You know it’s going to be good when the invitation to the party includes the phrase “I got these pills off a couple of Dutch blokes…”

No, it’s all perfectly legal (though the pills had to ordered online)! And it’s called Miraculin.

If you haven’t heard of Miracle Fruit before, it’s the berry of a West African plant first documented back in 1725 (though already well known to the locals). It binds to the sour and bitter tastebuds and stops them functioning for a short period of time (from experience about 15 minutes). This makes lemons and limes some of the delicious fruit imaginable. Well, until it wears off.

Vinegar was delicious too, as was sour dough bread, unsweetened yoghurt and feta cheese. Cheap strawberries were divine, but bitter chocolate was a little disappointing, since the removal of bitterness left it bereft of favour. It’s easy to forget, when devouring lemonade-flavour lemons that you’re not gaining sweetness, just removing sourness. Everyone develops a rather Cookie Monster-esque attitude to eating, grabbing food with crumbs flying everywhere and peel piling up rapidly. If you don’t get your whole mouth thoroughly coated you’ll find an odd spot where everything still tastes like normal, resulting in pulled faces, and it wears off a little strangely.

The pills were about a pound a piece, which is expensive for fifteen minutes of gorging yourself, and you risk pretty bad indigestion (and massive acid erosion on your teeth!) but it’s an absolutely brilliant experience. I completely recommend it, especially for dinner parties. It’s hilariously good fun.

And now, onto something that requires no help to be sweet: ice-cream. I’m going to start with the traditional flavours this week; Chocolate and Vanilla.

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I’m thinking of renaming these posts “Weekend Recipes” since I seem far more likely to post them on a Sunday as I am a Friday. Any thoughts?

Anyway, though you wouldn’t know it looking at the weather (or perhaps you would; you don’t get rain like this at any other time of year) but it’s summer. And summer means ice-cream!

I’ll be doing ice-cream recipes for July and August, taken mostly from The Book of Ices, 1885, by Mrs Marshall. She was the Mrs Beeton of ice-cream, patenting her own ice-cream maker and putting ice-cream in an edible cone for the first time.

Ice-cream (well, sorbet) was first eaten in Britain by Charles II, though it was so expensive he was one of the only people at the feast to actually get a taste. Frozen fruit ices were already well-known in China, and made their way over with a whole bunch of other Chinese imports like tea. By the reign of Queen Anne ice-cream was a popular court dish, though it didn’t become readily available to the average Briton until late in the 19th Century, when ice became easier to come by. Italian ice-cream merchants used to sell “penny licks” – a scoop of ice-cream in a glass, that the purchaser would lick up in one mouthful, and return the glass to the merchant – but these disappeared in the Edwardian period when they were linked to the spread of TB (quite accurately so!). Luckily, thanks to pioneers like Mrs Marshall the ice-cream cone was on its way into fashion, providing us with TB-free ice-cream for decades to come!

Victorian ice-creams were usually based on custard, making them rich, sweet, and eggy. And very, very indulgent! For the first post, I’ll detail how to make the custard bases, and how to make ice-cream without recourse to ice-cream maker or even a freezer (well, not strictly). After all, we’ve been making ice-cream since long before that little device, as I explain later.

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