Guineafowl with cherries and Beaujolais

I’ve been so busy catching up after my Alsace trip that I haven’t had much time for new food and wine discoveries but here’s one we had at Les Temps Changent in Chalons-en-Champagne, a hotel we frequently stop at to break the journey through France.

It was a guineafowl leg stuffed with a white boudin-type farce, served with a light jus and some warmed through fresh cherries and went perfectly with a half bottle of Morgon. (Which one? Afraid I can’t remember. After four full-on days in Alsace it was nice to order something without feeling I had to make notes about it.)

A word of warning though. The pairing worked because the sauce was not too intensely cherry flavoured. If that had been the case it might have stripped the cherry flavours out of the wine. Or, if the wine had been sweeter and more intense, like a New Zealand Pinot Noir, for example, it would have made the combination too sweet and detracted from the flavour of the guineafowl.

A Belgian-style cherry beer (Kriek) would also have been good.

Bakewell tart and Liefmans Kriek

It’s been hard to pick a single pairing from the beer and food matching dinner I attended at the Anchor in Walberswick last week but I reckon it’s got to be the perfect pairing of Bakewell tart and Liefmans Kriek.

Liefmans, which is based in Belgium used to make two fruit beers - Kriek which was flavoured with cherries and Frambozen or framboise with raspberries. Now it seems to make just Liefmans which is blended with cherries and other berries and what they call Liefmans Cuvée Brut which is wrapped in the distinctive red paper.and is, so far as I can tell, the old Kriek. Either would have gone with the tart, which contains a layer of raspberry jam with an almond topping. I’ve previously matched it with Frambozen but the Kriek is equally good.

We were also served a glass of Meantime’s very chocolatey chocolate beer which went well with a number of the desserts on this highly indulgent dessert plate (right) but particularly, I thought, with a white chocolate mousse on shortbread. Something you just couldn’t pull off with wine.

The dinner was part of an all day beer experience called ‘Beer Safari’ organised by a Suffolk-based company called Food Safari and included a trip to the local Adnams brewery in Southwold. I’ll be writing more about some of the other beers and pairings I tasted later this week.

I attended the dinner as a guest of The Anchor and Food Safari.

Apricot pancakes and apricot (or peach) beer

Pancakes and beer might not sound like the most obvious of combinations but as with other flour-based foods such as sandwiches or pies they work together remarkably well. Especially, as I discovered when I was writing my food and beer book An Appetite for Ale last year, fruit-filled pancakes and fruit beers.

You could have a cherry-filled pancake with a Belgian Kriek beer for example but my favourite was an apricot filled pancake with a apricot or peach-flavoured beer. There is (or was. I haven’t seen it lately) an English apricot beer made by Melbourn Brothers but I prefer the Belgian peach-flavoured beers such as Timmermans Pèche or even Floris Mango or Passionfruit.

The interesting thing about beer, unlike wine, is that you can pair beer and food with a similar flavour profile. The carbonation in the beer refreshes the palate so that you can pick up the fruit flavours in both the food and the drink.

I’m not sure that I’d pair the classic British pancake day pancake with sugar and lemon juice with a beer though. In the past I’ve found a glass of Asti works reasonably well though I’m not sure, being comfort food, that they aren’t nicer just on their own. Or with a cup of tea.

Cherry beer and cheesecake

If you’ve never tasted a fruit beer you might think this pairing sounds bizarre. If you have you can probably imagine just how good it would taste.

Fruit flavoured beers are nothing new but unlike many flavoured drinks they have real integrity, with a natural fresh fruit flavour. The best examples come from Belgium where they’re called by the Flemish name Kriek. They’re made by combining a lambic beer (one fermented from wild yeasts) with fresh cherry juice and are wonderfully tart and refreshing. The best example is Lindemans which comes packaged in a very pretty bottle with a paper wrapping.

You can drink a cherry beer with savoury foods (my favourite matches are with duck and with white-rinded cheeses such as Brie and Camembert) but I particularly like them with a creamy American-style cheesecake topped with fresh red berries including cherries. (The great thing about beer, as opposed to wine, is that because of the carbonation you can match pretty well identical flavours in your food and your drink without one knocking the other out).

Raspberry beer (Frambozen) is delicious with plain or berry-topped cheesecakes too.