Jersey’s Black Butter

Above is a cottage on the property of Samarès Manor, on Jersey, whose gardens we toured. I think this might be one of the guest properties they rent out. It was so beautiful I had to share this picture, although I am sure it would look much more picturesque without the vehicle in front.

While in Jersey I discovered that they have a regional speciality called “black butter”. It’s actually a kind of apple butter, flavoured with treacle and various spices. It tasted quite a lot like black licorice to me — you know, the strong expensive kind.

While in Jersey we went to an upmarket restaurant that overlooked St. Aubin’s Bay and there I had this dessert:

The ice cream on top was black butter flavoured and I thought I’d bring a jar of black butter back, just out of interest and because I thought my family might like to try it.

You can see it’s shiny soft black stuff. You can’t see that it tastes very strongly of both apples and licorice. After having some I can see how if you grew up with it you’d be a fan but as an adult coming to it for the first time you might need to work up a taste for it.

The restaurant in St. Aubin was quite nice, not the dream I’d hoped for. There are a couple of Michelin star restaurants on the island and I would have loved to try them out but the price, once translated from English pounds to Canadian dollars, was just too much on top of everything else. I was still choking a bit on my restaurant bills from Ottawa and decided to keep the Michelin star experience for another day. But we did have a nice seafood meal. I had oysters (my aunt was horrified and tried not to show it, watching me swallow them), some squash soup, and a lobster, crab, avocado, and mango  salad. I did think of taking a picture of the salad, it was so impressively arranged, but it was delivered in the half-lobster shell with all its tentacly legs trailing over the plate. Ever since my friend Eve commented on how repulsive one of my pictures looked, I have been very concerned about the aesthetics of what I show you! Which explains why there are so many dessert pictures and such a dearth of pictures from other courses. Desserts somehow always please the eye.

As I type this, I am sitting in a cheap hotel in Langley, British Columbia (taxpayer dollars in this instance dictating that I stay in a hole and not the nice clean Holiday Inn down the street). I had a “gourmet” hotdog at the ferry terminal that was a complete letdown ($7 later) and an apple and sandwich four hours later. And I am yearning to sit and overlook the bays of Jersey on a warm summer evening, eating that lobster and crab salad, and not fretting about my meetings this week. You can guess where my mind will drift during the powerpoint presentations tomorrow when I am not presenting.