A Plate of Summer

When I saw Stuart Gillies cook this Pea and Leek Tart with Glazed Asparagus and Herb Salad on The Great British Menu tv programme I thought it looked so pretty, and so seasonal. A simple vegetable tart on a plate with a little clump of salad. Beneath the soft quilt of parmesan cream is asparagus, cushioned on a plump green mattress of pea and leek.

When he baked his pastry case blind he lined it with clingfilm filled with beans. Clingfilm? In the oven? Surely not. I have seen this done once before, and I thought maybe there is special cheffy clingfilm that is different from mine, but nothing showed up on Google. So I decided to cook the tart and follow the instructions exactly to see what happened. And the answer is - nothing. Nothing happened. You can put clingfilm in the oven. It’s a good idea actually, because the film moulds easily to the pastry and you don’t get the sharp edges that dig into the cooked pastry when you try to remove it.

Stuart Gillies’ pastry may be the best I have ever made. It is generous with the butter. Try to keep your hands as cool as possible, and maybe even put the bowl back in the fridge a couple of times during the rubbing in. It makes the lightest, most delicate and fragile pastry. When he says add half a beaten egg to the mixture to bind it he means it. You probably won’t need the whole thing.

Keep tasting the mixture – the amount of parmesan and seasoning is critical. And when I was in the middle of making the glaze, whisking the egg yolks over simmering water, I suddenly remembered that one of the judges on the programme – Prue Leith I think – had said that it was deceptively simple looking, but actually quite difficult to make. How true! This little tart really tests quite a lot of techniques. Things you know how to do but haven’t bothered with in a while. Quite a little triumph to pull it off.

The other thing I wanted to make from The Great British Menu Cookbook was Richard Corrigan’s Wheaten Bread.

Just to be clear, in Ireland, soda bread is raised with bicarbonate of soda and made with white flour; wheaten bread is raised in the same way but made with a mixture of meals, white, wholemeal and, often, oatmeal. Corrigan adds honey and a teaspoonful of treacle, just enough to deepen the edge of the sweetness. Now this is what my grandmother’s wheaten bread used to taste like although I looked up her recipe and it’s a ‘handful’ of this and a ‘handful’ of that!

Above you see one loaf, in four 'farls' or quarters (fourths actually). Corrigan’s recipe makes four loaves; you need to eat the bread on the day you make it but it freezes well.