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."

Savoury mousse

Another source of material has emerged in the shape of my grandmother's battered red file of recipes, some typed, some handwritten. I dislike the title of the first recipe, "Cheese special" - but having sampled a few scrapings from the bowl in advance of a dinner party where this was the starter, can testify to its goodness.

Ingredients:

1 Philadelphia cheese
1 Boursin cheese with garlic
1 tin of C&B consommé - 8 oz
1 teaspoon Worcester sauce
4 oz single cream
Optional: a few prawns or shrimps
A little parsley

Method:

Put 3/4 of consommé into bleder.
Add both cheeses, Worcester sauce and cream.
Mix slowly if slightly lumpy or fast if smooth result required.
Pour into 5 or 6 ramekin dishes leaving 1/4 inch space at top.
Optional: add prawns/shrimps by hand before pouring into dishes.
Place in fridge for about 1/2 hour.
Remove from fridge and pour remaining consommé on top.
Return to fridge.

Serve:

Remove from fridge a few minutes before serving and sprinkle with a little parsley.

A very seventies dish which sounds potentially disgusting but is in fact rather good. Although I can certainly recall Granny making this as described above, I think my mother did something similar but without the consommé on top which she called "Snaffles mousse".

Fish soup

Another offering from my mother's recipe book. I don't ever remember her having cooked this. I like the specificity of the fish and am interested by the fact there are no ingredients other than fish and water (save a little butter for frying).

Postscript : I failed to see the recipe continued over the page and that there are some additional ingredients from the seventies - red and yellow food colouring anyone? And who recalls top of the milk?

1 red mullet

1 baby squid

1/4 lb prawns (unpeeled)

1/2 pound cod cheeks

Butter for frying

Prepare the fish; put all trimmings including prawn shells into saucepan with water - boil down for stock.

Cut up octopus into small pieces and fry in butter, then add some strained fish stock and simmer 'til tender. Add pieces of mullet & cod & simmer 'til just cooked. Remove cod pieces & put into blender with strained remaining stock & blend 'til creamy. Pour over fish pieces, & add peeled prawns & a little red & yellow colouring + a little top of milk. Season to taste. Heat slowly & serve with chopped parsley.

Paella

I agree with Elizabeth David on this one: this is an overrated dish. Perfectly pleasant but never spectacular in the way that a perfectly cooked risotto can be. It sounds almost insulting to say it is good street food because that is to imply that good street food can never be spectacular. Nevertheless, a good paella, served out of one of those colossal, slightly pretentious, pans: yellow rice, chorizo, chicken, mussels and prawns, to be gobbled in a market.

The village in Southern France where we spent summers in the nineteen eighties had a café (the "Café de la Paix"). When we moved there, it was known by some of the ex-patriots as Lenin's Tomb, so dour was the service; the first time I went in with my parents, nervously, wanting to practise my French, the man behind the bar affected not to understand my request for "Deux cafés et deux Oranginas". Later the place was taken over by a younger couple who offered food in the evenings, advertised on a blackboard outside. But it never seemed to change. Every evening as we drove past the "Café de la Paix", the cry would ring up: "Plat du Jour? Paella!" We never tried it.