The latest in Grub Street's hardback reissues of Elizabeth David's works - as long as you don't mind weights in pounds and ounces, they are lovely editions to have - is Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. The following is based on one of David's recipes. Of course, to insist that cumin isn't English is a bit like claiming that tomatoes aren't Italian.
Serves 4
750g stewing lamb (I used pieces of middle neck)
Sunflower oil
Salt
2 medium aubergines, cut into largish cubes
2 onions, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
2tsp cumin, toasted gently in a small saucepan, then crushed in a mortar
2 lemon husks (optional)
1/2 stock cube (optional)
2tbsp olive oil
Coat the lamb in a little sunflower oil, salt it, and brown it quickly on a ridged grill pan over a high heat. Remove to a plate.
Put the aubergines, onions, garlic, cumin, and lemon and stock cube if wanted, in a heavy casserole. (I had used the juice of the lemon to make some hummus at lunchtime; and I think that stock cubes, though often frowned upon, add savouriness to dishes.) Toss everything in the olive oil.
The onions and aubergines will stew, and don't need frying first, unless you think that this dish will benefit from the flavour of browned onions.
Tip in the lamb and any juice it has exuded. If you have used half a stock cube, be careful how much extra salt you add.
Cover, and put in the oven at gas mark 4/180C. If you have a heavy pan, the stew may take a good 45 minutes to get simmering. Once there is activity, you can turn down the heat - perhaps to as low as gas mark S/130C. You may want to give the stew another 90 minutes from that point. Stir it from time to time.
This is hummus, only made with cannellini beans. You need the lemon, cayenne/harissa, and black pepper, or it will be bland and sludgy.1 tin cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1 clove garlic, crushed with a little salt
3dstsp tahini paste
Juice of 1 lemon
1tbsp plain yoghurt
Several pinches of cayenne pepper, or 1/4tsp harissa
Black pepper
1 1/2tbsp olive oilPut all the ingredients except the oil in a food processor, and whizz. (You may not need more salt, because the beans have been preserved in briny liquid.)Stir in the olive oil. In my view (as also stated in the entry on mayonnaise), the flavour of oil is damaged by the whizzing blade of a food processor.
The latest article in Felicity Cloake's very useful “How To Make Perfect...” series in the Guardian concerns mayonnaise. Online, you get readers' comments as well.
In Cloake's own recipe, she adds oil to egg yolks and salt. I have always mixed Dijon mustard with my egg yolk(s) first. (And I have used a pestle and mortar, which have never given me as much grief as she seems to experience with them.) But yesterday I found that I had run out of mustard, so I tried her method. I ended up with a thin yellow liquid - my first ever failure.
The mustard - I generally use half a teaspoon of it with one yolk - helps to emulsify the sauce. As soon as the oil is incorporated with the yolk, the emulsification occurs. But that was not the case when I carried out my sorry experiment. The oil and yolk combined but did not thicken - perhaps I should have used a whisk. Nevertheless, I carried on, rather as if I were in a hole and persisting to use a spade.
I never use a blender. Blades damage the flavour of oil, in my view.
Here is my mayonnaise recipe. Nowadays, I use a ratio of sunflower/groundnut oil to olive oil of 125g/25g.
You don't have to use a sandwich maker to produce a toasted sandwich. A ridged grill pan will do.
I think packet white bread is good in this context. The sandwich above consists simply of buttered bread with slices of cheese in the middle. I buttered the bread on the inside; but I might also try buttering it on the outside, as I have to do when I use the sandwich maker. I set the flame under the pan to low/medium.
Various ways of cooking chicken stews have been almost as strong an obsession on this blog as has cooking rice. Here's another, enabled by the ability of my shallow oven dish to sit above a flame on the hob as well as in the oven. Serves 3.
2 red onions, sliced
1 clove garlic, chopped
Oil for frying (I used sunflower)
1 bay leaf
1/2 chicken stock cube (optional - but it does add savouriness, in my opinion)
1 glass white wine
3 chicken thighs, 3 drumsticks
2 plump tomatoes, skinned and chopped
Over a gentle flame, soften the onions and garlic in a tbsp or two of oil (enough to stop them catching). Five to 10 minutes.
Pour in the wine, with the bay leaf and stock cube (if using), and bring to a simmer. Place the chicken pieces in the sauce - you don't need to brown them first, because they will brown in the oven. Put the dish in the oven at gas mark 6/200C, for about 30 to 45 minutes, or until much of the wine has evaporated. Turn down the heat if the liquid is bubbling too fast, or if the chicken is browning too quickly.
To skin the tomatoes, bring a pan of water to the boil. Turn off the heat, and drop in the tomatoes. Drain them after about 20 seconds. The skin should slip off easily. (If you need to skin them right away, cool them under the cold water tap.) Chop them up, and add them to the stew. Put the dish back into the oven for another 45 minutes, taking it out for occasional stirring.
If the sauce is too runny, strain it into a saucepan - returning the chicken to the oven meanwhile - and boil it until it arrives at the consistency you like.
A very simple, one-pot meal for one. But, as you can see, I was a little careless in allowing the coating on the chicken to char.
The foil - without which the potatoes would stick to my pan - is Bacofoil non-stick, which works well.
2 chicken thighs
Olive oil
Harissa
2 medium potatoes, peeled, sliced, rinsed, and patted dry
Unpeeled garlic cloves (as many as you like)
Salt
Pepper
1 fennel bulb, tough and discoloured outer layers removed, sliced
1 preserved lemon, roughly chopped
Coat the chicken in a little oil (with your hands), then spread the harissa all over (with a spoon or knife). Put the pieces in a non-stick roasting tin, or in an ordinary tin lined with non-stick foil. Put in the potatoes and garlic too, and toss them in oil. Season everything, and bake at gas mark 6/200C.
After about 40 minutes, toss the fennel slices with the potatoes and garlic. Cook for another 30 minutes or so, until the potatoes and fennel are tender. About 10 minutes from the end, toss the preserved lemon pieces with the potato, garlic and fennel mixture.
Pork
I had three slices of belly pork, but of course a whole piece would have been just as good, if not better. The two questions I asked myself about poaching it were: should I cover the pan, and should I salt the broth? Both might have cooked the meat more vigorously and therefore toughened it: the covered pan because it causes an agitated simmer, whereas an uncovered pan can be kept at below boiling point; and the salt because it raises the boiling point of the liquid. On the other hand, salt has a tenderising effect. Another point to consider, if I wanted to use the cooking liquid again as a stock, is that I'd have to be careful about the seasoning of anything made with it.
I covered the pork with water, and threw in a peeled onion, a couple of sticks of celery, some peppercorns, and some juniper berries; and added salt. I covered the pan, brought the contents to a simmer, put a heat disperser underneath, and put on the lid. I cooked the pork for two and a half hours, allowing it to cool in its broth before shredding it by hand. It was beautifully moist and tender.
Vinaigrette
I like this recipe, from the Guardian's "How to make the perfect..." series. My vinaigrette differed in two respects: I simmered an unpeeled clove with the potatoes, and mashed the flesh into the vinegar; and I used a 2/1 oil/vinegar ratio. Combined with the pork and the potatoes, the sauce does not taste too sharp.
I got the idea for crumpets with a savoury topping from a magazine recipe. The harissa reflects my perverse taste for chilli with everything, and is obviously optional - though a pinch or two of cayenne pepper would be a nice, less controversial alternative.
The egg causes the mixture to puff up appealingly. If you were using twice as much cheese, you might mix it with a whole beaten egg rather than with two yolks.
Makes three crumpets
80g grated cheese, such as Cheddar or Gruyere
1 egg yolk
1tsp harissa
1tsp mustard
(Also possible, instead of the harissa: Worcester sauce, nutmeg, black pepper, cayenne)
Toast the crumpets. Mash up the cheese and other ingredients with a fork.
Spread the mixture on the crumpets, and grill (I use the lowest setting) until puffed up and browned.
Unless you want to make a compote or a fool, you may prefer to bake rhubarb rather than to stew it on the hob - the pieces will not break down and turn to mush. Serves 2.
4 sticks rhubarb
1 orange
Cinnamon stick, or sprinkling of ground cinnamon
2 heaped dstsp dark brown sugar
Cut the rhubarb into spoon-sized chunks. Give them a wash, and put them in an oven dish. Squeeze over the juice of the orange, and throw in the orange husks. Add the cinnamon. Bake at gas mark 8/230C for about 10 minutes.
Now stir in the sugar, which might have caught and burned if you had added it before the rhubarb threw off any liquid.
Bake for a further 20-30 minutes, until the rhubarb is very soft.
There will be too much liquid. Spoon it into a small saucepan, and boil it until syrupy. Pour it back over the rhubarb. Serve hot or warm (but cold would be fine too), with cream or yoghurt.
I got this method (for Basmati) from the back of a packet. It's my new favourite. The advantage over this one is that the rice doesn't clump together if you hold it in the covered pan.
- Measure the volume of rice. (In weight, about 75g is a good single portion.)
- Put twice that volume of water in a pan, with a little salt.
- Wash the rice, and add it to the pan.
- Bring to a simmer.
- On a medium heat, simmer the rice until the water level drops below the surface, which shows bubbles.
- Turn down the flame to the minimum, put a heat disperser under the pan, and cover the pan.
- Cook for a further five minutes.
It's probably ready now: I usually leave it, covered, for a few minutes longer.
It's certainly not worth firing up the barbecue for just a few lamb cutlets. So how otherwise to get that summery, grilled flavour? A ridged grill pan over a high heat will do it - the risk being that you will burn the surfaces of the meat before cooking the interiors. A mix of grill pan and the oven is the answer.
Crush a couple of garlic cloves to a paste with a little salt, and smear the paste on the meat. Turn the meat in a tbsp or two of olive oil, and squirt over the juice of half a lemon. Leave to marinate for an hour or more.
Put a grill pan over a high heat for at least five minutes. Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 8/230C. Scrape the marinade off the cutlets, and grill for about a minute each side - that should be enough to get them well browned. Transfer to an oven dish, pour over the marinade, throw in the lemon husk if you like, and put into the oven for five to 10 minutes, according to taste.
The thickness of tortilla or frittatas presents a challenge to the cook, because it necessitates a long cooking time, which can produce eggs with the consistency of Styrofoam. If, like me, you don't fancy tipping the half-cooked tortilla on to a plate and returning it to the pan the other way up, you may have to set the top under the fierce heat of the grill, further increasing the risk of toughening the eggs.
An alternative is to use the oven. It worked pretty well for me.
Serves 3 to 4.
6 medium-sized new potatoes
1 large, Spanish onion, sliced
Olive oil
6 eggs
Large knob of butter
80g hard cheese, such as Manchego or Pecorino (but the cheese on the omelette above is Cheddar), grated
Scrape the potatoes, cut them into slices roughly the thickness of 2 £1 coins, put them in a saucepan of lightly salted water, bring to a simmer, and cook until tender. Drain.
In a heavy pan - the one above is 20cms, and has, as you can see, a detachable handle - and in a tbsp or two of oil, gently fry the onions, lightly salted, until golden. It will take 10 to 20 minutes.
Lightly beat the eggs with a fork. Lift the onions from the pan with a slotted spoon, and stir them into the eggs, along with the potatoes. Add a little more salt, if you like.
Over a low heat, melt the butter in the pan. Tip in the egg mixture. My inauthentic addition - a regular theme of this blog - is the grated cheese on top.
Put the pan into a gas mark 4/180C oven for about 20 minutes, or until the egg is set.
Elements of this recipe (for 4) repeat my earlier recipe for moussaka. But this one is even less authentic. Moussaka should contain lamb, I believe; and I don't suppose that Greek cooks add Worcester sauce to it, or use Cheddar in their bechamels. I included potatoes - waxy ones would have worked better than the maincrop ones I used - because I didn't have enough aubergine.
Since writing the earlier entry, I've discovered a new favourite method of stewing mince.
2 onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
Olive oil
200g pork mince
200g beef mince
1 bay leaf
Chicken stock
1/2 chicken stock cube
1tbsp tomato puree
Few splashes Worcester sauce
Salt
1 large aubergine, cut into rounds the thickness of 2 £1 coins
3 medium potatoes, cut into rounds the thickness of 2 £1 coins
3dstsp plain flour
35g butter, or enough to make a roux with the flour
300ml milk
1 egg, beaten
3 tbsp Cheddar
A few scrapings of nutmeg
Over a gentle heat and in a heavy-bottomed pan, soften the onions and garlic with a little salt in a tbsp or two of olive oil. After about five minutes, add the mince, breaking it up with a wooden spoon as it starts to cook. Continue to cook the contents of the pan gently, stirring from time to time. After about 25 minutes, and once the liquid from the meat has evaporated, the mince will start to brown. (I used to worry that the onions would burn before the mince browned - but for some reason they do not.) When it is browned, add about 100ml of chicken stock, or just enough to produce a stew that is moist but not runny. Stir in the stock cube (which is not necessary, but does add extra savouriness), puree, and the Worcester sauce if you like, and add the bay leaf. Allow to bubble for a few minutes. Test the seasoning - the cube and the Worcester sauce are salty, and you may not need more salt.
Meanwhile, pour some olive oil into a saucer. Dip in a fork, and brush the aubergine rounds with the back of it. Place them in a roasting tin or on a baking sheet. Season with salt, and with pepper if you like. Bake at gas mark 6/200C for 20 to 30 minutes, until soft. (This is a far easier method of cooking aubergines than frying.)
Put the potatoes into lightly salted cold water, bring to the boil, and simmer until the potatoes are tender. Drain.
Make a thick bechamel. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over a gentle heat. Add the flour, and stir it in. The roux should have the consistency of wet sand. Cook it for a minute. Pour in the milk gradually, stirring to incorporate each portion before adding the next. Let the sauce bubble for a minute or two, stirring constantly, then turn off the heat. You want a thick, almost pasty consistency. When the sauce has cooled a little, stir in the egg. (After baking, the sauce should puff up.) You could season the bechamel with nutmeg as well as salt.
Assemble the "moussaka". I spread a little of the bechamel on the bottom and sides of the oven dish. Then I built up the layers: potato; stew; potatoes and aubergines; stew; aubergines; bechamel.
Bake in a gas mark 6/200C oven for 30 minutes, or until the top is brown and everything is bubbling.
Moussaka is particularly delicious warm, rather than piping hot. We ate ours after it had been sitting in the turned-off oven for 45 minutes.
Yesterday, I pushed my luck by cooking a souffle without referring to any recipes, and guessing on the quantities. It worked.
For 2
About 30g butter
2dstsp plain flour
About 175ml milk
100g Cheddar (or Gruyere, or similar), grated
A few scrapings of nutmeg
Ground black pepper, or cayenne (optional)
3 eggs, separated
Melt the butter above a low heat in a small saucepan. Stir in the flour. Adjust the butter/flour ratio if necessary to get a roux of the consistency of wet sand. Allow the roux to cook for a minute, without browning. Turn up the heat, and add the milk in stages, beating it into the mixture before pouring in more. Keep adding milk until you have a very thick, pasty sauce. Allow the sauce to bubble for a minute, stirring all the while. Turn off the heat. Stir in the cheese, and add your preferred seasonings. (Remember, if adding salt, that the cheese is salty.)
Beat the egg yolks. When you're sure the sauce is cool enough not to curdle them, stir them in.
A drop or two of vinegar or lemon juice in the egg whites will help them to set. Whisk them (I always do it by hand) until, when you lift the whisk from the egg, it forms soft peaks.
Pour the cheese mixture into the egg white, and fold it in without beating (which would drive out the air). I use a turning and lifting motion, until the mixture is amalgamated.
Tip the mixture into an oven dish. In my experience, the shape of the dish does not matter. Bake at gas mark 5/190C for about 30 minutes, until set. (The dish in the photo is not particular efficient at conducting heat. After 25 minutes, my souffle was not making much progress, so I turned up the dial to 7/220C for a further 10 minutes.)
I did not make a very neat or thorough job of coating my chicken pieces. The mystery is that the chicken emerged from the frying pan with what appeared to be a complete, crispy covering.
Plateful of plain flour
1tbs rosemary leaves, chopped (I used an old coffee grinder)
Salt
Pepper (black, cayenne, or both)
1 egg, beaten
6 chicken drumsticks
Sunflower oil
Mix the flour with the rosemary and seasonings. Dip the chicken pieces in the egg, and roll them in the flour. Lay them on a rack (as above) until you're ready to fry them.
Half fill a large frying pan with the oil, and place on a low to medium heat. After about five minutes, drop in a tiny piece of bread. If it sizzles readily, place the chicken pieces in the oil. Once they're frying, you can turn down the heat almost to the minimum.
Cook for 30 minutes, turning once. Remove to paper towels before serving.
An adaptation of this Yotam Ottolenghi recipe from the Guardian. Serves 2, as a main course.
2 small to medium aubergines
Olive oil
Salt and black pepper
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 tin tomatoes
100g feta
100g cream cheese
2 eggs, beaten
Nutmeg
Cut the aubergines into discs, brush them with olive oil, season them, and lay them on foil or greaseproof paper on a large baking sheet. Bake for 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C, until tender.
In a heavy saucepan, gently heat the garlic in a tbsp of olive oil. Tip in the tomatoes, bring to a simmer, and mash them with a potato masher. (You can add a little sugar, if you like.) Simmer until thick.
Beat the feta and cream cheese with the eggs, until smooth. Add a few scrapings of nutmeg, and grind in some black pepper. (The feta, and to a lesser extent the cream cheese, are salty.)
Spread the tomato sauce in a 20cm baking dish. Arrange the aubergines on top. Pour over the cheese custard.
Bake in a gas mark 2/150C oven for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the custard is set.
3 large potatoes
300g haddock fillet
300ml milk
Bay leaf
Six peppercorns
1 egg (but perhaps 2 would be better), beaten
Salt
Butter
Sunflower oil
Peel the potatoes, cut into chunks, cover with cold water, add a little salt, bring to a simmer, and cook until soft. Drain and mash.
Put the fish in an oven dish. In a small saucepan, gently heat the milk with the bay leaf and peppercorns until simmering, pour it over the fish, cover with foil, and bake at gas mark 6/200C for 10 to 15 minutes, until tender. Lift the fish from the liquid, and flake it into the mash.
You may well want to add, as well as some salt, ingredients such as chopped spring onions, toasted and ground cumin, saffron, and cayenne pepper.
Mix the potato, fish and any other ingredients with the beaten egg. Form the mixture into six patties.
On a medium heat, melt the knob of butter and a tbsp of sunflower oil in a heavy frying pan. Carefully add the fishcakes, and fry for a few minutes until browned on the undersides. Again carefully, turn them, adding another knob of butter.
When both sides are browned, transfer the fishcakes to a piece of foil on a baking sheet, and warm them through for 10 minutes in the oven (at the same heat as above).
I used the milk, strained, to make a bechamel, into which I stirred chopped leeks, which I had steamed for five minutes.
This is an adaptation of an Allegra McEvedy recipe in the Guardian. Stewed sausages have a different texture, obviously, from fried or grilled ones; I can find them offputtingly flabby. But I didn't this time. For 2.
4 sausages, cut into fork-sized discs (you can't do this neatly - no matter)
80g smoked pancetta, cubed
2tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
150g lentils, Puy or Puy-type, rinsed
250ml (or more) chicken stock (I used half a cube, and water)
1 bay leaf
1 dried chilli
A few splashes of Worcester sauce
In a heavy pan or casserole, fry the sausage chunks and pancetta in the oil, over a low to medium heat. Don't turn up the heat too high: the oil will burn, and bits of sausage will stick to the pan and burn too. Be patient until the meat starts to brown - about 10 to 15 minutes.
I don't think you need to remove the sausage from the pan now, as McEvedy advises. Throw in the onion and garlic, and keep everything moving until the onions have softened - five to 10 minutes.
Tip in the lentils with the stock, bay leaf, chilli, and sauce (optional). You want enough liquid just to keep the lentils submerged. Bring the contents of the pan to a simmer, cover it, and continue cooking on a very low heat. Check from time to time, because the lentils will absorb some of the liquid, which you may need to top up.
The trick is to maintain the liquid at a level that will cook the lentils but that will not leave you with a very sloppy stew. They may take 45 minutes to an hour to tenderise - about twice as long as normal. When they're soft enough, remove the pan lid to allow some liquid to evaporate.
Test the seasoning. You can add salt now: if you had done so earlier, it might have toughened the lentils. If you have parsley, chop it and stir it in.
Six days after Shrove Tuesday, a pancake recipe.
Gluten-free flour makes a passable bechamel, but is no substitute for wheat flour in pastry, in my view - even with the addition of the recommended xanthum gum. It has a dry, powdery quality. That quality affected these gluten-free pancakes as well. But it was less noticeable, partly because of the rich filling; and gluten-free pancakes are better than no pancakes.
After I had rested the batter, I discovered that flour had settled on the bottom of the bowl, and needed to be stirred into the liquid again.
Pancake batter: see recipe for Toad in the Hole; but use an extra egg.
Bechamel and spinach: recipe in this Eggs Florentine entry.
Once you've cooked the sauce, allow it to cool and thicken. Drain the spinach, and squeeze out the liquid, without being absolutely thorough. Stir the spinach into the sauce.
Heat a 20cm, non-stick pan above a medium flame. I don't have a proper pancake pan, but use a cast-iron one (a bit heavy for flipping). Swirl a little sunflower oil in it, then tip out any excess. Pour in half a ladleful of batter, spread it out, and cook for 30 to 45 seconds. Flip the pancake using your preferred method (I do it, gracelessly, with a spatula). Repeat, adding a little more oil when necessary.
I added spinach filling to each pancake, rolled it up and put it in an oven dish while the next pancake was cooking.
Cover the dish with foil, and bake the crespolini in a gas mark 6/200C oven for 15 to 20 minutes, until hot.
I have discovered the advantages, first mentioned in this post, of roasting meat alongside potatoes in a tin lined with kitchen paper or non-stick foil. (It is a good idea to use two layers.) You sacrifice the crispiness of potatoes that have been parboiled first and then roasted; but you get instead a sweet earthiness in the potato flesh that would otherwise be lost. The potatoes stick even to paper, but not as thoroughly as they do to my roasting tin.
Another advantage of this method, particular when roasting chicken, is that you get a lot more juice. Yesterday, I rubbed a chicken (2.2kg) with a little butter, salted it, and stuffed it with a quartered lemon and with the cloves from a head of garlic. I pre-heated the oven at its highest setting, then turned it down to gas mark 6/200C, and put in the chicken, with the neck part of the giblets next to it. After 30 minutes, I turned down the dial to gas mark 3/160C. After another 30 minutes, I surrounded the chicken with peeled, sliced, washed and drained potatoes.
The chicken was ready after two hours in total. I removed it to a hot plate, which I kept on the grill shelf above the oven. It left behind plenty of juice, which I spooned off into a saucepan, with the neck.
I tossed the potatoes in the tin with some olive oil, and returned them to the oven (with the shelf raised a level) at its highest setting. After 20 minutes, I tossed them again. They were browned in half an hour. The chicken was still warm.
There was enough buttery, lemony sauce, which I warmed in the pan, for four.
The lamb above is studded with slivers of garlic and rosemary, rubbed with oil, salted, and roasted with a foil covering for three hours at gas mark 2/150C. (It browns in spite of the covering.) The procedure with the potatoes was the same as above.
