Friday 12 October 2018

Another favourite sandwich

I discovered one of my favourite sandwiches in a little shop in Crouch End. I worked nearby, throughout the summer of 1992. I had an enlightened boss called Julian Santos, who told us that he expected all hands to the pump when there was work to be done: but when there wasn’t, we did not have to pretend to be busy; instead, we were welcome to do anything we wanted: making personal telephone calls; using the computers. I learned to touch type that summer. There was always plenty of time for lunch. The sandwich I discovered had four ingredients: white bread, mayonnaise, just fried bacon and ripe avocado. A sublime combination.

Wednesday 3 October 2018

Lawyers who lunch

At last one of my recipes has made it into print, in SA Law's Food for Thought (Volume 4). My recipe is to be found on page 8 and will be familiar to readers of this blog who recall my bacon casserole with flageolets. What is more, there is even a Wine Suggestion next to my recipe - apparently "the velvety fruity notes of a syrah ... including Chateauneuf du Pape" would go well with it. And there are a number of other appealing recipes to be found in the book, including Turkish Eggs, Cod Loin with Creamed Leeks, Tomato and Brown Shrimp Butter and Cinnamon Ice Cream...

Tuesday 2 October 2018

Greasy spoon

I am lucky enough to live a few seconds walk from what deserves the title of best greasy spoon in London: the Regency Café. It is curious that the term “greasy spoon” is no insult but a term of endearment, indeed high compliment. It makes it plain that the place in question is unpretentious, sensibly priced and, above all, offers a tasty breakfast. Indeed, you can guarantee salty food, not bland food.

So what is it about the Regency that makes even it stand out? Well, it has featured in a film for a start. Pride, the one about the unlikely alliance between the miners and gay and lesbian activists during the miners’ strike. (Not such an unlikely alliance in fact, as the film draws out: minorities under pressure from the establishment.)

But cinematic fame aside. Gingham curtains. Ceramic tiles. Brown chairs. Plain formica tables. A large sugar shaker, salt, pepper, brown sauce, ketchup, vinegar and mustard on each. None of those silly packets that are so difficult to tear. A queue often extending through the doorway. Signs  warning you not to sit down until you have ordered your food. Framed photographs and pictures on the wall.


Then there is The Voice. Behind the counter most days is a charming, gentle-faced woman who takes your order quietly. But when it is ready, it is as though she is replaced. A stentorian “Ham egg and chips coming up” is bellowed, prompting the relevant customer to return to the counter to collect it. You can hear her from my bedroom.

Wednesday 26 September 2018

Sweet William

I associate this with coming down in the morning after a dinner party the night before: a dinner party to which my brother and I were not invited. But the great thing about dinner parties was: the leftovers. And one of my mother’s signature dishes in the nineteen seventies was a pudding she called Sweet William. Chocolate chip cookies, each dipped in sherry, and then sandwiched to another with whipped cream, gradually forming a creamy circle around the edge of the serving plate.

Saturday 15 September 2018

North Pole pudding

They had fur in the soup on Tuesday, underboiled fish on Wednesday, and on Thursday the most unpleasant pudding Charlotte had ever eaten - North Pole pudding, it was called - a kind of jelly made of cornmeal, grey like porridge, shiny like glue and flecked with little pieces of meal like the flaws in glass.


From Charlotte Sometimes, by Penelope Makepeace

Wednesday 12 September 2018

Lunch and Dinner

I was once a pupil at a school for such a short time that I never really felt I belonged. I was not even allowed to join the school library. On the other hand, knitting lessons were inflicted on me. They happened to take place in the library and I recall being tantalised by a copy of one of the few Enid Blyton Books I Had Not Read sitting on one of the shelves, which I was not allowed to borrow, as I sulkily attempted and failed to knit. My parents told me that if I had to fail at anything, knitting was probably not a bad activity at which to fail...

Cedar School it was called, in Exhall. They had a definition of “lunch” which I have never seen anywhere else. “Lunch” was a parent-purchased school-provided snack: I only had “Lunch” on my first day, possibly as a treat to mark the occasion. Mine consisted of a bag of square salt and vinegar crisps with a name I cannot recall, although I do remember earnestly discussing what I had been given for my “Lunch” with another pupil: “I’ve got ...”


But this was not our only meal of the day. Our midday meal was “Dinner”. It took place in the dining hall which is where we also met for Assembly and chanted at the headmistress: “Good morning Mrs Bentley. Good morning everyone.” I remember little about the food we received. Yeasty bread rolls and stew, possibly with dumplings. Not only was the school the educational establishment where I spent the least time; it also had the least memorable food.

Tuesday 11 September 2018

Meaty soup

It was a cold Sunday evening in Kenilworth and there was a long drive to London ahead of us. We, the family, were hungry. We surveyed the contents of Granny’s fridge, gloomily. There was little enough within, because she and my grandfather had gone on holiday. A few vegetables left behind. And the remains of a beef casserole which would have served one. But it was enough for my mother who clearly regarded it as a challenge. “I could quickly turn this into a lovely meaty soup”, she announced. There was approval from us all and she set to work. Thus casserole for one and a few vegetables became rich soup for four, which we ate in the kitchen around the yellow Formica table.

Monday 10 September 2018

Cooked breakfast

Neves, whom I had met on a train from Delhi to Goa, had come to stay for a few days in England. I was still living with my parents then and they gave him the spare room. On his first morning, I had made him a cooked breakfast which he seemed to enjoy. The next morning, he came down before me. My mother was in the kitchen and, according to her version of events, said brightly, “Good morning Neves. Would you like cereal or toast for breakfast?” His reply, which has gone down in family folklore, “Actually I prefer bacon or ham with an egg fried on both sides.”

My grandfather, too, liked his cooked breakfast and a family legend about him also concerns a demand by him for a certain kind of breakfast in a foreign land. In his case, it was France, with the family. This would have been in the nineteen fifties or sixties. There were, unsurprisingly, no menus on the table and only slices of bread, unsalted butter and apricot jam. When the waitress came over to take orders for coffee (no doubt), Grandfather, loudly, slowly and painfully asked her: “Could you do ham and eggs?"


In neither case can I tell you what happened next.

Tuesday 21 August 2018

A Betrothal Feast

“Strong-smelling Arles sausage with its brown flesh, crayfish in their dazzling armour, pink-shelled clams, sea-urchins looking like chestnuts in their spiny cases, and clovisses, those shellfish that gourmets from the South claim are more than an adequate substitute for the oysters of northern waters; in short, all the delicate hors-d’oeuvres that are washed up by the waves on these sandy shores and to which grateful fishermen accord the general appellation of fruits de mer."

From "The Count of Monte Cristo (Penguin Classics)" by Alexandre Dumas, tr. Robin Buss)

Monday 20 August 2018

Showing off

"That night I met up with some Colombian friends and we went to a Mexican restaurant to celebrate.

'Are you ready to order?' the waiter asked. He clearly didn't like the look of us.

'We'd all like beans, rice and eggs,' I said.

The dish wasn't on the menu. He pointed this out, testily. 'This is a Mexican restaurant - you must eat Mexican food.' All I could do was remind him that what we'd ordered was all most Mexicans ever ate. He couldn't deny this and went to order the food."

Nick Danziger, Danziger's Travels (1987)

Thursday 16 August 2018

First meal in Corsica

Our flight to Bastia had been heavily delayed. We were hungry, and wanting something rather less plastic than the disappointing burgers we had eaten in Stansted Airport (the only compensation being that when I asked for mustard, wholegrain was produced).

The hotel receptionist sounded optimistic when we asked him whether there would be anywhere open. But we were told to be quick. It was about twenty to midnight.

And so we wandered along the edge of the sea, towards the old port. There were still people eating in many of the canopy-covered restaurants but, whenever we asked, “Fermé” or “Terminé” was the response.

The place we ended up in was in the old port itself, called O Sud. In the last restaurant we had tried, the waiter had told us of its existence and where it was, but warned us in strongly accented English, “It is not fine dining”. We headed there expecting burgers and Club sandwiches.

A man behind the bar told us we could eat and we found ourselves a table near the marina but were hastily moved further inside. Pop videos played on a wide screen; we must have lifted the average age considerably. My father would have hated it.


Menus arrived and we were told we could choose from the items with blue spots. There WERE burgers and club sandwiches on offer, but, to our relief, plenty more. Liz plumped for tomatoes and mozzarella and I had a Corsican plank. Liz’s salad came with a whole ball of mozzarella capped with another slice, on top of thick slices of tomato coated in pine nuts and pesto. My plank had salami, coppa and mountain ham. There was sweet butter and something which I thought at first was honey but the man serving it told us, having made us guess, that it was home made fig jam. We drank Pastis and were back in the Midi.

Friday 22 June 2018

Jelly

I must have been about twelve: on the cusp of being old enough to know better. It was about 1983. I was staying with my uncle and aunt in Kent. There were two cousins: Christopher, aged four, and his brother, Edward, younger still.

We were downstairs early one morning, in the kitchen and there were no adults about. There was enough of an age gap to give me a sense of superiority. But it was Christopher who was the more self-assured. He announced that he was going to make jelly, whipped a saucepan from a cupboard, and found a packet of jelly cubes. I seem to recall expressing doubt about his proposed course of action, but was assured that “Mummy lets me”.

Standing on a chair but still barely able to reach, Christopher stood over the hot stove, stirring the melting jelly cubes frantically with a wooden spoon, his brother Edward watching solemnly. I felt a vague sense of unease. There had been some recent episode when young Christopher had set fire to something, hadn’t there?

Suddenly, my aunt, his mother, whisked into the kitchen, in her dressing gown. No doubt she had smelt fumes emerging from the kitchen and come to investigate. Before I could say a word, start apologising for my inadequate supervision of small children, Christopher said sheepishly: “Mummy, I made some jelly by accident.”

Monday 18 June 2018

Duck

Walking on my way home past an outdoor branch of Côte, I had this sudden urge to pinch the last remaining slice of succulent duck breast from the board that sat between two people sitting at the table minding their own business. But fortunately for me, I resisted that urge.

Saturday 16 June 2018

Wartime rationing

“Charlotte had pushed the jagged grey pyramid of oyster shells to one side and was cutting into a plump Bresse chicken. She had ordered a while one and was undaunted by its size, or by the steaming pot of fresh parsley sauce. From the mound of mashed potatoes on her plate a narrow trickle of butter ran into the margins of the oily vinaigrette that dressed the mountainous green salad...”


And then she woke up and it was all a dream.

From “Charlotte Gray” by Sebastian Faulks.

Sunday 3 June 2018

Steak sandwiches

The walk had supposed to last twenty minutes, ten there and ten back. Before we were out of the village, it had been upped to forty. It took us three hours. Almond trees. A walnut tree. And cherry trees. Most of the cherries - on lower branches - had been taken. There were a few left, small and sour. But foraged so worth eating. Cornflowers. A bank of wild thyme, with two pink orchids blowing nearby A wild flower meadow. Someone in his seventies said it reminded him of his childhood.

Having boasted about my homemade mayonnaise, I was told that some would go very well with the planned steak sandwiches for lunch. So I made some in a too small mortar. Others sliced the beef into small chunks, found other things. We made our sandwiches similarly, buttering our bread with mayonnaise then adding mustard, beef, salt, pepper, gherkins, capers and sliced tomato. Delicious. The conversation, though, was impolite: this was a boys’ weekend.

Saturday 2 June 2018

Long lunch

Buxy, after a cycle ride along a disused railway, converted into a cycle path. Poppies, vines and the sound of insects. After the wine tasting, we were invited to lunch on the terrasse. Three round white metal tables, pulled together. Little shade where I was sitting. We were offered appetisers. Duck and lamb pate. Brown bread. A dip brought in a mug, consisting of cream, spices and garlic. Snails, not in their shells but in little hard pastry cases. The usual parsley and garlic butter. A green salad with sesame seeds, tiny yellow cherry tomatoes, cress, and thick yellow dressing. Our main courses were, somebody said, not traditionally Burgundian: I had a bowl of veal with potatoes in thick sauce and topped with paprika. The sauce mopped up with the bread. We were reminded by the waitress of the unusual salt and pepper - different ones on each table. Finally, pain perdu - spiced warm bread, with crime chantilly and ice cream. The cream was topped with sugar crystals. We had a conversation about the absence of fresh cream in France - except M & S in Paris.

Towards the end of the meal, someone had the idea of our crushing peppercorns between our fingers. Definitely flavours of grapefruit.


A feast

We arrive in St Gengoux Le National. Medieval staircases and roses on the walls.

A wooden board, with a flattened salmon fillet, smothered in dill. A few radishes and bits of lemon on the corners. Coronation chicken, tightly packed into a bowl. Bread, partly sliced so it needs to be torn off the loaf. Lettuce, more radishes. Olive oil, balsamic vinegar and garlic.

Conversation ranging widely from politics and law to confessions from long ago.

Wednesday 30 May 2018

Bourride

My mother made a bourride for the first time in 1983. We were staying in our caravan in Fréjus. I recall chicken pieces, boiled potatoes, carrot in broth. I was charged with making the aïoli. Handmade mayonnaise but with a clove of garlic crushed in the bottom of the bowl before I added the yolks. I can recall even now the eye watering perfume of the garlic permeating the contents of the bowl. It was an early supper, a perfect supper, the blandness of the meat and vegetables offset by the garlic mayonnaise. A view of pine trees and mountains.


I said it was the first time my mother ever made bourride. It was also the last. A few days later we left the campsite, my mother mysteriously ill. She had Guillain-Barré Syndrome it turned out. Although she recovered, months later, she commented that the associations with that disastrous holiday meant that bourride was not something she would ever want to make again.

Tuesday 29 May 2018

Mixing

The thought of mixing can make the heart sink or lift depending on the skills of the mixer. Pineapple and cottage cheese; potato salad and hard boiled egg; clotted cream and fudge; the thought of all of these, you might think surprisingly, at best cause indifference and, at worst, repel me. But other mixes interest me enormously. Baking meat into pastry. Scraping the residue of a tomato salad - chopped onion, tomato pips, olive oil and the tomatoey juices - into a saucepan of just drained pasta or into gazpacho.

Authenticity

It is possible to be a little obsessive about authenticity. Those obsessives who assert, for instance, that cappuccino should never be drunk after 11 in the morning. Or that cheese and fish do not go together.

I have no difficulty with people putting into a meal whatever ingredients give them pleasure ... but my hackles are raised if someone asserts that it is a particular dish when it is in fact something possibly delicious but completely different. Quiche Lorraine, for example, should have double cream, eggs and bacon. Not cheese. Not onions. And Elizabeth David says so.

I feel the same way about Tricolore. Tomato, mozzarella and basil. NOT avocado, which is perfectly pleasant but is not an ingredient of Tricolore and does not go particularly well with mozzarella. As I was writing this, I mentioned I was writing about Tricolore and, immediately, the enquirer said: “Mozzarella, tomato and avocado?”

But on the subject of avocado, there is, in my view, no one authentic way of making guacamole. And the same is true of gazpacho - which does not even have to have tomatoes in it. Indeed, given that it came into existence long before the Spaniards sailed for the New World and discovered tomatoes in the process, some might say that tomato in gazpacho is inauthentic.

Friday 25 May 2018

A dish of miga

I have mentioned Joan Aiken before. Repeatedly, in her writing, I encounter descriptions of food I have never sampled but long to, as a result of what I have read. Enid Blyton, too, often writes of food, appealing to children’s gluttony. More about her in another post. But Joan Aiken’s descriptions are often of more spartan meals than the joyous picnics and farmhouse high teas of Enid Blyton. For instance, in “Bridle the wind”, Joan Aiken’s hero, Felix, and his travelling companion have “a dish of miga” cooked for them by gypsies. This is how Felix describes it: “breadcrumbs steeped in water, sprinkled just with salt, then with hot oil in which garlic has been scattered”. He tells us that it is eaten with flat cakes of unleavened bread and cups of hot chocolate. Basic provisions: how these details enhance the raw sense of adventure.

Monday 21 May 2018

Delia's peppers

I am an admirer of Delia Smith. Unlike others, she has never gone out of fashion. Unlike others, she does not sneer at her readers. She is not the type who would waltz smugly into the dining room to the awe of her guests, having spontaneously whipped up some delicious concoction having found the ingredients in some corner of a hidden market. No: for her, I suspect, preparation is key; and while I doubt she needs to use a recipe book much of the time, she would do so - unlike others - without embarrassment. Her recipes work (by which I mean she puts in enough detail for anyone making the thing for the first time not to have to guess) and she should undoubtedly be included in the line of writers in this country who have been responsible for social change in the art of cookery: Mrs Beeton, Elizabeth David and Jamie Oliver are others.

Both my mother, my grandmother and even my grandfather (only an occasional cook) were keen on Delia; her Complete Cookery Course a well-stained volume in their kitchens. But one aspect of her writing used to irritate to the extent that it became quite a good parkour game: find a recipe of hers which is not one of her “favourites”...

This comes from her “Summer Cooking”. I do not have it in front of me so I may not be as precise as its author usually is, but it is a forgiving recipe.

INGREDIENTS
Red peppers (at least half per person).
Salted anchovy fillets (at least two per person).
Cherry tomatoes (at least three per person) - or, if fresh tomatoes not available, a tin of chopped Italian tomatoes.
Plenty of olive oil.

METHOD
Halve and seed the peppers and place the halves on a baking tray.

Halve the cherry tomatoes and stuff them into the peppers. If you are using the chopped Italian tomatoes, add them, including the juice.

Chop the anchovy fillets and top the tomatoes with them.

Fill the peppers to the brim with olive oil.

Bake. Then refrigerate. Eat.


I think these should be served fridge-cold. As Delia herself might say, nice for a starter or a collection of starters on a summer’s day.

Sunday 20 May 2018

Hungarian sausage

My mother once came to visit me when I was at boarding school in Canterbury in the nineteen eighties. I seem to recall that she had come with my grandparents who took us out for lunch. It would have been somewhere smart. After they had departed, my mother stayed and took me shopping. I do not recall where we went but I can remember one of the things she bought me: a large Hungarian sausage: bright red, coarse, full of garlic and studded throughout with fat and peppercorns. I think I ate it in one sitting, on my bed, after Mum had left; that I still recall it, thirty years later, is a testament to its quality. Ever since, I have been trying to find something similar, but have never succeeded. The Hungarian sausages I have encountered since have been disappointing: too salty or too greasy, like the worst kind of Danish salami. One day, though, I will find what I am looking for.

Saturday 19 May 2018

Swedish meatballs

The Swedes know how to make tender little meatballs. And they do not require a sauce. A freshly-cooked meatball, studded with onion fragments, neither dry nor soggy, is a delight. Astrid Lindgren’s hero, Karlssoj, a man with a built-in helicopter propeller,  is fond of them and persuades his friend Milo to go downstairs and fetch some for him. Milo’s mother, busy frying them in the kitchen downstairs, obliges. But she is not best pleased when she discovers that Karlsson has not eaten them but has used some of them to decorate a toy brick tower.

I discovered recently that Swedish meatballs originated in Turkey. The Swedish King, Charles XII, brought home the recipe from Turkey in the early eighteenth century.

Sunday 13 May 2018

Bear

“The Dwarf had splendid ideas about cookery. Each apple (they still had a few of these) was wrapped up in bear’s meat - as if it was to be apple dumpling with meat instead of pastry, only much thicker - and spiked on a sharp stick and then roasted. And the juice of the apple worked all through the meat, like apple sauce with roast pork. Bear that has lived too much on other animals is not very nice, but bear that has had plenty of honey and fruit is excellent, and this turned out to be that sort of bear. It was a truly glorious meal.”

From C S Lewis’s Prince Caspian

Wednesday 9 May 2018

Cherries in chocolate

Fresh cherries, dipped in plain chocolate, still with their stems on, make a spectacular after dinner comestible. Somehow, they have never quite worked for me. The chocolate is too thick in parts, and the cherries make the chocolate wet-tasting.

Although not homemade, I prefer Mon Cheris which, despite their French name, come from Germany. They are wrapped in pink foil, rectangular and should, in my view, be fridge cold. The chocolate cracks; the liqueur floods out and you chew the cherry. A feast for Christmas Day to be enjoyed while opening presents. And one should not drive afterwards.

I am always willing to try alternatives, but my opinion is that nothing beats a Mon Cheri. There is the Marks & Spencer’s cherry liqueur: beautifully wrapped in red foil, looking rounder and redder than Mon Cheris, but lacking in flavour or texture. Many years ago, before I even discovered Mon Cheris, my favourite chocolate of all was the Liquid Cherry, to be found in a box of Black Magic.

Tuesday 8 May 2018

C’est à Balaruc

The first meal on holiday is always memorable, no matter how ordinary. We stopped on the way from the airport in our hire car at the hypermarket at Balaruc for a big shop. The dangers of doing such a shop on an empty stomach are well-known. So we had a quick lunch, sitting outside, in the simple adjoining restaurant.

Being France, it had to be three courses. I had Museau Vinaigrette to start, slightly unsure what it was, but having a feeling - these were pre-smartphone days - that it was a meaty terrine of some sort. So it proved: boned pig cheek to be precise, as I discovered much later.


I cannot recall what was to follow - steak frites followed by Glace? - but it set us up well for the delights of wandering round the hypermarket. Though it didn’t stop us from buying far too much.

Wednesday 3 January 2018

Yellow food

Joan Aiken has an unusual way with food. In The Whispering Mountain, she tells of a sinister Marquess who only eats yellow food. “Alack, more yellow comestibles”, sighs one of the characters.  This is what is on the menu: curried eggs, chicken with saffron, smoked haddock with mustard sauce, peaches, bananas, and yellow plums...