Christmas Breakthroughs

Ginger Rogers in Cheek to Cheek by Emily Tellwright, 2026 New Year Books I had more time than usual for reading over Christmas and New Year, mainly because I abandonned social media. Fortunately, Santa had provided me with lots of interesting things to read, and it being a time for relaxation I picked the lighter options first. If you have read my writing style page, you will not be surprised that many of these are old books, or re-publications of lost works. There is a lot to be learned about plotting, pacing and the balance between plot and character from good vintage mysteries and thrillers. I am sorry to say that I find that the literary quality of many of these superior to contemporary serious fiction. The times we live in call desperately for new stories. I strongly believe that that is true on every level, from politics and economics to light entertainment. That means that the literary but entertaining style is much more appropriate now than experimental language and forms. Engaging plots and characters expressing important feelings and ideas in lucid, readable, good quality prose are what is needed. Reviews With this in mind, I am doing a short video series reviewing my Christmas reads on our YouTube channel with a new short coming out every couple of days. I didn't enjoy all the books, but there was something to learn in every case. Here's the first one. You can subscribe to the channel to hear when new videos are available. New Year Art: More Gingers The Ginger Rogers drawings series is progressing. I am hoping to launch the Fred and Ginger products on the store in February. They have all been challenging, and today's image had pressures of its own being by far her most famous outfit ever. You probably know that if you slow the Cheek to Cheek dance sequence (from which this post is taken) down you can see feathers floating off the dress and getting in Fred Astaire's face. Feathers The feathers are not too difficult to capture, but the pose and proportions need to be just right or she morphs from the epitome of 1930s elegance to a dumpy cloud! Finding contrast and definition in a large block of white is difficult, and I am pleased with the result. One of the things I have noticed while working on these drawings is how the movement of the long skirts closely alligns with her legs underneath, even in this very fluffy example. If you follow the line of her left leg up from her shoe, you will see that it is also the line of the shadow in the skirt. I had expected the dresses to have more independent movement. And that's a note of caution for modern digital photographers. When you draw something complex, you have to spend a lot of time looking at what is really there in front of you. You find that often reality is not what you expect. When I trained in Affinity Photo, I was shocked at the degree to which digital photgraphic processing involved taking an image and then altering it to fit some fashionable fantasy that had nothing to do with what had been in front of the camera lens. History of Feathers The original dress is now in a museum (if anyone knows which one, do put it in the comments). A staff member at a feather processor developed a technique for straightening the feathers to give this elegant, drapey effect. She guarded the secret and never passed it on, and no one has managed to recreate it. So this dress is unique. New Year Books and Art It's been a turbulant start to 2026 for JB and myself at Castle Sefton Press with family and financial challenges. (We are both fine now, so please don't worry). And as ever I seem to be behind where I'd hoped to be. However, we both have new projects under way. I have almost left social media altogether, having previously written about my problems with Meta. Much as I enjoy making short-form videos for TikTok, I have not managed to find anyone interested in my style of reading and writing after four months. I think this is an image problem of the platform. There is no reason why people with those tastes shouldn't be on TikTok, but they probably have a negative idea of what it is like and think it is not for them. So I'm not sure that there is much value in my trying to keep up with the relentless demands of the algorithm. I also think that there are worrying signs that TikTok UK is moving in the direction of Facebook. Less content is being shown to followers and there are more prompts for payment. Whether this has anything to do with the US takeover, I couldn't say. Perhaps all social platforms self-destruct from greed and control when they get big enough. I'm developing a presence on Pinterest and YouTube instead. New Book I have a title for my new novel, which I hope will be the first in a series. I'm planning to sit down and get the first words onto paper in the second week of February. I'll let you know if that happens. It's forming as something deeper and more serious than Ghost Train in my head. But I expect there will be a fair amount of humour when it emerges onto the page. New Art As well as the Fred and Ginger series, I have an abstract series that will be launched around Easter. Over summer I'm hoping to extend my range of animal art and add it to a greater range of products. I had thought of adding some of our range to Etsy, but the fees are now eye-watering. And like TikTok Shop, it is stuffed with what I can only describe as tat being sold at prices that don't even cover the cost of the materials that formed it. Sometimes I feel that launching an online store today feels like opening a shop in Pompeii just as Vesuvius started to erupt: the infrastructure on which you have placed your business is collapsing around you. Thanks So that makes supporters like you more valuable than ever. Thanks once again for reading this post, and do subscribe if you haven't already. I will never send spam or share your details, and you can unsubscribe at any time. If you like videos, consider subscribing to our YouTube channel too, and perhaps visit Castle Sefton Press. Sharing is helpful too, but only with those you think would enjoy my work. I'll be back soon. Hopefully with the finished Fred and Ginger series and news on the start of the new book.

Featured Image for Enshittification and Exhaustion: The Continental December News You might have been expecting something a bit more festive from me than a post about December news. Don't worry, I promised two blog posts in December, and the second one will be seasonal and celebratory. Today I'll be bringing you up to date with recent developments in my author, artist and publisher life. And refreshing the blog with a change of emphasis. Recent Developments Marketing In October, I finally began marketing Castle Sefton Press. There had been some book marketing before then, but nothing on the art side of the business at all. Very few people knew it existed! And I was about five months behind in getting started. We had a few strange setbacks in setting up the Castle Sefton Press store. That meant there were a lot of delays in launching. In addition, I was learning the whole process of WordPress and WooCommerce as I went along, which meant that some times I had to go back and make changes. By the time we were ready for marketing, my work rate was slowing down. I think I am a reasonably good learner, but when I came to learn the various social platforms – not being a natural user of social media – I was struggling because my mind hadn't fully processed all the previous year's new information. I had already learnt so many new technical skills in that time. Marketing is also a difficult subject because there is far too much information available. Most of it is poor quality and a lot of it expensive. So simply finding good, clear learning material on how and where to start can be very time-consuming and involve multiple false-starts. And you are chasing a moving target, because all the platforms and their algorithms are changing all the time and the pace of that seems to be accelerating. Meta As I was embarking on this final process in getting the art and book business off the ground, Facebook changed its algorithm completely. That included the way Meta advertising works. (Meta owns Facebook and Instagram along with other platforms that I don't use such as Threads and WhatsApp). This was a great blow as not only was it more to learn but there was uncertainty as to whether Facebook ads, which had been planned to be our primary paid marketing, would work at all for us any more. In fact, after a stressful few weeks I have abandoned Meta. (I still make an occasional Facebook post for our small group of followers). As a business, Meta was suggesting adding content on average nearly three times a day across Facebook and Instagram in return for 'reaching' about 40 people. Our existing followers were not being shown our posts. There were bugs in our business portfolio that were going to cause issues with advertisements. There is no technical support available, not even a robot. I had begun on Instagram getting a hundred or so views on a post. By the time I stopped, I was getting around five views per post. The algorithm seemed to be punishing me for not adhering to its posting demands or paying for adverts. I decided enough was enough. I don't mind working to build a following, but this is no longer an option on Meta. You are participating in a control game designed to force you to comply and spend. Enshittification The collapse of Facebook as a platform with any real use or purpose is a good example of the process described by Cory Doctorow in his book, Enshittification. Through greed and stupidity, the internet is destroying itself. One example he gives of this is AI search results. AI produces search results by crawling other articles on relevant topics, and these are then shown at the top of the search results. This means that you are most likely to click on the AI results rather than on the articles with the original information. But many of the sites hosting those articles depend on clicks and the corresponding advertising or purchases to survive. They are starting to disappear as the AI search results that have used their information take their traffic. So the range of information available for AI to crawl is reducing and hence so is the quality of its output. Amazon Amazon is another great example of the degradation of online platforms. For all its many ethical issues, Amazon still functions fairly well as a bookshop. I'm not saying that I recommend it as a bookshop – I certainly don't – but in most cases you can still find and buy the book you want on there with few problems. And I don't believe that it is the only villain behind the demise of bookshops. (You will be able to read more about this on the blog as soon as I get round to writing the article!) But Amazon has destroyed many other kinds of shops and producers, particularly in technology and electronics. If you try to find a small item of electronic kit – a small microphone, say – you may never get beyond the hundreds of Amazon results, peppered with those of eBay and other massive shopping platforms. Most of the products look similar and have indistinguishable reviews. Indeed, they probably are all the same mass-produced rubbish. If there are genuine products in those pages of search results, you will never be able to find them. Anyway, the chances are that the genuine sellers and manufacturers have been driven out of business by a combination of Amazon's aggressive charges and proliferation of cheap, fake products. New plans All this means that it's more difficult for a small online product business to get established than it has been for a long time. I have new plans for December onwards, but it means growth will be slower than expected and there will be even more work, trial and error involved. It is a tremendous relief to be free from dependence on Meta, though. New Plans for December Onwards Alternative Platforms Pinterest I have hopes of Pinterest as a long-term growth platform for Castle Sefton Press. I have some good resources to help me start building our profile there. One of the other difficulties of starting the marketing late has been that I was beginning in the run up to Christmas, and the special demands of that season have got in the way. I have learned a lot to prepare me for this time next year, but it's meant that I haven't got far with Pinterest yet. TikTok and YouTube I'm now active on TikTok making short videos. Actually, they are not always that short, being up to ten minutes in length. I'm not sure how effective this will be for the business, but I enjoy it and unlike Meta, TikTok gives you reasonable exposure with no conditions at all. I am also adding all the video content to YouTube, and I'll be improving the quality of our channel there over the next month. Other Options Alternative social media platforms, shopping platforms like Etsy, in-person events and collaborations are some of the options available that I'll be considering. I will be trying to get our books into some libraries. Bookshops remain largely a hostile environment for us. If you buy your books mostly from physical bookshops, it's worth remembering that they only stock the most mainstream works, and that there is a vast range of books available that they never consider, ours included. (There are exceptions of course, but this is still generally true). New Creative Work Art We already have a lot of new art products planned for 2026. This will include the Fred and Ginger Collection, one of which is the featured art for today's post. John Blake has been developing some fun and creative ideas in the run up to Christmas and we are hoping to add those as product ranges too. I plan to concentrate more on painting for my regular art practice immediately after Christmas. So more colourful images will be coming your way. Books I am determined to begin my next book in January, and it may be part of a series. Beginning is always difficult, but once I start I am generally a reasonably fast worker. It would be nice if it could be published before the end of 2026, but that is probably optimistic. However, now the business is established I hope to carry on writing and keep producing books without the long break there has been since Ghost Train. A Change of Emphasis I see the future of this blog as being more focussed on the process of my work. That will include writing, once I've started again, art and the business. I want to outline some of the reasons behind the change. A Consequence of TikTok Videos Making short videos means that I am chatting about the random ideas in my head into the camera, rather than writing them on this blog. I have never felt lost for words or ideas, but this month I found that all the current themes I would have written about here had been spent in videos. You can watch all the videos on our YouTube channel, where I am currently chatting about gift wrapping and books. A Consequence of Marketing Castle Sefton Press is a marketing nightmare. We produce fiction and art, and there are two of us but only I appear in the publicity. Given that focus and consistency are the two main requirements for any marketing programme, most advisors would tell us to restructure our business. Perhaps into separate businesses. I am strongly in favour of keeping it as one, because my original vision was of a complete creative business. John Blake and I have both been musicians, writers and artists and in the course of those experiences we've both met and worked with many very talented creative people. In every branch of creativity you find those for whom that is their whole world. All those authors who insist you must write every day, for example, and musicians and artists whose every waking breath is centred around music or art. It's never been like that for either of us. Since a child, I have always been widely creative: writing prose and poetry, music, visual art, dance, cookery, gardening, home decor and design, knitting, embroidery and more. Neither of us writes or produces artwork every day, but we are creative every day even if only in simple domestic or business tasks. Creative Business The way forward with presenting our business is to focus on this approach and diversity. And that will require some creativity from me! There's no guarantee of success of course, but I'm happy to carry on anyway. It's very hard to get anything unusual and outside current trends noticed at all, though of course if something different does get noticed it will often take off. I feel that if I make the focus of this blog part of that new approach, it can support me in doing this. Consequences of Writing I haven't been in the process of writing a book since I started this blog, because I have been busy setting up the Castle Sefton Press business. Once I am writing again, the blog is bound to have more about the writing process and an author's life. (That doesn't mean there will be no more recipes and food talk!). December News: Starting as I Mean to Go On Latest Art Ginger No 2 Today's featured artwork is the second Ginger in my collection of six Ginger Rogers poses taken from dance sequences in the films she made with Fred Astaire. Charcoal and chalk seemed to me the perfect media to capture these active black-and-white images, and so far I am pleased with the results. Resemblance The most difficult part is capturing a vague resemblance. The source images are blurred, being stills taken from digital reproductions of 1930s films (which have not always been well restored, depending on which film in the canon it is). The drawings are quite small – around A4 size – and this makes getting exact detail with charcoal challenging. Fred Astaire has a very idiosyncratic head shape, and once that is mastered, he becomes recognisable. Ginger is far more difficult. She has distinctive features, but they are masked by prominent make-up which changes as the fashions progress through the films. In this pose, the shadows cast by the powerful studio lights leave only her heavy eye make-up visible. In the previous drawing, last month's featured image, a different and thought-provoking issue of resemblance came to light. Ginger, as a major Hollywood star, was generally photographed and filmed, in more static scenes, from particular angles which were thought to favour her. When you take a still from a dance like this, you can end up with a view of her face that is very unfamiliar. And that is just what has happened in last month's drawing. It is a fair representation of the shot, but not instantly Ginger-like, because you are simply not used to seeing her features stretched in profile. Distinctive Pose One of the things I have found about drawing Ginger that is very distinctive, and that I had never noticed until I began drawing her, is the way she combines perfect stillness and movement in one pose. Both the poses so far show this beautifully. I think I have managed here to portray the perfect, motionless poise of her right side, while her left is still active. In the previous drawing, her upper body is statuesque while her feet are still alive. At first I thought that this was just the effect of her dresses – they keep moving after she has stopped – and they certainly accentuate it. But I have decided that it is definitely a feature of her dancing. It's actually quite different to Fred Astaire. You can take a still at any point of Fred's dancing – I have done quite a few! – and he appears perfectly still and poised throughout his body. Quite astonishingly, he seems to move smoothly through an infinite series of perfect poses when he dances. Like a living animation. Thoughts turning Christmas Lumpy and uneven. The real December news is that I have just been putting the almond icing on the Christmas cake. Very badly! Like so many tasks that you only do at long intervals, just when you think you have finally mastered it (last year I did it perfectly), you have a lapse. Happily, it will still taste good. I am also about to write Christmas cards having finished this year's seasonal art work. You will be seeing it in progress in the next post as it marks some interesting technical developments in my painting. And there will be December news of a different kind, with plans of all kinds for the new year. So until then, I hope you are enjoying the season and not finding it too tiring or stressful. Or making too much of a hash of your icing!

Ginger No 1: Let's Face the Music and Dance, by Emily Tellwright, 2025 Comfort Food It's November. According to the Met Office we have actually lost about two hours of daylight during October! Which perhaps explains why we often feel in need of comfort at this time of year, even though January and February are usually so much colder and bleaker. And looking at the state of the world, I think we all feel the need of it anyway. Can we find some comfort in our food? Different comfort foods for different people In Food, Culture and Identity I mentioned the recipe for pasta with simple tomato sauce that Zeno might have given to Clyde when he was shocked and tipsy (Ghost Train, p.82 for paperback readers). That's a good example of what I would call comfort food: something fairly simple and mildly savoury that lines your stomach and nourishes you; something that puts no strain on your digestion or tastebuds and that you can almost always get down however you're feeling; something that leaves you feeling satisfied and somehow reassured. Comforted, in fact. I also gave an example of a culture whose identity had been shaped by a food myth. I expect our ideas of what makes comfort food varies according to our culture and identity. For example, people from South Asia might well be soothed by something with plenty of chilli, but much as I like it, I would never choose it as comfort food. Chicken soup inspired by a traditional Jewish recipe is widely recognised as comfort food, but this particular recipe would never be my choice. I doubt whether I could feel comforted by eating something that I knew had used up a large proportion of the weekly shopping budget on its own! Good chickens are expensive, so for me chicken soup will always be something that happens to bones and leftovers. I'm including a recipe for my own comforting, silky, savoury cream of chicken soup. It's very economical too. Ultra-processed junk Unfortunately, many of us now turn for satisfaction to ultra-processed foods which are formulated to give us combinations of refined fats and sugars that are highly addictive. I'm not blaming consumers for this, as there are a plethora of reasons mostly beyond their control which cause them to do this. These products are not food and shouldn't be on shop shelves packaged and labelled as such any more than methylated spirits or cardboard. Satisfying cravings and feeding a voracious addiction, which is what many of these products create when regularly consumed, is not the same as comfort. Implicit in comfort are elements of nurturing and wellbeing. Ultra-processed foods do not bring health or even nourishment. They make you unwell and dissatisfied in order to make vast profits for huge corporations. Obviously, I'm not here to provide dietary or health advice. But I can bring hope. I suffered from food addictions and digestive issues quite seriously earlier in my life, but I am completely recovered. It's not a matter of resisting temptation for me. My body no longer recognises ultra-processed junk as food, and I would no more put it in my mouth than I would methylated spirits or cardboard. So if you've been sucked in by this stuff and feel it's ruined your health, take heart. You can get over it and still love and enjoy real food. My Comfort Foods The pasta with simple tomato sauce topped with some grated cheddar cheese would certainly be one of my comfort foods. There is something comforting about tinned tomatoes and cheddar cheese seems to feature in most of my choices. In addition, this is a dish that fellow Castle Sefton Press author, my partner John Blake, cooks very well. He's not much of a cook, so this pasta has the added benefit of being an enjoyable hot meal that I haven't had to cook myself. We always have the ingredients in the house, and it costs very little, all of which adds to its relaxing qualities. Salad I'm still vaguely surprised when I see a recipe for salad. Now many of these are delicious and some of them are classics. But I rarely make them. It doesn't enter my head, because somewhere in my consciousness the meaning of 'salad' has been fixed for a long time. Cookery writer Madhur Jaffrey often gives her recipe for 'Salaad' that appeared on their table at home for every meal. It always contained tomatoes, cucumber and onion and they 'ate it with everything.' (Curry Easy, p. 231). We didn't eat our standard salad with everything, although I've always loved it and probably would have if given the chance. But it did have standard ingredients, the most essential being lettuce. Lettuce as a comfort food "What?" I can hear you saying. Well, it's true. I love lettuce. It's soft and crunchy, sweet and bitter, very refreshing and a natural receptacle for a dressing. It's very good for us but does contain a drug with mild sedative, analgesic and euphoric properties. Perhaps I am a food addict after all! It was these properties of lettuce that Beatrix Potter was thinking of when Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny fall asleep after gorging on Mr McGregor's bolted lettuces in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The recipe My comfort food: salad So, to make what passes as 'salad' in my head, you need a large bowl, some lettuce, salt, pepper, vinegar and some salad servers or tongs. Wash and dry your lettuce, break or tear it into bite-sized pieces and put it into the bowl. Now you add whatever suitable vegetables you have in the fridge, cut into bite-sized pieces, aiming for a variety of colour and no more than say seven varieties in total. One of them needs to be some kind of onion – red, white, shallot and spring onion are all good. Cucumber is always in there for me, but after that the other vegetables could be tomatoes, peppers of any colour, radishes, grated carrot, cooked beetroot, celery, fennel, apple, kiwi fruit or kohlrabi. You could add some sprouted seeds, mange-tout, french beans or even tinned sweetcorn but it's starting to become something less recognisable at that point. The dressing A colourful version of 'salad' with beetroot The standard here is 3 parts extra virgin olive oil to 1 part cider vinegar with a good pinch of English mustard whisked together. I prefer to season the salad with salt and pepper rather than add it to the dressing. Sometimes I might add extra vinegar or a little sugar. My mother used to serve this salad with hot roast chicken and curried rice with sultanas and flaked almonds. It's a delicious combination that favours the extra vinegar and sugar dressing. If you are eating the salad with plain meat or fish – it's particularly good with grilled trout or steak, if you can afford such things – you can replace the oil dressing with a little mayonnaise thinned with a drop of vinegar. Staple Accompaniments If I had to choose between bread and potatoes, it would be potatoes every time. To turn this salad into my ultimate comfort food, it needs to be served with potatoes of some kind. Chips are good, as are jacket potatoes, but for maximum satisfaction and comfort I require either boiled new potatoes or mash, depending on the season, with butter and grated cheddar cheese. The sweet solidity of the potatoes, the richness of the butter and savouriness of the cheese mixed with the diverse crunches of the salad and the sharpness of the vinegar make this something I could eat day after day. I sometimes have! Comfort food in action We both had COVID right at the beginning of the pandemic when England had just gone into lockdown. I was not in great health at the time, and other circumstances made it a particularly stressful situation. I lost my appetite completely for the first few days. The first sign of recovery was when I started to eat again, and the first thing I had was 'salad' with potatoes and a tiny piece of steak. I went on to eat that every day until I was better, and it really felt as if it was feeding me back to health. Divine Cream of Chicken Soup There is a fashion now for calling things the 'ultimate' version, and this is perhaps what I am intending for cream of chicken soup here. But ultimate sounds much too active and aggressive for this most elegant and gentle of comfort foods. I once saw an Escoffier recipe for duck soup which I can no longer find. (If you have a resource for this, or know that I have misremembered, please let me know in the comments). Escoffier boiled whole ducks for days and then creamed and sieved them, bones and all. Now I am not going to those lengths, but that kind of condensed, concentrated flavour is what I'm looking for. You might call it 'essence of roast chicken'. I think of it as the real flavour that roast chicken flavour crisps are trying to mimic by artificial means. Mysteriously Unfashionable Judging by the number of cans of cream of chicken soup on the supermarket shelves, people still like it. And yet I couldn't find a good recipe online. Those there are have too many ingredients. They distract and disguise the roast chicken flavour that is the essence of the dish. And as for a velouté, such an unfashionable thing is never mentioned. But you will never get a silky soup that caresses your spoon without it. And that bit of flour in the velouté is what allows you to make a thick, satisfying soup with a powerful flavour using very little meat. I'm a great believer in Fanny Cradock's advice to buy the best food you can afford and treat it with enormous respect. Here we are doing that by extracting every last drop of flavour and nutrition from our chicken. [Video to be replaced – original file was hosted on WordPress and needs re-uploading to Shopify Files.] Three recipes in one So you have eaten all your roast chicken and are left with the bones with some bits clinging to them and perhaps the giblets, some bits of skin or some leftover roasting pan juices. That's all the chicken you need for this. And you don't just get soup. You can pour this soup into small cups or moulds, chill it and turn it out as terrines to eat with toast and salad. Or you can spread the cold soup, which will have a smooth, lightly jellied texture, on sandwiches as chicken paste. It's also extremely good for you, being essentially bone stock. So it's delicious, versatile, cheap and healthy! On the other hand, it is a bit of a fiddle to make. But you can spread the process over two days, or even freeze the stock and meat before blending and reducing to complete the recipe when you have time. You can also freeze the cooked chicken carcass if you haven't time to do any of it when you have the leftovers to hand. The Recipe I have used a pressure cooker for the stock. As well as saving time and fuel, pressure cookers make the best stock, stews, dal and dried beans. They are also excellent for stewed fruit, cooked beetroot, risotto, pot roasts and many other dishes. I encourage you to invest in one. If you cook, you won't regret it. But I have included instructions for making the soup in an ordinary pan for those who don't have one. Don't be tempted to skip the sieving. You will never get the smooth texture without it and you might end up with shards of bone in your soup. As long as you use a metal sieve it's a lot easier than you might think. And don't leave out the mace. It's the one essential flavouring here that is going to bring out the chickeniness. Eat your soup safely. It is quite safe to reheat it providing that it has been stored in the fridge and thoroughly heated through but I wouldn't reheat it more than once. And always cover the surface of any waiting or stored soup with a piece of baking parchment to stop a skin forming. Equipment Pressure cooker Wire sieve Large jug Plates or wide bowls Medium saucepan Stick blender or liquidiser Wooden spoon Metal spoons Flat whisk Scales Baking parchment Ingredients 1 roast chicken carcass 1 small onion, peeled and halved 1 carrot, peeled or scrubbed and halved 1 stick of celery, halved 1 blade of mace 1 bay leaf 3 oz butter (or the chicken fat made up to 3 oz with butter) 3 oz plain flour 3½ fl oz double cream (or 6 tablespoons) Salt Black pepper Water Method Put the chicken carcass with any loose bones and giblets into the pressure cooker or large pan. Add the vegetables, bay leaf and mace. Press everything down firmly with your hand. Add cold water until the carcass is just covered. Put the lid on the pressure cooker, bring to high pressure and cook for one hour. If using the pan, cover and bring to the boil then simmer on as low a heat as possible for two-and-a-half hours. Let the pressure drop naturally, and then open the cooker and strain the contents into the sieve over the jug. Tip the solid contents into one of the plates or bowls. Cover the liquid and let both liquids and solids cool. The liquid can be refrigerated as soon as it is cool enough. Before the solids get too cold, strip the meat from the remains into the other clean plate or bowl. Make sure you get every last bit! Discard the remains, including the vegetables and spices, and refrigerate the meat. Once the liquid is cool enough for the fat to have solidified on top, you can carry on. This will take some hours so you could leave it overnight. Remove the stock and the meat from the fridge. Skim the solidified fat from the top of the stock. You can use this for the roux later, or freeze it to make superb roast potatoes in the future. Put the stock into the medium saucepan. Put the meat into the jug or the liquidiser and add a few tablespoons of the stock so that it will blend. Now put the stock on a high heat and boil it hard to reduce it. Meanwhile, blend the meat to a paste. Remove the paste to a clean bowl or plate. Set up the sieve over the jug and then rub the paste through the sieve with the metal spoon. Don't forget to scrape the underneath of the sieve with another, clean, metal spoon. Once sieved, add the meat paste to the boiling stock and continue to boil and reduce the whole down until you have 2 pints or just under. If you go too far, just top up to 2 pints with water. Add the cream to the stock and leave it all in the jug. Now make your roux for the velouté. Wipe out the saucepan. Melt the butter, or chicken fat and butter, and then using the flat whisk, mix in the flour until smooth and cook the mixture gently for a minute or two. Add the hot stock mixture, ladleful by ladleful, whisking to keep the mixture smooth and keeping the heat low. Once it is all added, switch to the wooden spoon and keep stirring and raise the heat to medium. Soon the soup should develop a silken texture and be just thick enough to coat the back of your spoon. Check the seasoning and add salt as needed. Add just a turn of black pepper – you don't want it to mask the chicken flavour. Now let the soup simmer for a few minutes to cook the flour and then it is ready to eat! Note: Don't forget to cover the surface of any uneaten soup with baking parchment to prevent a skin from forming. Digression into family history The Staffordshire Oatcake My final comfort food is the Staffordshire oatcake, a cross between a pancake and a flatbread that is made with a yeasted batter of wheat and oat flours. I've never met anyone who didn't like them, and why they haven't spread countrywide like other regional British foods I don't know. Certainly, most local people have to leave room in their luggage for quantities of oatcakes whenever they visit family in other parts of the country. I don't know why they don't make an appearance in Ghost Train either. I expect as a non-local, Clyde was yet to discover them. I'm sure he'll like them when he does. Staffordshire Oatcakes These days, oatcakes are almost always eaten with cheese. For my father, though, who was born in 1922, they were more of a general staple. He would eat them with bacon, sausage, cheese, eggs, chops, steak or butter and jam in the same way we would bread. History The oatcake has an interesting history, and there is an excellent book about it, which also contains recipes to make your own oatcakes if you can't buy them where you live. JB has been making his own since COVID. The cooking takes a bit of practice, and is much assisted by having a proper iron griddle. You can also read a quick précis of its history in this excellent article by Jenna Goodwin, where you also have the opportunity to download a free book of (rather eccentric!) oatcake recipes. Jenna mentions that oatcake making in The Potteries (as Stoke-on-Trent used to be called) 'was often a cottage industry, with elderly widows making dozens of oatcakes daily on an iron bakestone to earn a living'. (Bakestone is pronounced 'backstun.') Some of my family were doing just that. All the Emilys All the Emilys. Clockwise from the top: Emily Mountford, Emily Platt, Emily Booth. There seems to have been a tradition in my mother's family to call the eldest daughter Emily, and here we have my grandmother Emily Mountford with her mother and grandmother. All the Emilys were renowned cooks, with visitors always dropping in on baking day. I believe it was great, great-grandmother Emily Booth who was making the oatcakes to sell from home, but I'm not entirely sure. Whoever it was, as a girl grandmother Emily Mountford was sent to the brewery to get the yeast for the oatcake making. Barmy Oatcakes This is very interesting, although it didn't occur to me why for a long time! We know where the grandmothers lived, and we know where the brewery was (Parkers in Burslem). There would have been several bakers nearer than the brewery in those days where bakers' yeast could be bought. And there were some very posh bakeries about the same distance away as Parkers. So why go to the brewery? You would get your yeast from the brewery if you were baking with the ancient British method of ale-barm. From pre-Roman times, bread in Britain was leavened using the yeasty froth that formed on the wort when ale was brewing. In southern Europe, sourdough was the traditional method. The clue is in the name, and ale-barm bread was sweet rather than sour. Sourdough must have been much more difficult in cool, damp north-western Europe, and ale brewing was commonplace in Britain. The ale-barm method would particularly lend itself to a batter such as used for oatcakes. So I'm fairly sure that my family were making their Staffordshire oatcakes with ale-barm. Which makes them one of the last surviving uses of this very old technique. Making oatcakes today Sadly, I don't have the family recipe for oatcakes. Can we try to recreate the ale-barm flavour? I've never had the chance to try, and I would need to do some research and trials too. What I do recommend is Bioreal Yeast which contains strains of natural yeasts and lactic acid bacteria grown on organic grain. You can read a bit more about its advantages in this blog post from Shipton Mill. I wish I could share some with you. But do look out for Staffordshire oatcakes and try them if you get chance. You'll always be looking out for them after that! And may your food and this blog bring you some cheer and comfort in the darkest of days.