Raspberry coconut ice
Cal Revely-calder
Freeze-dried berries elevate this old fashioned sweet treat, infusing it with a wonderful berry flavour. You could also make it with freeze-dried blackcurrants and blackcurrant powder, but the result will be more purple in colour. If you don’t have berry powder, use a couple of drops of red food colouring. You won’t get the berry flavour, but it will create the layer of pink that you want. I use coconut oil instead of butter as the outcome is much whiter and has a more coconutty flavour.
Ready in 10 minutes, plus chilling Makes about 21 pieces
Line a medium (4-5-cup capacity) loaf tin with baking paper to cover the base and at least 4cm up the sides.
Limoncello
Limoncello is a wonderful gift, great for a summer cocktail or afterdinner treat, and it’s so easy to make your own.
Melt coconut oil in a large pot. Mix in all remaining ingredients except freeze-dried raspberry powder or food colouring and garnish, and beat hard with a wooden spoon until evenly combined.
Spread half the mixture into the prepared tin. Stir the freeze-dried powder or food colouring through the remaining mixture a little at a time until desired colour is reached, then spread over the top of the white mixture. Sprinkle with freeze-dried berries, and chill until set (about one hour), before cutting into pieces (using a hot knife makes this easier). It will keep for up to four weeks in an airtight container in a cool place. If it gets soft, pop it into the fridge for half an hour to firm up.
Ready in 30 minutes, plus steeping Makes 4 cups
Combine vodka and lemon peel, and cover and steep for at least 48 hours or up to a week in a cool, dark place. Strain, discarding solids. Boil lemon juice, sugar and cloves with one cup of water until syrupy. Cool, remove cloves and mix into lemon vodka. Serve chilled in shot glasses or with ice and soda.
How crazy is it that a wine that scooped both the Champion Wine of the Show trophy and the Champion Syrah trophy at the recent Hawke’s Bay Wine Awards can be scored for under $25! It’s also earning so many gold medals and 5-star reviews, the team at Mission Estate are having to hammer extra brackets to the trophy cabinet to stop it from falling off the wall.
It’s a soothing, pepper-dusted, blueberry-boosted beauty, with fine, elegant, elastic tannins with delicious cling and chew. Softly smoky, statuesque and singing with dark fruit and exotic spices, it’s a seductively sippable treat that’s exceptionally priced.
150g coconut oil, melted 3 cups desiccated coconut 2 cups icing sugar ¼ cup coconut milk or regular milk 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 tsp lemon juice 1 tsp freeze-dried raspberry powder 3 Tbsp freeze-dried raspberries, to garnish
Elephant Hill Salome Chardonnay 2021 ($95)
When winemaker Hugh Crichton gets hold of perfect chardonnay grapes he roars into happy-place mode, because he’s basically a chardonnay shaman. A shamandonnay, if you will. His 2021 Salome is Elephant Hill’s exquisitely textured flagship chardonnay, boasting a softly smoky, toasty, nutty nose and then flooding your face with ripe nectarine, punchy pineapple and citrus zest flavours before finishing with peachy, creamy, complexity. Incredibly elegant, soothing and cellarworthy, it’s a spiritual experience.
No.1 Family Estate Assemble Methode Traditionnelle Brut NV ($32)
You simply cannot go wrong with this wine because not only is it gorgeous to drink, it also looks like money on the table and will bring oooh la las the minute it’s presented. Pronounced “assom-blay”, this ultra-classy, 60:40 blend of pinot noir and chardonnay is lovingly crafted by New Zealand’s first family of fizz, Daniel and Adele Le Brun. It’s so fresh and clean and crisp, it’ll definitely get your bells ting-a-ling-ing, from the second the cork pops. Creamy, dreamy, edged with soft, biscuity layers, nutty notes and citrus-laced loveliness, it’s absolutely perfect with celebratory oysters or crayfish or even that brie with a dubious best-before date in the fridge.
Africa. And Lauren Aimee Curtis’ magnificent
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $38) flicks through the narrations of three characters, framing and reframing a community’s exodus from a dying Mediterranean isle. What unites all the novels above is attention to literary form: politics happens obliquely, not in capital letters on a placard.
Several novelists succeeded on a more interior scale. (Faber, $45.70), Claire Kilroy’s tale of a woman struggling with new motherhood, became the talk of the town; her insistent rhythms sweep you along just as anxiety can, or love. Megan Nolan’s
(Vintage Publishing, $35) was another standout, the grubby tale of a tabloid reporter in 1990s London who takes the family of an alleged child killer and plies them with booze in order to flush their secrets out.
On a grander canvas, but with no loss of intimacy, came by Jenny Erpenbeck (Granta, $46.80), about an age-gap romance in the dying years of East Germany. Even as lust and hope curdle into regret and abuse, its protagonists remain too recognisable.
Among the subgenres to continue thriving was the “feminist retelling”. Those shelves have often leant towards the classical — Madeline Miller’s Circe, Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy — but this year’s highlight retold a tale no older than many of those who are reading this. Sandra Newman’s (Granta, $58.50) takes Nineteen Eighty-four and recasts it through Winston’s lover’s eyes.
“I wanted to know more,” Newman told us disarmingly this autumn, “about her time writing pornography for the Party.”
Between the novels and the short stories came several books that smeared the chalk line between the two forms. Jonathan Escoffery’s
(4th Estate, $33), which follows the queasily comic tribulations of a young Jamaican man, can be viewed as a single novel or a chain of linked stories. Since Escoffery’s material is the flaky connections of familial strife, it was clever to make that his formal crux. The same could be said of Kathryn Scanlan’s (Daunt Books, $23), a pithy presentation of real-life interviews with a Midwestern horse-trainer. In calling her book “a
novel”, Scanlan makes you look with a beadier eye at the craft of storytelling itself — manoeuvres she describes as “the liberties of fiction”.
Scanlan’s success points to another rule of 2023: look past the big beasts and imprints if you want some truly unusual triumphs. Daunt Books spent valuable time in the archives and hunting abroad. One highlight, of the former type, was
(Faber Factory, $35.20) by Dinah Brooke, a one-time enfant terrible of British fiction who vanished from the scene in the late 1970s. A black comedy of manners, it has “the unhinged realism of a fairground mirror”, according to Allfree.
Elsewhere, Faber’s “Editions” line impressed, reanimating books from Sven Holm’s
(Faber, $29.50), a 1967 tale of a luxury resort bunkered against an apocalypse, to Jean Stafford’s
(Faber, $32.20), a 1947 story of two vicious children who bond over their mother’s waning love. Galley Beggar Press, meanwhile, was on the post-orwell beat, offering Adam Biles’
(Galley Beggar Press, $35.90), a chaotic sequel that brings Manor Farm into the post-brexit and “post-truth” age. Its square political bites were fitting in the year Martin Amis died.
An author published in Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions again won the Nobel Prize: the Norwegian dramatist and novelist Jon Fosse. His latest,
(Fitzcarraldo Editions, $25), appeared soon after, and its vision of strange apparitions in a nightbound forest proved to be magisterially, intensely spiritual.
As with the late Cormac Mccarthy, who also died this year — and had been, for my money, the greatest living novelist — Fosse is a writer unlike almost any other. If you’ve never read him, do. Fitzcarraldo also continued to translate Annie Ernaux, Fosse’s predecessor as Nobel laureate: her slim autofictional books — this year,
(Fitzcarraldo Editions, $24) and (Fitzcarraldo Editions, $28) — were praised by Sally Rooney as “attempts to intervene in the passage of time”.
But the gem has been Verso, the UK’S closest thing to a mainstream radical publisher. It’s building one of Britain’s most interesting fiction lists: two highlights were (Verso, $39), a collection of fascinatingly skewy stories by the late writer and model Izumi Suzuki, and
(Verso Books, $42.60), by the film director
AAnna Biller, a stylised retelling of the old fable that mixes self-reference and gaudy excess. Its heroine, Judith, a gothic-romance novelist, shacks up in a crumbling castle with a brooding husband; the sex, death and pricey cognac are of a wildly enjoyable piece.
Biller’s novel wasn’t alone in that. A whole seam of fiction prioritised pleasure and campy fun. Leading the pack was Jilly Cooper, whose (Transworld Publishers, $26) saw Rupert CampbellBlack swap the polo fields for the Premier League. Luxuriating in libido on our behalf, Cleo Watson declared it “splendidly exaggerated”, and she would know: a former Downing St adviser, her own erotic novel, (Little, Brown Book Group, $61.40), appeared this summer. A riot of Westminster bedhopping, full of oddly familiar characters, it seemed tailor-made to be read — with interest or terror — by everyone in British politics.
Finally, the gongs. This year’s Booker, announced on November 23, went to Paul Lynch’s
(Bloomsbury, $42) — the shortlist is largely strong, without concessions to A-list status or transient buzz. I’d give it to Bernstein, but
(Penguin NZ, $26), Paul Murray’s well-liked tale of an Irish family in crisis, is “Booker bait” if ever I saw it. Elsewhere, the Goldsmiths Prize went to (Bloomsbury, $29.59) by Benjamin Myers, a dizzyingly inventive retelling of St Cuthbert’s life. The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction was given to Tom Crewe’s debut
(Penguin Random House, $37), about two gay men trying to overturn prejudice in the dying Victorian years; while the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction was won by Lucy Caldwell’s
(Faber, $40.70), the story of four days in Belfast during the Blitz.
The latter, in truth, appeared last year, yet its harrowing richness, its fidelity to historical trauma, came to mind when reading Lynch’s a shallow tale of a war-torn near-future Ireland. So here’s one last heartening trend: in the past few years, we’ve had too many dystopian novels, but it seems that they’re on the wane.
Fiction should offer more than real life with the names changed and the politics simplified. After all, the novels of the year, in various ways, give us exactly what fiction should — something sly or strange that you couldn’t possibly expect.
Even if you’ve already watched Severance — the psychological sci-fi thriller in which people can sever their consciousness, separating their work selves from their home selves — it’s been such a long and agonising wait for season two that it’s probably worth bingeing the whole thing again to refresh your memory. Severance was the most original and compelling show of 2022 and it left us — almost cruelly — on a monumental, heart-inthroat, cliffhanger ending. Little did we know then that the writers’ strike would delay production of season two so much. We still don’t have a confirmed release date, but it’s coming some time in 2024 and you’re going to want to be ready.
Initially, the concept of a teenage virgin being a profoundly astute sex therapist struck me as too outlandish, so I had abandoned Sex Education after only a few episodes. However, the fourth and final season aired this year, and the passionate response from its fanbase, who had become intimately attached to these characters, reeled me back in. What I’d failed to see the first time was that Otis’ ability to give sound, mature sex advice to his peers was being cleverly juxtaposed with his bumbling personal sexual experiences. It’s deeply uncomfortable at times — sometimes sexually explicit — but at its heart it’s a sweet study of teenage romance, and even more so, friendship. You’ll laugh, cry, cringe and heart-clutch.
The second high school comedy on my list, Never Have I Ever is a charming Netflix series created by Mindy Kaling. It centres around Indian-american teen Devi, who’s desperate to lose her virginity and has a colossal crush on the hottest boy in school. It’s not quite as shallow as it sounds, Devi’s recovering from a physical and mental breakdown following the sudden death of her father, so among the high school high jinks, the show tackles grief, race and sexuality with a lot of warmth. In an inspired choice, Never Have I Ever has an unlikely narrator for a teen girl: tennis-playing hothead
John Mcenroe. Like Sex Education and Succession, the show ended this year with its fourth season, which tied up Devi’s high school experience in a neat little feel-good package.
For those who dropped out of Succession some time during the very occasionally lacklustre second and third seasons, this is your call to action, because the fourth and final season is so worth returning for. The much ballyhooed third episode — Connor’s Wedding — remains the best episode of television I’ve ever seen. Jesse Armstrong’s writing on this series, loosely based on the Murdoch family, is razor-sharp and the performances are flawless. It’s a surprise to no one that it leads the Emmy nomination count this year. Due to the WGA and Sag-aftra strikes, we’re still waiting to see which of the — count them — 14 nominated cast members will take home a statue.
We’ve arrived late to Couples Therapy, but we’re making up for our tardiness with conscientious engagement — aka bingeing. A local version of the series was released earlier this year, but we’re deep in the US series, which has three seasons in which to luxuriate this summer. In it, clinical psychologist Orna Guralnik works through the relationship woes of four couples each season. It’s deliciously voyeuristic but doesn’t feel exploitative, because these couples willingly entered into recorded therapy sessions knowing they might get uncomfortable, embarrassing and exposing. It’s been an illuminating watch as a couple, seeing who each of us relates to and what relationship dynamics seem familiar. It’s like free therapy without ever having to tell anyone how you really feel.
It’s disappointing to have to include this among the year’s best viewing options because there’s something so gross about the concept of rich Americans buying a soccer club in a depressed British town and making a selfserving piece of marketing collateral about it. The series is enjoyable, mostly in spite of new owners/ actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mcelhenney. It’s the town’s characters and the club’s players who make it. Some of the scenes will make you cringe until you turn inside out, but that’s all part of it. Take the bit where Rob Mcelhenney goes into the Wrexham Women’s team’s changing room to congratulate them on winning the league — in the movie version, presumably playing in his mind, everyone’s whooping and laughing and starstruck, but in the scene we’re watching, it looks like it’s taking all their energy not to tell him to f*** off. You won’t be able to look away.
This docu-series contains an extraordinary amount of Williams in his undies, which I guess you could argue is a visual metaphor for the psychological nakedness its star exhibits throughout. The documentary’s key conceit is to force him to rewatch all the video footage of his life, and to film him reacting to it, then to ask questions that force him to react to it even harder, evoking the sort of deep introspection and emotional unravelling we love to watch.
It can be tough — at times, it feels like a multi-hour emotional breakdown set to Angels — but it’s worth it.
The subject is such an easy and obvious documentary win, it’s surprising it’s taken this long to get made: his talent, fame, beauty; his talented, famous, beautiful wife, his whole life recorded on a wide range of media. But what makes the series so great is the way it transcends its raw materials. It’s the final step in the transformation of the way we see David Beckham — from sports star to laughing stock to icon to human.
With the most morally questionable premise of any show made this year, and that includes Love Island, this series succeeds entirely because of its unbelievably perfect star. Ronald Gladden believes he’s been called for jury service, but he’s actually walking into an invented court case peopled entirely with actors in a fabricated courtroom. He’s thrown moral curveball after moral curveball, but he is not just unimpeachably good; he’s even better than that. The series is wildly uneven and sometimes drags, but when that final episode hits, all is forgiven.
Like Succession, The Bear has attained such omnipresence in the culture this year, it feels trite to even write about it. If you’re the type of person who will enjoy The Bear (the type of person who likes good TV), you’ve almost certainly already watched it. Nevertheless, as a depiction of addiction, of performance under pressure, of familial relationships fraying and decaying, it is perfection. It would be better without the schlocky and intellectually dishonest “if you work hard you can achieve anything” vibe, but this is America — what are you gonna do?
When it was announced that the creative team behind the Paddington films were making a musical about Willy Wonka’s early life, some cynics speculated that we were just going to get Paddington again, but with more songs, less marmalade and a different shape of hat. To which the rest of us could only respond: “Oooh, yes, that sounds lovely, thanks.”
Wonka — which is one of the best times you’ll have in the cinema — isn’t exactly that film. But it’s far closer to the recent big-screen adventures of Michael Bond’s beloved bear than it is to Roald Dahl’s original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory novel — and, frankly, is all the better for it. This is no conventional prequel, full of bucketloads (or even Bucket-loads) of laborious foreshadowing: there’s no breezy cameo from a hot Grandpa Joe, a la Jude Law’s young Dumbledore, in tasteful mid-century knits.
Nor is it an effortful Dahl cover version. The plot has villainy to spare, but no sadistic streak — even Olivia Colman and Tom Davis’ venomous hoteliers are a good deal less toxic than, say, the Twits — while all confectionerybased mishaps aren’t matters of cosmic punishment but industrial sabotage.
Instead, director Paul King and his co-writer Simon Farnaby have concocted a wholly self-contained caper about a plucky young chocolatier taking on a cartel of older, meaner rivals — then dusted it with enough details drawn from both Dahl’s novel and the 1971 film to make the branding add up.
Devout Wonkarians are rewarded with nods and winks: a turn of phrase here, a visual echo there, or a tinkling of Pure Imagination in Toby Talbot’s magical score. (The suite of new songs, by Talbot and his old Divine Comedy
collaborator Neil Hannon, are witty and wondrous: a set of instant, hear-once, humforever classics.) Otherwise, though, the film largely just gets on with its own Great Chocolate Caper thing.
As the youthful Willy Wonka, Timothee Chalamet does throw in the odd Gene Wilder-ish line reading or gesture, but the script doesn’t furnish him with many opportunities for those. Rather, he’s mainly required to be bright and charming, sell some amusingly silly lines, and hold a tune — which, with perhaps a little help from the sound engineers, he does.
And yes, perhaps sometimes, if you squint a bit, you could almost be watching a shaved Paddington in a natty purple suit. But his new film’s comic tone is riper and madder: King’s first directorial work was on the BBC sitcom The Mighty Boosh, and Wonka plonks itself squarely in that very British tradition of surreal escapades with a satirical kick. Long before the Boosh came Not the Nine O’clock News (whose famous gorilla joke makes a cameo of sorts), then the Pythons — and before them all The Goon Show, of which Wonka often feels like a feature-length episode.
Paterson Joseph’s Arthur Slugworth, head of the town’s wicked chocolate cartel, is a deliciously smarmy Grytpype-thynne type, while Matt Lucas and Mathew Baynton’s sidekicks are a pair of perfect Moriartys. Meanwhile, supporting characters constantly chime in with Goonish non-sequiturs, such as Jim Carter’s dark mutterings of an abbey of chocoholic monks, or Natasha Rothwell’s plumber warily asking Willy, after his clandestine midnight jaunt to the zoo: “Where have you been, and why do you smell of giraffe?”
Even Hugh Grant’s Oompa-loompa, Lofty — who, with his green hair and orange complexion, must be the film’s cleanest lift from Wonka lore — has an uproarious, martini-dry “must-we?” demeanour that screams Peter Sellers.
Perhaps the film’s only real sop to nostalgia (aside from the encore performance of a certain song) is its replication of the 1971 film’s weirdly ambiguous setting, which has been fleshed out into a gorgeous storybook hybrid of Bavaria, Paris and an English university town. Of all the things to bring back, it’s an odd one, but something about it just tastes right.
Like any good chocolatier, King has obsessively focused on texture and flavour. And it’s those qualities — tuned to mass-market tastes, yet held in connoisseurish balance — that give his film its irresistible velvety sweetness.