs, melted
butter and milk by hand. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the
wet. Gently fold in together with as few strokes as possible, for a light
muffin.
7. Spoon the batter into each patty pan to two thirds full. Sprinkle with the
reserved pistachios.
8. Bake for 5 mins at 220C/425F. Reduce the oven temperature
to 190C/375F and bake for another 13-15 minutes.
9. Remove from the oven and
pierce all over the top of each muffin (about twelve times) with a skewer, so the muffins can soak up the rose syrup. Immediately spoon syrup onto the hot
muffins, adding more as they absorb it. Be generous!
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| Spooning the syrup over the hot muffins |
10. When they are cool enough
to handle, remove them from the tins and place on a rack. Continue to trickle
more syrup onto the muffins but reserve some syrup for serving. I made the
muffins a day ahead of serving.
Place the muffins on a platter, decorate with
rose buds or rose petals. Serve with crème fraîche and rose syrup. And a
cocktail?
Now, if the smell of roses has some adverse associations,
these muffins are not for you!
