Cream of porcini soup

This looks like one of my mother's more recent recipes. Serves 4:

1 knob butter
1 finely chopped onion
500 g flat mushrooms (finely sliced)
50 g dried porcini (soaked)
4 bashed cloves garlic
1 glass white wine
1 l fresh chicken stock or tinned consommé diluted 50/50 with water
100 ml crème fraiche

Soak porcini in hot water until soft. Melt butter in large saucepan & add next 4 ingredients. Turn down heat & cover. Cook gently for 20 m. Add white wine & reduce by 1/2. Add stock & bring to boil. Simmer 10 m & add cream. Remove heat. Liquidise in small batches and return to clean pan. Season with salt and pepper.

Another version of pumpkin soup

There is a reference to pumpkin soup in a list of my mother's which I discovered at random. She also refers to spiced pumpkin soup in her account of Christmas 1990. Here, in her book of recipes, is what I think she was referring to:

"1 young and soft skinned small pumpkin, peeled & cubed (scrape off coarse fibres in middle).
1 large onion.
2 spring onions & greens.
1 level teaspoon curry powder.
2 beef stock cubes.
1 large can chopped tomatoes.
Olive oil/butter.

Fry chopped onions & pumpkin in butter/olive oil gently. Sprinkle on curry powder & fry until curry powder cooked through. Add tomatoes & stock cubes & 1/2 pint water. Simmer until pumpkin soft. Liquidise & add water until right consistency. Salt/freshly ground black pepper to taste."

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."

Blyton breakfast

"Porridge and cream," said the woman. "And our own cured bacon and our own eggs. Our own honey and the bread I bake myself. Will that do? And coffee with cream?"

"I could hug you." said Julian, beaming at her.

***

A wonderful smell came creeping into the little dining-room, followed by the inn-woman carrying a large tray. On it was a steaming tureen of porridge, a bowl of golden syrup, a jug of very thick cream, and a dish of bacon and eggs, all piled high on crisp brown toast. Little mushrooms were on the same dish.

"It's like magic!" said Anne, staring. "Just the very things I longed for!"

***

"Toast, marmalade and butter to come, and the coffee and hot milk," said the woman, busily setting everything out. "And if you want any more bacon and eggs, just ring the bell."

"Too good to be true!" said Dick, looking at the table.

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.

Hot drink

I am often sceptical when people tell me that they enjoy experimenting with food but I have just attempted one such experiment: a mug of milk with three chunks of Thorntons butter tablet and some mixed spice (which apparently contains various sweet spices including cinnamon and coriander seed) sprinkled on top. Into the microwave for two minutes. Warm and comforting.

Butter

Butter is a good word. Does its sound resemble its meaning: a smack of the lips, the tongue bouncing off the teeth? Or is that, as my English teacher used to write in red ink at the bottom of some of my essays, "a little fanciful"?


I like my butter fridge-cold, solid enough for a knife to struggle to break through; brittle enough to break. Or in melted form, sizzling, bubbling, foaming,  on the point of burning. Clear yellow liquid and white residue. Never "spreadable" or "mixed with vegetable oil" or "slightly soft".  In a restaurant, like the salt or the pepper on the table, the butter is an early test.


At nursery school, we made butter. In a jar containing cream and two shiny screws. We all took turns to shake the jar. We ended up with a white solid. The headmistress, Mrs Hancock, added a little salt (unnecessary) and we all tasted some on bread at lunchtime. Delicious.

Milk

It was a short story that haunted me when I was younger. By Joan Aiken, I think, its main character, a child, became obsessed about the moon: first she dreamed of it as a luxuriant, shining white garden but, in later dreams, it appeared to her as an empty, dusty desert. Falling ill, the girl went to hospital, where a man in a white coat showed her under a microscope her earlier visions of the moon. He then told her that what she was examining was a drop of milk: "Milk's full of moons", he said.

I had a curious experience of my own in hospital several years before I first read that story. I was there for the investigation of fits. During my stay, I was taken to a small room where the man and woman there offered me a choice between a moon and a star, to go at the end of my hospital bed. I chose a moon, which seemed to surprise the woman, who told me she thought that a star would be much better. But I stuck to my original request, buttons were pressed and the cardboard moon was produced from a machine. It was a silver crescent moon and before handing it to me, the woman used scissors to snip off the pointy ends, on the grounds that they were "sharp". When I repeated this story to my parents a number of years later, they told me that I had been full of medication and that it must have been a dream: a drug-induced dream indeed.

Another fairy tale is the tale of Lady Greensleeves - but the music is better known than the tale. It concerned two children who go on a quest to find their enchanted uncles. They are tempted on the way by a wicked equivalent of the child catcher who warns them of frogs in the water and offers them instead a goblet of milk "in which the rich cream floated". When they refuse, preferring on the advice of Lady Greensleeves, to drink water from the stream, their enemy angrily tips away the milk only to return later with an even more lavishly Blair goblet of wine.

But to return to the topic of milk. There is something drug-like about it. The way it can send babies into a stupor, followed by sleep. Perhaps it is the opaqueness. There is an episode of the Avengers in which the baddies introduce a mind-altering drug into milk bottles delivered by a fake milkman to various senior people in government. At a pivotal moment, Patrick Macnee's sidekick, the one whose name everyone forgets (NOT Diana Rigg and NOT Honor Blackman) is trapped in a glass churn of swirling cream desperately waiting to be rescued. When Steed finally saves her, she is caught like a fly in amber, in the middle of a gigantic block of butter.

I suppose, then, that milk is our first ever experience of food. Curiously flavourless while full of flavour: think of the difference between top of the milk and the rest of the bottle. Of the spoilsports who cheerfully tip the bottle on its end twice before opening it... Once there was gold top and silver top. One of my grandmothers, who I seem to recall buying sterilised milk, had the habit of not removing the silver top but instead piercing it and pouring the milk through the resulting hole.

Milk is something to be rejected instantly if its flavour goes wrong: I am thinking of milk that has gone only slightly sour. Like those triangular cartons or miniature one third of a pint milk bottles we had at school, both provided with a straw to poke through, left in their grey crates next to a warm radiator.

You can now buy in supermarkets bottles of creamy yellow Jersey milk. And in France, packets of Candia Frais with globules of cream amid the slightly sweet-tasting milk, which landed on and improved the arid texture of the shredded wheat. In St Tropez over breakfast outside our caravan, beneath the pine trees, we once noticed a solitary ant dragging a strand of the cereal that my brother had dropped from his bowl.

I also recall as a child reading one of the "Katie" books which refers to the evocative sound of "clinking ice in the milk-pitcher"; although cold milk is the way forward, I would be concerned about the ice diluting the milk.

Old enough to know better, I once attempted to make hot chocolate in Scotland by putting milk on to boil in an electric kettle. A funny smell resulted and the kettle was destroyed. That experiment over, one question continues to fascinate me. How would milk taste if it were put through a soda stream?

Buttered noodles

This discovery was in the south of France on a blazing hot day. At lunchtime, Mum produced them from an enormous saucepan:  French noodles - short strips of pasta - dressed with nothing but French unsalted butter, sea salt (which did not destroy the point of the unsalted butter) and black pepper. A mound of them on a yellow glass plate, melted butter and salt crystals glistening, the steam gently rising. How quickly they swam down our throats.

Years later, they became a staple at university. I once cooked a bowl of buttered noodles for a girl I rather liked there; these particular noodles were green. "Thank you for the lovely tagliatelle", she said on leaving my room shortly after finishing her bowlful. She was far too sophisticated for me, a friend told me, having disclosed my secret to the object of my affection and been told there was no reciprocal interest.

Pashka

It is hard to describe this without either sounding as though I am exaggerating...or as though I might be trying to put you off eating it. I think it's indescribable. The nearest thing to Ambrosia I have ever eaten?

I have heard it described as "Russian Easter Cake" but it really isn't like cake. My father described it as similar to "raw cake mixture" (don't forget how that was always so much nicer than the finished product). But unlike raw cake mixture, you really can eat large quantities of this without regretting it. My personal theory is that it's due to the sour ingredients offsetting the sweet in an impeccable combination. It is supposed to contain all the ingredients you are not supposed to eat during Lent.

The following recipe was handwritten for my mother by the granddaughter of a Russian woman - Kyra Mahoney - who, if my memory of family legend serves me correctly, left Russia as the revolution started. When my mother enthused and begged for the recipe, she was a little chary about disclosing it... Her daughter Chris, my mother's oldest friend, said that her mother would stand at the stove, stirring endlessly. These were pre-Google days. Eventually, Kate, her granddaughter, managed to obtain her Nan's recipe - and it is in front of me now: blue biro on green paper, and the ingredients in evidence on the paper. Here it is, unamended, although I have inserted metrics for my own ease:

"1 lb cream cheese (454 g)
1 lb cottage or curd cheese (454 g)
8 oz butter (227 g)
4 egg yolks
1 1/2 gills (6 fluid oz) sour cream (170 ml)
10 oz caster sugar (283 g)

1 - 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla essence
6 oz blanched almonds (flaked) (170 - 171 g)
4 oz seedless raisins (113 g)
3 oz mixed candied peel (85 g)

Mix cream and cottage cheese together and turn into a cheesecloth.

Leave in a cold place (not fridge) to drip overnight to make sure that cheese is really dry.

Next day, rub through a nylon or hair sieve.

Melt butter and allow to cool but not to set again.

Turn egg yolks and sour cream into a basin and mix together.

Add sugar and vanilla and whisk altogether for about 10 minutes or until sugar has dissolved. (Remember this was written before electric instruments were used).

Stir into the sieved cheese.

Add almonds, raisins and chopped candied peel and turn into a heavy saucepan.

Put the pan on a very low heat and cook stirring continuously.

When mixture shows signs of boiling (in about 1/2 hour) remove it from the heat at once (1st bubble) and stir until it is almost cold.

Take a sterilised flower pot (nearest approximation to a pashka mould) or a similar shaped vessel (not metal) of about 2 1/2 pint capacity with draining hole(s). Line it with cheesecloth and urn in prepared mixture.

Set the pot on a rack over a plate. Lay a piece of greaseproof or waxed paper over the mixture, set a saucer or small cake tin base in a plastic bag on top and weigh down about 2 lb weight.

Leave in a cold place/refrigerator if poss overnight.

Saucer must just fit inside lid of pot. We don't bother with greaseproof or plastic bag but fold excess muslin over top of pashka. I hope you like it."

Here is some commentary on the above, based on my having made it twice.

Bear in mind that the very first bit needs to be done in advance, but it takes fewer than 10 minutes: I recommend a Good Friday night and have an unhurried Easter Saturday making it: it doesn't actually take that long - say two hours before it's in the moulds and ready to go in the fridge. But one of the many points of this is that there is real pleasure to be derived in making it so give yourself plenty of time.

I use tea towels as my cheesecloth.

I use unsalted butter.

I use vanilla extract rather than essence.

This is the only recipe I know that uses gills as a unit of measurement.

The toughest part of this recipe is pushing the cream cheese and cottage cheese through the sieve!

There is no indication in this recipe as to when the butter is supposed to go in. I put it in once I've mixed the egg yolks and sour cream.

I approve of making it in a flower pot and have one that I use exclusively for Pashka. The photograph is of one made in London and eaten in Winchester.

Additional notes based on experience:

1. Having increased the cream cheese and cottage cheese to 600 g each (approximately a 30% increase), the other ingredients should ideally be increased proportionally to maintain balance. As a guide: butter ~300 g, sour cream ~225 ml, sugar ~375 g, 5–6 egg yolks, almonds ~225 g, raisins ~150 g, and candied peel ~110 g. If not increased, the result will be slightly firmer and less rich but still perfectly acceptable.
2. After melting the butter, allow it to cool for about 10–15 minutes. It should be fully liquid but no longer hot—just warm to the touch.
3. The butter should be added after mixing the egg yolks and sour cream together, but before adding the sugar and vanilla. This helps create a smooth mixture and avoids any risk of the yolks cooking.
4. There is no issue with sieving the cream cheese and cottage cheese mixture directly into the saucepan, provided the saucepan is completely cold.
5. After putting the mixture into the moulds, allow it to stand at room temperature for approximately 30–60 minutes before refrigerating, so that it cools slightly and avoids condensation.
6. The pashka should be left in the refrigerator for at least 12 hours before eating, though 18–24 hours is ideal for the best texture and flavour.
7. The cooking stage should be treated as a gentle thickening, not a true boil. Use very low heat and stir continuously, scraping the base and sides. The mixture should gradually become slightly thicker and smoother. Watch carefully for the first sign of a bubble or slight steaming from the surface—this indicates it is just reaching the point of simmering. At that moment, remove it immediately from the heat. Do not allow it to boil, as this can cause curdling or a grainy texture. Continue stirring off the heat until the mixture cools and thickens slightly.
8. For a more traditional result, the cream cheese may be replaced with a well-drained curd cheese (such as tvorog or quark), or the cottage cheese alone may be used if thoroughly drained and sieved. The drier and finer the cheese, the more authentic the texture.
9. For greater smoothness in the traditional manner, the cheese mixture may be passed through the sieve more than once.
10. A more traditional approach avoids cooking altogether, instead combining the ingredients and allowing them to set purely by chilling and draining. If following this method, ensure all ingredients are well incorporated and the mixture is thoroughly chilled under weight.
11. Additional flavourings sometimes used in more traditional versions include a small amount of cardamom or a few drops of rosewater, alongside or instead of vanilla.
12. A traditional mould (often pyramid-shaped and sometimes marked with religious symbols) may be used if available, though any suitably sized, draining container will function adequately.

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.

Bombay toast

Between finishing school and going to university, I spent four and a half months in India. Many years later, I read a book by William Sutcliffe called “Are you Experienced”. William Sutcliffe was born in the same year as me. His hero, Dave, like me, travelled to India in his gap year. Dave, like me, was about to read English at university. Dave, like me, was going to York University. I assure the reader of “Are you Experienced?” that my experiences were very different to those of “Dave” and that I have never met William Sutcliffe in my life.

“Dave” does not encounter “Bombay Toast” on his travels. I discovered it in about my second week in India, at St George’s Anglo-Indian School and Orphanage, Madras, where I taught for a couple of months. It was Tory, one of the other volunteers at the school, who described it to me when a stack of it arrived at breakfast time: “Bread dipped in a pancakey mixture and then fried”.

The key thing is that it should resemble a pancake, not an omelette. Unlike some versions of French toast, it is definitely sweet, not salty. This version is based on a recipe for “Pain Perdu” by Rachel Khoo. I leave out the fruit compote. The point of this is simplicity.

Ingredients:

1 egg.
100 ml milk.
1 tablespoon sugar.
4 slices of brioche bread (this is closest to the Indian version of Western style sliced bread).
1 tablespoon butter.

Method:

1. Beat together the egg, milk and sugar and pour on to a flat dish.

2. Place the brioche in the mixture and soak for about thirty seconds on each side.

3. Heat the butter in a large frying pan on a medium heat.

4. Add the brioche and cook for 2 to 3 minutes or until golden, then flip the slices over and cook the other side. Eat immediately. Cold Bombay Toast isn’t worth eating.

I discovered that Bombay Toast was readily available in the "Indian coffee houses” dotted around South India and it became my breakfast of choice on my travels. I associate it particularly with a breakfast by a lake in Ooty (official name: Udhagamandalam). There were a number of different versions of Bombay Toast, some, it has to be said, inferior: sometimes too thickly covered in batter; or with insufficient batter and tasting only of the oil in which it had been fried. Worst of all was the version available on Kovalam beach which was smothered with coconut and banana. On another occasion, in Mahabilapuram, I ordered four slices. The proprietor, possibly wilfully misunderstanding me,brought eight slices on the basis that a normal portion consisted of one slice cut into two. In other words, I had eight slices of Bombay Toast to get through.

Bombay is now officially known as Mumbai. "Bombay Toast”, on the other hand, has not been renamed “Mumbai Toast”.

Pumpkin soup

I am particularly fond of the word pumpkin (two plosives plus diminutive kin). I also love the look of a pumpkin or, better still, a heap of pumpkins, like the one outside Hagrid's hut in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban". To eat by itself, however, the pumpkin is a bland, slightly stringy, wet vegetable. To turn it from a sandy flavourless soup into a velvety soup worth eating on a cold night demands onion, curry powder, cream and time. There are probably those who would disagree, do without the curry powder or make a pumpkin pie instead.

Ingredients:
2 oz butter.
1 onion, finely-chopped.
2 tablespoons Bolst's Curry Powder (or whatever you prefer).
1 lb pumpkin, peeled, seeded and chopped into small dice.
3/4 lb potatoes, peeled and chopped.
1 tin chopped Italian tomatoes.
2 pints chicken stock.
1/2 pint double cream.
Salt and freshly ground black pepper.
Some chives and/or croutons if you have them.

Method:
1. Melt the butter in a large saucepan.
2. Add the onions and allow to soften for about 5 minutes.
3. Shortly afterwards, add the curry powder. Allow to cook slowly, without either burning.
4. Add the pumpkin and cook over a gentle heat for another 5 minutes.
5. Add the potatoes and stir on a low heat for about 15 minutes.
5. Add the tin of tomatoes, followed by the stock, the salt and FGBP.
6. Simmer until everything is tender (about one hour).
7. Allow to cool slightly then sieve or blend.
8. Return the soup to the pan (a few exciting scraps of unsieved soup left behind won't do any harm) and stir in the double cream.
9. Re-heat and eat. A few chives or croutons sprinkled on top are rather good.

Final thought: this is not soup to eat while watching "Halloween 3: Season of the Witch". I have, however, served this for a Halloween party. My friend Vicki Telling used the pumpkin shell to create a clever effect: my face amalgamated with Harry Potter's in a wizard's hat through which a lit candle shone. It was on the same occasion when her husband Richard Worth crept upstairs to change into his monk's outfit and came down in the dark bearing another candle. He caused quite a stir. A Tale Worth Telling.

This recipe is based on two taken from a little orange book called "Pumpkins, squashes and things......and how to cook them". Neither recipe has any curry powder to be seen. I am dedicating my version to my cousin Olivia Weiss who was born on 31 October!

Clare Allfree's chocolate sauce

Clare told me that this recipe was handed down to her by someone, handed on in turn by somebody else. There's a godmother in the story somewhere. There is something oh so smugly satisfying about such recipes, preferably written in fading blue ink on yellowed pages. This is how it goes and you will see that proportions only are given. Quantities are up to you.

1/3 plain chocolate.
1/3 golden syrup.
1/3 butter.

Melt in a saucepan. Stir and mix well. When it bubbles, it's ready. Spoon or pour over ice cream. I have a little ladle from Arundel that fits the purpose perfectly. If there's any left, it keeps in the fridge for ages.

Simple to serve at supper parties. Can be warmed up. Although I'm suspicious of the mantra "Everyone likes...", reactions are predictable and enthusiastic - especially when the sauce freezes on to the ice cream and becomes toffee-like.

Mint

There is something in this word that conjures up contradiction. Let me do some explaining.

Think of a few leaves of peppermint in a jug of Pimms. To my own complete satisfaction, I once pulled some leaves fresh from the cracks between the paving stones in my back garden and added them straight to the jug.

Then imagine someone breathing spearmint over you on the tube.

Fresh mint chopped into a saucepan of boiled potatoes with a dab of butter: my grandmother had a clever little metal device into which you fed in the mint, held the machine over the hot potatoes and wound a wooden handle. Out would come the mint: battered, bruised and shredded.

On holiday in France, some friends had been sitting outside a bar and seen someone drinking something bright green. "Menthe a l'eau", the waiter explained when they pointed to it and asked. "Like toothpaste water", my friend Kate said. I insisted on trying ot for myself and grew a taste for it, very cold in a tall glass with ice, the syrup curling oilily around the water.