Catherine and John Pawson’s ancient, yet contemporary sugary treat
In Home Farm Cooking, the couple serve a highly traditional dish in a thoroughly modern fashion
The most ancient part of Catherine and John Pawson’s country place, Home Farm in Oxfordshire, is around four hundred years old. Other elements within this farmhouse and associated outbuildings are of different vintages. Getting these various parts coalesce into a coherent dwelling wasn’t an easy task, as the couple explain in their new book, Home Farm Cooking.
“The inherited architecture — a combination of seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century domestic and agricultural structures — was complex and of strong character, and questions of how to draw all the various elements together to make a harmonious formal and functional composition were not quickly or easily resolved.”
Of course, if anyone could do it, the Pawsons could. Yorkshire-born John is renowned for architectural work that focuses on ways of approaching fundamental problems of space, proportion, light, and materials. His many interiors have included private homes, art galleries, chapels, stores and museums around the world, including London’s Design Museum.
Catherine, meanwhile, studied at the Inchbald School of Design in London and worked at Colefax & Fowler, before embarking on a long term partnership with fellow interiors specialist Juliet Byrne.
John has managed to sympathetically update the place, to create a beautiful home that retains many of the period features, while still being filled with a sense of contemporary lightness and space.
The kind of cooking, eating and entertaining that Catherine and John favour at Home Farm also pays tribute to the property’s regional heritage, while remaining modern. In Home Farm Cooking there are guides to making pesto from the region’s wild garlic, advice on picking and washing wild nettles, which can be turned into a tasty risotto, as well as plenty of olden-days dishes that the couple haul into the 21st century.
“In its oldest form, posset was a drink of hot milk, curdled with alcohol or citrus and flavoured with spices,” the couple write beside their recipe for lemon posset with thyme shortbread (top image). “From the sixteenth century, it evolved into a drink made from lemon, cream and sugar, similar to syllabub, but with a lighter set and recognizable as the dessert we call ‘posset’. It’s very simple to make and delicious served with berries and a piece of shortbread, subtly flavoured with thyme and lemon, to add some crunch.”
The Pawson version of posset is topped with thyme flowers, which now grow in Home Farm’s kitchen garden, and served in sleek, ergonomic glasses, designed by John for high-end Belgium manufacturer, When Objects Work. The pudding is proof, if any were needed, that the Pawsons can draw on tradition, while creating things that are thoroughly up-to-date.
For the full recipe as well as much more besides, order a copy of Home Farm Cooking here.