Pen's Great Food Club

Marmalade

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:30:05 -0400

As a teenager, whilst having my first ever breakfast in a French café (tres chic), I was mortified to discover that, not only was there no tea, no toast and no marmite, but that the marmalade I was expected to spread on my baguette was, in fact, apricot jam. Peu chic after all.

Marmalade always was jam. Even after the Scots had invented the tart stuff of Seville Oranges, Mrs Beeton (1861) was claiming that marmalades were simply made from firmer fruits such as pineapple, whereas jams were more berryish. Our first marmalades were a thick quince paste from Portugal, probably the same as Membrillo, and whatever fruit they were made from, they tended to be found on the dessert spread, eaten from little jars with a spoon, or made into blocks and cut into pieces. Seville Orange Marmalade was eaten as a sweetmeat for a good few years until the English, following their Scottish cousins’ excellent example, started spreading it on toast in the morning. I still think this is a good idea when you fancy something sweet after dinner and all there is in the cupboard is a jar of blackberry jam or, indeed, homemade marmalade. A spoonful makes an admirable dessert – a sort of private, sticky version of those sophisticated candied orange rinds you can buy at Christmas.

A quiet addiction to marmalade runs in the family; my Dad used to take a pot of my Mum’s inimitably tangy goo on his overseas trips; and I have had it on toast almost every day of my life, making do with the shop-bought stuff from home supplies ran out. Until now! I’ve discovered the easy joy of doing it yourself, for which I have to thank a young lady called Miss Debarry. Although Jane Austen didn’t have much to say in her favour (she was tedious and had bad breath) , she was friends with Jane’s great friend Martha Lloyd and passed onto Martha her ‘receipt’ for ‘Scotch Orange Marmalade’. I tried it out for my book of recipes inspired by Jane Austen’s novels and letters (publishing this October, since you ask) and liked it so much I made a second batch recently, with some Seville oranges I had stashed away in the freezer.

The recipe is entirely simple and sensible, with no faffing around with putting pips and pith into muslin bags that so many modern day recipes suggest (don’t bother! You don’t need to!) . Just make sure you have no cuts on your fingers and get on with filling the kitchen with that smell and your jam jars with bitter sweetness.

And enjoy some dessert…

The Royal Kitchens at Kew

Tue, 08 May 2012 04:06:10 -0400

When King George III (he of madness fame) his wife Queen Charlotte and their kids holed up in their cosy palace in Kew, they might have had a comfy, family weekend, but they were unlikely ever to have had a piping hot meal. All their food was prepared in kitchens eccentrically sited in a sort of outhouse, then wheeled on covered trolleys across the yard and eventually into a rather lovely paneled dining room.

These kitchens, built in the 1730s by that royal gardener, Frederick Prince of Wales (George II’s father) were closed following Queen Charlotte’s death in 1818. The various cooking rooms, scullery and culinary offices mouldered gently for two hundred years, with their original boilers and ovens and the sort of massive kitchen furniture – solid tables and dressers – Country Life readers (and me!) hanker after. Historic Royal Palaces have, to their great credit, persuaded the powers that be at Kew Gardens, to let them take over the building and spend £1.7million conserving and restoring them; on 18th May they will open to the public for the first time.
Inspired by their new-old kitchens, Kew Palace are hosting a series of Georgian dinners over the summer; for £100 guests are treated to a curated tour of the Palace and dinner in that same lovely dining room. I was honoured to be invited to a press night to try it out.

Georgian diners would have trooped into their dining room to find the many dishes of the first course already symmetrically laid out on the table, cooling their heels. Our courses were served to us (in the style that became fashionable in late Georgian and Victorian times); the first one – cold pea and asparagus veloute – was perhaps a deliberate nod to the problems of serving hot food. We think of historic food as being meat and pie heavy, but the Georgians loved these vegetables (although they may have overdosed them with ‘butter sauce’) and the wealthy could eat hot-housed versions over a long season (just as we do with our air-freighted Peruvian asparagus and Kenyan peas). A course of potted mackerel, preserved by plugging the fish with a layer of melted butter, felt reassuringly C18th (although the crispy breads were distinctly contemporary Mediterranean). The chef, coming on for a brief curtain call at the end, explained that he had cooked the lamb shoulder for the main course authentically; boiled in water rather than stock, with celery, carrot and onions, for 4-5 hours; adding nothing else. It was honest and tasty; and I liked the arch description of its accompanying ‘sweet white potato pudding’ (ie mash).

There were three desserts of beautifully contrasting shapes, colours and textures; a deep purple summer fruit jelly and whole orange filled with orange ice, were both (as Jane Austen might say) elegant. I was unsure about the third, an inauthentically solid Chocolate Cream; chocolate was taken only in liquid form until the mid nineteenth century; but clearly none of my fellow diners, licking their pudding spoons clean, cared a hoot whether it was anachronistic or not.
It was a very elegant occasion and an elegant dinner and I didn’t, as predicted by a colleague, develop gout overnight.

The Royal Kitchens at Kew are open from 18th May, 2012
http://www.hrp.org.uk/kewpalace/WhatsOn/kewkitchens

What Shall We Have for Dinner by Catherine Dickens

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 13:45:11 -0500

A hot day at the end of September last year found me in a rather nice kitchen in Shepherd’s Bush with a lovely home economist called Yasmin. We had the morning to prepare two Dickensian dishes; a huge Twelfth Night cake (which the wonderful Yasmin had already cooked to a recipe I found in Dr Kitchiner’s 1823 book, The Cook’s Oracle); plus a Charles Dickens favourite; a leg of mutton stuffed with oysters taken from Catherine Dickens’ book of menus and recipe What Shall We Have for Dinner, which we were to prepare and cook that morning, and then prepare again on set. After that, Sue Perkins and a BBC crew were turning up to film our bit about Catherine Dickens and the part that her little book of food played in her, ultimately, very sad life.

Stuffing a leg of mutton with oysters and sweet herbs, is a sheepy-smelling, iodine-y, herby pleasure, although of course all those little bits of stuffing escaping as you try and truss it up with string, just served to remind me that, I’m never really in control in the kitchen. I was definitely NOT in control of the oven which, set to maximum and fan, was puffing and blowing all its hot air out of the broken seal at the top of the door. Mutton carpaccio, not being a Victorian speciality, Yasmin and I moved it onto the hob where it simmered happily away…

Then, eventually, we were in place at the kitchen table (my hands hidden beneath lest anyone see them shaking), cameras rolling, wired for sound, everyone quietly confident… only not quite quiet enough, the sound engineer explained, because everyone could hear my heart thudding through the microphone taped to my chest.

But I was the expert here, so I started fumbling around with bits of dead sheep and oysters as Sue Perkins, with dismaying professionalism, rapidly chuff-chuffed her knife through a pile of herbs. As we stuffed the leg between us, cameras on, I became aware the “here’s one we made earlier” mutton on the hob behind us was simmering itself dry… dryer… nearly burnt… Plated up it was dark brown and dry. Blame the Victorians; they overcooked everything.

I was never claiming to be a top chef, of course, but here was my chance to show how much I knew about food history, answering questions such as: “Might Catherine’s menus have contributed to her weight gain?” And I was off, launching into all I had ever read or thought about nineteenth-century dining culture, Italian cream, Victorian ladies who lunch, cheese savouries, dinner a la Russe or a la Francaise, cabinet pudding, corsetry, marrow bone toast, vegetable consumption, suet dumplings, Dickens and the politicisation of hunger… I was wondering whether I could shove in a reference to Charles Lamb A Dissertation upon Roast Pig or Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor as I came to a halt. There was a silence. “I think,” the producer said gently, “the way to start the answer would be: “Yes”.

But in the end it was a huge plateful of fun (although with a good side helping of stress –you can never forget that camera or that microphone), as we wobbled around with the oysters and put the bean for the king, the pea for the queen and the rag for the slut into the Twelfth Cake. It ended up being about four minutes of what turned out to be a brilliant and eye-opening programme about Charles and Catherine Dickens’ unhappy marriage.

Burns Night with a bang

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:53:19 -0500

Haggis is probably one of the oldest dishes from these islands (perhaps excepting mammoth carpaccio); it is thought that the Romans brought over the recipe, or as near as damn it. Their army, with carefully-thought through provisioning that could be carried and eaten on the march, must have been the BC equivalent to the Yanks with tinned food in the Great War. Nobody seems to know when it sealed its reputation as a Scottish dish, but it pops up in the earliest English cookery. Dorothy Hartley in Food in England gives a 1300 recipe for it, involving a pluck, tallow and womb, and if this isn’t offputting enough, a picture showing “pluck boiling, with wind pipe hung out.” There is a similar recipe, recorded by one of Richard II’s cooks in the earliest surviving English cookbook, The Form of Cury (cookery) from 1390.

I was inspired to make haggis for this Burns Night, for rather more prosaic reasons than historical enquiry; I was itching to try out a recipe in Jamie’s Great Britain; the Burns Night supper at our local was oversubscribed; and I thought it would impress my Scottish boyfriend.

Jamie’s recipe is long but unthreatening; the pluck, tallow and tripe are replaced by nothing more unusual than liver, kidneys and heart. By the time you add the spices – allspice, cloves and black pepper – it has that definably “warm-reeking” haggis smell. When you add the toasted oatflakes, it starts to bubble and makes hilarious farty noises like a child trying to annoy the grown-ups; and this mixture of meat and cereal is probably the only relic we have of that pre-potato staple, pottage. Gervase Markham, in a chapter called “On the Excellency of oats” praises them for meat pottage and goes onto recommend mixing them with blood and liver which “maketh that pudding which is called the haggas or haggus” (The English Housewife, 1615).

Jamie keeps it as a stew or covers it with neaps and tatties as a pie. This, however, wouldn’t have served for the tradition of reading Burns ‘To a Haggis’ and plunging the knife into it “Trenching your gushing entrails bright” so that the insides, “warm-reeking, rich!” come oozing out.

I found natural haggis ‘caps’ from a wonderful company called www.weschenfelder.co.uk , which was established by the owner’s German grandfather who was appalled by soggily cased British sausages. The casings arrived, packed and salted, in the post. Desalting in a bowl of water they turned out to be intestines, sealed at one end, like alarmingly large condoms. Packing them with haggis mix and tying the ends with string turned out to be easy, so long as you are not put off by the slight slime and smell (or the holes in my jumper).

Just one yielded up a white, wormy sausage enormous enough for eight of us (with enough leftover mixture for the faint hearted which might include myself).

I set it to boil gently and set about the neeps and tatties and putting out those other Scottish delicacies for pudding, Orkney cheddar and those iconic Glaswegians, Tunnocks caramel wafers . As it bubbled away, the casing expanded gently, promising a pleasing Burns moment… and then burst with a loud bang. By the time I got to it I had a pan full of runny haggis mixture, with a huge condom waving apologetically around.

Some of the remaining mixture stuffed in the spare casing and boiled for a few minutes made for an instant, poppable (if not sufficiently cooked to be quite hygienic) haggis balloon, though. Our Burns night experience was saved.

The eight varieties of malt whisky – and the eight varieties of Scottish accents employed to read Burns poems – helped too.

A Real Tudor Minced Pie

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 04:39:00 -0500

Mince pies, appropriately for Christmas, are food of the gods. Deep, dark, sticky, sweet; all those zippy currants; that flavoursome suet that we try not to think about… The suet, of course, is a hangover from the original mince pies that were made with meat. Gervase Markham’s 1615 recipe calls for mutton; but could also be made with beef or veal. It is very simple; mix together meat, dried fruit and spices and put “into a coffin, or into diverse coffins”. It is not as sinister as it sounds; a coffin was simply a box.

We think of pies as rather homely food; but no grand C16th or C17th feast would have been complete without them. They would have been made with complex moulds to appear in all sorts of shapes, each beautifully decorated with pastry shapes and patterns which shame the occasional little star-shaped mince-pie top we get today. A huge “Grete Pie” or “Yorkshire Pie” is where that idea for a bird-within-a-bird comes and it might have been made with different coloured stuffings between the birds to make a beautiful pattern when it was cut.

I followed the recipe for A Real Minced Pie that Clarissa Dixon-Wright has worked out A History of English Food (what luxury to be cooking Tudor food with measurements, times and temperatures!). We met together with the BBC’s Nick Higham, Phil Westerman; producer and camera man at Katharine and Leo’s kitchen in Putney to talk about her book, Great Food, and to taste this famous mince pie for “Meet the Author” on the BBC News Channel.

The verdict was… “interesting”. That combination of sweet and savoury is very much an ancestral taste. It was little disappointingly bland; Clarissa said she had made it with proper, well-hung beef and it had a much deeper flavour. Najma, her lovely publicist (with the most beautiful nails!) was surely right when she said it would be perkled up with a pickle or two; the cameraman Phil Westerman took some back to his family and tweeted later that it tasted good cold with a strong blue cheese. Katharine and Leo (my oldest friend and cousin with whom I am staying and who so cheerfully and generously let it all happen in their kitchen) were more positive that evening, perhaps because we washed it down with a little hippocras; that gingery, spiced wine which makes everything seem brighter and more hopeful.

Link to BBC Meet the Author here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16311949

Getting (and staying) fresh with Alice Waters

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 06:17:00 -0500

It was a pretty rotten summer, wasn’t it? But, judging by the chirpy looking veg in the polytunnels, fields and shop of Church Farm in Ardeley, in Hertfordshire (http://www.churchfarmardeley.co.uk/) none of them seem to have minded the cool and wet.

So, for Food Club, earlier this Autumn, instead of doing Alice B. Toklas’s ludicrous shoulder of mutton recipe (because where would I get either the mutton or the necessary surgical syringe to inject it with cognac?) I turned to Alice Waters for inspiration.

Founder of the Slow Food Movement with her restaurant, Chez Panisse in San Francisco, Alice Waters’ influence in the States is similar to Elizabeth David’s here. Her watchwords are local, seasonal and sustainable. The latest writer in the Great Food series, she probably has most in common with the earliest, Gervase Markham for whom food in 1615 was local and seasonal from necessity (and fresh would have been a bonus). Alice Waters doesn’t feel that revolutionary to me, though as my mum still grows, makes and bakes much of her own food and buys her meat from a local farmer she knows. But it must have felt radical in 1980s America and, as with so many things Californian, we welcomed it too; it’s just that my Mum – like so many mums – got there first.

I came away from the Church Farm shop with an enormous, emerald lettuce; tomatoes in an extended family of shapes, colours and sizes; a hilariously knobbly cucumber plus two round ones (which Margaret was convinced were squash until we cut into it and saw the seeds), earth-covered spring onions. Two days and two unrefridgerated car-journeys later, the tomatoes were squishy, the lettuce was leathery and half the leaves had black patches and the cucumber was getting bendy with exhaustion.

In Tristram Stuart’s important book on waste in the food industry (called, pithily, WASTE) he tells you simply how to prolong the life of what William Verral calls “garden things”; put herbs in a glass of water in the fridge, for example, and they’ll keep fresh for days. We have lost a lot in the past four hundred years – flower salads, salmagundi, candied rose petals – but occasionally it’s good for an old die-hard like me to look at the fridge and remember what we’ve gained too.

Podcasting

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 17:44:00 -0400

This is a bit of a cheat for a blog as I haven’t cooked up anything except a couple of podcasts. A little while ago, I was down in Bath with Amanda Foreman who was giving a talk and recording the Blackwells podcast with the lovely George Miller. Being a multi-tasking sort of chap, he recorded one with me about Great Food at the same time. It’s up on the website - no. 58. http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/editorial/browse/podcasts/podcasts_index.jsp

This one was done for The Guardian, a day after I did a talk at Foyles. I took in various bits of historic cake and chatted about them with Claire Armitstead and Kathryn Hughes, who was there for - as Claire said - some “intellectual oomph”. She has so much in some ways I wish I’d just sat there and taken notes…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2011/sep/09/cookery-books-9-11-stories

I think I sound a bit eccentric to be honest; but perhaps that’s because I am.

Mrs Beeton's Apple Soup

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 06:33:27 -0400

I have just come in from the garden of my borrowed house with aching arms and the guilt-inducing smell of fermenting apples in my nose. This is not because I am making hooch out there, but rather that I have - too late - been raking up the leming-like apples that threw themselves onto the wet grass one windy day last week. Some of them are rescued and awaiting orders in the kitchen; the others have gone into the green bin where, judging by the speed with which they rot and the look of inebriated smugness on the sluggy faces of my bête noires, they will make fine, sweet compost.

Yesterday, I recorded the Guardian podcast with Kathryn Hughes, the social historian and biographer of Mrs Beeton, who made me laugh by saying that the Victorians hated salad; they were terrified of lettuce and would die rather than eat a raw tomato. Mrs Beeton must have thought that apples, well-boiled and pulverized, were safe, because she does have a recipe for Apple Soup.

This isn’t the sort of thing I would usually inflict on a co-eater, in case it was really horrid. But finding myself long on windfall apples but short on company a week or so ago, I gave it a go. It is probably the simplest recipe in the world. Boil some apples in stock, puree, and add a few spicey and peppery things to give it a kick. And, surprisingly enough, it doesn’t really taste as if it is just a few cookers boiled up in cheat’s chicken stock, but it is its own thing; a tart, fiery soup with a faintly glutinous texture.

It must be incredibly healthy too; but since I’m not I added some Stilton as you see (Wensleydale would be nice too), although this felt rather modern for Mrs Beeton.

The wholesome joys of chocolate

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 17:20:10 -0400

I’ve been thinking a lot about chocolate recently. And not just because I’ve been suffering from gum infections that have me eyeing up the chocolate box wondering if I could whizz up its nutritious contents into a milk shake. Oliver Thring, who writes for the Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog http://bit.ly/qFYdE7 asked me what sort of chocolate recipes there were in Great Food, so I’ve been having a rummage through the sweetie drawer.

Chocolate, I’ve discovered, has had quite an image makeover since it was introduced – as a drink – to England in 1657. We take for granted the association between a bar of even the yuckiest vegetable-fat laden chunks with lusciousness and sensuality. If we think about our ancestors’ culinary enjoyment at all, we might imagine a Black-magic box-shaped hole in the centre of it, as they valiantly got their sweet kicks from candied rose petals or caraway comfits.

But for Pepys, a keen pursuer of sensuous gratification, this new drink was simply healthy and comforting. When he “waked in the morning with my head in a sad taking through the last night’s drink” on 24^th April 1661, his friend gave him his morning draught in chocolate to settle his stomach (The Joys of Excess, p16). Brillat-Savarin, in 1825, promises that drinking chocolate in the morning leads to unfailing health and mitigates against that undesirable condition – losing weight. He interrupts his civilized history of chocolate with the extravagant claim that Spanish ladies of the New World love chocolate to the point of madness, but he certainly doesn’t see this “sensual indulgence” around him in France where, unlike coffee, chocolate “holds no terrors for the fair sex” (The Pleasures of the Table, p59).

Chocolate was first sold in solid form (by Cadbury’s and Fry’s) in the 1840s and it was quickly taken up at fancy dinner parties (Mrs Beeton has it served in an ornamental box on a glass plate). It was probably democratized when chocolate bars were given to soldiers in the First World War (but Shaw’s chocolate cream soldier of 1894 suggests the Swiss already had their own privatized version of chocolate rations). Alexis Soyer includes, in his instructions for cooking for regiments of soldiers, a recipe for cocoa for 80 men (The Chef at War, p101). He makes it with water thickened with arrowroot to give the sort of thick, chocolatey drink you get Italy rather than the chocolate milk we drink now. Similarly, Alice B. Toklas also gives a recipe for hot chocolate, served in bowls to comfort soldiers by the Red Cross Nuns in wartime France.

In the 1920s the high-society Agnes Jekyll describes cocoa nibs (A Little Dinner Before the Play, p51) as having a welcome ‘clean wholesomeness’ and recommends her super-chocolate cake (p23) for guests of robust appetites. (I make this for my talk – it has some unusual ingredients beside chocolate.) Nor does Alice B. Toklas rhapsodise about it; she passes on the recipe for sacher torte from her Austrian cook (Murder in the Kitchen, p18) but she is more interested in his love life than the cake’s chocolatiness. The Macon Cake - the luscious thing that transports her into ecstasies (p58) has mocha, pistachio and kirsch butter cream but chocolate is conspicuous by its absence.

But somehow, between then and now, chocolate acquired its reputation for sensuousness. Depending on who you read, we should thank the scientists who chopped it up and discovered the euphoric, falling-in-love chemical phenylethylamine; or the Aztec women who introduced it to the Conquistadores, or the hedonists who love the way it melts at blood heat on the tongue. The usual culprit for these things, Nigella Lawson, in How to Be A Domestic Goddess, says she doesn’t even particularly like chocolate. Personally I think it’s got something to do with the girl in those Flake adverts from the 80s.

Mackerel with fennel and gooseberries

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:26:35 -0400

This is from William Verral again, landlord of the White Hart Inn in Lewes in Susses, and a bit of a Jamie Oliver. He trained under a fancy French chef, M. Clouet, and his lovely, fresh recipes burn with a passion to get his compatriots eating ‘garden things’ and not throwing away good food that families ‘would leap mast high at’.

I have had mixed success with Verral - one of my earliest blogs was about the disaster that was his strawberry fritters, but I have been waiting a whole year to make this delicious, fresh sounding mackerel dish.

Only it isn’t really. I can imagine it on a contemporary menu; crisp skinned and oil-rich fish on a sharp slick of gooseberry sauce and aniseedy fennel for feathery elegance. The trouble is, I think, that our tastes have changed so much. It is very common for old recipes to boil or simmer up everything together; here its fish, wine, fennel, green (spring) onions, parsley followed by scalded gooseberries. The fish end up swimming in a thin sauce, bumping into blobs of gooseberries; the skin is stuck on to flesh which is solid, rather than that lovely delicate/meaty texture it gets under the grill. It is all a bit of a big, sweet mess.

Here it is, cooking not very merrily away, in a black pan. William Verral laughs at a neighbour and client who want him to cook a meal to die for in their kitchen, equipped just with “one pan as black as my hat”. Which is essentially what I used here, so maybe it really is the problem with the tools not the workmanship.

Hippocras and other seventeenth-century drinks

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 10:00:10 -0400

When I did my vegetarian Tudor meal, a surprise success was Hippocras. It is wine – it can be red or white – sweetened and flavoured with spices. I mixed some white wine with ginger and cinnamon and served it with a sprig of rosemary. It was both light and warming; a lovely thing to drink on a summer evening or a Christmas fire.

The champion handbook for Tudor bartenders must be The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened published in 1669 in which Sir K gives gallons of variations of recipes for his favourite drinks – his subtitle is Whereby is DISCOVERED Several ways for making of Metheglin, Sider, Cherry-Wine, &c. To which you can add Meathe, Hydromel, Sack with Clove-Gilly Flowers and other things to fox your local landlord.

Who knows what they are*, but the recipes are sheer poetry. For White Metheglin

Take a handful of Peny-royal; four handfuls of Angelica; a handful of Rosemary; a handful of Borrage; a handful of Maidenhair, a hand-ful of Hart-tongue; of Liverwort; of Water-cresses, of Scurvy-grass, ana, a handful; of the Roots of Marshmallows, Parsley, Fennel, ana, one Ounce.

Or, more simply, weed the garden and mix it up in the water butt with a hiveful of honey and the contents of your spice rack. It gets you quite a strong Metheglin, apparently.

There is a little section in Gervase Markham’s chapter on “the ordering, preserving, and helping of all sorts of wines, and first of the choice of sweet wines” which the schoolchild in me finds hilarious.

Who couldn’t love a recipe for A REMEDY FOR BASTARD IF IT PRICK that begins “Take and draw him from his lees if he have any…” Just so.

But the best one has to be HOW TO HELP BASTARD BEING EAGER The answer, all you laidback young things, is to “Take two gallons of the best stoned honey…” mmmmm… just floating off now into the early seventeenth century. Back soon…

* Broadly, Meath is Mead (honey wine) and Metheglin is the same but with herbs and spices added. Hydromel is a weaker version.

Haschich Fudge (yes, really)

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 04:55:55 -0400

Alice B. Toklas was the partner of writer, Gertrude Stein, and together they had a grand old time in early twentieth-century France, driving an ambulance in wartime France and entertaining Picasso with an elaborately decorated sea bass, which I’ve written about on this blog.

The most famous recipe in her bestselling cookbook memoir, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, is for Haschich Fudge which she recommends as an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club. It couldn’t fail to liven up a Penguin meeting, therefore, with her promised “Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter, ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes”.

Sadly I couldn’t find one if the main ingredients, canibus sativa (sic) anywhere in Waitrose (perhaps I was asking the wrong gangly youths in the aisles, or perhaps asking on the wrong side of those big delivery doors where they gangle out with cigarettes during their breaks).

The second disappointment is that it isn’t really fudge, either, but chopped up dried fruit (dates and such), rolled into little balls and covered in spices, including black pepper, which make it mysteriously and exotically hot. There is also a confusing line in the recipe that reads: “About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter.” But nothing as useful as a verb to tell you what to do with them. I first of all did without the butter/sugar, then added a very little and found that it helped the little balls of mush stick together better and the spices stick. It isn’t essential, though, and obviously it would keep better without.

The reception of this at Penguin towers was a bit mixed. One colleague said it tasted like something you’d get in an earnest vegetarian cafe. But some people liked it (and it’s fun to guess what the ingredients are, especially the spice mixture on the outside), and when I was making it, it smelled of Christmas. Always a good thing.

If Waitrose ever stock the missing ingredient, I’ll try it again.

Great Food at Hay

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 15:24:44 -0400

Last week, on a sunny Herefordshire evening, I gave my first ever talk. I was at Hay, a literary festival I’ve been to many times as a publicist looking after Penguin authors. I have always had great fun - but I’ve discovered it’s twice as much fun to talk than to shepherd.

I spent the day before shopping for ingredients and baking four cakes from Great Food, with a wobble at 9pm when I still hadn’t iced the last or worked out how to carry cake samples for over sixty people from London to Herefordshire (Hay is sometimes in Herefordshire, sometimes in Wales - I haven’t worked it out yet). But it must have got done because an hour before 8pm I was with Helen Conford (Great Food’s publisher), my colleague Maria and the lovely Lizzie Collingham, author of ‘The Taste of War’ putting plates of cake onto tables - four on each (one recipe from each of the last four centuries), all covered and numbered.

John Mitchinson, who started QI and knows far more about food and cookery than I ever will, was a kind and ease-putting-at chair, who helped me talk about the series and then looked at four specific books, their authors and the food of the time. Then the audience uncovered that plate and tried each cake, guessing at the ingredients.

A switched-on lady in the audience tasted the rosewater in Gervase Markham’s gorgeous marchpane, which is simply cooked marzipan.

Hannah Glasse’s carraway cakes were harder. As with so many of her recipes there are lots of tastes jostling for attention; caraway shouts loudest, candied peel is audible, rosewater can just be heard, but the sack - sherry - is a dignified whisper in the background and needs introducing before you can - just - make it out.

Eliza Acton is far more straightforward, of course. She doesn’t bamboozle you, but the complexity is there in Acton Ginger Bread. Lemon was easily guessed at, and some people did taste the cloves.

It is the latest recipe - a wonderful Super Chocolate Cake courtesy of Agnes Jekyll- which has the strangest and least guessable ingredients. The icing is made from the juice of maraschino cherries. And there is an oddly medicinal back taste to the chocolate cake that - fortunately - nobody guessed at. To find out what it is, you’ll have to buy the book or come to my next talk at Ilkley in October.

Caraway cakes

Fri, 27 May 2011 06:22:29 -0400

I have taken to throwing mixtures in the oven, shouting ‘Good luck’ and slamming the door behind them. Then I hover around nervously until whatever I’ve thrown in looks brown enough to be rescued.

It’s because it is baking time - from recipes with no oven temperatures or cooking times. I am going to talk about Great Food at the Hay Literary Festival and have promised to illustrate my talk with some samples (a cunning plan to make sure somebody comes). I will make the food here in this lovely kitchen in Highgate, which I am lucky enough to be occupying for the summer, then carry it off to distant Herefordshire and parcel it out for 60 people. Whilst I would love to make some Tudor mince pies with meat, suet, sugar and currants, the logistics of transportation (not to mention a health and safety fairy, hovering invisibly above my conscience) are beyond me. So baking it is.

Alison Samuel, whose kitchen this is, makes a gorgeous seed cake from a Nigella recipe which has inspired me to explore cooking with caraway seeds for this talk; caraway cake feels suitably nostalgic for a demonstration of old recipes. Agnes Jekyll (in A Little Dinner Before the Play -1922) has a recipe for Caraway Tea Bread which turns out to be a rich scone, baked in the round. Claire McElwee (kitchen goddess and food clubber) tells me her granny used to make caraway scones in Ireland; it’s a bit sad that we are so hidebound about what we think of as tea-time classics that you can’t imagine coming across this real classic in a tea room. Gervase Markham (in The Well Kept Kitchen - 1615) strews ‘caraway comfits’ onto a Norfolk fool (a rich bread and butter pudding) and Hannah Glasse makes her Caraway Cakes with caraway comfits, too (in Everlasting Syllabub and the Art of Carving - 1747).

These little sugar-encrusted seeds were used to sweeten the breath (and still are in Indian restaurants). I’ve tried making them a couple of times and haven’t quite mastered the art of getting the sugar to stick to each seed rather than make them sit in big sticky lumps. But whether comfitted or not, Hannah Glasse’s little caraway cakes are the way to go for Hay, I’ve decided. And her usual enormous quantities (two pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, two pounds of butter, eighteen eggs) suddenly don’t look so crazy when you have sixty people to eat the results. After the fun of working out what on earth she means by “you must have three or four doubles of cap paper under the cakes” (fairy cake cases, presumably?) we have a sophisticated version of a fairy cake, flavoured with candied peel, sack (sherry), rosewater and caraway - beaten up in the mixer to let the egg do its stuff in making them light and fluffy (no raising agent in the flour, remember).

In her recipe for seed cake (in Kitchen) Nigella reminds us of Jane Eyre and her doomed friend Helen being given seed cake by the gentle headmistress of her otherwise ungentle school. And if I have thought of caraway as a rather fusty taste, it makes me feel rather ashamed to be so spoiled when I read Jane’s rare cake-induced happiness; “we feasted that evening as on nectar and ambrosia”.

Colonel Wyvern's Chicken Curry

Fri, 20 May 2011 04:31:43 -0400

I first came across Colonel Wyvern’s chicken curry in the super-useful Conran Cookbook. Elizabeth David was also a big fan of the Colonel (actually called Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert) and his ”Culinary Jottings for Madras”, a mixture of chivvying and soothing instructions on how to produce Victorian haute-cuisine for the mutually mystified Memsahibs and native cooks of 1870s India. He deplores the use of tinned food when there is so much fresh fowl and vegetables from local markets and his philosophy is best summed up by this;

There will be times and places, when and where you will be obliged to fall back upon Mesrs Crosse and Blackwell, and be thankful. Until those evil days come upon you, however, do not anticipate your penance, but strive to make the food you can easily procure, palatable and good by scientific treatment.

Colonel Wyvern urged his Raj readers to revive the (then) old-fashioned habit of serving curries, by virtue of mouthwatering chapters on spices and curries; his recipe for prawn and cucumber curry with coconut milk had me drooling (not actually very convenient as I was in the British Library at the time, aiming at a studious air). He also offers a serious consideration (flavoured, naturally, with an anecdote about a friend and his naval uncle) of Mulligatunny.

But back to this chicken curry. The Colonel’s instructions, read through the first time, are a poetic mix of cloves (laoong), cardamoms (eelachi), nutmeg (jaephal) - all those spicey words! Read through a second time to work out what to do, I was flummoxed by the references to stock powders, pastes made with ‘some of the above adjuncts’; and why make two pastes then mix them together? And what do you do with those poetically evoked bayleaves (tajipatha) and lemongrass (uggea-ghas)… In the end I committed them all to the frying pan, which equalised everything. Fry the spices; fry the pastes; fry the chicken; and lob it in the oven with the (unfried) stock and coconut milk.

(An aside here; DON’T remember you’ve left the stock boiling only after your second length in the swimming pool, so your boyfriend has to run home to make sure his cottage hasn’t caught fire.)

DO however use, as the Colonel advises “a nice young chicken”. Because what you get is something utterley different from the Maharajah Indian Restaurant’s chicken whatever, where the sauce with its sizzle and scarlet spice takes the main stage, and those bits of chicken are a rubbery chorus at best. With Colonel Wyvern the chicken, kept super-moist by the coconut milk, is allowed to be the star; the sauce an unctuous, cosy, generous supporting act.

We ate it, rolled in a chappatti blanket, with two of his ‘chutneys’; fresh tomato and fresh cucumber; each chopped with chilli and onion a little spice or fresh herbs and each sweet and zingy.

And I believe I’ve been forgiven for nearly burning down the cottage.

Nice blog! I love all the book cover designs in the Great Food Series! Who was the designer and illustrator?

Tue, 17 May 2011 16:43:40 -0400

Thanks, Traci for your nice question - and sorry not to answer it sooner but I’ve been moving house for what seems like weeks. The brilliant Coralie Bickford-Smith was the designer - you can see some more of her work here… http://www.cb-smith.com/ The backgrounds and shapes in which the titles sit are all taken from ceramics contemporary to the period, researched by Sam Johnson. The beautiful lettering was by Stephen Raw. Glad you like them too.

Best,

Pen

Elizabeth David's tian

Fri, 06 May 2011 05:13:34 -0400

I was as nervous as a commoner marrying a prince about cooking from A Little Taste of the Sun, our compilation from seven Elizabeth David books. She is so iconic - ‘legendary’ is the first word from the blurb written by Louise Willder (Penguin’s legendary copywriter) - that it was somewhat like meeting the queen (I imagine). One knows one shouldn’t be phased, that a generation of subsequent worshipful cooks can’t be wrong, but… What if I was the only person who stumbled before her; whose tian - a baked, vegetable omelette - did not arise correctly? One doesn’t feel that, if one’s tian turned out to be a right, royal mess, ED herself would be particularly amused. Omelettes must be ‘correctly made’ with the right pan for, as she says, crisply, ‘Don’t hamper your cooking and waste time and materials through lack of the right tools for the job.’

Given Elizabeth David’s popularity, it is no surprise that A Little Taste of the Sun is already proving to sell ahead of its 19 Great Food siblings. The selection was done by Jill Norman, Elizabeth David’s long-time editor at Penguin and literary executor. Bee Wilson, whose smashing piece about Great Food appeared last week in the Guardian praises Jill’s cleverness in weaving together chapter from seven books, to make her “speak to us fresh”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/30/rereading-great-food-series-penguin-cooking

In the end, the shocking thing about my tian was not the THREE pans, the FOUR stages or the 90 minutes it took to make it. But, since we’re being numeric about all this: one tian for four; one hour later; one nearly empty plate; and one disgustingly full cook.

A Great Chef

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 04:19:00 -0400

I’ve been fumbling around this Great Food cupboard for a wee while now, never quite sure if I’ve put my paws on the right ingredients. So I was overjoyed when the wonderful Andrew Turner, Executive Head Chef of Wilton’s on Jermyn Street said that he would rustle up a few dishes for the FT magazine.

Here’s the menu; all of which would have been around when Wilton’s was founded in 1742 by Jeremy Wilton with his oyster barrow - and a few notes about what I found most interesting about what Andrew said and did with the food.

Water souchy

From William Verral - 1759

This is a soup made from freshwater fish, wine, vinegar and parsley. It is presumably an Anglicised version of the Belgian Waterzooi. It’s creamy whiteness feels very old fashioned but Andrew thought it had probably morphed into the great British fish pie. They managed to source a pike - a formidable-looking creature which doesn’t feature much on the modern table because, Andrew said, it tastes vile!

Pigeons au Poire

Hannah Glass - 1747

Pigeons cooked in the shape of a pear (she gives three different versions)

This is Andrew putting the finishing touches to Pigeon’s au Poire, watched by Sous Chef, Will Best. He said this felt very ‘cheffy’. He probably changed this recipe in terms of cooking more than any of the others. And what a revelation! I love pigeon in restaurants but Stewart discreetly steers me away from them in Waitrose, thanks to the poor dried up little scraps I’ve ‘served’ (or rather bounced onto plates). The answer is cling film and silver foil and a water bath. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous!

A minced pie

Gervase Markham – 1615

Made from mutton and suet, cloves, mace, currants, prunes, dates, orange peel.

Andrew said this was the dish he had most doubts about beforehand but it turned out to be quite popular in the kitchen. Although very sweet meat dishes were beginning to feel a little old fashioned by Jeremy Wilton’s day, they lived on in the Mince Pie, especially at Christmas. The mince only came out of it in the C19th, leaving suet to carry the show.

A Dutch Cream

William Verral – 1759

Creme brulee flavoured with lemon and coriander.

Andrew made this with lemongrass (probably anachronistic but who cares; it tasted amazing), and it looked like a very posh version of the lemon meringue pie beloved of our Sunday lunchtimes. Andrew put this on the menu as ‘Cambridge Cream’ for that lunchtime. My parting image of lovely Wilton’s was of the serving staff, whisking it away from the table and tucking into it with joy.

On the table at Wilton’s.

This is Natalie’s piece.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9cf4533c-5fed-11e0-a718-00144feab49a.html#axzz1JfwC8xPr

Click here for Andrew’s recipe versions of the dishes he made.

A fish for Picasso

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 03:08:23 -0400

Alice B. Toklas lived with Gertrude Stein in Paris, through two world wars and a sociable riot of the avant-garde. Besides entertaining Picasso, pleasing and soothing Gertrude Stein (apparently a full-time occupation in itself) and travelling across France in WWI to deliver supplies to American soldiers, she learnt to cook and collected recipes from everybody she met. She interwove them with her own memoir which became one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time; The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.

We’ve called our selection Murder in the Kitchen after a marvellously funny chapter on learning to despatch your food whilst it is still flopping or flapping (and learning to live with yourself afterwards). The Dashiell Hammett novels she was reading made her realise, “before any story of cooking begins, crime is inevitable”.

She tells another funny, fishy story of decorating a “fine striped bass” with red and white mayonnaise, hard boiled eggs sieved – the eggs and yolks separate; fine herbes and truffles. We had no lovely bass to cook as per the recipe from Alice’s grandmother (who “rarely saw her kitchen but who had endless theories about cooking”), but my mum did have a job lot of rather good smoked salmon that needed using up. So I laid it on a white plate in a fish shape and used the same ingredients (sadly minus the truffles) to decorate it.

Alice B. Toklas is a wonderful anecdotalist and many of her recipes sound gorgeous (although is injecting a leg of mutton with cognac via a surgical syringe a sensible idea?), but she is inclined to miss things out (useful verbs telling you what to do with the butter, for example). Perhaps it is the surrealist in her. In the case of Picasso’s fish she forgets, or can’t be bothered, to describe the pattern she made. So I made it up as I went along (as you can tell from the pic).

I was told, by those artistic wags in my family, to put the mouth in the tail or the eye in the belly, in homage to Picasso. In the end I went for a straight homage to Alice B. so that it would be recognisable as a fish for the children. And they loved it; especially three-year-old Julian (“My fishy”!). Until they came to eat it. Let’s say that the taste of smoked salmon isn’t really improved by pink mayonnaise scales or sieved egg-yolk sand. Next time I’ll reach for the cognac and the syringe.

Exciting food for southern types

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 09:00:07 -0400

I suspect my food goddesses were enthusiastic about the suggestion of Italian food for the next food club at casia mia because they thought it meant something nice and not weird and historic. They didn’t know about my secret weapon - Pellegrino Artusi - a funny, opinionated, discursive cook. His 1891 La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiare bene (usu trans as Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well) defined north Italian cuisine for successive generations.

Here’s Jess showing her enthusiasm…

One of the interesting things Artusi shares with Dumas is a surprising number of references to English food; both admiring (perhaps grudgingly?) as in the recipe for Rosbiffe and playfully insulting. In his introductino to Pisello con Prosciutto (peas with ham):

“Let’s leave to the English the taste for eating boiled vegetables without any seasoning, or at the most with a little butter; we southern types need our food to be a little more exciting”.

Hence our Great Food title; Exciting Food for Southern Types.

When I was making the selection for this book I simply chose those recipes with chat that made me smile. I can’t imagine ever wanting to make Meat Loaf but I couldn’t resist a recipe for Polpettone that begins: “Dear Mr Meat Loaf, please come forward, do not be shy. I want to introduce you to my readers.” So was this less than sophisticated editorial strategy going to come back and bite me in the bum? Would I be able to find something to cook?

One of the lovely things about food club is that we share the burdensome joy of cooking between us. Katharine made monkfish with vermouth; Jess came with a caponata of smoky aubergine, salty capers, sweet peppers, fresh mint - a five-act drama in one bowl. You can’t imagine an English dish like this; exciting food for southern types, indeed.

Italians are infamous (to us Brits) for denuding their hedgerows and fields of small, edible birds; lamentable behaviour of course but I confess to always being intrigued to know how they taste. So I made Artusi’s Torda Finti - ‘mock thrushes’, with its promise that the taste is suggested by its juniper, chicken livers and anchovies filling. It was distinctly tricky to make; chopped livers escaped like blobs of mercury and I found spots of the things for days afterwards on the dishwasher, the tea-towel, the rolling pin (how?).

Here they are; trussed and uncooked and blobbing all over the place;

Then you need to roll them in veal (I used chicken fillets beaten thin), tie the parcels with string and shove the escaping filling back into the parcels in a way that feels a bit too intimate. And don’t forget to kick yourself for buying lardons and realising that, by lardoons, Artusi means streaky bacon which should wrap around the ‘torda finti’.

Anyway, they were OK but I managed to overcook them.

Here they are, looking all the better for being overcooked…

But with George’s champagne, several buckets of Prosecco, Margaret’s lemon and pinenut cake and Isabelle’s home-made biscotti with vin santo - quite frankly who cared?