Rosemary's ham

How many recipes, I wonder, are said to come from the author's grandmother? Hundreds of thousands, perhaps. One pictures a white-haired old lady stirring a bowl of cake mixture, following a secret recipe which, perhaps came from her own grandmother. My first memory of home-cooked ham came from my grandmother. She would spike it with cloves, boil it and smother it in some unknown brown spice, and we would eat it over several days, accompanied by salad: lettuce, washed and dried in a salad spinner; hard-boiled egg, sliced in an egg slicer; cucumber with the peel chopped off; tomatoes which were sometimes skinned; beetroot in vinegar; spring onions; sometimes a tiny bowl of potato salad. There was salad cream in those days, although as the seventies turned into the eighties, she gradually switched to mayonnaise. Olive oil was used only rarely, for extra-special salad dressings, made in a vinaigrette and shaken vigorously before each meal. Slices of brown bread. Once upon a time I would have eaten the last ever slice of ham which had been cooked by her, but, like many firsts and lasts, I cannot pinpoint that moment.

Poached eggs on ham

Breakfast or brunch. Three elements: buttered toast; a thick slice of ham; a perfectly-poached egg on the top, with freshly ground black pepper. This used to be a Christmas morning tradition and I can recall it being followed in Winchester ten years ago. My brother Will had cooked the ham, baked the bread and poached the eggs. He had not supplied the newly-laid eggs, though; they had been brought by me, a parting gift the day before from some friends who kept chickens in their garden. Crumbly home-cooked ham. Orange egg yolks. A very late breakfast after church. A good start to the excesses of Christmas.

English ham

It seems slightly bizarre to start this entry with a reference to "Jambon de Paris", but this was a term I first heard my mother use with a contemptuous tone of voice to refer to plasticky ham of any kind.

Even worse than plasticky ham, though, I reckon, is tinned ham. Once a luxury - imagine receiving it from the Americans in World War II! - I associate it with impoverished old ladies. I recall a school friend and I being given it for supper and heating it on a candle which gave it an interesting grilled edge.

Finally, I must confess that although I may receive a rocketing for saying so, I find it difficult to distinguish our various regional hams: Wiltshire ham, Yorkshire ham, Northampton ham for goodness' sake? That is not to say that British ham is a bad thing. Think of a ham sandwich with granary bread, unsalted butter, wholegrain mustard and gherkins for lunch. One of my breakfasts of choice would be poached eggs on ham, the home-cooked, crumbly variety, like my grandmother used to make. She once cautioned me shortly before some guests arrived not to offer them ham, because they were Jewish.

Impressions of another

It is not often that I receive a written review of something I've cooked; the closest is usually in the form of a bread-and-butter letter. But a few years ago, family friends had supper and stayed over with me; and one of them was an Australian priest who wrote a diary for his parish magazine. The egocentric in me was delighted. I quote:

"The meal was good. With the drinks were little pieces of toast spread with a pungent, dark coloured, but tasty paste, there followed a cold orange soup and then a good salad with an eclectic collection of interesting food from a platter, including pickled herring in cream, prosciutto, ham, and more, all excellent. Ice cream and strawberries for dessert."

The "pungent, dark coloured, but tasty paste" might have been tapenade, I suppose. The cold orange soup was certainly Gazpacho (not, I must confess, homemade). I find it surprising that I would have served ice cream with strawberries.

Gammon and spinach

My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Cecil; it is part of family legend that we are descended from Elizabeth I's Secretary of State. Another is that we have all inherited something called the "Cecil Mean Gene". That is to say, put at its gentlest, we avoid spending money and gain serious satisfaction from a bargain. Last night, I found myself in precisely that frame of mind while wandering around the supermarket. I lingered over the "Reduced to Clear" shelves, a place where there is a hint of tension. Will anything really exciting arrive there during my survey, so I get first dibs? Will someone manage to grab something before I do? I tend to watch people like a hawk, noticing what they pick up, occasionally willing them to return it so that I can then snatch it. It's like a return to toddlerhood.

What I found last night was a large piece of gammon which had been reduced to half price - the reason being, I surmised, that the best before date was that very day. Into the basket it went.

At home, I decided to conduct a little experiment. The gammon would be simply roasted. I stuck a few cloves in. Then, taking an idea from Nigella Lawson (cooking ham in coca cola) I tipped over the ham the dregs of a bottle of ginger beer and then smeared some honeycomb on top, put it into a hot oven and waited for a couple of hours.

I think it worked. The ginger beer had completely dried up on the bottom of the roasting tin. The fat of the ham was completely blackened and shiny. The ham itself was neither too moist nor too dry. I had some of the end for breakfast this morning, with unsalted butter, coarse grain mustard, in a hot cross bun.

As for spinach, I've never eaten it with gammon.

Long haul flights

These musings occur to me on a flight from Tokyo to Vienna - both excellent places but the parts in between, certainly on the current flight path, seem to me to be a little barren.

First, I am convinced that one of the two outer seats in the bank of four is the best to aim for. There is always a chance that the passenger next to you will choose to clamber out on the other side if you are asleep. The other two passengers are almost bound to do so.

Airline food is almost always disgusting: Victoria Wood once summed it up well when she described the passenger next to her who ate everything: "He ate the salt and pepper. He ate the little towelette thing for wiping your hands on. He even ate the thing I thought they only put there for a joke, you know the tinned pear and the dream topping." When comedians make you realise how we've always thought something but never dared to say it out loud.

The meal just served by Austrian Airlines fell, I am afraid, into the disgusting category. There was a choice between "Asian Chicken" and "Western Pork". I plumped for the chicken, on the grounds that we were in Asia and the food was likely to have been made there by people more experienced in putting together Asian food than Western food. The chicken had been so finely minced that it was indistinguishable from the insipid sauce surrounding it. Remind me, on another occasion, to write an entry on the western style sliced bread they give you in India.

The only exceptions to the rule about poor food are, in my view, when snacks are purveyed. Air France provided a perfectly good baguette filled with Mountain Ham on a flight from Paris to London once. Fortunately there was no time to heat up any food. A different kind of ham but none the worse for it was given to me by the staff on a USAir internal flight. I recall a particular awkwardness: I wanted a tomato juice to go with it. How, though, should I say tomato?

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?

Cold turkey

The turkey is a bird I could live without. As Pippa Middleton reminds us, it is convenient for feeding large numbers, but that ought not to be the test. It seems more than a little ominous if the first thing to be considered is its ability to assist with mass catering. Just multiply your chickens or pheasants is my alternative suggestion. That said, the size of the bird does mean a large quantity of the very finest dripping, for spreading on toast with flakes of sea salt.

To begin with, we did have turkey on Christmas Day. My father was particularly keen on it cold and there I think he is right. There is something rather fine about slices of cold, dry, crumbly turkey breast. That reminds me of the appalling moment in our house when I realised that the turkey which I had been picking at had started to grow a white beard. Cucumber with lashings of Tabasco seemed, for some reason, a sensible plan.

Let me conclude with a post-Christmas story. It happened in London, maybe the day after Boxing Day. Plenty of cold food around. I had offered to prepare supper for my parents and the offer had been accepted. So I "paved their plates" with turkey slices, probably cold ham as well, and potato salad. Then disaster struck when I decided to make a French dressing to go on the green salad. Olive oil and wine vinegar: can't go wrong, you might think. But shortly after I triumphantly carried in the plates of food came howls of outrage from my mother. What on earth had I put into the salad dressing? It turned out that the bottle of what I thought was red wine vinegar was in fact cherry brandy.

Completely unintended by me, but my mother was unforgiving, thinking it was one of my "jokes" which had been becoming increasingly tiresome of late. But food was not something with which I would ever joke.

Mortadella

I first visited Italy on 11 September 2001. Cousin Pen took us there by motorway from Lorgues in Provence to just over the border: Ventimiglia. The purpose of the trip was to go to the post office to pay a parking fine that one of my other cousins had incurred. It was a good excuse.

As we drove through the tunnel at the border, I concentrated, hard, on the fact that we were entering Italy. On the other side, we descended into the town.

The so-called purpose of going, the post office, was quickly over. Of much greater interest to us all was Pen's favourite food shop.

You know how many supermarkets in England have a cheerful "Try before you buy" sign at the delicatessen counter. I always feel slightly guilty for asking and, when I do, it becomes such a big deal to produce a wafer thin fragment of ham or whatever, presented to me on a cocktail stick, that I end up buying some. Possibly the point.

The lady behind the counter in Pen's shop had a different approach. I would express the vaguest interest in a particular salami or some Parma ham and she would immediately seize the article, rush to the slicing machine and produce enough for all three of us to have a large mouthful. Of course, we would end up buying some. A lot. Possibly the point. But the feeling in that shop was one of generosity. (Later, Pen would reveal that the woman running the shop may in fact have, dishonestly or otherwise, charged us incorrectly and in the shop’s favour – but let me give the shopkeeper the benefit of the doubt. I warmed to her.)

The title of this piece is Mortadella and that is one thing I did not buy at that shop in Ventimiglia. But I saw it for the first time I can remember. Not surprisingly. It was the largest sausage I have ever seen. Slightly off-putting.

Since then, though, I have grown to love it. As cousin Pen told me later, it is great picnic food. Folded into good bread, with slices of tomato, lettuce and a little mayonnaise , its moist slightly bland saltiness is welcome at the edge of the road on the way, say, from Rome to Lorgues.

But be warned: there is plenty of rogue Mortadella out there. I would say as general rules:

Only buy it loose, never in packets.

The bigger the better.

It should be studded with peppercorns and either pistachios or pieces of truffle. If not, avoid it.

If it looks particularly dry, don't bother - one of the exceptions to the rule of dryness in sausages. Having said that, once the outer slice has been removed, it may be better within. It will be a good test of the integrity of the person trying to sell it to you: does that person try and include the first slice in what you're being sold, or discard it?

Ask for it to be sliced thinly.

Eat it quickly.

If you are disappointed, don't give up on it. It is variable.

Part 2 of the trip to Ventimiglia to follow.

Alan Miller's heart attack on a plate

This is from my own recipe book, with some comments added, I discovered recently, by my mother. I'll set out the (terse) recipe, followed by her commentary.

1 onion, chopped.
Chopped ham.
Chopped potatoes.
Herbs (eg rosemary).
Olive oil.
Salt and peppper.
Egg yolk.
1. Heat oil in large frying pan.
2. Add onion; fry until soft; add herbs.
3. Add ham; fry until browned (don't let onion burn).
4. Add potatoes; fry until crisp.
5. Add salt and pepper. Serve.
6. Raw egg yolk in middle of plate. Allow to cook. Eat.

"Alan Miller", wrote my mother, "worked for the BBC and was from Scotland. He stayed with us for several months and made this. Ali's version is different; she uses butter and a tiny bit of olive oil to stop it browning and she doesn't add any herbs. And the potatoes must be pre-cooked and cut into tiny cubes. The egg yolk should be settled into the mound of potatoes like an egg in a nest. You could make a less delicate version with chorizo."

My own commentary: this is, I think, originally a Swiss dish, introduced to us by Alan Miller, who gave me my first ride on the back of a motorcycle: I can still remember the raw terror. I agree that the potatoes should be pre-cooked and cut into tiny cubes. The idea of a raw egg yolk puts many people off. Don't let it. Because provided you are organised, the egg yolk cooks in the middle of the potatoes. Having nested the egg yolk, I then pile potatoes around it (carefully so it does not break) and then start eating from around the edges before attacking the egg yolk. I have been known to add a dash of tabasco and even a squeeze of lemon juice to this.