A Single Man’s Kitchen
By Jeremy Goodwin (July 21, 2006)


Scarlet sauce and love letters

I would like to take this opportunity to share a tale of true love. Just before Christmas two years ago, we were catering parties for corporate bigwigs in Houston.

One of my coworkers was a five-foot bundle of irrepressible energy; Connie, cute, skinny and in her mid-50s, was looking for Mister Right, but at the time she was content with Mister Right Now.

She had recently bought her dream house and was decorating the bathroom walls with postcards from exotic places around the world.

She asked me if I could get my brother, who lives in the highlands of Scotland, to send her some cards for her bathroom wall. Peter was living alone in a cottage on the Bamff Estate, just outside Alyth in Perthshire. He had been married, but his wife had died a couple of years previously, leaving him adrift and unaccustomed to the social whirl. He agreed to send a couple of cards to Connie, and being unwilling to leave the back blank, wrote something witty. Whatever he wrote must have caught Connie’s attention, and she replied. Over the following 18 months, they emailed each other and exchanged the stories of their lives. For some unknown reason, they never got around to speaking on the phone. 

Two months ago, Connie landed at Edinburgh Airport, clutching in her sweaty hands a photo of the man she knew only from his prose. She was hoping it would help her identify the person with whom she was about to spend the next eight days.

At the moment that they met, the world became a better place.

They climbed hills, biked the back roads, planted a vegetable garden together, and relearned the meaning of joy.

When it came time for Connie to leave, they realized that they could not stand to live apart, and even the thought of separation hurt. Connie is back in Houston, 4,500 miles away from happiness, but she is selling her dream house, applying for a visa, and preparing to abandon her life in America.

You may have coasted through your middle years, not necessarily numb, but lacking in enthusiasm, with your emotions muted. When true love finds you after decades of absence, it is like being 19 again. Both Connie and Peter are walking around with silly grins on their faces and seem to be getting younger every day. The only fault I can find is that their happiness may remind the rest of us of what we are missing.

Thankfully Connie does not have any of the more common complications that many people adopt. She has no allergies, no aversion to strange foods, or troublesome squeamishness. It is very fortunate, because much of the food served at Bamff Estate is game—pheasant, partridge, hare and rabbit—much of which is left to age in an unheated room at the back of the cottage. It is an unfortunate fact that after a while, even the diversity of flavors offered by game may become mundane.

As the French are wont to state, the sauce is the base of the dish, and I invented this to add a little variety and a lot of color. Anybody familiar with the local markets will have seen many different types of cactus fruits for sale. The taste and texture varies, but they all have a common disadvantage—there are too many seeds. Tunas, or the prickly pear fruit, may be mild in taste, but they are seriously red. They are really suited for making a brilliant sauce that will make your most simple food seem exotic. The sauce is really simple to make and can be finished a number of different ways. The recipe above uses butter, but you can finish the sauce with heavy cream or coconut milk for different tastes. The coconut milk will give a sweet finish, the cream a sharper profile, and the butter gives a very smooth feel in the mouth.


Cactus fruit sauce

4–5 ripe cactus fruits (tunas) 1/2 cup sweet red vermouth 1 tablespoon dried thyme 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons unsalted butter (room temperature) 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper 1/4 teaspoon cayenne (or a fresh hot pepper) 1 bay leaf

Throw everything except the butter into a saucepan and bring it to a boil. If you need to, add a little water to cover the fruit. Simmer gently for about 10 minutes. Allow the fluid to cool and then strain it into a new pan. 

Bring the strained juice to a boil and cook until you have reduced the volume by about half. When the sauce begins to thicken a little, add the butter and stir it until the desired consistency is achieved, a little thinner than a classic gravy. Allow the sauce to cool for five minutes before serving.

When serving a sauce finished with butter, it is advisable to warm the plates to prevent the sauce from congealing.


Jeremy Goodwin is an author, freelance food writer and owner of The Best Kept Secret. He may be contacted at Jeremy@dcnet2000.com. He may be contacted at:jeremy@dcnet2000.com.