Beetroot & orange consommé

Here is a further recipe from my mother's book. I include it more for historical interest. I cannot contemplate my mother using orange juice or arrow-root in any recipe from 1980 onwards...

"Cut up one large raw beetroot and two onions. Cook them gently in butter for 5 minutes. Add two beef stock cubes in one pint water. Bring to boil and simmer until beetroot is pale. Strain. Add 1/4 pint orange juice, 1 tablespoon arrow-root to thicken, a little hot pepper sauce, freshly ground pepper to taste."

Marinated lamb with potato salad

My personal recipe book contains a number of newspaper clippings: recipes that I like the sound of but have rarely (if ever) got round to testing. Here is one such cutting, attributed to Ruth Quinlan.

Serves 6.

Ingredients:

2 whole fillets or 6 steaks lamb
4 cloves garlic
4 twigs rosemary
1 tbsp. ground black pepper
1 kg new potatoes
200 g green beans
1 tbsp capers
2 tsp paprika
1 lemon (juice and zest)
150 ml olive oil

Method:

Chop the garlic and rosemary leaves and mix with the pepper and enough oil to coat the meat. Leave in a cool place for at least six hours or overnight. Boil the potatoes and the beans. While still hot, break the potatoes in half using your finger and toss with the rest of the ingredients. When the barbecue is red-hot, sprinkle salt on the meat and cook the steaks for eight minutes and the fillet for 15 - 20 minutes. Rest the meat in a warm place for ten minutes. Serve with the warm potato salad. If you are using fillet, slice thickly. In case of rain, grill (full power) or roast (220 degrees C/mark 7) the meat. The same cooking times apply.

Logs

I have just seen a sign advertising "seasoned logs". I mean, what do they do with them? Sprinkle them with salt and pepper?

La Tielle de Sète

I have written or thought about writing about Sète before: it is where I had one of the best burgers in my life, at the railway station.

More gastronomically, perhaps, I turn to one of its local specialities - La Tielle de Sète. A kind of orange pastry, looking like a crab, and filled with octopus and tomato. My father reminded me of them the other day when he sent a postcard from nearby - we have been going to Sète since the 1980s - with a photograph of half a dozen and a recipe for the same. He had written "Yuk (I think)" on the back. My father does not like octopus.

I cannot find an English translation of "Tielle", only references to this dish - more commonly named La Tielle Sétoise - with the accent changed from a grave to an acute. There is probably a linguistic term for that but this is a piece about food. I also learn that Tielle is based on the Italian Tiella di Gaeta, Tiella meaning "pan" and the whole dish being prepared like a "pocket sandwich", whatever that might be. They look a little like pockets, I suppose, so that is what I shall call them. Sétoise, incidentally, I perceive as a sauce with tomatoes, chilli and onion: orange-looking, exactly like these "tielles" in fact.

Here is the wording on the original postcard, followed by my attempt at a translation.

La Tielle de Sète

(Pour 6 personnes)

Prendre 1 kg de poulpes, les nettoyer et les plonger dans un court bouillon. Faire blondir 200 g d'oignons dans un peu d'huile avec 2 gousses d'ail, 1 brin de persil et du concentré de tomates, ajouter du vin blanc, du sel, du poivre.


Faire cuire quelques minutes. Puis ajouter les poulpes apres les avoir coupés, du laurier, un peu de piment et laisser cuire 20 mn.

Pendant ce temps préparer une pâte à pain avec 1 kg de farine, de l'eau et de la levure. Mettre la pâte dans une moule, garni avec la farce et recouvrir du reste de pâte en formant un couvercle en le soudant avec de l'eau bien hermétiquement. Badigeonner d'huile et laisser cuire 15 mn à 20 mn thermostat 7°.

POCKETS FROM SÈTE

(Serves 6)

Take one kilo of octopus, clean and immerse in a "court bouillon". Sauté 200 g of onions in a little oil with two cloves of garlic, one sprig of parsley and some tomato purée; add white wine, salt and pepper.

Cook for a few minutes. Then add the octopus having cut it, with bay leaf and a sprinkle of pepper and cook for twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, prepare a bread dough with one kilo of flour, water and yeast. Put the dough in a pan, top with the octopus mixture and cover with the remaining dough, forming a cover by sealing with water.

Brush with oil and cook for fifteen to twenty minutes at gas mark 7.

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.



Chilled soup

I recently received a marketing e-mail from Waitrose which included the headline "An exclusive 25% off chilled soups". Below, it read: "Soup is the perfect comfort food to cheer up a chilly autumn day. That's why we're offering myWaitrose members 25% off all chilled soups until 7 October". Apart from the flawed logic, it is the misuse of "chilled" to which I object. Presumably, they are referring to soup which is served hot but sold from their refrigerators rather than in a tin or a packet. But to me "chilled soup" conjures up Gazpacho and Vichyssoise - perfect Summer soups but not, I suspect, what the marketeers had in mind. As a matter of fact, I'll happily eat Gazpacho all year round: and, in fairness to Waitrose, having criticised their use of language, they are the only supermarket in the land which sell Gazpacho (Alvalle is the brand) that bears any resemblance to what you can get in Spain.

My uncle Alex has a novel way if Gazpacho is ever on the menu at any dinner party he attends. He asks for it to be put in the microwave. Cold soup, in his view, is unacceptable.

In my mother's recipe book is a recipe for "Strawberry Gazpacho". I reproduce it below:

1/2 lb strawberries
1 teaspoon tabasco
1 tin beef consommé
1/4 pint orange juice
2 cucumbers
Salt and pepper
Blend in food processor.

I have not tried it, and must confess I would feel slightly wary about doing so. Beef consommé and orange juice? Hmmm.

There is a further recipe for another chilled soup on the same page:

Beetroot consommé

Boil pieces of raw beetroot, carrots, onions, potato and stock cube. Make up with one packet of Madeira aspic. Serve chilled with sour cream.

Horseradish

I was so used to seeing this come out of a jar, a little slimily (and usually served with grey rather than red beef), that I never realised there was an actual vegetable called a horseradish, until I saw a pile of them in Fortnum & Mason's one Christmas Eve. As we were planning to have roast beef on Christmas Day, it was the perfect find. So the horseradish was bought, and when it was bought it was wrapped and went into my brother's stocking. As I expected him to do, he made an obscene remark on discovering it. On Christmas morning, I allocated to myself the task of turning it into horseradish sauce. And very quickly, I realised why it was that most people acquired their horseradish sauce from a jar rather than making it from scratch. Grating it was worse than chopping an onion. But, having finished making it, I very quickly realised why it was WORTH making it from scratch. It actually tastes fresh and alive. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is responsible for this recipe, which comes in his River Cottage Meat Book: the best book on the subject that I know.

100 g horseradish

125 g creme fraiche

1 teaspoon English mustard

2 teaspoons wine vinegar

Pinch sugar

Salt and pepper

Peel and grate horseradish. This is the toughest bit. Then steep the horseradish in the vinegar, mustard and sugar for ten minutes. Stir again. Add the creme fraiche and mix it together well. Add salt and pepper if and as necessary.

Mashed potato

It is odd how something so simple can on occasions be so utterly revolting. Take Smash: dried mashed potato in a packet. The most successful advertising I've ever experienced, judging by the distance between the advert and reality. The description of the carefully selected, beautifully peeled and prepared potato... What on earth was my mother thinking of when she bought it? Perhaps I inveigled her. The finished result was utterly lacking in flavour, texture or integrity.

Another thought that occurs to me, this time in relation to school mashed potato. How was it that it was so nasty yet in different ways depending on the day it was served? And how could the powers that be have decreed that it ever be served with salad (Monday lunches)?

Here is how to make mashed potato that sings. Peel, chop into small pieces and boil your potatoes. Meanwhile, cut a small onion as finely as you can. When the potatoes are cooked, drain them, then throw in the onion, a large lump of unsalted butter, a glug of double cream, some salt crystals and freshly ground black pepper and mash away furiously. I use a potato ricer.

As you'll have gathered, this is not one of those recipes where precision in terms of quantities is required. What is necessary is thorough mashing and heat.

A final observation. "Mustard mash" is something you often now find in the kind of pub that serves lamb shank. It is my theory that potatoes and mustard do not go together. However, I have no difficulty with a dab of mustard on the side to go with the sausages that so often accompany mash: though it was only in the "Dandy" that they were ever stuck into the mash, as a feast for Tom Tum or Greedy Pigg.

Chorizo roll

Brindisa in Borough Market do something called a chorizo roll. It consists of a roll drizzled with olive oil, a split in two grilled chorizo, a red piquilla pepper and some rocket. You can either have a single or a double (quantities of chorizo and pepper). Having a double appears much better value. The queues for them normally snake quite a way out of the covered section where they are sold. Today, people had to huddle inside, out of the rain. Still, they sold like hot cakes. Seriously good.

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.

Avocado puree

My recipe book; Mum's handwriting.

Avocado puree (Mum's "nicer than guac.")

1 soft avocado, 1/2 finely chopped onion, salt, pepper, tabasco to taste and a glug of olive oil.

Mash avocado, mix in other ingreedience.

Some commentary. Simple. The final word of the recipe demands further explanation, which will be for another day.