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Recipe: the best pistachio ice cream

This pistachio ice cream is mouth wateringly good. The recipe is from The River Cafe Classic Italian Cook Book, a cook book we cherish, and the only change we’ve made is to roast the pistachios first, as we think this gives the ice cream an even deeper, richer flavour. This recipe will seem extravagant – ten eggs! – but it makes a lot and keeps really well, at least in theory. Ours always gets eaten quickly because everyone loves it so much. This is the recipe we are asked for more frequently than any other, and now that it’s hot again, it’s time to make another batch.

Note: you can’t make this ice cream without a food processor to pulse-chop the pistachios as they must be chopped very, very finely. A food mixer will also make it easier to beat the egg yolks and sugar together, but you can do this using an electric whisk, or if you’ve got a lot of muscle, by hand.

Here it is:

Serves 10 (at the very, very least)

200g unsalted shelled pistachios
400g caster sugar, plus an extra 80g
700ml full-fat milk
300ml double cream
10 large free-range organic eggs, yolks only (freeze the whites in a couple of batches and use them for meringues)

Roast the pistachios by putting them into a dry frying pan over a medium to low heat. Watch them carefully and shake the pan so that the pistachios brown very lightly on all sides. Don’t let them burn.

Put the roasted pistachios into a food processor with 80g of sugar and pulse-chop them as finely as possible.

In a thick-bottomed pan, heat the milk and cream to just below boiling point (you will see bubbles beginning to form at the very edges of the pan). Remove from the heat.

Put the egg yolks and 400g of sugar into the bowl of an electric mixer and beat for about 8 minutes, until pale and thick and doubled in volume. Wash the thick-bottomed pan (this is to remove any milk residue that might be a bit scorched).

Add the warm milk and cream to the egg and sugar mix, beating on the lowest speed.

Return this custard mixture to the clean thick-bottomed pan and cook slowly over a very gentle heat until it coats the back of a spoon; this will take at least 15 boring but worth it minutes.

Remove the custard from the heat, stir in the pistachio paste, and then pour and rub the whole thing through a fine sieve into a bowl.

Leave to cool, then churn in an ice cream machine in two batches until frozen. If you don’t have an ice cream maker, put it into the freezer in a shallow container and stir it every fifteen minutes with a fork until frozen and creamy in consistency.

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Book: Dan Pearson’s Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City

If you read gardener and landscape designer Dan Pearson’s column in The Observer, you’ll know that he recently bought a small holding in the West Country, so leaving behind his jewel-like garden in Peckham Rye. Being London gardeners ourselves, we miss the stories from the Peckham garden, with its bamboo hedge and hornbeam, its raised vegetable beds and white wisteria, and so we are thrilled with Pearson’s latest and most personal book: Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City.

Part memoir, part practical manual and part seasonal diary – a bit like a gardening version of Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries – it’s a good read full of inspirational ideas as well as Pearson’s brilliantly reliable garden knowledge and practical tips. It’s illustrated throughout by Howard Sooley’s gorgeous photographs, though we wish there were more, particularly of the many individual plants Pearson name-checks.

Read it from cover to cover for full pleasure and to find lots of ideas (no one combines plants and colours quite like Pearson), or else pick specific subjects that you want to know more about – late-flowering bulbs, say, or potting-on – and dip in and out of the book, which is easy to do as each seasonal chapter is divided into useful short sub-sections with clear headings.

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Recipe: make elderflower fizz

Every London park is bursting with elder right now, and because the plant is a weed and an abundant one at that, it’s fine to help yourself. It’s the white frothy flower you see growing on a tree rather than a bush. If you are in any doubt, smell it and you’ll recognise its distinctive scent.

Here is 80-something cook and forager Pamela Michael’s wonderful recipe for this delicious, grapey, flowery drink.

Elderflower Fizz:

  • 12 large elderflower heads
  • 2 large, unwaxed lemons
  • 450g sugar
  • 4 litres of water
  • 3 tablespoons of white wine vinegar

Shake off any insects from the elderflowers and snip away the stalks.

Pare the rind from the lemons and squeeze out the juice and put both into a very large bowl or clean bucket. Add the elderflowers. (Note: the photograph above is of a batch we made using a slightly different recipe, which called for sliced lemons. But this recipe, also by Pamela Michael, using the juice and pared rind instead, makes the more superior fizz).

Add the sugar, water and wine vinegar and stir till the sugar has dissolved.

Cover the bucket or bowl with a lid or clingfilm to exclude the air. Leave for 24 hours.

After the 24 hours is up, strain into a jug and pour the liquid into clean dry bottles with good lids. Fill to within 5cm of the top and screw the caps on tightly.

You can drink it immediately, but the longer you leave it, the fizzier it will become. It keeps for weeks.

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Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Alex Peake-Tomkinson writes features and reviews fiction for the Mail on Sunday, the Times Literary Supplement and the Telegraph. She has also written for the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, the Metro and Time Out. Prior to this, she was the website editor at Portobello Books, an imprint of Granta. Her favourite person she has interviewed is Elizabeth Jane Howard. She would usually rather be reading but when not reading, she likes watching Spanish football, baking indifferent cakes and dancing.

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Daisy Allsup

Daisy first fell in love with newsletters when she kept a diary of her life as a florist in the form of one. Her monthly musings from the trials of driving a van to the joy of seasonal flowers can be read here. She went on to found The Iris Letter, an inspirational scrapbook for women, for which she’s interviewed many of her female heroes from Alexandra Shulman to Dolly Alderton. Daisy is a freelance writer and regular Travel Contributor to angels & urchins magazine and the Antibad Journal. Born and raised in London, her favourite place in the city is the Dutch Garden in Holland Park.

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Rosie Arkell-Palmer

Rosie Arkell-Palmer….Is in the fashion team at Harper’s Bazaar and has previously worked at AnOther Magazine and as a freelance fashion stylist. When she’s not trawling the Golborne Rd for vintage gems she can be found strolling along the river path at Hammersmith. Her weaknesses are musicals, margaritas and anything velvet.

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Annie Reid

Annie has worked in publishing all her working life: first as an editor of children’s books and then biographies and fiction. Soon after she started her family, she set up the London parents’ magazine angels & urchins, which she co-edited for 17 years. With five kids, including young twins, she knows what it takes to keep her head above water. Seeking out the beautiful, bizarre and quirky interiors is her passion. In particular fabrics – different textures and hues, both vintage and new, from around the world.

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Restaurants: Books for Cooks

It’s the Notting Hill secret that nobody wants to spill: the food at Books for Cooks, by chef Eric Treuillé and his team, is not only delicious but unbelievably cheap – £5 for two courses, £7 for three! Squeezed in at the back of the bookshop, the café tables fill up quickly (you need to be there by 11h50 to make sure you don’t have to wait or miss out) and then all you need to choose is how many courses you want from their set menu, including which of their mouth-watering cakes you’d like for pudding.

You can also attend one of their workshops – learn how to cook anything from Dim Sum to Lebanese Stews – in the evenings. And of course, if it is cookery books you are after, you’ll find you are spoilt for choice.

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One day at Great Dixter and…a lifetime of dreams

On Monday I went to Great Dixter to do a day’s gardening course, specifically: “Preparing Your Border For Spring & Summer.” The day was given to me as a Christmas present and what a great present it turned out to be. I love Great Dixter. I love the house (see the March issue of World of Interiors. It’s on the cover), I love the books, I love the nursery, I love the shop and I really, really love the gardens. And now I love the head gardener, Fergus Garrett, too. He is film star handsome and charismatic and totally single minded. A proper obsessive. Plus, as he reels off plant names, it’s as if he speaks fluent latin. Sigh.


These pots, just inside the front door, are the first thing you see when you go into the house. The trilium in the left hand corner is a wonderful plant.
Here it is in close up.
Loving these tiny tulips. They are called Tulip Humilis Lilliput.
I learnt lots of things about how to make my own borders better. No, in fact, what I really learnt was that I should start again with my borders which look bare and brown and desolate in comparison to Great Dixter’s complicated and multi-layered planting schemes. I can’t believe I haven’t spread out my forget-me-knot and honesty self-sown seedlings. And what was I thinking planting tens of muscari and fritillaria? I need hundreds of them. I also need to work on my garden full time and I need staff, students and interns.
This is a banana plant in the Exotic Garden in its winter coat. Someone spent a cold day making this coat for the banana. Can you imagine how much work it is to over-winter every tender plant at Great Dixter.
It’s really inspiring how they pick out pockets of the garden for spring (and later summer) bedding. Talk about a swathe of bellis perennis.
Probably my favourite bit of the garden if I was having my head chopped off and had to choose. A meadow of daffodils and fritallaria.

It’s goodbye for now…

The team at A Little Bird are taking a break to recharge and make some exciting changes behind-the-scenes. We look forward to seeing you again soon.

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