Another version of pumpkin soup

There is a reference to pumpkin soup in a list of my mother's which I discovered at random. She also refers to spiced pumpkin soup in her account of Christmas 1990. Here, in her book of recipes, is what I think she was referring to:

"1 young and soft skinned small pumpkin, peeled & cubed (scrape off coarse fibres in middle).
1 large onion.
2 spring onions & greens.
1 level teaspoon curry powder.
2 beef stock cubes.
1 large can chopped tomatoes.
Olive oil/butter.

Fry chopped onions & pumpkin in butter/olive oil gently. Sprinkle on curry powder & fry until curry powder cooked through. Add tomatoes & stock cubes & 1/2 pint water. Simmer until pumpkin soft. Liquidise & add water until right consistency. Salt/freshly ground black pepper to taste."

Family stories: another list

The companion volume to Alexander's Roots is a book of family stories for children. Some of them are apocryphal, including a splendid story about an evil old aunt who provides "very healthy food" consisting of things like "very plain pasta with pallid slimy mushrooms" or "a pile of Barlotti beans, boiled until they were mushy and served with small pieces of stringy chicken, all skin and bones, and some soggy onion. None of the food was ever browned or caramelised or crisp: it was always colourless: even the salads were made with pale, blanched chicory with a bitter taste...For pudding there were always under ripe bananas, already peeled and cut into chunks." The children, we are told, "hated all this pale tasteless food and longed for savoury grilled and roasted meat, savoury salami, fragrant orange fleshed melons and black grapes with a bloom on their skins and melting figs and juicy peaches with furry skins". Worst of all, this woman beats children with a wooden spoon. Towards the end of the story is a wonderful description of lunch for eight hungry children:

"After what seemed a very long time, Giacomo and Uncle Orlando returned to the dining room. Giacoma was bearing an enormous dish of food. There were tiny artichokes preserved in oil, pink prawns, grilled aubergines with black marks from the grillade, shining red tomatoes, brilliant red peppers, mozzarella balls with herbs, eggs halved and stuffed with anchovies, Barlotti beans livened with tuna, roasted green peppers drizzled with olive oil, potato salad and many other delicious morsels. "Enjoy your antipasti, my children," said Uncle Orlando Norsa. "There will be some properly succulent pasta to follow, and then grilled veal cutlets with fried potatoes. And there will also be some changes round here. From now on your mother will take her meals alone in her bedroom until she is feeling better."

Roasted peppers stuffed with fennel

Another recipe taken from Granny's red file. Never sampled by me but similar to one of Delia Smith's in her "Summer Cooking" and from the list of ingredients, it looks to me as though you can't really go wrong. I don't know who is responsible for the illustration which appears on the same page as the recipe itself.

Serves 4 to 6 people as a first course.

4 large red (or green) peppers.
2 small bulbs fennel.
1 x 14 oz tin chopped tomatoes.
1 teaspoon mixed pepper berries. (I surmise that these are peppercorns).
1/4 teaspoon whole coriander seeds.
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds.
8 dessert spoons good quality olive oil.
The juice of 1/2 lemon.
Rock salt.

Pre-heat oven to gas mark 4.

Slice each pepper in half lengthways, cutting right through the green stalk end and leaving it intact. Remove seeds. Place pepper halves on the baking sheet, then divide the tomatoes into eight portions, placing each portion inside a pepper half. Pare off any brownish bits of fennel and cut the bulbs first into quarters and then again into eights, carefully keeping the layers attached at the root ends. Put them into a saucepan with a little salt, pour boiling water on them and blanch them for 5 minutes. Then drain them in a colander and arrange two slices in each pepper half. Sprinkle olive oil over each one. Lightly crush the pepper berries and seeds with a rolling pin and sprinkle them evenly over the peppers; finish off with a grinding of rock salt. Bake for approximately 1 hour on a high shelf in the oven. Then sprinkle them with lemon juice, cool and serve. If you want to make them ahead of time cover with cling film but do not refrigerate as the flavour will be spoiled.

Catalan breakfast

Whether this is an authentic term for what you see below I do not know: but it is what I use. The components are light pieces of toast, olive oil, tomatoes well-salted and peppered and Serrano ham. You squash the tomatoes into the oil with the toast and then alternate between eating tomato, ham on the toast - or even both. It is a good plan to leave enough toast at the end to mop up the juices at the end...or make more toast.



The first French restaurant

When my parents first started taking us to the south of France in the mid nineteen seventies, they were doing something relatively unusual for the times. There was not a lot of money and - surprisingly, perhaps, for the daughter of an Italian - my mother would pack food from home which we took with us: packets of Shredded Wheat; those round flat tins containing Fray Bentos steak pies; and tins of meatballs. It might have had something to do with exchange controls.

Be that as it may, two tins of the meatballs got to the south of France. One was pronounced so disgusting that the other was shipped all the way back to London and given to harvest festival collectors who came to the door.

One year, we had arrived in northern France; the tent was up; and we were all hungry. I have a feeling that my aunt Christine was with us. For whatever reason, the idea of opening one of the tins of food was rejected and we headed out, destination unknown. It was to be my first meal in a French restaurant, indeed my first meal in any restaurant other than a Berni Inn.

I do not recall there being much choice about where we would eat. The restaurant was on a  square in a nondescript northern French town. It was dark. But the light coming from the restaurant was cheerful and the place bustled. There were probably white paper tablecloths. It was that kind of place.

In those days, my brother and I shared one adult portion between us. I can remember the menu very clearly. Cornets of ham, filled with "crudités"; stuffed tomatoes; Steak-frites. And, having said I can remember the menu, I have no recollection of what there was for pudding. If the place was anything like the dozens of other, similar restaurants we were to encounter over the years, there would have been a choice: Crème Caramel, Mousse au Chocolat, Tarte aux Pommes, Glaces, Flan. Or was "Flan" simply another term for "Crème Caramel"?

I suspect that if we had walked into such a restaurant thirty years later and been offered the same things, we would have spent the rest of the holiday reliving the appalling meal we had endured. Instead, on that August night in the nineteen seventies, we were all enchanted with cornets of plastic jambon de Paris with tinned Russian salad in thin mayonnaise; with tomatoes that were stuffed with some kind of mince; with steak that, according to my mother, was "probably horse".

So enchanted were we that a few years later, at my particular request, we returned. It was a mistake. None of us knew for certain even the name of the town, although I had a vague recollection that it was called Albans or something similar. My father only remembered roughly where we would have stopped on that first night. We spent some time fruitlessly searching for it as the night grew darker and ended up back at the campsite, hungrier than when we had left, forced once again into self-catering. A sarcastic remark I made ("Well that's great!") was misconstrued as being a criticism of others and it was not a happy evening.

The following day, we renewed our search and very quickly came upon the square in the town, to find the restaurant, and it was open. It was not usual for us to eat out at lunchtime but it would clearly have been rude not to have done so on this occasion. And my father suggested we did just that. It was perhaps an illustration of how one should never try to recreate the perfect meal. Unlike its forerunner, the menu has passed into oblivion, although my father documented the "foul mashed potato" in the holiday log. His conclusion about the meal was that it was "much less impressive (and more expensive!) than last time". Or had we simply grown more sophisticated in the intervening years?

Bacon casserole with flageolets

Possibly the first recipe I wrote down, this falls into the category of simple food for a winter supper.

Ingredients:

3 rashers of streaky or middle bacon or 1 bacon chop chopped roughly
1 medium onion chopped finely

1 tin of chopped Italian tomatoes
1 tin of flageolet beans, drained and rinsed
1 teaspoon oregano
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon olive oil

Gently heat the olive oil then turn up the heat, add the bacon and fry until well cooked. Add the onion, turn down the heat and allow the onion to soften without burning. Add the beans and continue to cook without adding any water but making sure the contents do not burn. Finally, add the chopped Italian tomatoes and the herbs and bring to the boil. Then allow to simmer for half an hour (adding a little water if contents in danger of drying out) and serve. Eat hot or cold; good if dressed with olive oil.

Herrings Alethea

Alethea was my mother's first name. This is the first recipe in the "fish" section of her recipe book and it is written in red biro in handwriting I don't recognise but may be an earlier incarnation of hers.

At the foot of the recipe in brackets is my mother's maiden name, A. Weiss, followed by a word that I cannot read. Next to the name "Herrings Alethea" in different-coloured ink is an address: 111 Woodstock Road Oxford. Was this something she cooked when working as a secretary in Oxford before she went to university? Strangely, someone has crossed out the recipe. But it is still legible and, for the record, here it is below. I don't remember ever having eaten it.

Cut and fillet 1 herring for each person. Lay flat on floured board and place slices of garlic, dabs of French mustard and a few drops of lemon juice. Clean 1 small sweet pepper and a couple of tomatoes, fry them lightly in cooking oil along with a few very thin slices of onion.

Place a few teaspoons of this mixture inside each herring, roll it up and place in a greased baking tin. Plcae remains of tomato/pepper mixture on and around fish and then pour about half a cup of milk over them. (The roes should be chopped up and placed inside the fish.) Season and bake [?] in a low oven until fish is tender.

Tomatoes and peppers

The tomatoes from Tuscany, the peppers from the stall next to the bus stop where I got off at Leyton after my flight back from Italy.