The Crab House

Some meals are memorable. This one was in the US, following the only time I have ever been in a train crash. It happened on our way from Charleston, South Carolina to Florida. Just outside Jacksonville, we came to a standstill with a jolt, having hit a car which, inexplicably, was on the track. Unlike the ending of “Back to the Future 3” in which the time-travelling DeLorean is hit by a train and destroyed, no damage seemed to have been done. No one, the driver assured us over the PA, was seriously hurt. We copied everybody when our train arrived in Orlando three hours late and walked over the rails towards the taxi rank.

As it was Florida, we should probably have looked for a restaurant serving Alligator. Instead, we headed for somewhere doing seafood. It was called "The Crab House”, on International Drive, halfway to Disneyworld and in the midst of Universal Studios. Other attractions included a “Just can’t believe it museum” where even the building itself was skew-wiff – a bit like the old King's School shop in Canterbury, only more so.

While waiting for a table in the restaurant, I went over to inspect the “unlimited salad bar”: masses of shrimp, oysters, mussels, clams and crabs. Seated and with our menus, I plumped for “half a lobster with snow crabs” while Mum chose “snow crabs and garlic crabs”. Our waiter did not approve and told us they were “not very good”. So I chose the unlimited salad bar instead, which the waiter seemed to think was a brilliant idea. Mum’s second choice, broiled shrimp, he didn't like either, and told her she could have “unlimited shrimp” on the salad bar. So Mum took the hint and chose that too and the waiter put on a broad grin and said in a drawn-out way, “Alright!” We speculated after he had disappeared that the menus were phoney and that the only thing available was the salad bar. The waiter soon brought us plates which we went and filled. More than once. As I stuffed myself with shrimp, Mum commented that she could eat the oysters almost as quickly as the man at the salad bar was opening them. Shortly after this, the waiter came over bearing a slightly anxious look on his face and a loaf of warm bread, which he urged us to try: “It’s really good”. But we were not as interested in filling ourselves up on the bread as he was keen to persuade us, and, instead, we took a further trip to the salad bar where we loaded our plates with seafood for a third time. Finally, we were defeated.

It all reminded me of the bit in Ian Fleming’s “Goldfinger”where James Bond, forced to spend the night in Florida, is treated to a meal at "Bills on the Beach” in Miami. Junius Du Pont, a man whom he met in the first Bond book, “Casino Royale”, is his host and does the ordering:

“Stone crabs. Not frozen. Fresh. Melted butter. Thick toast. Right?”

When the food arrives:

“With ceremony, a wide silver dish of crabs, big ones, their shells and claws broken, was placed in the middle of the table. A silver sauceboat brimming with melted butter and a long rack of toast was put beside each of their plates. The tankards of Champagne frothed pink. Finally, with an oily smirk, the head waiter came behind their chairs and, in turn, tied round their necks long white silken bibs that reached down to the lap”.

Bond considers it the most delicious meal he had had in his life:

“The meat of the stone crabs was the tenderest, sweetest shellfish he had ever tasted. It was perfectly set off by the dry toast and slightly burned taste of the melted butter. The champagne seemed to have the faintest scent of strawberries. It was ice cold. After each helping of crab, the champagne cleaned the palate for the next. They ate steadily and with absorption and hardly exchanged a word until the dish was cleared.”

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!

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.

Leftovers

Unlike a plate of buttered noodles or a fried onion, the word "leftovers" can cover a delectable feast or acres of disgustingness. Much more to say on the subject but I think my general principle would be: avoid the temptation of making use of everything at your disposal. And don't hesitate to combine the leftover bits with something fresh and new. As Nigel Slater once said, if you have cold boiled potatoes in your fridge, then you have treasure. I would add: very easy to corrupt that treasure. Here are three basic principles. .

1. Let us take into account the joy of "one pot cooking" AND the principle that the golden bits at the bottom of the pan are worth a lot of effort. They are the buried treasure!

2. Recooked vegetables can go wrong.

3. Cousin Pen enjoys her roast potatoes cold.

Bolognese sauce

It seems to me that there are only four essential ingredients of a Bolognese sauce although the Bolognese themselves might well disagree - just as they would never serve this sauce with spaghetti. For reasons I have articulated elsewhere (round food) I don't rave about spaghetti much anyway. My pasta of choice with this sauce is tagliatelle. James Bond and I would disagree about the choice of pasta if not the sauce. In Thunderball, one of the "three obsessions which belonged to his former life and which would not leave him" was: "a passionate longing for a large dish of Spaghetti Bolognese containing plenty of chopped garlic and accompanied by a whole bottle of the cheapest, rawest Chianti (bulk for his empty stomach and sharp tastes for his starved palate)". This is possibly the first dish I was ever taught to cook and it got me through university. When I first published this version, I received a particularly helpful critique and have incorporated some of the suggestions from it into this revised version.

Those essential ingredients, then: an onion, about 1 lb or 500 g of minced beef, a small tin of tomato purée (I would not have added an accent but the device I am using cleverly did so) and the empty tin filled with water and stirred so as to leave the tin shiny and no remnants of tomato within it. There will be ample fat in the mince for cooking purposes. Just these ingredients will make a rich sauce far better and more cheaply than anything from a jar. One of those dishes like Shepherd's Pie which is simply not worth eating other than at home.

That said, I have refined the sauce over the years and would add the following optional ingredients: a clove of garlic, a pinch of thyme or oregano, a bay leaf, a little freshly ground black pepper, a finely-chopped carrot or two, a stick of celery, a tin of chopped Italian tomatoes, a splash of olive oil and a splash of red wine. The imprecision of some of the quantities given is not intended to sound airy or unhelpful but to demonstrate that, unlike some other recipes, it's fairly flexible. NOT, though, when it comes to certain additional ingredients...

Let me do some explaining. This, above all, is a meat sauce. The onion, garlic, celery and carrot are condiments only, to melt unobtrusively. You do not want great lumps of them in this sauce. Nor, in my view, should other, alien ingredients, such as mushrooms, peppers or, dare I say it, sweetcorn, be added. Nor am I convinced by the addition of a handful of lardons or pancetta, which is contrary to what I said in yet another earlier version of this post. The recipe continues to evolve! I like to think I favour liberalism in cooking. And if you fancy a mince and vegetable sauce for your pasta, fine. But it seems to me that too many extra vegetables or whatever cross the line between what can legitimately call itself Bolognese and what cannot. The other thing to add, while I'm being principled, is that this is a thick meat sauce: it shouldn't be watery.

The method, leaving out steps depending on the optional ingredients...

1. Finely chop an onion. My only tip on avoiding tears is this. Peel it all first and don't chop off the ends until you've done so. You want to minimise the amount of time following the first cut which starts to release in vapourised form the (very dilute) sulphuric acid that attacks the eyes.

2. Heat about a teaspoon of olive oil in a frying pan. If you're not using any oil, leave out step 5: ie add the mince first, followed by the onion.

3. Finely chop the garlic if you're using it. Warm it gently in the oil. Remove once it's added flavour to the oil.

4. If you're using lardons, fry them at this stage.

5. Fry the finely chopped onion, stirring frequently to prevent it from burning.

6. Put the mince into the frying pan, turn the heat up and brown the mince on all sides. Gradually mix the mince with the onion. Stir frequently, breaking up any clumps of mince as you do so and stopping the onion from burning. Shake the pan every so often. If there's a lot of fat in the pan, now's a good opportunity to pour it off.

7. If you're adding any of the other optional vegetables (carrot and celery), add them at this stage, as finely chopped as you can. To repeat myself, they are condiments. Similarly, the thyme, bay leaf and FGBP can all go in at this stage.

8. Add the tomato purée. Because of its thick consistency, it may be a struggle at first to mix it with the mince. Persevere: the heat will rapidly cause it to melt. Don't add water at this stage, but stir furiously. You don't want the tomato - or anything - to burn but the direct heat at this stage seals in the flavour. I think.

9. The trick, I have decided, is to cook everything on the highest possible heat you dare (stirring furiously as burnt onions are horrid) until you add the water, whereupon you turn the heat as low as it will go.

10. Add the splash of wine and/or chopped tomatoes if they're going in.

11. Finally, add the water. Turn the heat down to its lowest possible setting. Let the sauce bubble gently. Scrape down the sides of the pan every so often. Stir and/or add a little more water every so often if there's a danger of sticking.

12. I think this should be allowed to simmer for 45 minutes or longer. There should be some, but not too much, rich red liquid on the top. Cook the pasta. Eat.

Some reminiscences. This was the first thing I was taught to cook before I went off to university. It's still a staple. On one occasion - this was before I had learned to cook it - we had all been to the theatre with an extended party of family and friends. The plan was that Mum was going to cook this when we got home afterwards. But she had to be dropped off at the local hospital, having got something in her eye. So my father took us all home and asked us what we'd like to eat. In an injudicious attempt to lighten the atmosphere, I said airily, "Oh you know, some smoked salmon, some caviar, something like that". In my defence, I hadn't appreciated my mother was actually in casualty; she happened to work in the hospital and I'd thought one of her colleagues was going to sort her out. In any event, my father didn't lose his temper in front of guests but we were swiftly banished from the kitchen and he put together a bolognese sauce about which one of my cousins was a little doubtful. My roasting came the following day after everyone had left...

Dinner at the Hamlet

Upstairs, Downstairs. Those of us in the first and second years of the Dulwich Hamlet Junior School in the late 1970s ate their dinner in the lower dining hall. Those higher up the school – I left after two years so never got there – would eat upstairs. After morning lessons, we would all hover in the school playground outside the dining hall. Over the entrance was a blackboard, listing each class, in the order they were due to go in for the meal. Every so often, a bell ringer would emerge from the doorway: one of the teachers, together with a pupil. While the teacher clanged the bell, the pupil would brandish a white card showing in black the class whose turn it was to enter. It was as though the bell was ringing out the name of the class: “1F,1F, 1F, 1F, 1F”. F stood for Francis, Mrs Francis, the name of my class teacher.

This was quite new. My two previous schools, both in Coventry, had been reassuring places at mealtimes. This was noisy, chaotic. Beyond the tables, at the opposite end of the hall from where we trooped in, was the kitchen, the long serving hatch and the dinner ladies. Memories of the first day are acute. One of the white-capped dinner ladies had purple hair. My mother was highly amused at me when I reported this to her agitatedly when she collected me from school that day. “What charming people you have at your school”, she told me, reassuringly. The next day it was a smiling woman with pointy black eyebrows who made me nervous: she seemed to be staring at me; I couldn’t take my eyes off her. But the dinner ladies gradually became friends. Particularly Ivy, “the pudding cook”: orange-haired; squat; a dry, bark-brown, powdery, wrinkled face with a lipstick smile. "There’s a dinner lady called Ivy at every school”, my father explained to me. Ivy signed her name elegantly in my autograph book on my last day at the school: “I. Smith”. She was the provider of Arctic Roll, of chocolate sponge and of my very favourite, jam sponge: a crispy top, a little jam underneath the sponge. I always refused custard. I also blenched one day at sickly rose hip syrup and, another time, a revolting thing called "Queen of Puddings", cold, slimy and flabby.

The food took some getting used to: day one introduced me to grey, heavy, strong-tasting, meaty lumps of beef burgers. I couldn’t get through mine and was reprimanded by Mr Holmes, the master in charge, but he permitted me to get away with it on that first day. I grew fond of the burgers over time and even of Mr Holmes. The thought of having male teachers for the first time had made me anxious before I joined the school. Dressed in a green suit, Mr Holmes was a tall, lean and scathing schoolmaster, with a slightly sinister, hungry grin and a voice that carried. “There is a boy here who is not allowed to eat flour”, he bellowed on that first day, and everyone fell silent. “Would he please go to the kitchen and discuss what he can eat with the kitchen staff”. The singled-out boy in question quickly obeyed his instructions and I saw him a few moments later at the hatch in conversation with an earnest-looking dinner lady.

Puddles of mince – soya mince – I could not eat. On another occasion, it was Miss Ware who was in charge in that lower dining hall. I had bizarrely and stupidly chosen “spam fritter”, something I had never tried before. The first mouthful, strange and foreign-tasting, was manageable. But I realised quickly that I could not eat much more. Our plates had to be inspected before we were allowed to return them to the kitchen hatch. Miss Ware was unimpressed with the amount still on my plate and told me to eat just the spam. “But it’s the spam I don’t like”, I told her, plaintively and truthfully. She took pity on me. “Well just eat the fritter then”, and I returned to the table, relieved and did as I had been told. Another teacher, Mrs Selvum-Holly, used an alternative, kindly, technique on pupils who had not emptied their plates.“Just three more spoonfuls”, she would cajole and it was not hard to obey, by making the spoonfuls particularly small. Rounds of mashed potato, crisped on top, which I soaked in vinegar, I remember as being edible, but I cannot remember what they were called.

Yet the thought of going without lunch, however foul the food, once filled me with raw misery. It happened on about my second day at the school. Every morning before assembly, Mrs Francis would collect each member of the class’s “dinner money”. But that day I had been given no such money by my mother and was alone in the class in not handing up my little brown envelope with its coins inside that were to pay for lunch. Nobody had noticed, seemingly, and nothing was said to me. I sat through assembly, in miserable fear, as the teacher read us a story about Simon and the Witch, generating gales of laughter from everyone except me. Back in the classroom, either I approached the teacher or she came up to me and I was told that my mother had already paid for a term’s school dinners by cheque. I felt a fool, but a relieved fool.

After we had finished eating lunch, we were not allowed to hang around and so “I’ll wait outside for you” became a familiar thing to say to the slower eater. I fantasised once that I would persuade everyone in the dining hall to wait outside for me; two lines would then grow along the school playground; and I would emerge and process all the way between the two lines (is there a word for such a concept?) to the end. Of course, I admitted to myself, there would be some who would not be there as comrades but as enemies, no doubt sticking out an unkind leg to make me fall. Now the word for that is gauntlet.

Once, I emerged from the dining hall to find not a procession but everyone rooted at various spots in the school playground, booing loudly. Knowing nothing about what was going on, I joined in. The reason emerged when, later, the Headmaster, Mr Dartnell, summoned the school to the assembly hall. The purpose of this was not to say “Jolly Good Well Done”, his conventional words when congratulating individuals for winning a prize or similar. No. Those who had started the jeers had been insulting visitors from another school and we were all admonished. By contrast, on another day, those of us who volunteered to clear litter from “Sainsbury’s Field” after a sports day, were rewarded with a can of drink: my first 7-Up.

At another assembly, there was an announcement from Mr Dartnell. It must have been winter of discontent time. The kitchen ladies were going on strike and we would all have to bring packed lunches. Cheers erupted. Mr Dartnell was indignant: “You have the best school dinners in the whole of South London”, he insisted. But we never saw him at lunch, except for once a year at the Christmas lunch when he crept into the dining hall and said a few words in hushed tones beginning “Ah...this is…er...our Christmas Dinner…” and ending in an invitation to us to raise a cheer for the dinner ladies.

Hot chicken salad with bacon and tarragon

Warm salads are counter-intuitive. I found this on a recipe card in Sainsbury’s and cooked it for many friends since. Simple to put together.

Ingredients:

4 chicken breasts, skins removed

4 rashers of middle bacon OR lardons

1 teaspoon olive oil

Juice of 1 lemon

1 teaspoon tarragon

Ground pepper

1 lettuce

For the dressing:

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon wine vinegar

Salt, pepper

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan.  Chop the chicken and the bacon into bite-sized strips and add it to the oil. Fry until crisp.  Add the lemon juice, tarragon and pepper and allow the liquid to reduce.  Put the lettuce in a bowl and dress.  Add the chicken and bacon mixture, toss and serve.  Serves 4.