Vinaigrette

This is not a copy of a recipe, but my memory of some instructions given to an interviewer of Raymond Blanc in a Sunday magazine. Its importance lies not in the ingredients, which are standard, but the method.

Put a teaspoon of Dijon mustard into a mug. Add some sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Then add olive oil, as though you were making mayonnaise, slowly at first and then a little more quickly, stirring vigorously, until you have a mixture so thick you could turn the mug upside down. Then add about a teaspoon of vinegar.

The advantage of doing it this way is that you have an uncurdled vinaigrette which coats every leaf beautifully.

Mayonnaise

I am told that I would make this when a small child: what I did not know was that, far from stirring olive oil into egg yolks, I was stirring tap water into custard powder. My mother would then dispose of my effort having made her own in stealth but I would receive the congratulation for having made it.

On another occasion when I was old enough to make "real" mayonnaise, I produced a post-Christmas supper for my parents: cold turkey, potato salad and dressed salad. My mother took one mouthful of salad and recoiled in horror. I had mistaken cherry brandy for wine vinegar and the salad was thus a disgusting sweet concoction. My mother thought I had done it deliberately. My father was more sympathetic.

Ingredients for real mayonnaise:

2 egg yolks
1/2 pint of Extra Virgin Olive oil OR combination of olive oil and sunflower or rapeseed oil
Tablespoon lemon juice or wine vinegar
Rock salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Method

Ideally using a pestle and mortar, slowly beat the oil into the egg yolks, drop by drop to begin with, then, as it thickens, teaspoon by teaspoon. You will see after a while that when you add each amount of oil, the mixture floats on it for a period of time. Once it ceases to float, it is properly mixed and it is time to ad the next amount. If you dare, you can then let the remaining olive oil trickle in straight from the mug. Then add the lemon juice/vinegar (which will thin the mayonnaise), the salt and the black pepper.

If the mixture curdles, don't worry, provided you have a fresh egg yolk. Simply add the curdled mixture to the new egg yolk as slowly as you would add the oil.

Mixed with a little cream (which, like the lemon juice/vinegar thins it), this makes a sublime potato salad.

Onion vinegar

The best chip shops offer a choice of vinegar. There is the common brown sort which used to be called malt vinegar but now comes in bottles labelled "non-brewed condiment". And the clearer, slightly green sort which I was told by the man in the chip shop in Canterbury was onion vinegar: the stuff in which pickled onions are stored.

As well as looking different, it has a more interesting flavour, and soaks far better into the chips and batter than the malt variety. Of course, the purist would say that it is wrong to call these vinegars at all because vinegar means sour wine. Hence our being lumbered with "non-brewed condiment". And I have tried shaking wine vinegar on to fish and chips. It just doesn't work. Just as a green salad with oil and malt vinegar is an abomination.

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.