Bread, Water, Salt, Oil...

MAofFCVol1

2008-08-09T12:58:00.004+01:00

Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Vol 1) is the first serious cook book I ever owned and I know I have mentioned it elsewhere on this blog. A couple of years ago I found myself at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery and in one session I spoke up from the audience in defence of this book and its authors, two French and one American, the American being the incredibly famous Julia Child.

I can't really remember why I thought it necessary to defend these three, but I've got a feeling the presentation was something to do with soufflés and feminism and the soufflé wasn't coming out of it too well.

This was the book that told us where we could leave off slaving over a hot stove, let the food rest, for an hour, for a day, until we were ready to take up cooking again. With nary a colour photograph, this was the book that painted a picture of culinary glory for the faint hearted. This was the book that said “you can do this…just read these six pages on how to make a soufflé and you’ll be fine.” And we were empowered.

The first time I came spoon to spoon with MAFC was when I was working for Terence Conran’s Design Group in London and a colleague told me she was going out to buy what she needed to make a cassoulet. “For tonight?” said I, having no idea what a cassoulet was. “For Saturday” she said. It was Wednesday.

I had never come across a dish that took three days to make. Read MAFC and you will understand why. I bought the book on the spot.

I then proceeded to cook my way through it, starting with a spinach soufflé. Not that easy, but with the six pages of soufflé instructions that preceded it I felt someone was on my side.

Lately I have been reading “Julie and Julia” by Julie Powell, who, approaching the watershed of 30 years and with her biological clock ticking, decided to cook her way through the entire canon of MAFC in one year, in a tiny New York flat, with a heroic husband. Now, I have to admit that I did not cook every single thing in the book when I was starting out. Anything involving kidneys, rice and mushrooms was to me hors de combat. As was anything that required making a difficult sauce only to reduce it and turn it into something completely different.

I’m always sorry that Julia Child seems to have filched all the plaudits for the book, despite the fact that there were two perfectly good Frenchwomen involved in it, but there you go. So, here I am reading the bit where Julie is making braised beef a la Julia Child, and here’s me with a bit of rather indifferent beef in the fridge waiting to be cooked. Julie prepares hers; I prepare mine.

How long is it since I actually marinated a chunk of not great beef in thinly sliced carrots, onions and celery, with garlic, herbs, red wine and olive oil? Too long, I tell you. I even sliced the vegetables on a mandolin, such was my enthusiasm.

The scent of the marinading beef floated through the house, scenting the damp August air, but that was nothing to the perfume that trilled about the place once the dish went into the oven.

I re–read the recipe; and I re-read Julie’s commentary on her own efforts; and I suddenly remembered the last time I made it myself.

My in-laws were coming. Julia Child calls for a veal knuckle, or a calf’s foot, split, to go into the braise to unctuate (is that a word?) the sauce. I spent a fortune in time and petrol finding a calf’s foot in Soho, getting them to split it, then scrubbing the silken hairs more or less clean. I say more or less, because throughout the cooking there was just the faintest scent of, how can I put it, the byre. And, as Julie has it, at the end of the evening, a fleeting zephyr of hoof. My in-laws were worryingly polite.

This time I didn’t even bother to go and look for a bovine metatarsal, but in deference to my current rather poor quality piece of beef I was generous with the aromatics and the seasoning. It was winey and herby and garlicky and the outer garments were just great. Unfortunately no amount of gussying up can really disguise an indifferent raw ingredient. I’m sure that Julia Child, in her Parisian garret, newly married and in love, would have had the good fortune to start off with better stuff. Revenons a nos moutons, or, as they say in France, let’s get ourselves some decent beef.

The jus, however, was fab!

Meanwhile...back at the soufflé...

Glastonbury Festival 2008 – Sunday

2008-06-29T11:41:00.004+01:00

On Saturday several good things happened. Firstly it didn’t rain, despite the forecast. The sun came out and dried up all the mud leaving the walkways feeling a bit like a rubber mat though not quite so sweet smelling. Secondly Amy Winehouse made it to the Festival, opened on time, and sort of made it through the set, although at one point she got down among the crowd and gave her minders a heart attack.

Of course the sun makes a huge difference to the day, and it was lovely to see people swap the rain ponchos for – well, see for yourself!

Up at the Acoustic Tent where I listened to Thea Gilmore, Andy Fairweather Low and Seth Lakeman (who did a stormin’ set) people were singing the praises of Pilton Pasta, a bunch of local people who were offering a bowl of fresh cooked penne with simple but tasty home made sauces for a fiver. I tried the fresh vegetable sauce with mine and it was pretty delicious. And the fiver would have been well spent because, as we know, pasta keeps you going. What nobody ever tells you is that Glastonbury is a tremendously physical event – you have to trudge for miles to get where you want to go, and that includes the loo! After a couple of days I’m beginning to feel the benefit of all this walking, but I am by no means match fit!

This morning there are more dark clouds sailing overhead, but they just keep moving on so maybe we will be lucky and have another dry day.

HorseCam

2008-06-28T13:34:00.003+01:00

This is unmissable! Somerset and Avon Police have horse patrols at Glastonbury and this is the view from their riders.
http://www.avonandsomerset.police.uk/glastonbury/HorseCam/

Glastonbury 2008 - Saturday

2008-06-28T10:55:00.016+01:00

Right. So this was the Glastonbury Festival 2008 on Thursday…

And this was the Glastonbury Festival 2008 on Friday. A little spot of overnight rain turned the hard baked earth into a sticky mire. But only on the well tramped thoroughfares so it could be worse. Still, it makes walking and staying upright quite a challenge and you work out muscles you didn’t know you have.

The scale of the thing is just phenomenal. There are 150,000 people here. The population of Bath is only 90,000, and Bath covers a lot more than the 1000 acres of this peaceful valley. I watched everyone arriving on Wednesday and Thursday and I was so impressed. They parked their cars and then trudged patiently for what seems like miles to get to their camping ground. The must-have accessory is a wheelbarrow and I plan to snap up one of the leftover ones at the end for my allotment!

There is food everywhere. I don’t know how people have time to listen to the music they’re so busy chomping, and that doesn’t count all the biscuits in the tents. Chomp, chomp, squelch, squelch…that’s the soundtrack to Glastonbury. Huge queues formed around the falafel stalls – my thinking is vegetarian, deep fried, comfort food and probably safe! I was glad to find a free range chicken stand that was using local chicken, and Yeo Valley is here with local organic yogs and ices.

The best apple and pear juice on the park is from my favourite The Orchard Pig, who are here with their own Gloucester Old Spot sausages and bacon as well. From Dorset there is Hall’s Smokehouse, offering smoked salmon and smoked mackerel in a wrap. Delicious, if pricey at £5.50.

I liked the look of the Chimichurri Argentinian steak sandwiches with chimichurri sauce, again around the £5 - £6 mark and someone is doing gourmet fish and chips – haddock only – cooked to order.

Some kids from Leeds are here with really excellent home-made lemonade, and you have to try a Welsh Oggie – Welsh steak, Welsh veggies, in a puff pastry crust so nice you can eat the whole thing.

More rain is forecast for Saturday, but Sunday looks clear, which is when Neil Diamond and Leonard Cohen are rattling their Zimmers on the main Pyramid Stage. Today we have Crowded House, British Sea Power, Seth Lakeman and Buddy Guy. Tonight we are all several gogs to see if Amy Winehouse actually makes it. Last night in Hyde Park for Nelson Mandela’s 90^th birthday concert she seemed a bit, er, distracted. What that girl needs is a decent Welsh Oggie…

The Glastonbury Festival

2008-06-20T11:51:00.002+01:00

Well, the countdown is definitely under way. Next week sees the start of this year’s Glastonbury Festival. I live less than four miles away from the entrance gate and if I opened the window at my house the noise would be palpable, so I decided perhaps I had better attend in person! I’m thinking of my grandchildren. If I don’t go they will say “You lived less than four miles away and you didn’t go??? What was the matter with you???”

The last time I was at Glastonbury was 1973. There were a few people in a field. Now it has grown into the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world. Over the past few weeks the signs have been going up and the lanes have been filled with snorting screaming lorries loaded with fencing and portable loos. The big tents have been going up for companies like Orange Mobile where everyone will be able to recharge their phones, and up on a hill there is a bunch of tipis which will house the richer Festival goers.

If you’re really loaded you’ll be staying at Camp Kerala and hobnobbing with supermodels and would-be royals. I actually know someone who’ll be up there and I’m hoping the party will be at her’s!

I’ve bought a tent, which I haven’t tried to put up yet. I’ve bought an inflatable mattress with a built-in foot pump, and I’ve bought a lantern. The lantern comes with a key fob so that when you’re staggering back to your tent in the dark and you know it’s around here somewhere you can press the key fob and your tent will light up, like a beacon in the night! Isn’t technology marvellous! (I have a friend who takes a very dim view of anything that improves the Glastonbury experience. I think he thinks that suffering and getting lost is part of the magic.)

I plan to write about the food on offer, in the hope that I’ll find something delicious and tasty among the pot noodles and burgers. You never know!

Elderflower jelly

2008-06-16T15:42:00.005+01:00

Everybody seems to be making jelly these days, jellies for cheese, jellies with herbs, jellies with and for everything. And as the hedgerows are frothing with elderflowers I thought I’d have a go at making elderflower jelly.

The base is a Bramley apple jelly, left to drip overnight and then flavoured with elderflowers. For this you will need a jelly bag, but if you don’t have one, or, like me, can’t find it because you use it so infrequently, just use a pillowcase. Support it on a sturdy coat hanger and hang it from something over a large bowl.

Ingredients
4 lbs Bramleys
3 pints water
2 pounds sugar
6-8 heads elderflowers
3-4 tbsp lemon juice

Method
Wash, core and chop the apples roughly. Put in a pan with the water, bring to the boil and simmer until very soft. Pour into a jelly bag and allow to drip overnight.

Next day measure the juice and add one pound of sugar for every pint of juice. Dissolve the sugar over a gentle heat. Add the elderflowers tied in muslin. Bring to the boil and boil vigorously until the setting point is reached.

Remove flowers. Add the lemon juice and allow to cool slightly.

Pour into clean sterilised jars and seal.

This is lovely with cold chicken, or to deglaze a pan that you have cooked chicken in. It’s also great with lamb.

Apple Blossom Day

2008-05-21T13:23:00.008+01:00

May is Apple Blossom Time in Somerset. This is when the harvest to come in the autumn starts out on its annual journey. Never an easy time as wind and rain and frost can wreak havoc on the crop, but somehow the trees make it through and when the blossom comes it’s like a snowstorm in May.

This year one of the Somerset orchards – The Orchard Pig near Glastonbury – opened its orchards to the public for the first time on Mayday Bank Holiday. The different varieties of tree come into blossom at different times, and the flowers last for no more than about a week but during that time it is a breathtaking sight. People said it was like being on a different planet for the afternoon!

The Orchard Pig has 45 acres of trees at its main home at West Bradley. In the autumn the apples will be hand-graded and farm-pressed to make five different single variety apple juices and dry and medium cider made in the French style.

The Orchard Pig
West Bradley Orchard
West Bradley
Nr Glastonbury
Somerset
BA6 8LT

www.orchardpig.co.uk

The Real Food Festival, London

2008-04-28T10:04:00.001+01:00

Another food festival to add to the growing calendar. I liked it. I’ve been to a lot of food festivals in the last couple of years and I’m often disappointed, because the big boys always seem to crowd out the little producers, and it’s nearly always the latter that I find most interesting.

This time the stallholders were handpicked by an advisory team with impressive credentials, and attendance was subsidised. You can tell immediately if the person on the other side of the stall has had any involvement in the production of the thing they are selling, and these people were there in abundance.

There were Master Classes from chefs like Barney Haughton from Bordeaux Quay in Bristol – everybody learned how to make ailloli – and tastings aplenty. I got there at 10.30 in the morning and by 11.00 I had eaten cheese, oysters, chilli chocolate chip cookies, red wine, an ice lolly, rum and olives. Oh and a monster brownie. I had to have a little sit down and an Alka Seltzer.

With wood shavings on the floor which reflected the light and made the cavernous exhibition centre feel like the biggest farmer’s market in the world, and hundreds of quality stalls it was certainly a foodie’s delight. The arrangement of stalls, however, with stalls all grouped together according to product, will have disappointed some producers. And with all that free tasting the people who were there to sell snacks may have felt a bit left out. Four days of festival and a setting up day means that people were away from their businesses for a long time and the first couple of days were badly attended. I think a lot of producers may stay away next year, which will be a pity as the advance publicity will be better. But the quality really was good and that is something that the more regional festivals could learn from.

The heart of a tomato

2008-04-03T18:23:00.007+01:00

This is one of the little tomato seedlings which are currently reaching for the sky on my windowsill. If April is, as T S Eliot wrote, the cruellest month, one of the reasons is because some of these little ones will make it, and some just won’t. All the tiny shoots basking in the hot spring sunshine are about to have a horrid weekend – snow is forecast across the country.

But maybe this will be one of the lucky ones. It’s an old variety called Harrison’s First in the Field and I’m going to grow it outside and cross my fingers. If it turns into a tomato plant, and if there is enough sunshine in Somerset, I may get some good round healthy fruits, and then I can test out the conclusions of Heston Blumenthal's first published scientific paper.

The paper, published with academics from the University of Reading last year, observes that the pulp of the tomato, which contains the seeds, has more umami taste than the outer flesh. Umami is a Japanese word meaning "savoury" or "deliciousness", and is a proposed addition to the currently accepted four basic tastes sensed by specialised receptor cells present on the human tongue (Wikipedia). There's a whole web site devoted to this one word.

The interesting thing about this discovery is that, as you will have figured out, most recipes tell you to squeeze out the tomato seeds and throw away the centre pulp. Apparently, according to Heston et al if you do that you will be throwing out the tastiest bit of the tomato. So…not just a pretty face eh?

Rapeseed oil: the next big (yellow) thing

2008-04-02T12:10:00.007+01:00

Stand by for two things. The first is the explosion of acid yellow rapeseed flowers that will dazzle the eyes in fields across the country in early summer. The second is the explosion of locally grown, cold pressed rapeseed oil that is going to migrate from the plastic bottles on the bottom shelf to the fancy bottles on the top shelf, where the olive oil sits.

We’ve been growing rapeseed in this country for years, thanks to EEC subsidies, and the EU interest in biofuels is going to see to it that those glaring fields of yellow continue to shock. I don’t mind them; they put me in mind of French impressionists and I quite like the scent although I believe it gives some people a headache. All the oilseed rape grown in the UK is GM free, which is nice, but I bet you didn’t know that 85-95% of it goes into the food chain. And most of the stuff in plastic bottles that is labelled ‘vegetable oil’ is actually rapeseed oil. I don’t think I would like to know about the processes the large scale manufacturers use to recover the oil, but then I wouldn’t like to know about what they do to make ordinary olive oil either.

No. We are now talking about a high end product. Cold pressed, low in saturated fat, ten times more Omega 3 than olive oil, and a natural source of Vitamin E, rapeseed oil is locally produced in an increasing number of locations in the UK. Arable farmers who previously took little interest in what happened to their product are now keenly aware of consumers’ concerns about food miles and a market has opened up. I sampled oil from two producers; Mellow Yellow from Farringtons in Northants, and Oleifera from right up in Northumberland, on the Scottish borders.

Mellow Yellow is a virgin cold pressed oil with an unfiltered cloudy look in the bottle. Grown by Duncan Farrington on his LEAF marque farm (Linking Environment And Farming) it is one of the leaders in this new move from commodity product to a competitor to olive oil. The seeds are planted in August and the pods are harvested at the end of July. You can plant a variety of rape in the spring, but it tends to have a bitter taste. The seeds are pressed gently, at temperatures which never rise above 31ºC, thereby retaining all the health giving properties.

Oleifera, in its elegant tall bottle which won’t fit into my cupboard, is clear and bright golden. Grown by a group of farmers in the borders the crop seems to like the climate and thrives. It settles naturally to give a bright sparkling oil which, aside from all its healthy properties, has a high burning point of around 230ºC, making it ideal for frying and for roast potatoes to which it imparts its wonderful golden colour. From first pressing to bottling takes about six weeks and if you’re wondering about the name – Oleifera is latin for ‘oil-bearing seed’, and as the Romans brought the seed to Britain it is an appropriate name.

So – what does it taste like? Both oils look bright and clean, with the Oleifera bright in the bottle and Mellow Yellow cloudy and unfiltered – good in my book. Mellow Yellow has a bit more scent than Oleifera when you sniff it. When I tasted the Oleifera my first thought was ‘buttery’. It has a warm, clean taste, very light and with a trace of sweetness. Mellow Yellow – my first thought was ‘new mown hay’. A definite but quite pleasant vegetal taste, sweet and clean. Both producers describe their product as having a ‘nutty’ taste, but when I think ‘nutty’ I think of walnuts and hazelnuts and there is no comparison.

But if, like me, you really like olive oil, I think you will be disappointed. The complexity of olive oil, the pepper, the hit at the back of the throat, the bitterness or lack of it, the acid freshness green or golden, those notes are absent. I don’t honestly think you could offer your guests a pool of rapeseed oil to dandle their bread in and expect coos of delight.

But, on the other hand, you know how cook books are always telling you not to use your best olive oil for such and a thing, and you end up using your best olive oil because you only have one bottle? Well, for roasting potatoes instead of goose fat, for massaging the roast chicken before it goes into the oven, for mayonnaise when you don’t want the strength of the olive flavour to dominate, and for a light salad dressing – this will be ideal. And it hasn’t travelled very far to get to you.

Sea kale

2008-03-19T12:49:00.006Z

I grew up in the North West of England, on the shores of the Irish Sea. We had a flat golden strand where lunatics went sand yachting, and a cinder track that ran along between the dunes and the golf links. Strange blue glaucous plants grew among the sand and the shingle; sea holly with its blue spiky globes, and sea kale with its mass of tiny white flowers in the summer. I didn’t know then what I know now about sea kale. Although the tough green foliage is almost inedible when it is at its height you can force it like rhubarb early in the year, and then you have an entirely different thing.

I have a friend who grew up the son of a greengrocer in London; he has been explaining to me how certain vegetables, like chicory, were so delicate and so sought after that they came into the shop in special boxes, wrapped closely in waxed paper. That’s how the early forced shoots of sea kale arrived, a high priced vegetable with a delicate nutty flavour, brightening the winter diet of root veg and cabbage. It was known as winter asparagus.

They used to force the stems by piling up sand and shingle around them, but now you aren’t allowed to pick sea kale from the wild because it was overpicked in the twentieth century and a ban was enforced. Sandy Patullo at Eassie Farm near Forfar in Angus, Scotland, grows a crop commercially in polytunnels, and is now about the only grower producing sea kale on any scale in the UK.

You can grow it from seed, but it takes forever and is a bit hit and miss. You can however, occasionally, find someone who will sell you a plant. And I found someone just around the corner! Dinah Lindon-Critchley at Blooming Hill Plants in Shepton Mallet, Somerset,grows an eclectic selection of vegetable plants – 42 different varieties of tomato just for a start, plus all sorts of other interesting things, and she is one of the few places in the country that you can get sea kale.

The tiny shoots are dark purple at the moment. I will let them get on with it for a while and see what happens when I force them next year.

A.H. Pattullo
Eassie Farm
Eassie
Forfar
Angus
DD8 1SG
01307 840303

How to make butter

2008-03-16T13:30:00.008Z

George Keen is one of the great Somerset cheesemakers; his family has been making traditional farmhouse cheddar for over a hundred years and Keen’s cheddar is one of the three great artisan cheddars in the Slow Food presidia.

Keen’s cheese is made with unpasteurised milk from their own herds, hand cheddared, cloth bound and sealed with lard, and left to mature for at least ten months.

If you have your own milk, like George, you also have access to your own cream, so a few of us gathered the other day, courtesy of Slow Food Somerset, for a lesson from George in butter making. As luck would have it the stainless steel butter churn, which would have hidden the whole process from view, had broken down, so it was back to old fashioned methods. We were each handed a screw topped jar half filled with two day old cream, and invited to shake. If you try this yourself, don’t use very fresh cream – it won’t work.

There’s a lot to be said for churning your own butter in a glass jar. You can see all the various processes as they happen.

The cream thickens quite quickly and then solidifies into a lump surrounded by thin buttermilk. When you take it out of the jar it is quite granular. This is just how it should be. The next step is to wash it. You wash the butter grains in cold fresh water, which washes out the excess proteins, and then you knead the mass, adding in salt if you want some salt in your butter. Having tasted the butter with absolutely no salt in it I do think that a very little salt is a good thing for taste purposes. And it does preserve the butter.

Next you want a pair of butter hands! These wooden paddles are soaked first in hot water, which opens the grain of the wood, and then in cold water, which closes the grain. The effect is to prevent the paddles from sticking to the butter, a bit like wetting your hands before you make meat balls. You then work the butter into pats, or blocks, or rolls.

I’m filled with pride to be able to say “I made this” – my butter, made under the tuition of one of the world’s greatest dairymen, unpasteurised, golden, and all my own work!

Thomas Etty Esq, Heritage Seedsman

2008-03-01T17:15:00.007Z

The small family firm of Thomas Etty, in Horton, Somerset, is the only heritage seedsman in the UK, quite possibly the only real heritage seedsman in the world. That’s quite a claim, but one that Ray Warner and his family (Mr Etty's representatives on earth) feel passionately about. Whilst other seed merchants number some heritage seeds in their catalogues, Thomas Etty sells only heritage seeds, 450 varieties at the last count. Everything listed in the catalogue has a history and a provenance, many going back to the originals listed by Philippe-Andre de Vilmorin in the 1880s. So if you want to make an fifteenth century flower garden you need to talk to Thomas Etty Esq.

The catalogue lists flowers and bulbs, but my main interest at the moment is the vegetables. The seed bank in this country has narrowed over the last few decades, firstly because large producers wanted a uniform product that all ripened at the same time, and secondly because the EU insisted that seed varieties should be tested and approved for our safety. Testing costs money and without it seeds cannot be listed. In the last 100 years, 90% of UK vegetable varieties have been lost from our soils and, as we know, large corporations now control a quarter of the world’s seed markets, raising issues of genetic modification and disease resistant F1 hybrids that do not breed true.

Many of the old varieties do have built in disease resistance but are a funny shape, and they ripen unevenly. But as a gardener, I’m concerned with flavour and the last thing I want is all my tomatoes to ripen on the same day! And I don’t mind if they are not a uniform size because I don’t have packaging issues. What I want is a wonderful taste, and perhaps some old fashioned beauty. It never really occurred to me before, but for a long time green was not necessarily the only colour for a French bean – it could be yellow, or purple, or maroon splashed with cream.

Ray and Jane Warner, and their son Dan, have their business in a small village near Ilminster, Somerset. They buy in from a small number of wholesalers and package the seeds in smaller quantities for sale mainly on the internet. This low cost high volume business was made for the web and they have as much business as they want at the moment, selling everything with no need to advertise. Last year they sold 32,000 packets of seeds from their cottage, to customers all over the world, although getting past the US regulations requires some skills.

I love the names of some of these old varieties – how did a lettuce called Fat Lazy Blonde get its name I wonder? Or the one called Drunken Woman? And what will my beans look like if they are called Coco Rouge de Prague? Can’t wait to find out!

The other source of heritage seeds is what used to be called the Henry Doubleday Research Association and has now become Garden Organic. Gardeners pay to become members of the seed library, and each year they are given a selection of six of the hundreds of varieties to grow.

Brotformen

2008-02-24T10:44:00.007Z

If you make your own bread you will have come across the proving baskets known as bannetons. Traditionally these baskets are made of wicker or cane, some sort of breathable material, and often they have a cloth liner made of calico to prevent sticking. For some reason the ones you can purchase for domestic use seem to be incredibly expensive. I have made my own from time to time, fashioned from a basket or a colander lined with a tea towel, and it didn’t work terribly well! A while ago I was given a couple of cane baskets by an artisan baker and I have been using them a lot. They give a lovely beehive finish to the loaf. But they do stick occasionally.

Lately I came across a German company called Ernst Birnbaum who make proving baskets for the bread trade and will sell them to domestic breadbakers for a small additional cost. They have a very utilitarian web site which has an English version. Their range is astonishing and the prices are extremely reasonable. It took me a while to figure out the best way to pay for my order because my bank wanted to charge a huge amount for transferring the money, but eventually I used PayPal and I would urge anyone considering the exercise to do likewise.

I expected that the order would take a few weeks to arrive but four days after the PayPal instruction went through there was a knock on my front door and there they were. I was amazed.

These proving baskets are made of wood pulp and are very light but also sturdy. I suppose if commercial bakers are using them regularly they expect them to last. They do somehow remind you of something you might have seen in a hospital! I floured mine well before the dough went in and when I turned it out there was a satisfying sucking thunnckkk as it came out perfectly. The basket leaves tiny linen like indentations on the surface of the dough which stand out nicely when you slash the top.

I ordered seven pieces in different sizes for friends and myself and the total, including delivery charges from Germany, VAT and extras came to 45 euros. Impossibly little for something that really works well. I recommend them unhesitatingly.

Ernst Birnbaum
Email: kontakt@brotformen.de
www.brotformen.de

Chard labour

2008-02-22T18:20:00.007Z

I acquired an allotment last autumn, or half an allotment to be exact. The day I heard about it I went down at sunset and looked at the huge piece of ground of which I had become the custodian. It seemed to stretch into the distance and I thought I would never fill it. I went home and sketched out my plans on paper. The next day I returned, looked at the plot, looked at the paper, and suddenly it was tiny!

I had to choose between asparagus and artichokes, between salsify and spinach, between brassicas and beets; I wanted a quince tree and a mulberry, an apricot, a peach… ohhhh and I wanted it NOW!

But you have to be sensible and get a grip. The microplot, as it now appeared, is just not big enough for everything, never mind a mulberry tree, but it is plenty big for my needs which are simple. I was however desperate to plant something there and then. I planted chard, that leafy green vegetable with the pale ribs. And surprisingly it grew and thrived. Oddly, I felt bad about picking it. It was growing along nicely and it seemed a shame to cut it off. But I got over that.

My chard doesn’t look like the kind you get in shops. To be honest it looks a bit manky, with some holes and some yellow leaves, but when you twist off the roots they come away with a satisfyingly juicy crunch that bodes well. The first batch I cooked was unbelievable – fresh fresh fresh.

What to make with it: the one thing I know about chard is that the Italians love it and put it into ravioli fillings.

I have just purchased The Oxford Companion to Italian Food by Gillian Riley and others, and I know Gillian to be a fine writer and researcher and an authority on Italian art. This book is a monumental work, the first in a series that follows in the steps of Alan Davidson’s magnificent Oxford Companion to Food. But it has nothing on chard, or swiss chard, or biete which is the Italian for chard. Nothing under vegetables, or greenery, or ravioli. It is missing. It is not there. I think this is a bit of an omission in what is supposed to be a compendium.

But it’s not hard to find a recipe for a ravioli filling that uses chard, and they are all pretty much the same.
For two people

Ingredients
Chard – about 4 washed and sliced handfuls
Ricotta – about three dessertspoons
1 egg
Nutmeg
Seasoning
(You can add some chopped pine nuts too if you like.)

Method
Wilt the chard in a tiny bit of water with the lid on
Drain, and press out extra water
When cool enough to handle chop finely
Add ricotta and egg to make a paste
Season generously

If you are going to make your own ravioli you really need a pasta machine. I speak as someone who disdained the things for ages, until today actually. But it is very very difficult to roll out pasta dough thin enough to make acceptable ravioli without one despite what Gillian Riley says. I know. So once the chard idea took root the next thing was a pasta machine acquisition and lo, the Great God Argos had one in his sale half price. Sometimes you just know that a thing is meant to be and that pasta machine had my name on it.

I thought it would be a bit of tin and it would fall to pieces immediately. But I was very wrong. Argos are selling a good heavy bit of chrome with a good solid clamp and I am absolutely delighted with it. But apparently they will not be stocking these things any more, which is why they are half price, so I take it that DIY pasta is now out of fashion.

Meanwhile I had a lot of fun making pasta so thin you could read the newspaper through it. I only used half of the pasta dough so tomorrow – the attachmenty thing for making tagliatelle!

Delia, for the love of God…

2008-02-14T11:50:00.008Z

Last night I decided to rustle up some nice simple leek and potato soup because those were the ingredients to hand – a couple of leeks, an onion, some potatoes, some chicken stock and the remains of a tub of clotted cream.

Just in case there might have been a revolution in the recipe for leek and potato soup I had a look at Delia Online, the website of the sainted Delia Smith. I wasn’t expecting very much – I mean how complicated is it to chop a few leeks and a couple of potatoes?

Imagine my surprise when I find that she recommends using three discs of frozen mashed potato. Am I seeing things? No. The woman who had the public sweep the shelves clean of fresh cranberries a few years ago is recommending we buy frozen mashed potato. And not any old frozen mash either, but McCain’s frozen mash – she even spells it out. (Wonder how much that works out at per click?)

Honestly, how long does it take to peel a spud? Or to get someone else to do it for you?

I know that Delia’s new thing is that food has become too cheffy and programmes like Masterchef where budding cooks get their dishes trashed are off-putting to the inexperienced, but for goodness sake... there are times for cheating and a potato is not one of them.

Delia’s new book is full of this sort of stuff. It’s called How to Cheat at Cooking and it will go straight into the bestseller charts at No 1 on pre-orders alone. I don’t think Gordon Ramsay will be buying it, and neither will I.

Reasons for peeling my own potato:

I know where it came from and how far it travelled.
I know how it was raised and what its name is
I can listen to the radio and drink a glass of wine as I peel
A child can do it and it is an excellent introduction to food for them
I put the peelings on the compost heap and they nourish the ground

Any more reasons for peeling your own potato are welcome!

Potted pheasant

2008-02-11T14:26:00.000Z

It’s a bit late this year, because the pheasant season has just ended, but if some time you find yourself cooking pheasants and you have some left over this is a really good way to use it up. The number of times I have carefully put the leftover legs in the fridge and never used them because by the time they are chilled they are tough and chewy and full of sinews, when I could have been making potted pheasant.

Remove as much of the flesh as you can from the leftovers and make stock with the rest. If the bird has got cold a good way is to reheat it in a low oven with the braising vegetables and a little wine, cider or water. When cool enough you can get quite a lot off the bones.

Clarify some butter by slowly heating the butter through and pouring off the clear liquid, leaving behind the milky fluid.

Whizz the pheasant in a processor with some of the reduced braising stock, some clarified butter and about half a teaspoonful of my favourite spice, mace, or the same of nutmeg, plus some black pepper.

Pack into a clean jar and pour clarified butter over the top to seal. Should keep in the fridge for several weeks.

A woodcock

2008-02-05T14:27:00.001Z

Someone gave me something beautiful the other day. And I ate it.

A woodcock is a small game bird, with a wondrous long beak. Its plumage is designed more for camouflage than for showing off, but that beak is amazing. Long and slender, it is used to probe and search for earthworms, and the top half of it is flexible. You will never see them for sale so a gift from a hunter is a rare prize.

This is one of those birds that you can, apparently, eat insides and all. However the Orvis website suggests that you need to have three Martinis first – maybe to face up to the innards – and that you cook your bird for 25 minutes in a moderate oven. The Shooter said he wouldn’t eat the bits himself and I decided that neither would I. Roasted for twelve minutes in a hot oven it makes a meal for one person, with a taste that is rich and deep but not over gamey. Maybe the only time in my life I will get to taste it.

In Defence of Food

2008-01-29T14:50:00.000Z

Michael Pollan’s new book In Defence of Food describes in detail how food, our food, real food, has been stolen from us, commercialised by the business of nutritionism. Not nutrition, he points out, but nutritionism, a pseudo science that insists that food can be reduced to its component parts and then synthesised, recombined and sold back to us at enormously inflated prices.

Food, he says, is something that our grandmothers would have recognised as such. It is the whole carrot, not the beta-carotene supplement. It is the simple version of yoghurt, not the fat reduced, gelled, bulked, flavoured omega-3 substance with the corn syrup sweetener. It is real bread, made with whole grains, fresh yeast, salt and water and NOTHING ELSE.

And on the day when my newspaper announced a study by scientists at Oxford University into the links between eating junk food and violent behaviour he also makes the connection between this reductionist approach to eating and the fashionable and very very scary condition known as metabolic syndrome.

Last Tuesday 22 January BBC Radio 4 devoted its Case Notes programme to this disorder. You can hear what was said here.

The rocketing rates for obesity and diabetes are, says Pollan, a direct result of our Western Diet, which has allowed commercial interests and nutritionism – sponsored by those same interests – to hijack what we eat and in the process make a lot of us very ill indeed. But capitalism is also able to turn these problems to its advantage and sell us diet pills, diet books, spa treatments and heart bypass operations. Pollan estimates the cost to society in health care costs to be in the region of $250 billion a year for America alone.

I have an interest in all this because ten years ago I had bowel cancer and I had a good look at my diet to see what I thought could have caused it. A few years later a good friend was diagnosed with breast cancer, and again we found ourselves scrutinising what was in the fridge. We are coming down with studies about what we should eat, or drink, and every time a new one comes out we have to throw out the butter, or the red wine, or the margarine, or the chocolate, and start all over again. You would think they could get it right, but maybe, just maybe, there is more to food than the sum of its constituent parts. Maybe a carrot is more than beta-carotene, maybe it's its inherent carrotiness that makes it good for us.

A major culprit is the way we eat, or should I say consume, our calories. In front of the tv, in front of the computer, in the car, who knows what goes into their mouth? Could be cornflakes, could be the packet…and the less time we spend eating the more obese we seem to get, whereas people who spend two hours eating their lunch actually consume fewer calories. Go figure.

Pollan offers some advice; don’t eat anything your grandmother would not have recognised as food. Don’t buy supplements, buy the whole food. Eat more plants than meat (and if you have read his previous book The Omnivore’s Dilemma you will know why this is a good idea), and eat a bit less of everything.

Personally I find I’m becoming extremely narrow minded about food. I eat seasonal vegetables, some of which I grow myself. I never buy ready meals – because I find my teeth banging together in the middle in search of some integrity – and I don’t buy things with unpronounceable ingredients like ethoxylated diglycerides. I make my own bread so I know what goes into it and I try to ensure that my vodka is the purest I can find. Why on earth would anyone want to do anything else?

In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating by Michael Pollan

Published by Penguin Books

www.penguin.com

Raise your glasses please…

2008-01-25T15:20:00.000Z

Yes, it’s Burns Night. All over the world people with only the faintest claim to Scots nationality will be getting in touch with their inner celt. People who never normally drink whisky, and wouldn’t dream of drinking it throughout a meal, are downing tots of expensive single malt and tucking into haggis and neeps as if it were a gourmet dish. Haggis, like Christmas Pudding, is one of those once-a-year, whether-you-feel-like-it-or- not dishes. And every year I think to myself “You know, this is not bad. I should eat this more often.” It helps that I really like neeps, or swede if you’re from the south of

England

, or turnip if you’re from the north of

England

. Very confusing.

Robert Burns has been getting a makeover recently, and not entirely to his advantage. Out goes the dreaming romantic at the plough, breaking his heart over a harvest mouse. In comes the upwardly mobile philanderer, loving and leaving endless maidens, usually pregnant. He supplemented his meagre farming income with a proper job as an exciseman and seriously thought about emigrating to the West Indies to manage a sugar plantation, complete with slaves.

But I used to live just down the road from the Burns farm, and a low miserable place it was, along with all its neighbours. Annan, on the Solway, was a place where they built clippers until the early part of the twentieth century, and those ships must have whispered to him of faraway places with much better opportunities, and weather.

The dialect in which he wrote is another reason why folk love him; he holds up two fingers to the swanky language of more acceptable poets, and if you can understand his lines that makes you a bit of a rebel, along with him. When I arrived in the South of Scotland it was 1960. We had nuclear power stations and everything. My first day in school the rest of the class stood up and, one by one, recited the poem they had learnt.

“The bairnies cuddle doon at nicht
Wi muckle focht and din.
O try and sleep, ye waukrife bairns
Yer faither’s comin in…”

I had only moved about seventy miles north from England, but it felt like a different planet.
For the following week we all had to learn a Burns poem, To a Mouse, and all this time later it is still etched in my memory, the language lilting and strange, and even to my ears then a cut above the bairns above.

“Wee, sleekit cowerin timorous beastie,
Oh what a power’s in thy breastie
Thou need nae run awa sae hastie
Wi bickerin brattle
I would be laith to run and chase thee
Wi murderin pattle.

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken nature’s social union
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle at me
Thy poor earth born companion
And fellow mortal.”

Robert Burns may have died because he drank foul water from the Brow Well, or because he had a heart complaint, or from the excesses of alcohol, it isn’t really clear, but 50,000 people came out onto the streets of Dumfries in July 1796 to see his funeral cortege pass by. He was 37 years old.

Nobody in their right mind would think of making a haggis from scratch, but if you are really that way inclined you might find this article interesting.

Hot pot

2008-01-21T16:07:00.000Z

I’m sure everyone knows the background to the famous Lancashire hotpot; it’s one of those dishes that was prepared in the morning and put into the baker’s oven after the bread came out to cook long and slow and be ready at the end of the day. It’s a hearty warming dish for a cold day and maybe the men took it down the mine wrapped in a blanket as I have read, or maybe the mill women with their shawls around their shoulders and their clogs sparking on the cobbles collected it from the baker on their way home to feed hungry families. I always thought it was the latter actually but it could be both.

I looked up various recipes for Lancashire Hotpot, which I remember from my childhood in Cumbria where we had it for school lunch (yup, those were the days!) and I’m interested to see that the early 20^th century recipes mention oysters, tucked under the final potato layer, as well as kidneys. But the surprise was that there was a special pot in which to cook the hotpot, a tall straight sided crock, in which the long boned mutton chops were stood on end to cook slowly all day with onions and maybe a carrot or two. The only illustration I can find comes from Food in England by Dorothy Hartley, published in 1954. She describes how the vegetables are packed in around the chops and the lid put on to cover everything until 15 minutes before the end of the cooking time when you take it off to let the potato topping brown.

If you haven’t got chops that will stand on their ends any other manageable cut of lamb or mutton will do fine. And this is a hearty dish so you shouldn’t be using your best olive oil for it – dripping is the thing.

Melt the dripping in a pan and fry a sliced onion until soft.
Put the onion in the bottom of a crock with a bay leaf.
Brown the meat on either side and add to the crock.
Add kidney if you are using it, then a sliced carrot and some sliced mushrooms. Season as you go.
Make a gravy by adding a spoonful of flour to the fat in the pan and stirring in about a pint of brown stock.
Arrange sliced potatoes over the top of the meat and vegetables and pour the gravy over. Finally sprinkle a teaspoonful of sugar over the potatoes and put to cook slowly in a medium oven for a couple of hours.
15 minutes before the end of the cooking time take the lid off and allow the potatoes to brown.

I don’t know why this dish works so well cooked this way, but it does. Mutton would be better than lamb but lamb is good. Don’t be tempted to do anything any more fancy than the above – no garlic, no rosemary, just salt and pepper, and that final scatter of sugar. The correct thing to serve with it is a dish or a glass jar of pickled red cabbage. Which I don't happen to have about me.

Wassailing, Somerset 2008

2008-01-20T11:41:00.000Z

In the days when Christmas Day was celebrated on 5 January Twelfth Night was celebrated twelve days later on 17 January. This date is now known as Old Twelfth Night and is a traditional date for festivities throughout the cider making counties of England.

Glastonbury holds its celebration in the wonderful fourteenth-century Abbey Barn which is part of the Somerset Rural Life Museum. The fun involves drinking cider, eating cake, and trudging out to the apple orchard to make a libation and to scare away the evil spirits. So everyone turns up on a cold damp evening wearing wellies and warm jackets. The really nice thing about this event is that there was a real whiff of authenticity about it. The Master of Ceremonies was Bernard Coulter of the Somerset Levellers Band who swept us through the history and evidence and the claims for tradition with a healthy and scholarly scepticism and then launched us into some of the old wassailing songs with gusto. When I tell you that one of them is about the time when the Danes were a menace locally and how King Alfred got rid of them you will understand that we are going back a bit! We have long memories in Somerset!

First comes the cake, Somerset Apple Cake, handed round to everyone. It is moist with apple and spiced with cinnamon and crackling with brown sugar. Someone will find a bean in their piece, and they will become the King or Queen of the Wassail and be crowned with a wreath of green leaves. They are entitled to issue an edict – our King wished everyone to be happy for the night – and their reign lasts until midnight.

Led by the King, holding a triple handled wassail cup filled with cider and a two pronged fork with a piece of toast soaked in cider, we process out to the orchard. The cider is sprinkled around the base of the apple tree, for a good harvest to come; the toast is placed in the boughs, for the robin; and a shot is fired into the branches, to ward off evil spirits.

Then we all go back into the barn, for mulled cider and dancing and you’d be amazed how light footed you can be with wellies on your feet and cider in your belly!

Somerset Apple Cake

Ingredients:
12 oz self-raising flour
a pinch of salt
8 oz margarine/butter
½ teaspoon cinnamon
6 oz caster sugar
4 oz sultanas
1 lb cooking apples, finely chopped
3 eggs
a little milk
a little demerara sugar

Method:
Rub the fat into the flour and salt. Add the sugar and cinnamon. Make a well in the mixture and drop in the egg and fruit. Mix well; if the dough is a little too stiff, add some milk.

Place in an eight-inch greased cake tin, and sprinkle a little demerara sugar on the top.

Bake for one-and-a-half hours, in a moderate oven (Gas Mark 4/180°C/350°F). Allow to cool slightly before turning out onto a cooling rack.

This cake is better if you wrap it up in foil or waxed paper for a day or two.

Marmalade – a long cut

2008-01-18T15:38:00.000Z

I usually avoid any recipe that tells me its method is easy. Easy generally means short cuts; easy like as not means dried, packaged, microwaved, deep frozen and processed; garlic granules, tinned potatoes, frozen mixed veg are easy, and none of them improve a meal.

For years I have used the same old marmalade recipe, and now the page is so stained it is becoming impossible to read, so I looked for an alternative. I don’t want to make a different marmalade – I want to stick to my favourite dark coarse cut – and I don’t want grapefruit or ginger or whisky in it, but I’m prepared to try another method, just this once. Very rarely does easy offer a genuine benefit by suggesting a long rather than a short cut, but this marmalade recipe, from the blessed Delia Smith, does exactly that.

The fragrance of the house during marmalade making is a once a year pleasure, as are, I suppose, the windows streaming with condensation and the general chaos of pips and fruit and stickiness. But it does take quite a long time, and you do need to pay attention. Start it in the evening, after work, and you’ll still be there at three in the morning. Delia has devised a method which fits in well with ‘our busy modern lives’ and can be taken up and paused and dovetailed with other things in a leisurely way. A long cut.

In summary, you don’t juice the oranges and then cut up the peel, you poach them whole, let them cool and then scrape out the insides. Then you cut up the peel. See what I mean. Easy. The insides come away with all the pith and pips, which is the pectin bearing bit, and the skins are left thin and tender and won’t go all hard when you add the sugar. (I do have one complaint; she tells you to boil the stuff for far too long once the sugar is in, but you can be the judge of that. I will tell you my version.)

Ingredients:
1 kg Seville oranges
1 unwaxed lemon
5 pints water
2kg granulated sugar

Put the fruit into a preserving pan with the water and bring slowly up to simmering point. Cover the pan with a double thickness of foil and reduce heat so that the fruit poaches very gently without the liquid evaporating. This will take about three hours. Remove pan from heat and allow to cool.

When fruit is cool enough to handle (I left it overnight) remove from liquid with a slotted spoon. Cut fruit in half. With a spoon scoop out the flesh, the pips and the pith and put into a medium saucepan. Discard the lemon peel but keep the orange.

Add 1 pint of the poaching liquid to the saucepan. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes. Allow to cool a little, then put into a sieve lined with a large square of muslin. Allow to drain.

Meanwhile, cut up the orange peel as thin or thick as you like and put back into the remaining poaching liquid in the preserving pan. If you feel you lost a lot of the liquid during the poaching now is the moment to redress the balance.

When the fruit and pips mixture has drained take up the corners of the muslin and twist really really tightly so that the pectin is squeezed out. Discard the detritus. Add the liquid to the preserving pan. Leave for several hours or overnight.

When you are ready to take up the cooking again, warm the sugar through in a low oven for about 10 mins, then place the preserving pan on the stove, start heating it and pour in the warmed sugar all in one go. Let the sugar dissolve slowly and completely, then boil hard until a set it reached. Start testing in about 45 minutes.

Allow the marmalade to stand for ten minutes to let the peel distribute itself evenly, then fill clean warm jars and seal.

This makes about five pounds of dark marmalade that absolutely zings with the sharp tang of Seville. Not to everyone’s taste, but certainly to mine.

Sic transit

2008-01-14T21:37:00.000Z

Someone died. Someone I never met, and did not know beyond a couple of exchanges of emails, but someone who was part of a profound change in my life.

How long ago was it exactly? Fourteen years or fifteen? I was married to a man who spent a lot of time in California. Life was tough for me and my daughter, left behind in the dank English climes while he spent his time beside the swimming pools. He was wheeling and dealing on our behalf, or so we thought; and we bided our time, waiting for the call to the sweet life. Instead we heard that he had just had a child with his Californian lover. Our family life was over.

His idyll lasted long enough for her to bear him two girls; he lied about our marriage and tricked her out of thousands. She threw him out in the end. He returned to England and we haven’t spoken in years.

We just heard that she has died. Her two girls are fourteen and twelve. It wasn’t her fault. None of it was her fault. Her daughters are the half sisters of my daughter, and, singleton that she is, she loves them as the sisters she never had.

It would be too simple to say that had things been different we would not have lived such a frugal life for so long. Maybe it would have been even more limited. Certainly we became the authors of our own destiny, for better definitely, not for worse. But from a life of comparative luxury we certainly came to know how to make things go round.

From that time I remember some things most strongly; there we were, in a gamekeeper’s cottage that would, under other circumstances, have been deemed romantic. Our heating came from a wood fired stove. Each morning in the winter I pulled wellingtons on under my dressing gown and trudged to the wood heap to keep the fire smouldering. Not very romantic. I daren’t let the car revs slow as I took my daughter to school, for fear it would stall, as it often did. Sometimes there was flooding, sometimes gales howled around the eaves of the little cottage, sometimes there was an evil black ice over all the roads.

But the farming people hung braces of pheasant on our door handles for us to pluck and dress, and up the road was a house where they kept hens, and we got our eggs from them, fresh as you like. And one day we had new laid eggs and we found ceps in the wood, a whole lot of them. Next day we told rich friends about our omelette and their eyes grew great.

I can’t really see her as the author of misfortune. Without her things would definitely have been different and it is not often that you can see so clearly the place where the road took a different turn. I never knew her, and I might not have liked her, but her girls are sisters to my girl, and they have lost her. And I have never had such eggs again.

Daube

2008-01-13T12:50:00.000Z

Today, Sunday, is a day about which stern weather warnings have been issued. I don’t think I have ever heard a weather forecaster actually tell me to stay indoors with a good book, but that is what they advised us to do today. Seems like a good day for a daube.

I love the way the French use the name of the utensil in which a dish is cooked to describe it. Marmite, casserole, terrine, pot-au-feu come to mind, as does daube. Alan Davidson, in his monumental work The Oxford Companion to Food, tells us that the daube originated in 18th century Saint-Malo where they were a speciality and included artichokes, celery, pork cutlets, goose as well as beef, and the foodstuffs, once cooked, were removed to be eaten without the sauce and often cold, in the jelly. With the sauce the correct French name is en compote. So Boeuf en Daube, the one remaining familiar dish, should by rights be Boeuf en Compote. I will cook mine in the black oval cast iron cocotte that I use for just about everything.

Next but one to Daube in Davidson’s fine book is David, Elizabeth, to whom I automatically turn first for recipes for this sort of thing. I have several of ED’s books, though not all by any means, and I was surprised to find that daube features at length in only one of them, French Provincial Cooking. She rightly says that there must be scores of different recipes for daubes in Provence alone, and how you make it is largely a matter of what you have.

I chose to use topside, sliced and marinated overnight. Put the oven on at 290ºF.
Into the pot goes:
Olive oil to cover the surface of the pot
A couple of slices of streaky bacon, sliced
1 onion, sliced finely
1 carrot, sliced diagonally
1 tomato, skinned and sliced

Arrange the slices of meat on top, overlapping, and bury a flattened clove of garlic in the centre, plus a bouquet garni that includes a thin slice of orange peel.

With the pan uncovered, start the cooking on top of the stove on a moderate heat.

Strain the marinade into a small saucepan and add to it a large glass of red wine. Bring to the boil and simmer long enough to boil off some of the alcohol. Pour over the meat, cover the pot with foil and then a tight fitting lid and put into the oven for about 2 ½ hours. After no more than half an hour the scent of wine and oil and herbs and garlic starts to penetrate the house, bringing a delicious perfume of Provence to cold and windy old England.

With the daube safely tucked up in the oven it is time to sit down to read, of which more anon.

Serve the meat with a little of the sauce and perhaps, says ED, a persillade of finely chopped garlic and parsley, with an anchovy and a few capers. Or add some stoned black olives to the pot half an hour before the end of the cooking time.

Two for lunch

2008-01-12T16:05:00.000Z

Last week I had a lovely experience; I met a friend for lunch and we ordered food and talked about it. The venue came with expectations, which were, in the end, not entirely fulfilled by the kitchen, but the experience far outweighed the result. The conversation started with the bread. I had brought some olive oil as a gift and we wanted to taste it, so we asked for bread. The place had modest pretensions, but pretensions all the same, and we were disappointed when the bread was white and soft and floppy. As blotting paper for the very excellent oil it did the job, but barely. And yet if the bread had been half decent we would have gladly paid extra for it. Why don’t restaurants understand that it is probably the first solid thing that you taste, and it sets the tone for everything else. It’s not hard – you can leave it to do its own thing overnight and bake it first thing in the morning. People would come for the bread alone.

Anyway, we then ordered three starters for the two of us, for a test. My friend was considering booking the place for a foodie event and we wanted to see what they could do. We tasted, and considered, and put our heads on one side, and had another forkful.

“Not enough seasoning”
“Too bland”
“Too smoky”
“Don’t like the spices”
“Love the spices”
“Delicious dressing”
“Is this supposed to be cold?”
“Great lentils”
And then on to the treacle tart…
“Do you think there is marmalade in this?”
“I always put some Seville oranges into mine”

And then the coffee...

"How are they making it?"
"They've got a Gaggia machine"

All in all the repast was adequate, but not outstanding. But we spent two hours talking about it non-stop, with just a few side trips to discuss cheese and how to tell the ripeness of sloes. Two hours! Two hours of serious and considered discussion. I don’t think anyone overheard us, but we were lost in a private passion.

I recently found myself in the pub next to a group who had come in together from something they had all been doing. It turned out to be bell-ringing. They laughed and joked and talked about peals and rings and changes and Plain Bob Minors or some such. It was a joy!

Why do these snippets amaze and delight and yet the braying of city types is such an aggravation. I suppose, or at least I like to think, it’s because the passion is real, a private world of total fulfilment.

I’m not sure that the place will get my friend’s event, but it was huge fun!

Good things from Catalonia

2008-01-10T12:03:00.000Z

Just before Christmas I was in Barcelona. I had a couple of things on my shopping list, one being some good Iberian jamón and the other being a nice bottle of Pedro Ximenez sherry. It’s always lovely when you buy these things from people who really care about what they are selling you. Yes, the jamón was the most expensive in the jamóneria, but it tasted like silk, and the expression on my face made the jolly round jamónista break into laughter. And I did taste about four others just to make sure.

I like sherry, but I’m of the manzanilla disposition, dry with a salty zephyr of the sea somewhere, and a bowl of almonds. I had never actually tasted a Pedro Ximenez (named for the grape, it’s not a brand). So we went off to a wine shop in the barrio where my daughter lives. The barn like building had wooden floorboards dark with age and its gloom was increased by shelves stacked high up the walls with bottles, cases piled in the middle so only one person could pass, and along one wall big wooden wine barrels. The only light came from the open doorway and there was a constant stream of pushy old ladies with plastic bottles to be filled from the barrels.

We found a few bottles of PX and asked for advice. It’s not cheap, this stuff. Some of it is very expensive indeed and the assistant felt it was a bit too special for us! So we made our choice and he went out the back to get the bottle, returning with an additional one. He explained that this second bottle was a bit more expensive than our chosen one, and held slightly less – 500 ml as opposed to 750 – but it was of a higher quality and he thought we would like it. Never was a truer word spoken. If you ever get the chance to buy a bottle of this you will not regret it. It’s called La Sacristía de Romate

To call this elixir sweet is to completely miss the point. Dark brown and concentrated, it tastes like fudge in a bottle, with overtones of chocolate and coffee and raisins. As a pudding wine it more or less is the pudding! I was delighted to see that on Christmas Day people who don’t ordinarily drink sweet wine reached for the bottle for second helpings with alacrity.

It was just as we were about to pay for the sherry that I caught sight of a hand chalked sign on a slate on the wall. It was notifying customers that the new Catalonian Siurana oil was available. What a piece of luck! This was mid December, so it was pretty much hot, or in fact cold, off the presses.

I don’t know why we don’t make more of a fuss about oil. We are quite happy to pay a whole lot of money for it, but I don’t know anybody who actually tastes the stuff in the bottle. Try it. Taste a teaspoon, all by itself, not with bread. If you haven’t bought a bottle since November it will be from the 2006/7 harvest and by now it will be old and stale – in fact the correct word is rancid, which seems a bit strong but there you are. Anything from the most recent harvest will have a best-before date of 2009.

There are hundreds of different kinds of olives, and my favourite just happens to be the little Arbequina, which is what the Siurana oil is made from. The new oil, from the early part of the harvest, is green and grassy fresh, fruity, clean and supple, with just a hint of pepperiness at the end, half way down your throat. I quite like that peppery kick in oil, as long as it isn’t accompanied by bitterness. Later pickings give oil that is soft and golden, smooth and almost sweet but never bitter. Truly the most delicious of oils to my mind.

A great book about olive oil, with notes about tastings, regions and producers is Olive Oil by Charles Quest-Ritson, part of the Eye Witness Companions series from Dorling Kindersley . This really is a terrific piece of work; just opening it at random I came across a note that tells me that fresh olive oil contains a chemical that works like ibuprofen – I didn’t know that! If you are at all interested in the amazing variety of olives that the world produces you will find this book fascinating.

Estonia

2007-12-03T20:53:00.000Z

I was invited to Estonia recently. My mate Marny is a tutor in European Rural Tourism at nearby Radstock College and she asked me along to do a workshop with a local food network in South Eastern Estonia. Near the Russian border. A place called Voru. Once you’ve found Estonia on a map, and then find Voru, you discover it’s actually nearer to Riga in Latvia than to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. And you can now fly direct to Riga from Bristol Airport. So off we went.

As we drove towards Voru through the flat birch wood countryside the snow started to fall, lightly at first and then more thickly. By the time we reached our destination it was a foot deep. In Estonia they don’t grit the roads, or sweep the snow from them. The cars just have snow tyres with studs in them. For some reason our car didn’t have snow tyres and we tobogganed our way down the country roads at the end of the journey.

The workshops were held in a log cabin, well equipped technically and cosy – they do know how to do cold. It perched above a freezing lake, the ice growing as we watched. We had about sixteen participants, all involved in local tourism and interested in food.

It’s hard to know what to tell such people. In this part of the world we are all eschewing processed foods and buying locally. Even, heaven forbid, actually growing some of our own vegetables. Local food festivals are multiplying, there are farm shops everywhere, and each town has its own farmers’ market. But isn’t that what they have been doing for centuries in Estonia?

Well, no, surprisingly. Which is when you realise what being under the heel of the Russians, then the Nazis, then the Soviets does to the character of a nation. Estonia was a sovereign country for only a couple of decades in the early part of the twentieth century. For the rest of the time, until 1991, it was part of somebody else’s hegemony. So, apart from the regional costumes and the national pastime of choral singing they have hardly any traditions left.

We ate good black bread, made locally from rye, and sometimes it had raisins in it. Main courses were invariably pork and potatoes. The local supermarkets were well stocked, with oranges from Spain and the usual range of vegetables. I liked the vodka a lot, also made from rye. It was smooth and faintly fruity. Local beers included one with honey. The wine was called Old Tbilisi and it was recommended but I gave it a miss!

We took with us the pride of Somerset – West Country Farmhouse Cheddar from Westcombe Dairy – see previous post. We also took some chutney, Real Ale chutney. Some translating problems with the words Real Ale, never mind chutney. It’s amazing what you take for granted about your own culture.

In return they gave us goats’ cheese, a multiplicity of grains including spelt, and some wonderful berry products, juiced and dried, from the virgin woods and forests of Estonia. Had it not been for the whiteout we would have foraged further.

As the bargain airlines fly planeloads of hen and stag parties ever further into foreign territory, places like Voru – quiet oases of peace and solitude – will have their chance to bid for tourists who don’t want to party all night. I’m just not quite sure how you tell the difference between all these new arrivals on our eastern horizons.

Westcombe Cheddar

2007-11-06T15:13:00.001Z

Anyone can make Cheddar. The word ‘cheddaring’ describes the process of cutting and turning the curd. There’s a place in Somerset that is called Cheddar, but cheddar cheese is made all over the world.

However, the best Cheddar is West Country Farmhouse Cheddar, which is a PDO (Product of Designated Origin) recognised by the EU, and to meet this standard the cheese must be made in the traditional manner using local ingredients in one of the 4 designated counties of SW England: Somerset, Devon, Dorset or Cornwall.

Westcombe Dairy in Somerset produces one of the three great West Country Farmhouse Cheddars, recognised by Slow Food and part of a distinguished Presidium, Slow Food’s mark of quality.

The little village of Westcombe is tiny and rural and cheese has been made there since 1890. The fortunes of cheesemakers have fluctuated over the years, and fashion suggested for a while that block cheddar was the way to go, but lately the Calver family has returned to the big cloth wrapped rounds that are the traditional cheddar shape, and the cheese is flying out the door.

Richard Calver owns the farm, and things really picked up when Tom, his son, came back to Somerset after training as a chef with Prue Leith. Together with the cheesemaker, Bob Bramley, they are making cheddar of an exceptional quality. The milk, from herds grazing locally, is unpasteurised. The cows are fed on grass in the summer and in the winter 85% of their diet is grown on the farm.

Cheese is a truly ancient food. Milk has always turned sour, but at some point in history artisans deliberately caused milk to coagulate, and when the resulting product was particularly successful samples of the original starter were handed on to other dairies. For a long time all cheese was made from these starter cultures - wild, adventitious bacteria present in the milk, probably from vegetation, that grew and produced acid as they consumed the lactose in the milk. This acid aided the action of rennet in the coagulation of the curds and gave the product flavour, structure and longevity.

With modern production methods, particularly the demand for standard and repeatable flavours and textures, nearly all cheese is now made with the addition of a dose of freeze dried or deep-frozen culture, straight from the packet. It’s a ‘use once only’ product – you can’t hand on a sample of the culture to start off another batch of cheese – and the cell numbers are concentrated by filtration or centrifugation. Only a small proportion of the lactic acid bacteria is robust enough to survive this treatment.

Five miles away from Westcombe is Ditcheat, where the Barber family has a big cheesemaking operation. They were dismayed to realise that the old traditional Cheddar cheese starter cultures were in danger of dying out, superseded by direct inoculation cultures. They determined to do what they could to save them and now all the great West Country cheesemakers use these traditional starter cultures to make their cheese.

Nothing is easy though; there are good bacteria, which are to be encouraged, and there are bad bacteria, known as ‘phages, which, if not controlled, will overwhelm the good bacteria and spoil the cheese. All cheesemakers are constantly on the lookout for the point at which the ‘phages start to get the upper hand. The price of your after-dinner treat is constant vigilance.

After the rennet and the curds and the whey and the cheddaring and the milling and the salting comes the moulding of the cheese, which is then pressed, sealed with lard and wrapped in cloth before being pressed one last time and stored.

At Westcombe they make 18-20 cheeses a day, 5 days a week, with family friendly sociable hours. The big rounds will be matured for up to 18 months, tested from time to time by plunging a cheese iron into their centres, and checked for flavour and acidity. You never quite know when a cheese will be ready – it just takes as long as it takes. Typical Westcombe cheeses will display a rounded sweetness with a good long finish and perhaps a hint of butterscotch.

They sell as many as they make, and if you want to watch one of their cheeses maturing you can do so at http://lbx.cheddarvision.tv. You can watch a timelapse video of the life of the cheese; and so far over 1,600,000 people have checked its progress!

Quince and Pheasant

2007-11-05T20:06:00.000Z

This time last year there were quince in the market, small versions of the big French ones you can sometimes buy, and I bought them and made an effort at membrillo. The fruits were hard, difficult to peel, impossible to core and chop, and splashes of boiling conserve kept stinging my forearm as I stirred the paste. It was sort of ok, a mellow terracotta colour, but not great.

This year someone gave me a whole bag of little quince from their tree. They don’t look at all like the usual fruit and, small and knobbly, I knew there would be nothing left if I started in to peel, core, etc. So I put them in the pan whole, half covered with water on a low heat and, knowing it would take ages for them to soften, went about my business elsewhere. Less than half an hour later the house was filling with a rich perfume and I bounded into the kitchen to find the whole fruits blossoming soft in a reducing liquid. I put them through a sieve, leaving behind the pips and the skins and the gritty bits that feel like toe nail clippings, and found I had a wonderful sunny puree. As I hadn’t added anything to the poaching liquid I added sugar to taste, and some lemon juice, which may preserve the colour, or may not, I don’t know.

I’m amazed. This puree is tart and fruity and would make a lovely sorbet, or a stunning ice cream, or a filling for little tiny tartlets, or…just about anything. But tonight it is going to add zing to a newly shot pheasant (mind your fillings).

The pheasant recipe is embarrassingly easy:

Preheat the oven to 200ºC

Liberally cover the base of a shallow, lidded casserole dish with olive oil, herbs (fresh or dried, but lots) and seasoning.
Half or quarter some waxy potatoes and turn them in the oil.
Joint your pheasant, musing on how you might have been a damn good surgeon.
Season the joints and place on top of the potatoes.
Chop an onion roughly, chop a couple of cloves of garlic finely, scatter over pheasant.
Season again, add more herbs, splash on some more oil.
Cover and cook in the oven for an hour.
Uncover for last ten minutes to allow to brown.

Serve with something green and a spoonful of the fabulous quince puree.

Doy Bags

2007-10-31T15:57:00.000Z

I read about this collective of women in the Philippines, and when I saw their website I was immediately taken with what they do. They collect and recycle the plastic drinks sachets that are so popular in Asia, the non-biodegradable foil and plastic packaging that would otherwise go into landfill sites and incinerators, and they make bags from them. Amazing!

Almost all the women are their family's main breadwinners, most of the husbands being unable to find work due to the poor economy of the area. The women have an average of 4-6 children, thus working for the cooperative makes a real difference, elevating families from extreme poverty to a decent life.

Just at the moment I'm thinking about Christmas and there's a real chance everyone in my family will get one of these. Do have a look at www.doybags.com, read about the women and what they are doing, and reach for your credit card. Spread the word!

Sloe vodka

2007-10-20T18:29:00.000+01:00

We have had a ground frost twice this last week. And some patient soul has been out gathering sloes. I found them in the farm shop and, feeling I should have got out and picked them myself I dithered, and then gave in. You are supposed to wait until after the first frost to collect sloes, the fruit of the blackthorn, but sometimes the frost comes late and the birds get them all, so luck is on our side this year.

I had it in mind to make sloe gin, which is what you do, but I don’t really like gin. And then I came across a little presentation in the farm shop from Godminster, who make vintage organic cheddar in Bruton, Somerset, and who have lately started making flavoured vodkas too, and it gave me an idea.

I love the Godminster cheddar, with its rich purple wax coat, and recently I had some of their absolutely stunning horseradish flavoured vodka, which is glorious in a Bloody Mary. They started making the vodkas with bought-in spirit to use up some of the fruits and vegetables that grow on their organic farm, and the range now includes cucumber (a star in Pimms), elderflower, the horseradish, and the more traditional blackcurrant as well as sloe. Next year they are going to do rhubarb and ginger. Taking on the Scandinavians from Somerset!

So this is my sloe vodka.

Ingredients
450g/1lb sloes
225g/8oz caster sugar
1 bottle vodka

Method
Prick the skin of the sloes all over with a clean needle and put in a large sterilised jar.
Pour in the sugar and the vodka, seal tightly and shake well.
Store in a cool, dark cupboard and shake every other day for a week. Then shake once a week for two months. The sugar will slowly dissolve and the sloe vodka will turn a beautiful dark red and be ready to drink.

Decant into clean bottles.

Just in time for Christmas I think!

Stuff

2007-09-25T16:34:00.000+01:00

I have just been through my second house move in two years and am unpacking things that have been sitting in boxes for quite a while. I remember that when I packed them up in the first place I got rid of tons of stuff, keeping only the things that really meant a lot to me. Now, as I unwrap the paper and discover the contents again, I do find myself wondering why I chose these things to keep. The tangible sense of belonging that I know I once felt has somehow rubbed off a lot of them. I look at them and the attachment has vanished. I don’t think there are many that I will actually dispose of yet, but a lot that I will wrap and box up again, ready for the mighty car boot sale to come. It’s quite a relief. No matter how hard I try I am still greatly overburdened with stuff, and at the time it all seems so redolent of importance and nostalgia that there is no way it can be disposed of. It’s nearly impossible to know which little thing has struck so deep into the psyche that its disappearance will be a cause for regret for years. So you keep them all.

Here’s a carving from Kenya, found in the back of a dusty shop. I think it’s supposed to be a hippopotamus, but it seems to have been carved by someone who usually carved elephants, and I do wonder if he had ever seen a hippo. Maybe it’s a baby hippo. Maybe it’s a child’s toy. But it is carved with such love that it cannot be for the tourist trade and I treasure it.

Here’s a silver nautilus shell. You fill it with hot water. It’s to warm your ice cream spoons. Those Victorians eh?

Here’s a big lump of flint that stops my papers from flying about. Actually it’s a Mesolithic handaxe from a little hill outside Petra in Jordan – which proves that early man enjoyed a good view and a nice breeze while he sat knapping.

And here’s a really pretty mug made by an American potter called John Glick. I love his deep dark vibrant colours.

Next time – all the kitchen stuff I can’t throw out but for which I have no room either!

Freshly dug carrots

2007-09-16T15:43:00.000+01:00

If I’ve been a bit quiet lately it’s because I have been moving house. All the pots and pans and the batterie de cuisine have been boxed up and moved a few miles down the road to a market town called Shepton Mallet. It has a market cross, winding streets and cobbles. It has been badly neglected for about twenty years, but an enormous Tesco has just landed in the turnip field and things look set for a big change. I shall document the goings on as they occur.

Meanwhile there were fourteen boxes to unpack into the kitchen and much heartache and weeping because it wouldn’t all fit. The charity shops have benefited, but I have kept all the strange and battered things that I think look great. So many I could go into business.

And the best thing was that my name came to the top of the allotment waiting list, so I am now the proud guardian of a piece of the earth, and today I planted a row of spring cabbage. Somebody kindly lent me their wheelbarrow to move a bag of horse manure (yes, that serious!) and gave me a bunch of carrots he had grown. So we will have them for dinner, with a good free range chicken, all with their funny rude shapes and wonderful carroty smell.

Until broadband gets plugged in I am on wind-up internet, so things will be short, but I am definitely back in touch and have lots to write about as the mellow mists of autumn sweep in.

Overfed, oversexed and over here

2007-08-17T19:11:00.000+01:00

35 years ago the red clawed American Signal crayfish was introduced to our rivers and streams. Since then it has made itself at home and pretty much wiped out our smaller native, white clawed crayfish, which is now a protected species. The Signal crayfish is a bit of a bully, and it also carries a fungus which is lethal to the native variety. In large numbers they can be a threat to spawning salmon by taking fish eggs. They have been known to wipe out whole areas of aquatic plants and, by burrowing into banks, they can damage the habitat of endangered species like water voles.

So what to do? Well… eat ‘em!

The fishmonger in Shepton Mallet market this morning had a whole bunch of them, from the clear waters of Mells, just up the road. He very generously gave me far more than I needed, and even he treated them with extreme respect.

When I tipped them out of their double bag to take their photograph while the water came to the boil they went crazy, charging around and escaping over the edge of the dish. What is it about snapping claws and numerous legs and waving antennae that reaches deep into the recesses of the subconscious and scares you to death? They are only a few inches long but they’re terrifying. Half my photographs were out of focus because I jumped every time one of them waved at me.

Jane Grigson suggests removing the intestine by pulling out the middle tail fin, before you put them in the pan. She must be joking. I’ll deal with that later.

Rinsed in plenty of water and drained, I plunged them into a big pan of boiling water with a good splash of white wine, half a stick of celery and a generous pinch of salt. I must say, unlike lobster (see post passim) I felt no qualms about sending them to their doom. When they come back to the boil give them four or five minutes and drain. Even in their cooked and pillar box red condition I found myself checking them cautiously for signs of life – just in case. Leave to cool.

The market also yielded a big head of rosy garlic fresh from Normandy, so I think aïoli is in order. And if you want to know how to make aïoli the recipe is here.

Of course, one thing leads to another, and the new season’s crop of Anya potatoes is just in from Cornwall, and they would be so delicious with aïoli too, so…here’s to a little garlic fest!

Get out of jail free dessert

2007-07-30T16:35:00.000+01:00

Lemon posset with twice poached raspberries.

The lemon posset is an Allegra McEvedy pudding and it is she that describes it as a get out of jail free dessert. It is absolutely delicious, if not for the figure conscious. Incredibly simple, it uses lemon juice to thicken the double cream instead of eggs.

For four

Ingredients
420 ml double cream
150g granulated sugar
Zest of 3 lemons, unwaxed
Juice of 2 lemons (about 5 tbsp)

Method
Put the cream, zest and sugar in a pan and bring to the boil, stirring constantly as the sugar dissolves. Boil for three minutes, making sure the cream does not overflow, which it is wont to do. Take off the heat, allow to sit for 10 minutes, then stir in the juice and watch it start to thicken.

Strain to remove zest. Fill ramekins, or one larger dish, allow to cool and then chill in the fridge for several hours or overnight.

Twice poached raspberries
This is my own recipe, an invention born of necessity.

It’s very difficult to get raspberries to stay whole if you poach them. The first lot I tried, poached in sugar syrup, came to pieces. So I sieved them, brought the coulis to the boil and poured it over another batch of raspberries in a jar. Bingo! Intact berries in a satiny coulis.

Ingredients
50g granulated sugar
3 tbsp water
500g raspberries
Another 500g raspberries

Method
Heat the sugar and water slowly until the sugar dissolves. Tip in the first lot of raspberries, put a lid on the pan and poach slowly for about five minutes. Sieve the coulis. Return to the pan and bring slowly up to simmering point. Meanwhile fill a jar with the remaining 500g of raspberries and when the coulis is simmering pour it into the jar to cover the berries. Allow to cool.

The raspberries are quite tart, which goes well with the sharp/sweet lemony posset.

Supper with Mrs Noah

2007-07-22T11:30:00.000+01:00

Half the country seems to be flooded. Thousands of people are camped out in church halls contemplating the misery of the destruction. The water rose so fast in most cases that they could save very little. People have lost everything. The RAF has been airlifting stranded citizens to safety and sometimes it has been touch and go – the biggest lifesaving exercise in peacetime Britain.

I know we go on a lot about the weather - being an island we are constantly subject to its whims - but this year has been particularly whimsical. All that stuff in the supermarkets for barbequing is a bit of a joke as the clouds darken and the lightning flashes. I started thinking about the Ark and how Mrs Noah doesn’t get a namecheck. Noah does, as do Ham, Shem and Japheth, but we don’t know the names of their wives. Bet they had to do all the cooking though. So when they were fed up with pulses and the odd giraffeburger I was wondering what they might have had for supper.

Maybe some fat silver sardines hot pickled and flecked with chilli, to cheer up those dreich and streaming days while they waited for the dove to return with the olive branch. This dish from Valencia in Spain which adds a little shelf life to the sardines would be perfect.

Escabeche de Sardinas
Serves 4 as a starter
Preheat the oven to 170ºC/325ºF

Ingredients
900g/2 lbs fresh sardines, filleted
2-3 garlic cloves, skinned and sliced finely
1-2 bay leaves, crumbled
Salt and pepper
150 ml/¼ pint white wine vinegar or sherry vinegar
6 tbsp olive oil
1 dried chilli, de-seeded and torn into small pieces

Method
Layer the sardine fillets in a shallow dish, sprinkling with garlic, salt and pepper and crumbled bay leaf as you go.

Bring the vinegar to the boil with the same volume of water and pour around the fish. Drizzle with the oil, sprinkle over the chilli, cover with lid or foil shiny side down and bake for 20-30 minutes depending on the size of the fish. Serve at room temperature with a plain potato salad and some fresh leaves.

This recipe is from a lovely book about Iberian food
The Food of Spain and Portugal: A Regional Celebration By Elisabeth Luard
Kyle Cathie Ltd
www.kylecathie.com

Jamming

2007-07-04T12:23:00.000+01:00

In between the thunder and the lightning and the torrential downpours I made my way to the Pick Your Own farm to get fruit for jam. Tom Phippen’s wife Jean stopped her little tractor between the rows of blackcurrants for a chat. We have had the wettest June practically since records began and it has been cold too, so the crops are all a couple of weeks late. But worse is the fact that people don’t come out of their cosy houses in this sort of weather. If nobody picks the fruit it will be destroyed, and if that happens the farm will not survive. Chosen Hill Farm is the only Pick Your Own around here, and they don’t sell to retailers, it’s just for folk like me who come and get their own. It would be a tragedy if we lost it.

I was getting fruit for jam, strawberries and blackcurrants. I don’t know why I make strawberry jam – I don’t really like it, I find it very sweet. I think it’s the challenge, because it isn’t that easy to make. If it sets, which doesn’t always happen, it can set like toffee, and then it sits like rubber on your bread. But it’s quite quick to make, because it doesn’t involve a great deal of liquid and boiling. This is my recipe.

Ingredients
1 kg hulled strawberries
Zest and juice of l large unwaxed lemon
1 kg sugar

Try to get just ripe fruit, because it has the most pectin. Small strawberries can stay whole, but big ones will need to be halved or quartered.

You can get jam sugar with added pectin, and I think it’s worth the little extra expense for strawberry jam. Some recipes only use the juice of the lemon, but I put in the zest as well because it cuts the sweetness a bit.

Heat the strawberries and lemon juice gently in the pan, stirring to reduce the volume. Add the sugar, stir till dissolved and boil until setting point is reached. What you absolutely must have is a jam thermometer. It’s amazing how long it takes to creep the last few micrometers to the right temperature, and it saves a lot of testing. When you get up to temperature start to test the jam by dropping a blob on to a chilled saucer. Push the blob with your finger, and if the surface wrinkles you’ve got a set.

Leave the jam undisturbed for about ten minutes, skimming off any scum that has formed. This resting allows the fruit to sink and means that you have more evenly distributed fruit in the finished jam. The idea is to get a jar full of fruit held in a syrupy suspension, not a jar full of red mush.

My absolutely most favourite jam is blackcurrant. This is jam for grown-ups I always think. This is jam for a flaky croissant, with a good cup of coffee, rumpled bedclothes, Sunday newspapers…

Ingredients

1 kg blackcurrants
1 ½ pints water
1 ½ kg sugar

Try to get good plump blackcurrants and pick over to remove stalks.

Stew slowly with the water until the skins are soft, which will take at least half an hour. If you don’t do this properly you will end up with hard ‘boot button’ currants in your jam.

Add the sugar, stirring over a low heat until dissolved and then boil rapidly until setting point is reached.

If you figure out how much it costs you to make your own jam it doesn’t work out particularly cheap. But there is simply no comparison between what you make yourself and the rubbish sold in shops. It’s quite a soothing thing to do, standing in the kitchen listening to the radio. And I love the Waltons moment of putting the gleaming jars into the cupboard with pride!

Annual Lobster

2007-06-29T18:24:00.000+01:00

There are some things in life that are worth waiting for; English asparagus, local strawberries, new potatoes and LOBSTER. You can get them frozen, you can get them from warmer climes, but as my birthday coincides with the height of the native lobster season it is my traditional present to myself. Our colder waters, like those of Maine, produce the sweetest, tenderest, tastiest lobsters in the world. They are also fantastically expensive.

You can, of course, buy your lobster ready cooked, but unless you know your lobstermonger well, and know how and when he cooks his crustaceans, it is infinitely better to buy it live and cook it yourself. I usually have a bit of a tussle with the beast, but that is nothing to the struggle I have with my conscience. Other seafoods go live into the pot, but none gives you pause for thought quite like a lobster.

Mine was a female, about 1.5 lbs, an ideal weight and plenty for two. Don’t be persuaded to buy bigger creatures – you will be disappointed.

I have in the past cooked lobster by putting it in a pot of cold water and bringing it slowly to the boil. The idea is that the lobster gets sleepy as the water warms up, and quietly expires at around 80ºC. The last time I did that she struggled and clattered and banged around in the pot and I felt truly dreadful.

So this time I tried another technique. My girl was pretty lively and I put her in the freezer for half an hour. At the end of that time the water had come to the boil and she was frosty and slow. I muttered an apology as I held her over the steam and then dropped her in and slammed on the lid. Twenty minutes later she had turned from a lively navy with ocelot spots to a brilliant lipstick red. I left her to cool.

If I ate as much lobster as I would like to eat I would probably do something different with it from time to time, but as I eat it so rarely my appetite for plain cold lobster with potato salad and cucumber has not yet abated. Worth making a bit of an effort with the cucumber though, so I peeled it, sliced it thinly on a mandolin, salted it and set it to drain for half an hour. Patted dry and checked to make sure it isn’t too saline, it only needed some chopped parsley and a splash of elderflower vinegar – which I must say worked a treat.

It’s a bit personal between me and the lobster, but it was absolutely delicious.

A Plate of Summer

2007-06-15T14:45:00.000+01:00

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.

Great British Menu Cookbook

2007-06-13T10:45:00.002+01:00

I will get to the cookbook presently, and my praise will be fulsome, but before that, some background.

Last year, 2006, BBC tv presented a series in which justly famous British chefs competed against each other to represent the regions that begat them for the honour of cooking a course at a banquet to celebrate the birthday of HM The Queen. This year a second series culminated in a banquet at our embassy in Paris, where the guests were our old culinary enemies, the French.

The theme of both series has been that British cooking should be throwing off the shackles of haute cuisine and finding its own personality and brilliance. For too long, goes the mantra, we have been subservient to a French authority in the kitchen, for too long we have been judged by Gallic standards, for FAR too long our cooking has been dismissed as inferior with a languid wave of a whisk by our neighbours across the Channel (that would be the English Channel). Time to put that right.

The climax of the affair took place last week in Paris. One of the notable facts was that each of the three chef finalists (Mark Hix cooked two courses) actually cooked all the dishes themselves. Imagine that! There were some disasters and some cliff hanging moments, which made for good viewing, but in the end it all turned out fine.

We had been promised that the guests would include the grandees of French cuisine. In the event I could spot only two grandees: Pierre Gagnaire and Raymond Blanc. Raymond Blanc hardly qualifies as a Frenchman any longer, having spent a quarter of a century in England. Pierre Gagnaire is universally worshipped in the UK, and is associated with a London restaurant described as the most expensive in the capital, Sketch.

You might find it instructive to read part of a review of Sketch by Matthew Fort, one of the judges in the tv competition. Fort writes for The Guardian and rates restaurants out of 20. His meal cost £143 for one person in 2003. He gave Sketch 0/20.

“Food horizons in the UK have broadened in the past few years: one of the advantages of not valuing highly our own cooking traditions is that our chefs do not, perhaps, feel constrained by them. So I'd say that our food culture is being reinvigorated in a way that the French food culture is not. This may seem irrelevant in the scheme of daily life, but in terms of how we will eat in 10 or 15 years, it is immeasurably significant. Gagnaire nobly celebrates a culinary tradition that is, in effect, imperceptibly but surely, withering. It is simply too strong for even the most creative chef to break out of.

If £143 worries you in any way, you should not go to Sketch. You will spend too much time wondering if you're getting £143-worth of pleasure. Anyway, at this level, the price is irrelevant. Consequently, I have given Sketch nought out of 20 because it defies any, even notional, value-for-money judgment.”

Rachel Cooke, in The Observer, was similarly aghast. “The Lecture Room, whose menu is overseen by the great French chef Pierre Gagnaire, is Britain's most expensive restaurant. A starter of spider crab, milk-fed veal and caviar will set you back £70; a main course of Angus beef, Béarnaise sausage and aubergine cannelloni with snails costs £65. The critics went for it like meat cleavers on a butcher's block.”

I’ve been to Sketch, for tea and cake, and very nice it is too. A slightly hallucinogenic take on décor in a warren of rooms. (And you must check out the loos!) At any rate, I thought I would find out what Chef Gagnaire is currently offering, so I could compare it to our own presentations. I looked up the Starter Menu.

Langoustines {Addressed in Five Ways}
Tartar with Jellyfied Citrus Juice and Baby Fennel
As a Cold Spicy Broth
Mousseline Flavoured with Cardamom, Cubes of Green Apple and Cucumber
Skewer Cooked Meunière Style, Green Pepper Accra
Pan-fried with Girolles Mushrooms

I thought at first this was the Starter menu, but it turns out to be one dish on the Starter Menu

I think what I’m getting it here is - how on earth did we think we were going to impress the French if this is what they are turning out?

But, to be fair, our chefs were asked to cook for a banquet, not to serve up individual dishes for individual guests.

Anyway, go back to the Langoustines and work out how long it will take you just to get a rough idea of what is going to be on the plate.

So, now we know what we’re up against, how did we do?

The Great British Menu Cookbook profiles the chefs and details every dish cooked in the competition. The ingredients are the stars of the show; it is a matter of regional pride that they are sourced locally and of the finest quality. Presentations are simple, in some cases deceptively so. The idea is that the taste and quality will shine through. Richard Corrigan’s great salmon dishes exemplify this. There is wit and humour, in Sat Bains’ Ham, Egg and Peas and in Mark Hix’s Stargazy Pie. There are a lot of clingfilm rolled things simmered slowly in water baths (gadget du jour, no doubt about it). And an example of clingfilm lined tart cases filled with beans for baking blind (test case to come). And crab is definitely the featured ingredient – yippee, I love crab.

It’s a really excellent book, filled with classy recipes, witty takes on classic dishes, and most of them we could even do ourselves. There is some star dinner party stuff here. I do find myself reading through and mentally crossing out some of the ridiculous cheffy stuff but I know that the finely sliced oysters gracing the poached salmon were probably what aced the dish.

I could have done with more photographs. Sat Bains’ Ham, Egg and Peas was a winning dish, but there’s no photograph of it. If you didn’t see the series you would never know that it is a stunning idea. There are some recipes for dishes that, as far as I remember, never made an appearance on screen, but no explanation. And, the main omission, there is no record of the judges’ remarks at the time. I know for a fact that there were a couple of things that the judges described as perfectly awful. It would be good to have had a rating system.

My British reticence also slightly wishes that the cover didn’t feature the Union Jack quite so prominently, but you can certainly see this book from half a mile away.

Meanwhile, back at the banquet, the French were polite, although I don’t think they are shaking in their three star boots. But they had never heard of elderflower… or perry. Two up to us I think.

The Great British Menu Cookbook

Published by Dorling Kindersley

An evanescence of elderflowers

2007-06-12T12:39:00.000+01:00

The recent TV competition to find a British menu to serve at a banquet in the British Embassy in Paris culminated last week as the feast was presented. The big hit was Mark Hix’s jelly and elderflower ice cream. I knew it would be. Didn’t I say it would be? And the amazing thing was that the French knew nothing about elderflowers. How can that be? They grow like weeds here and I’m sure they have them in France. The scent, a gooseberry fragrance like a Sauvignon Blanc, is fragile and fleeting and delicate. If you want to do anything with elderflowers you must gather them and use them immediately.

Elderflower cordial, which you will need to make the ice cream, is the easiest thing imaginable. This is a recipe from Jane Grigson, given to her by a neighbour.

Ingredients

Makes about 1½ litres
20 large heads of elderflower
4lb (1.8 kg) granulated sugar
2¾ oz (75g) citric acid (from chemists)
2 lemons

Method

Put the elderflowers in a large basin
Place sugar in large pan with 2 pints water and bring slowly to the boil, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Pour over elderflowers, stir in citric acid, add grated zest of lemons, then slice lemons and add to the bowl.
Cover and leave for 24 hours
Strain through double muslin to catch lemon rind and any extraneous wildlife
Pour into sterilised bottles and store in a cool dark place.

Correctly stored this will keep for months. It’s great as a summer drink with fizzy water, or with fizzy water and vodka, or gin. You can add a splash to gooseberries too.

While the sugar is dissolving, make Elderflower Vinegar.

This is excellent for deglazing the pan after frying chicken, or pork.

Just cram as many heads of elderflower as will go into a preserving jar; cover with white wine vinegar and leave on a sunny windowsill for a couple of weeks. Strain through muslin and bottle.

Tesco.com

2007-06-10T15:14:00.000+01:00

Tesco comes in for an awful lot of stick. Some of it is deserved. The supermarket is humungous; it holds a huge land bank, it drives uncompetitive small shops out of business, its requirements from producers tend to mitigate against artisans and small businesses and its treatment of dairy farmers was, until recently, appalling. Tesco is one of the things that people give up for Lent.

On the other hand…

It has a better stock of olive oil than any other supermarket, it gives yeast away free, it is beginning to source some of its produce locally and it already stocks a lot of organic stuff. All this in response, I would guess, to customer pressure.

Anybody who has worked in business knows that there’s a lot of lip service paid to customer satisfaction, but usually it comes from HR. Imagine my surprise therefore when, in response to an email, I got a real letter from Sir Terry Leahy, Chief Executive of Tesco. This man is one of, if not the, most important retail chiefs in the country. You don’t see much of him, although he does occasionally pop up in person on the Today programme, because he seems to spend all his time rushing around doing deals with China.

I had the misfortune to take a tumble in one of his stores. Usually people rush up and ask you if you are all right. We will gloss over what actually happened, but it wasn’t that. I came home seething and fired off an email. I took a guess at the address and lo it was right! Three days later he returned from China and I got a real letter, on real parchmenty type paper. Signed by the real person (I assume). And not the usual two line brush-off either, but a considered, grammatically correct reply that showed that my complaint had been understood and remedial action taken.

Don’t tell me I shouldn’t have been surprised and that it’s his job and that I’m a customer…I was ASTONISHED!

You can’t let these tiny moments pass unnoticed so…a round of applause for Sir Terry Leahy please.

And now let’s get back to the barricades.

The Bath & West

2007-06-04T11:38:00.000+01:00

How I love a good agricultural show. The annual Bath & West Show, held at its purpose built showground in Shepton Mallet, showcases prize-winning livestock and some of the best produce in the country. This year the rain came down in stair rods for two of the four show days, but then the sun appeared and it all turned out fine. Most of the animals didn’t mind the rain, although the dogs all had to show inside a tent and the racket was incredible. The poultry show was cancelled because of an outbreak of non-infectious bird flu in Wales, and then the ducks couldn’t fly because of the weather.

Some of the bulls looked like sculptures. The SIZE of these animals is titanic. They stood, or sat, or leaned around, looking patient, and not at all bothered by the overwhelming levels of testosterone that were doing the rounds.

Much thoughtful consideration was given to the cheese competition…

and to the cider…

My favourites were the little pigs, who would NOT stand still to be judged.

There was even a Human Cannonball to remind us of lost innocence

And a sheep shearing competition to remind us that not every shearer is Australian

And of course lots and lots of rosettes and prizes.

My Hero

2007-05-27T15:21:00.000+01:00

The current run of BBC TV’s Great British Menu has given us a new hero. Mark Hix won his regional round to represent us here in the South West, and in the final judgment he had two of his dishes given the approval of the Great British Public for the menu for a grand dinner at our embassy in Paris in June, to be attended by the greatest of the French chefs. He’s the Chef-Director of Caprice Holdings Limited in London, overseeing all the restaurants and events in the Caprice Group, which would be a job to drive you crazy I would think. But Hix will be remembered by those who watched the tv series for the fact that he spent half his time reading the newspaper while his opponents worked themselves into early graves.

I loved his dessert of Perry jelly with summer fruits and elderflower ice cream. It is a West Country take on jelly and ice cream and should knock the socks off the Frogs. Perry – a sweet cider made from pears – is just starting to recover after the Babycham years. Perry pears are small and ugly, and they make a wonderfully fragrant soft delicate drink. One favourite is the Stinking Bishop pear, whose juice is also used to wash the rind of the now famous Stinking Bishop cheese (thank you Wallace & Gromit).

I noticed when I looked into some of the recipes from the series that many of them were immensely complex, as you would expect from a bunch of capital chefs. Hix’s recipe for his dessert is stunningly simple and I reproduce it here in its entirety. He presented it in a ring mould, with the ice cream in the centre, but mine is in two parts.

Ingredients

For the elderflower ice cream
300ml/½ pint whole milk, preferably Channel Island
6 medium free-range egg yolks
100g/4oz caster sugar
300ml/½ pint Jersey or clotted cream, or a mixture of the two
200ml/7fl oz elderflower cordial
For the perry jelly and summer fruits
4 gelatine leaves
500ml/18fl oz perry (sparkling pear cider)
75g/2¾oz caster sugar
125g/5oz mixed berries, such as blueberries, raspberries and wild strawberries

Method
1. For the elderflower ice cream, bring the milk to the boil in a heavy-based saucepan, then remove from the heat. Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together in a bowl, pour in the milk and whisk well. Return to the pan and cook over a low heat for about five minutes, stirring constantly with a whisk. Do not boil. Remove from the heat and whisk in the cream and elderflower cordial. Leave to cool, then churn in an ice cream machine (according to manufacturer's instructions) until thickened. Decant into a clean container and place in the freezer.
2. For the perry jelly and summer fruits, immerse the gelatine leaves one at a time in a shallow bowl of cold water and leave for a minute or so until soft. Bring 100ml/3½fl oz of the perry to the boil in a medium saucepan, add the sugar and stir until dissolved. Drain and squeeze the gelatine leaves, then add to the hot perry and stir until melted. Remove from the heat, add the rest of the perry and stir well. Put the pan of jelly somewhere cool, but do not let it set.
3. Divide half the berries among four individual jelly moulds, or use one large mould. Pour in half of the cooled jelly. Chill for an hour or so to set, then top up with the rest of the berries and unset jelly. (This ensures the berries stay suspended and don't float to the top.) Return to the fridge to chill until set.
4. To serve, turn the jellies out onto plates and place a scoop of the elderflower ice cream in the middle of each one.

Mark Hix’s second dish to represent Britain in Paris is his take on Stargazy Pie. This is a Cornish dish, usually made with pilchards, their heads sticking up out of the pie as if looking up at the sky. Hix makes his with freshwater crayfish and rabbit. As both of these creatures are running riot in this country, damaging waterways, native species and crops, what better to do with them than feed them to the French!

How to cook the perfect...

2007-05-13T14:53:00.000+01:00

Marcus Wareing is one of the top chefs working in Britain. Out of the Gordon Ramsay stable, he has three Michelin stars, two for Pétrus and one for the Savoy Grill, both London restaurants. For those of us who don’t visit top London eateries very often he shot to prominence last year as one of the chefs in Great British Menu on BBC2, cooking an exquisite custard tart for the Queen’s 80th birthday celebrations.

That custard tart was a triumph. A clean, cool, trembling tribute to British food at its very best. Sad then to read in an interview with Marcus ‘I don’t want to be remembered for a custard tart when I’m gone’!

The tart though, was the starting point for this book – How to cook the perfect… It seems that after the television programme Marcus met a couple of ladies who had run into some trouble recreating his dish. Reading through the instructions on the BBC website, I wonder if it was baking the tart case blind that caused the trouble. I notice recently that, in order to stop the pastry sliding down the inside of the tart tin, chefs do not trim the edges before they bake, draping the pastry over the edge of the tin and cutting the extra off afterwards. Hmmm. Good trick.

So Marcus and his co-writer, Jeni Wright, have come up with a book that lets us into the secrets of perfection. And the publishers, Dorling Kindersley, have come up with a video of how to make the famous custard tart. If you watch it you may be alarmed to see that he seems to plonk the baking beans into the tart shell still inside their plastic bag. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this recently and any comments on putting plastic in the oven will be gratefully received.

Another clever touch is to fill the baked shell with the uncooked custard after you put the shell in the oven, so you don’t spill it all over the place trying to manoeuvre it across the kitchen. And, in a change to the original recipe, the book suggests that you also grate the nutmeg over the tart once it is inside the oven, and not after you take it out. Have a look at Marcus’s oven in the video – it’s the size of a wardrobe. Have a look at yours. Get out the BandAids now.

You see, if you tell me you have the perfect method I am going to be picky.

I was all set to cook the famous tart until I read that it was far from his idea of a legacy. Well, if it’s not good enough for him… So I looked carefully through the book to see what else I could make to tempt you, my gorgeous public. How about roast potatoes? Mashed potatoes? Scrambled eggs? Pork chops? Don’t think so somehow. But wouldn’t pork chops ‘Michelin’ be spectacular? Well, yes and no, because the recipe is Marcus’s Mum’s. In fact most of the book is a hymn to family cooking, straightforward Sunday lunch stuff and salads and puddings. There’s a very good piece on how to make a chocolate fondant, all gooey inside – but do we really need to be told how to make a green salad?

In the end I made the nice fish pie, and very good it was too. But I have to confess that for two people I did not start off by making a couple of litres of good fish stock ‘from sole, plaice, halibut or turbot’. That’s the problem – a fish pie is supper, it’s not a three act drama. Nevertheless, it was good to be reminded to drain the vegetables and fish thoroughly so they don’t make the sauce watery. Elsewhere the tips are good too – scoring the skin of sea bass, drying out scallops overnight in the fridge and not overcooking a salmon fillet – and they are indeed the things that make the difference between a dish cooked well and a dish cooked averagely.

So who exactly is this book aimed at? I’m a bit puzzled actually. Its lovely sugar bag blue cover (well done DK design) is a delight to handle, and it brings back memories of Lipton’s shops and marble topped counters, flour bins, pats of butter and racks of biscuit boxes. I know that Gordon Ramsay is keen, quite rightly, to get women cooking again and restore the Sunday lunch, so maybe that’s who this is for, the roast chicken and apple crumble brigade. As a basic cook book it’s very good. But the dish that engendered this book was for the Queen of England! You’ve got all these Michelin stars, Marcus! Some of us are pretty good at roast chicken and apple crumble!

I finally figured it out. I know who this book is for. It should be on the wedding present list of every young thing that’s getting married this year. The Shires will be ringing with the sound of nutmegs being grated and potatoes being mousselined. An excellent idea – I have several people in mind for it!

How to cook the perfect... by Marcus Wareing with Jeni Wright

Published by Dorling Kindersley www.dk.com

Marcus Wareing returns to our screens this week in Great British Menu on BBC2 to defend the regional title for the North of England that he won last year.

The video of the custard tart is at http://youtube.com/watch?v=sI82eJFnuzs

How to pot a shrimp

2007-04-30T19:27:00.000+01:00

The North Atlantic brown shrimps (Crangon crangon) are in season now. They are not overfished, stocks are at safe levels, and they are absolutely delicious - tiny pinky brown morsels that are an expensive delicacy when you can find them. (In America they are represented by C. franciscorum, the California, grey or bay shrimp.) They are estuarine creatures, coming from Morecambe Bay in the North of England, and from the mudflats of the Bristol Channel, and also from the flat coastal regions of Holland, Belgium and Denmark. Potted shrimps, wedged into a lightly spiced butter, are a traditional English luxury. You can get them already packed into little plastic pots in Fortnum & Mason, Waitrose and the like. Or you can make your own. Like this:

Drain the shrimps in a sieve

Clarify about 4ozs butter and return clarified butter to pan.

Add a large pinch of mace, a large pinch of cayenne and a pinch of nutmeg

Swirl spices in butter and add shrimps

Warm gently through but do not allow to boil

Pour into clean dry jar/pot/ramekin and allow to cool.

Chill in fridge.

Remove from fridge long enough before needed for the butter to soften and serve with toast.

In the middle of writing this I remembered that I had seen a big patch of watercress growing in a stream nearby, and I thought it would go nicely with the potted shrimps, so I rushed off to see if I could get some. Sadly the flow of the stream makes it just out of reach without waders so the watercress will have to wait for another day and more equipment!

Bread Matters

2007-04-26T15:05:00.000+01:00

I have been absolutely delighted to see that this book, Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley, has been in the bestseller lists for non-fiction in the UK for a couple of weeks. It is a scholarly work for our times and a revelation to read.

Andrew Whitley started The Village Bakery in Melmerby, Cumbria, in 1976, because all that was available in nearby Penrith was supermarket white sliced bread. Melmerby is a tiny place, frequented by walkers and climbers, with the fells rising immediately behind the houses. The Village Bakery is the largest employer in the area.

Over the past thirty years Andrew Whitley has almost single handedly changed the taste of supermarket bread in Britain. His sourdough loaves, boules de campagne and Russian rye breads now jostle for space on the shelves with steamy white sliced. He produces 20,000 loaves and buns a week, using organic flour from Shipton Mills, and each batch can take up to 24 hours, depending on the weather.

I have a number of bread books of which, until now, only one
was pre-eminent. Elizabeth David’s classic English Bread and Yeast Cookery was first published by Allan Lane in 1977, one year after Andrew opened for business in Cumbria. Two years later Penguin brought out the paperback version and I still have mine, completely stained and fallen to pieces. It is a book about breadmaking, its constituents and its history, and I read it through from cover to cover when I bought it. I was fascinated by the erudite nature of the writing, her enquiries into meal and fat and salt, and shocked to read, for the first time, of the Chorleywood Bread Process. Developed in 1961, at Chorleywood in Hertfordshire, this process meant that a loaf was mixed, proved and ready for the oven inside one hour. Supermarket bread still uses this method.

In his excellent and informative book Andrew Whitley notes that coincidentally it is from round about the same period that people first started reporting allergies or intolerances to bread, specifically wheat bread. Now nearly everybody remarks on, if not full-blown wheat allergies, at the very least a feeling of bloatedness after eating supermarket bread. There are even products on the market targeted at the condition!

Bread Matters describes the complex, and scandalous, adulterations that have led to this completely unnecessary situation; the additives – some admitted and some not – the huge amounts of yeast, the wheat hybrids bred to take advantage of intensive modern chemical agriculture, the unseemly rush from flour bag to shelf, all of which force onto the public a superficially attractive product that is doing most of us active harm. The book offers a thought-provoking explanation of this state of affairs and a detailed guide to producing your own bread. He is particularly good on the Russian ryes, spelt and sourdough, and, as Elizabeth David is completely hopeless on the last, and many contemporary writers overcomplicate the business, this is extremely welcome.

My own breadmaking skills are in a constant state of evolution. I remember vividly the first loaf I ever made, inspired by Mrs David; it consisted of heavy 100% wholemeal flour, dried yeast, water, olive oil ( I was in my early Mediterranean phase, it wasn’t her fault) and six teaspoonfuls of salt (she had had a stroke and lost her sense of taste, it wasn’t my fault). It baked like a house brick.

But one thing she did mention, and it stuck in my mind. She said that she often used a very small quantity of yeast – half a teaspoonful of the dried kind – and left the dough overnight on the kitchen table.

Over the years I practised and, speed equalling desirability, I could eventually produce a fairly creditable loaf, i.e. one that looked as if it had come from Tesco, in about four hours from start to finish. It tasted sort of all right, on the day, but frankly it still didn’t really taste of very much. And up to this point I have to admit that ‘boughten’ bread was still a better choice than mine, unsliced of course to give the illusion of rusticity.

Lionel Poilâne’s rugged country loaves became fantastically fashionable in the 1980s, just as I was getting serious about cooking. I lugged a couple back from Paris, paying overweight to BA. I learned about sourdough and tried my best, but honestly, my versions were dreadful.

However, this story does have a happy ending. My bread is pretty good now, edible for the entire week, and infinitely preferable, I think, to supermarket candyfloss. I let it prove for longer and it tastes a lot better, but it is still often a bit of a leap in the dark. Which is where we come back to Bread Matters. Andrew Whitley attempts, heroically in my view, to bring some order to the mysterious and somewhat chaotic process that is domestic breadmaking. Whilst stressing that the feel of the dough is something you achieve through experience – you just ‘know’ – he lays down some very exact rules for temperatures and weights which should, in a perfect world, produce a perfect loaf, perfectly risen, with a perfect crumb and crust.

Now if you want to start a bakery all this will be very important, but if you don’t, if you make one loaf at a time, perhaps only once a week and perhaps with varying meals, you will find that all the weights and timings in the world will not be enough to make a good loaf, because in the end you just have to ‘know’. And this much I know:

You can keep your sourdough starter in the fridge for two or three weeks and resurrect it – it will be fine.

Make your dough soft and somewhat sticky – it will be fine.

Try to do the same thing each time – you will not succeed and it will be fine.

Use less yeast, prove for longer – it will be fine.

Take no notice of printed proving times – poke the dough with your finger, it will be fine.

And wonder, as Elizabeth David does, at this quote:
“Do you mean to tell me that this thing is only flour and water? Then what on earth do they do to the bread in the shops?”

M. Vivian Hughes, A London Home in the Nineties, 1937 quoted by Elizabeth David in English Bread and Yeast Cookery Penguin 1979

Bread Matters
The state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own
by Andrew Whitley
Fourth Estate www.4thestate.co.uk

Jack-by-the-hedge

2007-04-25T14:20:00.000+01:00

This is a quick post for Susan in Italy, who left a comment about this lovely weed. It's called Jack-by-the-hedge, or garlic mustard, and its latin name is alliaria petiolata. It springs into life along the hedgerow at this time of year, with fresh green leaves and tiny brilliant white flowers. The leaves taste mildly of garlic and are absolutely terrific in salads because they are a decent size and love a good dressing. The leaves are very delicate and you would think they would wilt quickly, but they last well if you put the stems in water. They make a good sauce for lamb, and there is a 17th Century tradition of eating them with fish. In my view they are a great deal nicer than ramsons, the wild garlic with the quite tough leaves that appears a couple of weeks before them. You might at first confuse Jack-by-the-hedge with young nettles, but they are a much fresher green than nettles and the flowers are quite different. In the picture above there are nettles on either side of Jack - a darker green and, oh, you know what nettles look like!

Cornish Early potatoes

2007-04-20T11:27:00.000+01:00

The first new potatoes from Cornwall were in the market this morning. They are a good fortnight early, coinciding with the even earlier English asparagus.

As its name suggests, the Cornish Early is the earliest new potato to be lifted in all of Britain, and is known as a ‘short season delicacy’ because it’s in season for just three weeks. Grown only in Cornwall, where the mild winters enable farmers to plant the crop in late December or early January to ensure an early harvest, they have a rich, sweet, distinctive taste and get to the shops within hours of being harvested so they are really fresh.

The crop is relatively small, which means limited availability, and the potato can be recognised by its dust-like skin which rubs off easily. The taste is rich and sweet, as most of the natural sugar has yet to turn to starch, and the texture is floury.

When the first Cornish potatoes arrive I love to eat them just by themselves to enjoy the flavour, with just a dollop of unsalted butter and a sprinkle of fresh herbs.

And, as luck would have it, overnight it seems the hedgerows are full of a lovely delicate plant called Jack-by-the-hedge (alliaria petiolata), with tiny white flowers and fresh green, fine toothed leaves that taste mildly of garlic. Shredded they make a wonderful garnish for the spuds.

George Perry-Smith's Salmon in Pastry

2007-04-19T13:41:00.000+01:00

In Bath there used to be a very famous restaurant called the Hole in the Wall. Although it is still there, with the same name but different owners, I doubt if many of the visitors to Bath, or even the locals, know that it is the source of a great English cooking tradition.

If we are seeing a resurgence in English cooking, with a renewed emphasis on clear flavours and excellent ingredients, it is largely thanks to its owner in the 1950s, George Perry-Smith, who served “real food, prepared as a careful home cook would prepare it, with the best ingredients to be got and no short-cuts taken in its preparation”.

Paul Levy writes in his obituary of Perry-Smith, who died in 2003:
“People tend to think that there were no restaurants in Britain worth eating at before the food revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, but that is because they are too young or too London-centred to remember the Hole in the Wall at Bath, which George Perry-Smith opened in 1952.”

Perry-Smith came to cooking via a spell of teaching in Paris which enabled him to tour the country during the holidays. When he returned to England he brought with him a determination to offer the Brits the sort of food that Elizabeth David had written about, but which was nowhere to be found in the grey 1950s.

This famous signature dish of salmon in pastry has its roots in eighteenth century cookery, hence the currants and ginger. I found it in a file of cuttings dating back to the 1980s when, with a young child at my feet, I first started cooking in earnest. There are variations – some recipes say crystallised ginger, some say raisins, some say puff pastry – but the basics remain the same. It is a very simple recipe, easy to make and wondrously impressive to serve!

Ingredients:

Two fillets of salmon, skinned and pin bones removed.
4 ozs butter, softened
4 knobs preserved ginger, chopped
1 heaped tbsp currants
1 tbsp chopped blanched almonds

Shortcrust pastry to enclose

Egg to glaze.

Method

Cover a baking tray with clingfilm. Lay one fillet on it.
Add ginger, currants and almonds to butter and mix thoroughly.
Lay half of the butter mixture on the fillet
and cover with the other fillet.
Bring clingfilm up to cover fillets tightly and refrigerate to firm butter.
Roll out pastry thinly.
Unwrap fish and place on pastry. Season and cover with remaining butter mixture.
Enclose in the pastry, decorating with pastry trimmings, refrigerate until needed.

Preheat oven to 220ºC

Slash the pastry a few times to allow air to escape and brush with egg glaze.
Cook for 30-35 mins until golden.

Serve cold, hot or warm. It’s a very amenable dish and doesn’t mind waiting.

I prefer to serve this warm, with a watercress salad and some new English asparagus, but if you serve it hot the traditional sauce is Elizabeth David’s Sauce Messine from French Provincial Cooking (Michael Joseph, 1960).

Queen of Puddings

2007-04-10T17:50:00.000+01:00

When I was writing yesterday about boarding school food I found myself remembering with delight the wonderful school puddings that nobody eats any more. All the chocolate stodge and custard, the lemon steamed puddings, the rice puddings… And oh god the sago, let’s not go there, and the semolina and the tapioca, only made palatable by the jam.

Queen of Puddings was a majestic dish. Served as they all were in dishes large enough to feed at least eight Queen’s Pud was a cut above the others. I recalled it as a soft custardy base with jam and meringue on top, the jam hot enough to burn your mouth under the crunching quaking meringue. I thought it might be nice to make one to see if it was as special as I remembered.

Apparently this pudding was developed from a 17^th Century recipe by Queen Victoria’s chefs at Buckingham Palace – hence the name. Some recipes flavour the custard base with lemon and vanilla, which sounds about right, but I’m absolutely certain nobody wasted good vanilla on lumpy eleven year olds, so mine is made, as ours was, sans vanilla. It would of course be easy to posh up, with cream and vanilla seeds and brioche, but that was not my experience, and actually it’s quite delicious without any of that fancy stuff. Gave me a new respect for dinner ladies too.

Ingredients

7 ozs /200 g fresh white breadcrumbs
2 tbsp sugar
zest of a lemon
1 pint/600 ml milk
2 ozs/50 g butter
4 eggs, separated
4 tbsp raspberry jam, warmed
2 ozs/50 g caster sugar

Method

Heat oven to 180 °C / 350 °F / Gas 4. Place the breadcrumbs, sugar and lemon zest in a large bowl. Scald the milk and butter and remove from heat. Stir in the breadcrumbs and leave for 10 minutes. Beat the egg yolks and add to the breadcrumbs. Grease an ovenproof serving dish which will hold 2½ pints/1.5 l or six individual ramekins. Pour in the mixture. Bake for 30-35 minutes. Remove from the oven, leave for a few minutes and gently spread the jam over the top (be careful not to break the surface skin). Whisk the egg whites until stiff and slowly fold in the caster sugar reserving 1 teaspoon to the side. Pile the egg whites over the top of the jam, sprinkle the remaining teaspoon of sugar over the top and place back in the oven for 15 minutes until set.

The contrast in textures is wonderful; the crisp outer shell of the meringue hides a soft cloud of interior, the jam sharp and sweet and the base a pillow. It makes you feel loved.

Meme 2 & 7 Part II

2007-04-09T12:27:00.000+01:00

(For what this is all about, see previous post.)

In 1962 I was at boarding school. On Sunday afternoons the rain thrummed down on the corrugated iron roof of the Common Room and we listened to Top of the Pops on the radio. Alan “Fluff” Freeman counted down the Top Ten pop records “And at Number One it’s Please Please Me From The Beatles” and signed off with a cheesy “All right, stay bright…” The Sixties were getting into full swing and I was reading Ian Fleming. James Bond heroines always had short cut fingernails and smelled of musk. We were rationed for sweets – 2ozs twice a week – and we learnt that marshmallows and chocolate buttons went a lot further than toffee.

The food was pretty miserable. All the meat was grey and round and fatty, lambporkbeef all indistinguishable from each other. Hunks of gristle in the stew, and a clean plate de rigeur. Years later I was at a private banquet in Northern China, dining off silver with the Governor of the Province. He helped me to a choice morsel with his silver chopsticks. I slipped it into my mouth and froze. Blocking my throat was a huge lump of gristle. Instantly I was back in boarding school and the sweat broke out on my forehead. I reached for the water in my silver goblet but it would not be budged. At last, holding tight to the underside of my chair with both hands, I swallowed hard and felt it shunt down my gullet. Turning to my translator I whispered
“What on earth was that?”
She nodded sagely.
“Camel’s toes…”
“Camel’s toes? Do you eat a lot of those?”
“I’ve never had them. Great delicacy. Come from Outer Mongolia”

Puddings were what boarding school did really well. Lots of stodgy things with chocolate sauce or custard. Something called Queen of Puddings with jam and a meringue topping; spotted dick, syrup pud, and rice pudding, solid and sticky sometimes, and other times loose and creamy. We fought over the skin. And then we went and ran up and down a hockey pitch for two hours and worked it all off.

On Sundays we had coffee for breakfast. My grandmother was diabetic and maybe this was why she drank her coffee black, I don’t know, but I took to drinking mine without milk too. On my table sat Matron, wearing a wimple and a little upside down watch pinned to her chest and looking as if she had just landed from Sebastopol. Her accent was pure Edinburgh Morningside:

“It’ll stain your insides”

“Nobody is going to see my insides”

“It’s EFFECTATION, sheer EFFECTATION.”

And one day at supper in 1963 the housemistress rang her little bell for silence, which was usually a prelude to telling us that someone had failed to clean their games boots. But this day she said simply

“I thought you would all like to know that President John F Kennedy of the United States has been shot and is not expected to live.”

Meme 2 & 7 Part I

2007-04-06T14:12:00.000+01:00

If I haven’t put finger to keyboard for a while it’s largely because I have been feeling very guilty about this. Lindy, of Toast who I respect and care for a lot, tagged me for a meme. The best way to explain it is thusly, as she says: “Two of my favorite lovely and clever foodbloggers, Ximena of Lobstersquad and Melissa of The Travelers' Lunchbox, tagged me for this meme, which seems to have come from, maybe France? (Or maybe, like the Coneheads of yore, not so much.) Anyhow, the deal is-starting with the first year of your existence which ends with a "7" or "2", the tagee is to report on what s/he was up to, at 5 year intervals.”

So I got tagged for this and I’m only now getting to grips with it. And I may lie, and leave things out, like entire decades…

I was around in 1952, but I don’t remember it very well. Not much happened. The King died, long live the Queen. (Now the next year, 1953, that was a year…coronation, big frocks, tiaras, tiny televisions in shaky black and white, lots of oohs and aaahs…) So let’s fast forward and have a look at 1957.

In 1957 we moved from the North of England, where my Dad had been part of the team that built the world’s first atomic power station, to the South of Scotland, where they built the second one. I arrived at the local school to find that during the holidays the children had learned a poem – pronounced poyum – and they stood up one by one and recited the following:

“The bairnies cuddle doon at nicht
Wi muckle focht and din.
O try and sleep ye waukrife bairns
Yer faither’s comin in.
They never heed a word Ah say
Ah try tae gie a froon,
But aye Ah hae them up and cree
“O bairnies, cuddle doon.”

I thought I had landed on Mars.

The small town was grim and sad. But it did have two cafés run by immigrant Italians who made the most brilliant ice cream, which came in a cone with a slick of raspberry syrup dribbling down it. In those days the local salmon fishers had not yet acquired deep freezes, and in the fishing months the wild salmon was cheaper than cod, when cod was pretty cheap. Summers were cold salmon and strawberries – until you were sick of it! The rest of the time we ate Aberdeen Angus beef which was raised on the very green fields that rose up from the Solway Firth. Years later I discovered that not all beef tasted like that and it was a real shock.

Saturdays were for shopping, or, in my case, for trudging around shops or sitting in the car waiting and annoying my brother. On Saturday evening there was a huge fry-up, everything in sight went into the pan, things I never see now, like potato bread. Things that make me feel a bit queasy, like fried bread. And baked beans cooked in the pan after the bacon so they acquired the flavour of the streaky.

On Sundays throughout my childhood we had a proper Sunday lunch, which was most often roast chicken, with potatoes and frozen peas. The chicken tasted – of chicken - and the frozen peas were the height of modernity. I think the potatoes were mashed and buttered and creamed. We listened to family comedy shows on the radio before lunch and had proper trifle after the chicken. Proper trifle does not have jelly in it. Ask anyone from the North.

And now that I have pulled out the pin and rolled the trifle grenade into the arena I think I will retire quietly and maybe do a Part II with food news from the boarding school front. Not sure I want to recall that in too much detail. (But oh golly, I’ve just remembered the fabulous rice pudding…)

Hotel Chocolat

2007-03-18T16:11:00.000Z

I write this post on Mothers Day, a celebration of all our mothers. It is also Mothering Sunday, not the same thing at all. In bygone days this was the Sunday when Christians returned to their mother church – usually the cathedral of their diocese – for a special religious celebration.

But, as with most festivals now, Mother’s Day is another great excuse to eat chocolate, the first steps in the build up to the chocolate crescendo that is Easter. And as I didn’t give up chocolate for Lent – it never really crossed my mind actually – I am able to bring you advance news from the chocolate front. A company called Hotel Chocolat very kindly sent me one of their eggs and it’s only fair that I eat it and tell you all about it.

It comes very beautifully and elegantly packaged in black and silver and this one is thick milk chocolate, filled with little praline eggs. As I usually look for the big numbers on dark chocolate it was interesting to read up on milk chocolate. Good quality dark chocolate usually contains a minimum of 50 % cocoa mass, but can go as high as 85 %. Because milk chocolate has more added sugar than dark, as well as dried milk solids, it has a lower percentage of cocoa mass, usually about 30 - 40 %. Hotel Chocolat’s egg is made with 40% cocoa mass, at the very top end of the scale. I checked out the milk chocolate available locally and found that many of the familiar labels have no more than 27% cocoa mass. I couldn’t find anything with 40%, but Green & Blacks has 34%, as does a milk chocolate called Bellarom, bought in Lidl, and Tesco’s own brand Belgian milk chocolate has 32%.

Growing up with Cadbury’s Dairy Milk (20% cocoa mass but not a word against it, not a word!) has anaesthetised my taste buds when it comes to milk chocolate. Some courageous souls have done good work in this area, for example Wayne Schmidt’s Milk Chocolate Comparison page. Says Wayne “I like a pure chocolate flavor that isn't masked by fruity, smokey, or mocha flavors. The after taste should be strong, long lasting and not turn sour.”

So, to June’s Concise Milk Chocolate Comparison Test:

Tesco Belgian Milk Chocolate

Cocoa Solids 32% minimum
A good full rounded taste, strong on caramel. Coats the mouth. Short after taste

Bellarom Deluxe Finest Alpine Chocolate

Cocoa solids 34% minimum
Very pure chocolate taste, light, very little caramel. Pleasant after taste.

Green & Black’s Organic Milk

Cocoa Solids 34% minimum
This has a strong, not altogether pleasant taste, rather sour in the mouth. Burnt caramel.

Hotel Chocolat Egg

40% cocoa solids
An immediate hit of that dairy texture that reminds me of Dairy Milk, followed by a good strong chocolate flavour, sweet in the middle of the palate with a caramel aftertaste.

Hotel Chocolat’s website gives a lot of information about its products and their provenance. Chocolate from the Americas usually comes from one of two varieties – Forestier and Criollo. A third variety, Trinitario, is not found in the wild, but is a hybrid of the other two. Hotel Chocolat buys some of its beans from FairTrade sources, but is involved with a new estate, Rabot, in St Lucia. According to the website “With the construction of a chocolate making facility on the cocoa estate, within two years Hotel Chocolat will be employing local labour and using local sugar to make the chocolate from their plantation, as well as buying cocoa from neighbouring farmers at a rate that enables them to make a profit and re-invest in their cocoa farm.
This approach will be radically different from the industry norm, where the cheap commodity crop is usually exported to Europe for the value to be added there.”

The website also offers a host of other products and options, including treats for vegetarians and vegans.

Hotel Chocolat is also running an Online Easter Egg Hunt, to win one of 20 of these luxury hampers.

The competition is open to everyone (UK and abroad) and closes 2 April. To enter, here is the link: http://www.hotelchocolat.co.uk/chocolate-easter-egg-hunt-Aegg_1/

And, just in time to make us all feel a whole lot better about eating chocolate, comes a claim from science that a compound in unrefined cocoa has enormous health benefits.

Epicatechin is derived from unrefined natural cocoa and Professor Norman Hollenberg of Harvard Medical School believes it could have a revolutionary effect on stroke, heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Epicatechin is a flavanol with a bitter taste and for this reason is usually removed from commercial cocoa. Research shows that drinking epicatechin-rich cocoa boosts blood flow for two to three hours after consumption, raising the possibility of enhancing brain function among elderly or sleep deprived people.

Britons eat 10kg of chocolate each every year, spending an annual total of £4.3bn. Makes you wonder... who's eating my other 9kg??

By colour, by season

2007-03-09T16:15:00.000Z

February is such a grim month. By nine o’clock most mornings the sky was pewter grey; by nine thirty the heavens had opened. Underfoot everything turned to mush. I didn’t feel much like writing, so I just opened another Swedish crime novel and stoked the boiler.

According to meteorologists, Spring starts on 1 March. And lo, a brisk warm breeze has arrived to dry things out, and the sun is up for a few practice bouts. There are daffodils in a hundred different shades of yellow and the world is back to Kodachrome.

At Christmas I was given this great book by Allegra McEvedy. “If you eat by colour by season” she says “you will naturally be giving your body what it needs at that time of year.” I have always thought that this was true, but Ms McEvedy, and Georgia Glynn Smith’s lovely photographs, put it most persuasively. This is a robust, unfiddly book, brimming with flavour and good humour. I found I started to bookmark the pages I wanted to return to: Berber salad, dandelion salad with goats cheese and polenta croutons, soft cheese baked with quince in vine leaves. And this delicious sounding recipe for Portuguese custard tarts.

Ingredients

1 x 12 large or 24 small muffin tray

1 packet frozen puff pastry defrosted

275ml milk

Zest of 1 orange

1 vanilla pod, seeds scraped out and reserved

4 egg yolks

150g white sugar

1 ½ tbsp plain flour

Method

Preheat oven to 220ºC/425ºF/gas 7

Grease muffin tins with butter.

Roll out pastry to 3mm thick and line moulds

Heat milk in a non-stick pan with orange zest and vanilla pod (not seeds)

In a separate bowl, beat egg yolks with sugar until pale, then stir in flour and vanilla seeds

Just before milk boils remove from heat and strain through a fine sieve into a jug. Discard zest and pod.

Pour milk on to egg mixture, whisking all the time.

Fill pastry cases to brim

Cook for 15 mins for small muffins and 25 mins for regular size.

They will come out of the oven looking like Yorkshire puddings and will collapse a bit, but that’s ok. The entire house will be scented with orange and vanilla, and it will be the real thing, not that Christmas candle ersatz aroma.

Leave to cool a bit, because they are VERY HOT when they come out of the oven!

Allegra McEvedy's Colour Cookbook. Photography by Georgia Glynn Smith

published by Kyle Cathie Ltd www.kylecathie.com

Kippers and Red Herrings

2007-02-16T17:36:00.000Z

Look at this beautiful, beautiful fish. It’s a Scottish kipper, a smoked herring. They split the herrings along the back from head to tail, gut them and soak them in brine. Then they hang them up on tenter hooks (the metal hooks used originally to fix wet cloth to a frame (a tenter) so it dried straight), hang them on racks and smoke them in big kilns.

Kippering is one of those methods of preserving fish, mainly salmon and herring, whose origins are lost in the mists of time. The word kipper is certainly Old English, and the most likely derivation is from the Old English kippian, to spawn. Spawning fish are not good to eat fresh, but they turn up in large numbers, so kippering is a good way to deal with a glut. The crude smoking process also used to turn the fish a golden red, hence the expression red herring. In the 1840s John Woodger of Seahouses, in Northumberland, decided to adapt the old salmon-kippering process, gutting the herring and smoking it slowly over oak for 6 to 18 hours. Modern methods preserve even more of the original colour of the fish, and it glints gold and silver, with a blue black back and a white belly.

Anyone who grew up in the North of England, or Scotland, will remember kippers for high tea, often on a wintery Saturday, with bread and butter and tea. If you’re lucky you might get them in a good hotel as a cooked breakfast, but they were out of favour for a while because there were some disreputable evil colours in the cheaper curing processes. Now they are big on the menu again, because they are oily fish and we all know about oily fish don’t we?

You can jug them, bake them in foil, fry them or eat them raw. But I prefer them grilled, with a knob of butter to slide around over them under the grill. And all you really need to go with them is good fresh bread and butter.

If, however, you would like something more in the way of a vegetable, let me offer to you a recipe for colcannon from none other than Dame Helen Mirren. And here it is:

Ingredients for Colcannon

1 lb/450 g kale or cabbage, finely chopped

7-8 fl oz/200-225 ml milk or cream

2 small leeks or green spring onion tops, chopped

2 lb/900 g potatoes, preferably Irish, diced

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

A pinch of ground mace

4 tbsp butter melted

Method

Cook the kale or cabbage in a large pan of boiling water until very tender, then drain and keep warm. Put the milk or cream in a small pan with the leeks or spring onions and simmer until soft. In another saucepan, cook the potatoes until tender, then drain and mash them.

Mix in the leeks or onion tops and enough milk or cream to give a creamy consistency. Add the kale or cabbage and season with salt, pepper and mace. Drizzle with the melted butter and serve immediately.

Serves 4

Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb…

2007-02-14T21:41:00.000Z

I know, it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the week of the Wakefield Rhubarb Festival, and frankly Yorkshire forced rhubarb is a great deal more exotic and interesting than scentless roses and overpriced chocolates.

Mine came from Daylesford Organic, the posh farmshop-in-the-Cotswolds run by Lady Carole Bamford. Well worth a day out for excellent produce, beautifully presented, and a rather good lunch to boot.

Rhubarb originates from the Russia/China border area. It has been used since ancient times for medicinal purposes, usually in a dried form as a laxative, and it was first grown in England in the 1760s for scientific purposes at Edinburgh's Botanical Gardens. It grows like a weed in everyone’s garden later in the year, but the early crop is forced, in darkness, and harvested by candlelight. The hub of this winter activity is in Yorkshire, and in Wakefield they have a festival in February to celebrate the arrival of the new crop. Forced rhubarb is delicate and fine in flavour, nothing like the coarse stalks that come later.

But you’re right, today is Valentine’s Day, so what could be more romantic than a pink vegetable that is harvested by candlelight? I liked the sound of some of the recipes for Rhubarb Confit, but my friend the Allotment Owner and Rhubarb Connoisseur has issued dire warnings about not interfering with the fragile flavour of early rhubarb, so I am doing it the simple way, with just a little orange juice and grated orange rind, because I want to serve it with wild duck.

(And now might be a good time to offer up a word of gratitude to the great god Tesco, who has so bountifully bestowed upon us the gift of unwaxed oranges, which is good news indeed for the grating public.)

Wild duck with rhubarb and orange compôte

The compôte
3 sticks forced rhubarb, chopped into ½″ lengths
4 tbsp caster sugar
½ zest of 1 large orange

Juice of 1 large orange

Put all ingredients into heavy bottomed saucepan, stir gently to amalgamate, and simmer very gently covered until rhubarb is tender. Remove lid and allow liquid to reduce for about five minutes. Leave aside with lid askew.

The duck

Olive oil
1 mallard
Salt, pepper

Preheat oven to 400ºC

Anoint the duck with olive oil. Pour a thin layer of oil into a heavy ovenproof pan and bring to smoking point. Sear duck on all sides. Season with salt and pepper and place pan, covered, in oven for ten minutes. After ten minutes, uncover and test for doneness. The duck may well need another five, even ten minutes. Allow to rest for at least five minutes.

Serve with rhubarb compôte, greens and mashed potato.

(If you are cooking for your True Love, your mashed potato should be faultless. Cook the potatoes until they are soft all the way through. Drain thoroughly and dry on low heat. Mash completely. Add hot milk and whip until your wrist aches. Adjust seasoning and add unsalted butter to taste. Whip again until you are exhausted. Only then will your True Love know how much you care. Your mash will be soft and velvety and voluptuous. Who needs chocolates?)

Spelt (2)

2007-02-06T11:01:00.000Z

This is just a post script to the spelt story (see post passim). I think that spelt is now my wholemeal of choice and I continue to be extremely enthusiastic about it. It goes well with rye and this loaf is almost entirely spelt with one handful (only) of rye. The resulting flavour is more complex and interesting, but the rye does not dominate, or affect the rising adversely.

Mussels and the Mesolithic

2007-02-05T11:46:00.000Z

Down on the south coast of England early man has left signs of his presence. In the Middle Stone Age our hunter gatherer ancestors collected shellfish and cooked them by placing small round pebbles from the fire in water held in skin bags. We have evidence of the little stones, sometimes known as pot-boilers, and heaps of shells piled in middens. Archaeologists even found a ring that they think was used to keep the mouth of the skin bag open. The diet would have been good, if a bit monotonous, but I always think that the amount of energy available from the food must have been just about balanced out by the energy expended to collect it.

With global warming our native shellfish are already packing their bags on the south coast and heading north, for cooler waters. And so, balancing out energy expenditure and energy saving, I motor to the fishmonger and purchase a net of mussels.

Glistening with all the dark colours of the deep, navy to ochre, and linked by the seaweedy looking byssus which held them to a Scottish rope, mussels will be fine for a couple of days in the bottom of the fridge. When you come to prepare them, wash them under running water, pull off the tough byssus with a sharp knife, and discard any that stubbornly refuse to close. The great thing about rope grown mussels is that you avoid the sand which is otherwise a given and was probably a real problem for our ancestors.

A little kick of chilli doesn’t go amiss with shellfish, so my ingredients, for two people, are:

A net of mussels
2 tsp black peppercorns
2 cloves garlic
2 shallots
1 medium sized, hot red chilli
3 tbsp olive oil
1 lemon
Big splash of white wine or vermouth
Small bunch parsley

Prepare mussels as above. Crush the peppercorns roughly. Chop garlic and shallots. Remove seeds from chilli and slice finely. Soften all together in the olive oil. Add lemon juice and wine/vermouth to pan and allow to bubble for a moment. Chuck in all the mussels and put lid on pan. Give it a good shake to distribute the mussels, and another a minute later. The shellfish will steam open in a couple of minutes. Chop parsley and toss on top. Serve with lemon and warm bread.

And if you have any left over, they will be great the next day as a sort of tapa. Refrigerate overnight and serve at room temperature, with lots of bread to mop up the spicy juices.

The strangest fruit

2007-01-30T11:54:00.000Z

These are dank days; the skies are grey and no wind stirs. We are not in the dramatic and icy grip of winter, just a leaden silence with no birds’ song. Until the new rhubarb comes out from its candlelit caves there is nothing exotic on the shelves, because we don’t count strawberries from Peru and blueberries from Chile.

But hey, look, it’s a pomegranate! OK, not local, unless you live in Tehran, but seasonal as you like. And so exotic. They were definitely the strangest fruits when I was a child. We dug out the rubies within with bodkins, or tapestry needles. In Greek mythology the pomegranate represents life and regeneration, so it is a timely addition to the table in these deep dark days. The rich colour says sweet, but the taste of the arils is astringent. Ev idence shows it to be effective against prostate cancer and cardiovascular disease, and the juice is loaded with vitamin C. Personally I find it a bit cheek-tightening to drink on its own, but there is a wonderful Iranian dish called Fesenjan that uses pomegranate molasses, a reduction of the fruit now easily available in bottles from the supermarket. It has a rich sweet/sour flavour and the walnuts give the dish a surprising texture.

You can use chicken or duck or lamb, and I used guinea fowl.

Ingredients

Duck, chicken, lamb or guinea fowl, cut into serving pieces
2 oz butter
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 tsp. black pepper
4 oz finely chopped walnuts
4 tbsp. pomegranate molasses
hot water or stock
1 medium aubergine
salt (for aubergine)
cooking oil
2 tsp. cardamom (powdered)

Method

In a large pot, melt butter and brown the onions and pepper. Remove with slotted spoon and brown the meat with the walnuts. Return onions to pan, add pomegranate molasses and enough water or stock to barely cover the meat. Cover and simmer over low heat for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, peel and cube the aubergine. Put into a colander, sprinkle with salt, shake and leave for 20 mins to get rid of some of the moisture (otherwise it uses up all your oil!). Rinse, pat dry. Brown in oil in another pan and add to stew. Add cardamom and simmer for another 30 mins until tender. Allow sauce to reduce towards the end of the cooking time. Taste for seasoning.

Serve with rice.