Hints and tips:
...New Zealand was missed out and Canada was represented by five ounces of minced apple, despite the tons of wheat it was pouring into Britain....
...It’s distilled beer, just as brandy is distilled wine....
...To finish, Hunter served us the restaurant’s own bottling of Laird’s Apple Brandy with salted-chocolate pretzels....
...Wetherspoon has already swapped out French champagne for sparkling wines from UK and Australia and traded in German wheat beers for UK-made brews....
...This was an object lesson in simple, well- curated ingredients: wheat flour, butter, sugar, eggs, raisins, sultanas, currants, pear, apricot, orange, lemon, brandy, almond, vegetarian suet, nutmeg, cinnamon...
...The parson was proud of his restraint, for they had eaten no pastries, nor indeed anything made from white flour: “even the melted butter thickened with Wheat Meal”....
...The sponsor of the Elysian is an agricultural company known for its controversial innovations – such as crossing wheat with Arctic cod to make it resistant to frost....
...Within a few years anyone with access to quantities of wheat and some simple equipment was turning out gallons of cheap “white lightning” – pure (ish) alcohol....
...A bit of vine for your wine, a bit of wheat for your flour, pigs, chickens, rabbits. There was no supermarket. We go back once or twice a year, and it has changed a lot....
...A face that knows it will never see loneliness, or a bed-sitting room, or the melancholy finishing of a brandy and soda in some mouldy Pall Mall club....
...De Ferron knows her Armagnacs are good but, she says, “they are not enough to keep the estate going”; her current concerns are sunflowers and wheat – mixed farming is the norm here....
...For example, the crisis of 1847 had the railway mania, the potato disease, a wheat crop failure one year and a bumper crop the next, followed on the continent by revolution....
...Like its kin ouzo and raki, this is an aniseed-based brandy and at 30° proof it can cloud the head as rapidly as it does water once the two are mingled....
International Edition