Sea bream

Buried under cubes of ice in a polystyrene box, looking mournful, he was about to be my lunch. "Dorade", the waiter told us. The disappointing taramasalata beforehand was fortunately not a precursor. Crispy skin, white meaty flesh and boiled potatoes, beans and carrots which I dressed with olive oil, lemon juice and salt. I ate him peering at faint mountains across the Aegean. The little black cat that came to join our table was treated to a little chopped Calamari and the remains of the Taramasalata.

Shepherd's Pie

At the outset, I accept that this is not Shepherd's Pie in that it is made with beef rather than lamb AND I cook it from raw mince rather than use the remains of the joint, which is something I rarely have anyway. But I dislike the "correct" term for this dish, Cottage Pie, which conjures up thoughts of school dinners. In any event, it seems to me slightly more attractive to think that the shepherds would not eat their own lambs...



My version is based on the splendid Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's version in his River Cottage Meat Book...though I am not convinced that he would acknowledge his offspring.



Ingredients for "an enormous Shepherd's pie".

500 g minced beef.
A splash of olive oil.
2 onions, chopped.
2 carrots, finely chopped.
3 sticks of celery, finely chopped.
1 leek, finely chopped.
1/2 pint stock.
1/2 glass red wine.
1 tablespoon or dollop of tomato ketchup (I am keen on Tiptrees although I accept there is nothing wrong with the ingredients in Heinz).
Two dashes of Worcester Sauce.
About a kilo of mashed potato - mashed with butter and milk.
Salt.
Freshly ground black pepper.



Method:

I suggest you use a frying pan to fry the mince, a large saucepan to boil the potatoes and a larger saucepan for everything else including, later, the mince. You'll also need a suitable pie dish. Plus a potato peeler, a sharp knife (I recommend a serrated kitchen devil), a chopping board, a wooden spoon and a colander. It's worth laying out all the ingredients and utensils in advance.

Ok. Heat the oil in the largest saucepan and add the chopped onion. Allow the onion to cook very gently. Unlike HFW, I recommend against allowing it to brown. One step nearer to bitterness. Next, add the carrot and the leek. Keep going, very gently, stirring every so often.

Now, fry the mince on a relatively high heat, encouraging it not to steam or to burn but to brown. When it's cooked through, add it to the vegetables and mix everything together thoroughly. Add the ketchup and the Worcester sauce, followed by the wine and the stock, in swift succession. Again, mix it all together well. Turn the heat to its lowest setting and let the whole thing cook for around half an hour although it is forgiving and will allow you longer. Taste, add salt and pepper if needed and additional Worcester sauce and ketchup, if needed. But this is not a tomato based sauce. It is the mince and vegetables that should sing. You can also add a little water or wine if it's in danger of drying up...but you don't want excessive amounts of liquid. Think casserole rather than soup. Stir every so often.

While things are cooking, peel, chop and boil the potatoes. Mash them with butter and milk: not too much though.

Once the mince and vegetables are cooked, tip them from the saucepan into a pie dish. Then put the mashed potato on top. Several dollops plonked unceremoniously on to different parts of the pie dish...and then spread it as evenly as you can without being precious about it. Use a fork to make patterns which will brown nicely. Don't worry if the gravy at any point slops on to the potato. I think the reason this is intuitively displeasing is because it feels like planting muddy footprints on to a virgin field of snow. Once again, this dish is very forgiving. Spilt gravy will simply cause the potato to brown better. But do try to seal the edges.

If you're wanting to eat this in about half an hour, put it straight into a pre heated oven at about 200 degrees and cook for around twenty five minutes. Or, if you want to eat it later, say the next day, put it into the fridge. It will then take about 40 - 45 minutes to cook from cold. Keep an eye on it while it's in the oven. You are aiming for golden brown rather than burnt brown. When you take it out of the oven, it should be bubbling up at the sides however well you sealed it and this is a good thing. Eat.

Bolst's mango pickle goes particularly well with this as does lemon pickle. Others like Worcester sauce, ketchup, mustard or other things. My view is that in the case of Shepherd's pie, it's particularly important to cater for everyone's different tastes, condiment wise. The following idea comes from Nigel Slater. Put all relevant jars and bottles on the table including those rather suspect jars with wax paper containing mustard with honey or chilli jam that someone gave you as a present ages ago. Someone else will love it.

Lemon

So much of a lemon often gets discarded: the pips, rightly; the skins, which is often a waste (see Lemon pickle (2)); but most often the part that does not have a name. I will call it the residue. Imagine chopping the lemon or juicing it. On the chopping board or still in the juiced lemon is a mixture of flesh and juice, of solid and liquid. The point is that there is nothing inedible about it. Both the flavour and texture are good. Just for stirring into a mayonnaise or a curry, say.

Are there any other fruits or even vegetables that have so many different parts from the cook's perspective: zest, peel, juice and flesh. Compare other staples: onions, garlic, carrots, celery. All essential ingredients but in each case only one part that can be eaten: I might be prepared to accept that celery has a couple of other parts beside the flesh with culinary value: the leaves and the seeds.

The lemon is one of my eight desert island foods. Its ability to cut through richness, to alter flavour, to destroy blandness makes it a crucial thing to have around. Then there's always lemon pickle...

Bolognese sauce

It seems to me that there are only four essential ingredients of a Bolognese sauce although the Bolognese themselves might well disagree - just as they would never serve this sauce with spaghetti. For reasons I have articulated elsewhere (round food) I don't rave about spaghetti much anyway. My pasta of choice with this sauce is tagliatelle. James Bond and I would disagree about the choice of pasta if not the sauce. In Thunderball, one of the "three obsessions which belonged to his former life and which would not leave him" was: "a passionate longing for a large dish of Spaghetti Bolognese containing plenty of chopped garlic and accompanied by a whole bottle of the cheapest, rawest Chianti (bulk for his empty stomach and sharp tastes for his starved palate)". This is possibly the first dish I was ever taught to cook and it got me through university. When I first published this version, I received a particularly helpful critique and have incorporated some of the suggestions from it into this revised version.

Those essential ingredients, then: an onion, about 1 lb or 500 g of minced beef, a small tin of tomato purée (I would not have added an accent but the device I am using cleverly did so) and the empty tin filled with water and stirred so as to leave the tin shiny and no remnants of tomato within it. There will be ample fat in the mince for cooking purposes. Just these ingredients will make a rich sauce far better and more cheaply than anything from a jar. One of those dishes like Shepherd's Pie which is simply not worth eating other than at home.

That said, I have refined the sauce over the years and would add the following optional ingredients: a clove of garlic, a pinch of thyme or oregano, a bay leaf, a little freshly ground black pepper, a finely-chopped carrot or two, a stick of celery, a tin of chopped Italian tomatoes, a splash of olive oil and a splash of red wine. The imprecision of some of the quantities given is not intended to sound airy or unhelpful but to demonstrate that, unlike some other recipes, it's fairly flexible. NOT, though, when it comes to certain additional ingredients...

Let me do some explaining. This, above all, is a meat sauce. The onion, garlic, celery and carrot are condiments only, to melt unobtrusively. You do not want great lumps of them in this sauce. Nor, in my view, should other, alien ingredients, such as mushrooms, peppers or, dare I say it, sweetcorn, be added. Nor am I convinced by the addition of a handful of lardons or pancetta, which is contrary to what I said in yet another earlier version of this post. The recipe continues to evolve! I like to think I favour liberalism in cooking. And if you fancy a mince and vegetable sauce for your pasta, fine. But it seems to me that too many extra vegetables or whatever cross the line between what can legitimately call itself Bolognese and what cannot. The other thing to add, while I'm being principled, is that this is a thick meat sauce: it shouldn't be watery.

The method, leaving out steps depending on the optional ingredients...

1. Finely chop an onion. My only tip on avoiding tears is this. Peel it all first and don't chop off the ends until you've done so. You want to minimise the amount of time following the first cut which starts to release in vapourised form the (very dilute) sulphuric acid that attacks the eyes.

2. Heat about a teaspoon of olive oil in a frying pan. If you're not using any oil, leave out step 5: ie add the mince first, followed by the onion.

3. Finely chop the garlic if you're using it. Warm it gently in the oil. Remove once it's added flavour to the oil.

4. If you're using lardons, fry them at this stage.

5. Fry the finely chopped onion, stirring frequently to prevent it from burning.

6. Put the mince into the frying pan, turn the heat up and brown the mince on all sides. Gradually mix the mince with the onion. Stir frequently, breaking up any clumps of mince as you do so and stopping the onion from burning. Shake the pan every so often. If there's a lot of fat in the pan, now's a good opportunity to pour it off.

7. If you're adding any of the other optional vegetables (carrot and celery), add them at this stage, as finely chopped as you can. To repeat myself, they are condiments. Similarly, the thyme, bay leaf and FGBP can all go in at this stage.

8. Add the tomato purée. Because of its thick consistency, it may be a struggle at first to mix it with the mince. Persevere: the heat will rapidly cause it to melt. Don't add water at this stage, but stir furiously. You don't want the tomato - or anything - to burn but the direct heat at this stage seals in the flavour. I think.

9. The trick, I have decided, is to cook everything on the highest possible heat you dare (stirring furiously as burnt onions are horrid) until you add the water, whereupon you turn the heat as low as it will go.

10. Add the splash of wine and/or chopped tomatoes if they're going in.

11. Finally, add the water. Turn the heat down to its lowest possible setting. Let the sauce bubble gently. Scrape down the sides of the pan every so often. Stir and/or add a little more water every so often if there's a danger of sticking.

12. I think this should be allowed to simmer for 45 minutes or longer. There should be some, but not too much, rich red liquid on the top. Cook the pasta. Eat.

Some reminiscences. This was the first thing I was taught to cook before I went off to university. It's still a staple. On one occasion - this was before I had learned to cook it - we had all been to the theatre with an extended party of family and friends. The plan was that Mum was going to cook this when we got home afterwards. But she had to be dropped off at the local hospital, having got something in her eye. So my father took us all home and asked us what we'd like to eat. In an injudicious attempt to lighten the atmosphere, I said airily, "Oh you know, some smoked salmon, some caviar, something like that". In my defence, I hadn't appreciated my mother was actually in casualty; she happened to work in the hospital and I'd thought one of her colleagues was going to sort her out. In any event, my father didn't lose his temper in front of guests but we were swiftly banished from the kitchen and he put together a bolognese sauce about which one of my cousins was a little doubtful. My roasting came the following day after everyone had left...