Speculoos ice cream

Sunday, that means roast.  The Old Bat and I are traditionalists as far as Sunday dinner is concerned and we always have a roast.  And if the meat is beef, then there has to be Yorkshire pudding.  Chicken (or, very occasionally, turkey) is always accompanied by chestnut stuffing.  Gammon is glazed with honey and mustard, while lamb - which we had last week - is cooked with rosemary and garlic and served (for me) with mint sauce.  I suspect that today's meat is to be pork.  The Old Bat always has apple sauce with hers, but I have never much liked stewed apples so I pass on that.

We ate apples last night - in a crumble.  I have always thought of apple crumble as an English dish but it has now been discovered by the French and I have seen it on the menu in a number of restaurants over there, although they usually serve it as a form of tart or flan.  And I have never seen an apple pie in France.  Come to that, I don't recall ever seeing any sort of pie.  Except in the supermarket in Pouancé.  There they have a small section devoted to English foods, much as English supermarkets have a section for Polish food.  The English food stocked by Super U (the Pouancé supermarket) includes Heinz baked beans, Colman's English mustard, Cooper's Oxford marmalade - and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies.

The commonest apple dessert served in French restaurants is tarte Tatin, but what is served up is rarely what I know as tarte Tatin.  Usually what we get is an apple flan.  But during the last six months or so there has been a revolution in France.  Desserts - such as tarte Tatin - have generally been served with piles of Chantilly, the sort of whipped cream served from an aerosol can.  For many years that was the only cream sold in France but about three years ago pouring cream started to appear in the shops and this is now quite widely available.

But that is not the revolution I'm talking about.  It was towards the end of last year that we were served with tarte Tatin accompanied by ice cream.  One might have expected the ice cream flavour to be vanilla, but no - it was ginger (speculoos in French).  And it went surprisingly well with the apple.  So well, in fact, that the Old Bat decided to adopt the practice.  Well, we were quite unable to find ginger ice cream in any English supermarkets so we looked in France.  The first couple of stores didn't have it, but we did track some down and there is now a tub in our freezer.  We had some last night with the apple crumble - and I highly recommend it.

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Just outside the town of Lewes (that's pronounced almost the same as Lewis - two syllables) is Mount Caburn, an outlier of the South Downs.  This is a popular spot for hang-gliders, as it was when I drove past last Wednesday.