The Voluptuous Manifesto

Frugal food that's fit for an emperor

2012-02-01T15:06:00.010Z

With everyone watching the pennies, the question of ‘frugal food’ has reared its head, and launched almost as many articles as Helen of Troy launched ships.

But ‘frugal food’ is hardly a new idea – and it doesn’t just refer to cost, but to culinary simplicity too.

And not only that, but it doesn't mean ignoring flavour either – there’s no way that it would get any mention here if it did!

So bearing all this in mind, a perfect example of frugal food is that classic of Italian cuisine, minestrone.

It’s believed that the origins of minestrone predate the Roman Empire, while the Roman army is said to have marched on minestrone and pasta e ceci (a sort of beans and pasta).

Marcus Apicius's ancient cookbook De Re Coquinaria described polus, which was a Roman soup dating back to 30AD and made from faro (a wheat-based food), chickpeas and broad beans, with onions, garlic, lard, and greens thrown in.

Just as with the cassoulet I was exploring at the weekend, there is no one recipe for minestrone – no right or wrong way to make it. Much depends on seasonality and even what’s in the cupboard or fridge, which of course makes it idea frugal food, since it’s the perfect way to use up leftovers.

The only real certainty is the beans – and they should, ideally, be borlotti (or Roman) beans.

Minestrone alla Genovese is a version that’s typical of Liguria, and contains a greater use of herbs than other versions, plus pesto.

And this is the one I decided to use as my own guide, using The Food of Italy.

The first attempt was chock full of taste – but The Other Half was not overwhelmed because he has decided that he would prefer something that was not as chunky and had more broth going on in the bowl.

So, bearing in mind that a quiet life is worth making a certain number of adjustments for, I tried again today.

Whatever you’re going to put in your minestrone, the sofritto is crucial.

This is how any minestrone begins.

Chop an onion and garlic. In the meantime, melt around 40g of lard in a big, heavy pan. What you want to do is cook the vegetables, plus a couple of chopped leaves of sage and some pancetta very gently in the fat for at least 10 minutes. They need to be well softened, but most certainly not browned.

Once that's done, add a couple of medium-sized potatoes - peeled but not cut up - plus sliced carrot and celery, and cook for a further five minutes.

Add a good squeeze of tomato purée, a tinned of chopped tomatoes and some chopped basil leaves - be generous with the freshly ground black pepper, and then add stock and bring gently to the boil.

Turn the heat down, cover and cook for two hours, stirring a couple of times. The big test is when the potatoes have started collapsing on their own and can easily be crushed into the soup.

Test the seasoning.

Then add your rinsed borlotti beans - if from a tin; otherwise, add soaked beans with the tomatoes.

Now at this point, I added a sliced courgette, plus some broken pasta - spaghetti is ideal, but it could be anything, frankly. Keep the broken pasta from the bottom of a bag and save to chuck into a minestrone. And then carry on cooking until the pasta and green vegetables are cooked through.

Serve with a dollop of pesto – which gives it a lovely zing – and some grated parmesan.

According to Janet Clarkson's Soup: A Global History, various texts refer to something called 'Italian wedding soup', but something has got rather confused in the translation.

No such soup has ever existed. But one of the words for soup in Italian is minestra (zuppa is the other). Thin - or 'little' - soup is minestrina and thick - or 'big' - soup is minestrone. When ingredients in a soup are happily combined, they're referred to as maritati or 'married'.

It's not difficult to see where the mistake occurred.

But it's also easy to see why this classic soup is such a fine example of 'frugal food'. Forget the tinned version - it's a travesty. Cooked freshly, this is food fit for a Roman emperor. And given the number of ingredients, there'll be no stinging on portions - mine has done enough for lunch for The Other Half and me tomorrow.

And if all that wasn't enough to get you excited, it's healthy too!

Cometh the hour, cometh the cassoulet

2012-01-29T19:47:00.015Z

It was July. The weather had been mixed as we had trundled from Bordeaux to Carcassonne by train. It was late afternoon when we disembarked, with no obvious method of getting to the hotel other than Shanks's Pony, so we walked, using iPhone 'sat-nav' to guide us.

After checking in, we'd walked over the bridge to the village that lies beneath the plug of rock that bears La Cité itself. Everything was shut. Reluctantly, we adjourned to the hotel restaurant and, expecting nothing to match the view as night descended on the ancient city, ordered cassoulet.

It went way beyond our expectations. We'd had the tinned stuff before, but this was a first 'proper' taste of a treasure of French regional and national cuisine.

Two days later, when we boarded a train for the mountains, we took with us a carefully wrapped cassole, the traditional earthenware cooking pot for the cassoulet.

Back home, in the autumn, I laid in duck confit, but the haricot bean - at the heart of this hearty dish - proved elusive. And then, just as the weather started its dip to the sort of temperatures one could expect in January in northern Europe, I found some.

The moment had arrived.

Cassoulet was, the great cook Prosper Montagné declared, "the god of south-western food" in France.

Initially, it would have been made with fresh broad beans, until white beans arrived from across the border in Spain in the 16th century. And the haricot had since become the established bean for the dish. It remains arguably one of remarkably few absolutely crucial ingredients.

This culinary adventure began in seemingly sensible manner - checking recipes in my own library.

I turned first to the version in Hot Sun Cool Shadow by Angela Murrills; then to one in Goose Fat & Garlic by Jeanne Strang and yet another in Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of South-West France.

Stephanie Alexander had produced her own version in Cooking & Travelling in South-West France, which was the last of my collection of books dedicated to that area - and, as far as I know, the only ones published in English.

If I was getting a little dizzy by now, it was but the start.

In French Country Cooking, the Roux brothers used pork and lamb and no confit. Joël Robuchon's version includes lamb shoulder and lamb neck, and involves topping the final dish with crushed melba toast mixed with parsley, which sounds close to heresy, if you ask me.

Bruno Loubet presents a simplified version in Cooking from l'Odeon, to be cooked not in a traditional earthenware pot, but in something like Le Creuset and presented at table in exactly that.

In The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery, Auguste Escoffier gives instructions for a cassoulet dominated by mutton and with the option of "goose or chicken".

In European Peasant Cookery, Elisabeth Luard's version is informed by her year living in the Languedoc and the instruction of her neighbour there.

And of course, we cannot forget the divine Mrs David, whose French Provincial Cooking goes into some detail about the history of the dish, as well as providing relatively straightforward instructions from a period when Toulouse sausage was something you could only hope to find in a very limited number of shops.

Culinaria France crams it all into a very terse recipe, while The Food of France, like Murrills, simplifies.

Larousse Gastronomique prefers far more detail, and quotes Montagné as having said that cassoulet could be divided into three types - a 'Trinity'.

The 'Father' came from Castelnaudary. The oldest version, it included pork - loin, ham, leg, sausages and fresh rinds - with "perhaps some fresh goose".

The 'Son' of Carcassonne used leg of mutton and, in the shooting season, partridge.

The 'Holy Ghost' of Toulouse uses the same ingredients as in Carcassonne, but in smaller quantities and with the addition of "fresh lard, Toulouse sausage, mutton and duck or goose".

These are the main versions, but as Larousse makes clear, it is far from being a finite list. There is even a salt cod version, with the fish replacing the duck or goose.

But while this so clearly reveals its peasant roots, the French being the French, there has had to be some formalising of what was already a classic - well beyond its home region - into an institution.

In 1966, the États Généraux de la Gastronomie française decreed that a cassoulet had to be made up of at least 30% pork (which could include sausage), mutton or preserved goose, together with 70% haricot beans and stock, fresh rinds, herbs and flavourings.

All of which still leaves things about as clear as mud for the beginner.

So, which path did I follow?

In the end, it was largely Luard, with hints from Robuchon and David.

Prep had started yesterday with the beans. I usually use tinned ones, so I was grateful to read on the packet that 40g of dried haricot would turn into 80g of cooked pulses, which is generally regarded as a 'portion'. Seeing 80g weighed out, I decided to add another 20g for good measure. These was then decanted into a bowl with plenty of cold water and left overnight.

And so to this afternoon.

The pulses were rinsed, drained and popped into a large pan with plenty of cold water, a peeled and sliced carrot, a stick of sliced celery, an onion studded with two cloves, a sachet of bouquet garni, six crushed garlic cloves and the small amount of pork fat Matthew had been able to give me yesterday.

It's heated quickly and then, just before it starts to boil, the temperature is reduced to leave it barely simmering. And so it stays for an hour.

In the meantime, the meats are prepared. Now, this was dinner for two people with smallish appetites, so I'd got a small piece of lean pork, which I diced, plus two Toulouse sausages.

One of the confited duck legs was placed, dripping, into a frying pan, where it gave off all of it's coating of creamy fat, before being removed to a plate. Then the pork and the sausages were fried in this fat, together with another four crushed garlic cloves.

The duck leg was stepped of its flaking meat; the sausages were sliced thickly. A diced onion was cooked in the fat after the meats had all been removed.

Don't throw the fat away - you need it later.

Next up, skin, deseed and chop a large, beefy tomato.

Heat your oven to 120˚C.

When the beans are ready, strain. Get rid of the vegetables and bouquet garni. Keep the pork fat.

Take your pot/casserole and put the fat in the bottom, fat side down. The theory is that, starting with some beans, you layer the ingredients. For just two of us, that meant a layer of beans, then everything else forming on thick layer, to be topped with more beans.

Oops. A problem. There were nowhere near enough haricot to top the dish. It was rather too late to contemplate a minimum four-hour soak for more beans, followed by an hour simmering.

I cheated in the only way possible, rinsing of a tin of cannellini beans and using them to fill in the gaps.

The dish is covered (with foil, if you don't have a lid) and placed in the oven for two hours. Check a couple of times and, if the beans look a little too dry, add a little boiling water.

After two hours, remove from the oven and turn up the heat to 160˚C. Spread a layer of breadcrumbs over the top and drizzle with the melted goose/duck fat from the duck confit that you'd reserved.

Leave the lid off and pop back in the oven. Give it 30 minutes, by which time it should have a nice, golden crust, then remove and stir the breadcrumbs gently into the beans. Back in the oven it goes for at least another half an hour.

The key here is patience. But every 10 to 15 minutes, give it another stir.

This breaking the crust is considered to be really authentique: they do it seven times in Castelnaudary and eight in Toulouse. It's now been set at three times in Hackney.

Remove, serve and eat.

For a first effort, I was very pleased. It wasn't perfect - the shortage of haricot being an obvious point. But I'd also be inclined to increase the initial bean cooking time by 30 minutes, as suggested in at least one recipe, to ensure they're just a little softer.

And the pork and sausages need to be cooked initially for a shorter time but at a higher heat.

But that apart, I was chuffed. My first effort was no insult to the lovely, half-glazed dish that has graced the kitchen since our return last August. And it certainly won't be long before I give it another go.

Dealing with a case of SAD. Or is it EOF?

2012-01-26T14:42:00.006Z

It could be the all-pervading gloom and a dose of SAD; it could be a hangover from the festive period. It might be the knowledge that the clock is now ticking on the final year of my forties.

But one way or the other, I have not been myself of late. And the nearest description I can offer is that it has felt like a case of Early Onset Frumpiness.

Is this what women mean when they talk of suddenly feeling invisible as they reach A Certain Age?

At home, I slob around in casual gear – and feel perfectly happy doing so. But elsewhere, I have been feeling distinctly dowdy and dumpy.

After allowing this mood to dominate me for a week or so, I realised that there were things that I could do. Mostly, it was about finding ways of feeling that I was taking back control.

Step one seemed obvious. Ever since getting less than a pound back from a tenner for a single packet of fags at WS Smith at Glasgow Airport in November, my smoking days had been numbered.

I hadn’t set a time frame – it was too frenetic a period to be adding in something like that – and then stocked up in France on the basis that, once the Gauloise were finished, I would be too, as a smoker.

In the event, it took a packet more, but on Monday, I pressed a patch onto my arm and threw away the remaining ciggies.

It is nearly the end of day five now and we are progressing well. And I haven’t had increased munchies either (which will calm my father, who is more worried that I will turn into a veritable beach ball of elephantine proportions than improve my bank balance and my cardiovascular health).

Step two – book a hair appointment. And that was late this afternoon – fresh colour to cover the grey and a short, sharp cut to make me feel modern again.

I never have been able to do the long hair that, in the UK, seems to be de rigeur for every woman who doesn’t want to be assumed to be a raving bull dyke.

Why this obsession with long hair, I don’t know: why this belief that the only 'properly' feminine hair is long hair? There seems to be far greater variety of length in France than here. Personally, my hair has always been far too fine – and a halfway house between curly and straight – to do much with it if I do let it grow.

Yet more than one hairdresser down the years has baulked at cutting it short. Not Ian, though, who always does a very nice job. And the whole experience – not just the wonderful head massage – is deeply relaxing.

Step three – think about the wardrobe. Not quite as easy. I am, in many ways, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea in two ways at present.

On the one hand, I’m a traditionalist in matters sartorial – my mother had me looking like a junior Miss Marple in my teens, so it’s well rooted – but there's a part of me that yearns to be far more bohemian. After all, I’m ‘A Creative’, don’t y’know!

On top of that, the clothes problem isn’t helped at present by being ‘between sizes’ as I very slowly lose weight.

But what could be done easily was remembering to wear some heels in a morning rather than opting for the rather flat boots I’ve been living in. It might sound daft, but even a small heel can put a bit more spring in your step.

And then, in a take-hold-of-the-situation-and-shake-the-cobwebs-out-of-it sort of way, I set about a day of deep cleaning in the flat.

It might not have been good for my hands, but it was certainly good for our abode. And the exertion was a good wrench out of the lethargy that seems to have been hanging around with all that grey cloud.

I had allowed myself to slump into laziness. Other little things had been allowed to slip too – like a decent skin care routine.

The only thing that is clear is that, five days after embarking on this attempt to invigorate myself, I feel a lot better. Now if only the blue skies stay overhead, I can finally step properly into the new(ish) year.

Pep up the midweek food

2012-01-19T14:17:00.009Z

Can you eat well but cheaply? It’s a question that has been exercising more than a few minds in the last few years, as the county slumps from recession to recession and families find it increasingly difficult to make ends meet.

And indeed, what does "well" mean within that construction? Does it simply mean healthily? Does it simply mean 'enough to keep you going'? Or can it mean something more?

More than one person has observed that the last time we were a really healthy nation was during rationing – so perhaps there’s hope now? And more than one person has decided that suggesting frugal food solutions can be a money spinner.

Yeah. Well, that might be more than a tad boring, looking back at some of what people ate during WWII and in the immediate years after.

But there’s a point here – and it’s not totally unrelated to what I posted about earlier this week.

Perhaps cash concerns can be beneficial to health – and pleasure?

With the general idea I discussed there in mind, I try to have at least two meat-free days a week.

Actually, I should be a bit more specific here. It’s very rare for my lunch to include meat. Occasionally, my breakfast might include meat. So it’s primarily a question of dinner being meatless a couple of times a week. Of fishless, for that matter.

Tuesday was just such a night.

I have decided that, even though this is not one of The Other Half’s favourite dishes, he can put up with it occasionally. It’s not far distant from an arrabiata – and he certainly enjoys a pomodoro – so he has little excuse.

This recipe, although essentially traditional, originally came from a little book of 32 pasta recipes from Lidl, which cost me peanuts – a book that continues to be a delightful source of dishes.

So this is my ever-so-slightly tweaked version.

Take some big tomatoes – you want really fleshy ones: big Italian plum tomatoes are the best, but they’re not easy to get, so the sort of beefy ones that my local Turkish shops sell are the business.

I used five tomatoes for two people. Halve them and scoop out the seeds, then leave them to drain on some kitchen paper.

Take a couple of romano peppers – they’re the long ones and so much sweeter than the standard bell peppers. Halve and remove the seeds. Do the same with a couple of red chillies.

Heat your grill and put the shelf around 10cm below.

If the fruits have been in the fridge and the skins are damp with condensation, wipe them dry carefully. Better yet, make sure they've been out of the fridge for a good 20 minutes before you start preparation.

Pop everything on a foil-lined baking tray, skin side up. And under the grill it goes.

It’ll take a minimum of 10 minutes for the skins to scorch and blacken. Once you’ve reached that point (see the picture above) bring them out and let them cool until you can handle them comfortably. Then you can peel the skins off.

In the meantime, pop a saucer under the grill with a layer of ground almonds on it. You’ll need to watch this because it can get burnt very quickly, and you just want it when it’s started turning golden.

Right. Now you can put everything in a pan and give it a very gently blitz with a hand-held blender – or give it just a tiny process in a processor.

Otherwise, just chop the fruits roughly and mix with the toasted nuts.

That’s it, in essence. If it’s a bit stiff, you can loosen it with olive oil, but otherwise, simply heat gently and serve with the pasta of your choice.

Easy, tasty, healthy and inexpensive. Given word associations, it seems churlish to describe it as ‘frugal food’, but it’s certainly not a bank breaker!

Enlightened self interest and pleasure

2012-01-16T17:30:00.001Z

It didn’t take long for the first bit of bad food news of the year to appear.

On Friday – just as you were looking forward to a weekend brekkie with the full works – the media revealed that processed meats cause cancer. That bacon butty can kill you! And let's not mention the sausages!

Well, actually, behind that tabloidesque comment – and the headlines that were on display – was research that suggested that the risk of pancreatic cancer can be increased by around 19% by eating approximately one sausage a day.

But pancreatic cancer is, itself, rare. And there appear to be other factors – known and unknown – that could have an impact.

Yet the World Cancer Research Fund has advised people to completely avoid processed meat – which seems to be the most crass and counter-productive piece of advice ever.

Actually, what’s counter-productive are these sort of stories in general.

Some years ago, I had been commissioned to write an article about Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I contacted one of the charities involved. One thing that emerged from conversations was how they hate it when stories about cancer get into the general media.

It’s not that they think that the results of surveys should be hidden, but rather that a steady diet of ‘this gives you cancer’ and ‘that gives you cancer’ might not actually give you cancer, but it will quite probably make you feel so fatalistic that you’ll stop any reasonable efforts you’re making to avoid obvious risks.

They noted that, whenever such a story emerges – this was around the time of ‘you’ll get cancer if you work night shifts’ – they actually found that fewer people called them for advice, precisely because of the fatalism that such stories create.

If so many things in life can give you cancer, then what’s the point of trying to be healthy? You’re going to get it anyway.

What's more, many of the research that is reported is being taken out of its scientific context and, therefore, usually manages to sound much more frightening than it actually is.

Should it be reported in the mainstream media, then? Well there's a question – and particularly at a time when media ethics is being examined in great detail by the Leveson inquiry that has followed revelations about phone hacking by parts of our news media.

Perhaps the question that should be asked before publication is does the sum of these stories – see above – outweigh any possible advantages. I wonder if there's a single story like this that has resulted in a saved life.

But back to this one specifically.

I doubt that any sensible person wants to increase their chances of getting cancer – I certainly don't. I might have started getting waves of the sense of my own mortality at the cliché-ridden age of 40, and I might have known – and know – a horrifyingly large number of people who have had to deal with or are dealing with cancer, but I have no desire to see whether I would be as heroic, under such circumstances, as they have been.

So what about the question of meat consumption?

It’s probably fair to suggest that, although we are omnivores – and therefore evolved to eat meat – we are omnivores. In other words, we can eat more than meat. Indeed, our ancient ancestors probably didn’t get a big kill and eat meat every day.

Unlike Boudi, Otto and Loki, we don't actually need meat (or fish) at every meal.

Perhaps the real problem is that meat has become so cheap that many people consider it a staple for every day – indeed, even for every meal.

Isn't that cheapness a good thing?

Well, perhaps not. Look at what it can mean. The £2 chicken has probably spent its brief life sitting in its own shit, unable to move and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones and other drugs.

Setting aside any question of animal welfare, why would anyone want to eat that?

We know that swine flu evolved via intensive factory production of pork products. Why would anyone want to eat pork reared in such an environment?

But if we look a bit further, we can also see that cheapness is a bit of a con.

Take bacon. It's not difficult to find a pack of six rashers for around £1.99. But since those rashers shrink massively during cooking, spewing white gunk into the pan – water that the meat has been pumped full of in the first place – and never gets crisp properly, then wouldn't it be better to buy six rashers of quality bacon for double the price, and ensure almost zero shrinkage, none of the gunk and rind that will crisp?

In fact, if you look at it like that, the prices must be close to equal.

But what I didn't mention there is another factor – taste.

There is a good argument for animal welfare on the basis of taste alone. Call it enlightened self interest, if you will. Because meat from animals and birds that have been raised decently will taste a lot, lot better. That £2 chicken might not actually taste of shit, but then it won't taste of anything at all, so you'll need to swamp it in a sauce to make it edible.

But better meat is more expensive. In which case, why don't we simply buy less and, therefore, make it easier to afford the better product?

Meat-free days are really not the purgatory some might imagine – even to a committed meat eater like me. There's always fish – and even vegetables are nice!

Yet by opting for the best flavour possible, instead of the cheapest product, and by then cutting the amount of meat we eat in order to find the best possible stuff, we possibly even manage to do ourselves some good from a health perspective.

Pleasure can be good for you.

Telling people that they shouldn't eat a popular and enormously enjoyable foodstuff, at all, ever – and even of the best quality – is just plain stupid, and doomed to fail.

The start of a wintery weekend

2012-01-15T18:26:00.004Z

Friends – it is the weekend. The time of the week when I sit down to start contemplating food – as if I don't do it at other times! But there are fewer distractions over the coming days.

I managed to get back to Broadway Market on Friday before Henry Tidiman, our rather good, traditional local butcher, had closed, and thus have something fresh for the evening to get things going with a bang.

Otto, who enquired about the food question the moment I walked through the door, was sated somewhat with a tin of sardine and mackerel from Waitrose – she had to share it with Boudi and Loki, of course, but it made them all a tad calmer.

They mostly eat biscuit, but I have to give in to feline demands occasionally. And this particular example of tinned food always looks so good when you open it – no brown 'mush' – that I'm tempted myself.

That done, it was down to contemplating exactly what to do with the chicken thighs that I had bought.

The temperature is finally fallen to something closer to what you'd expect in January, so it's entirely fitting to feel that need for comforting food.

I know some of you don’t like the cold, but two things strike me: first, when we had the foot and mouth crisis in 2001, it was due in part to having had a number of mild winters in the preceding years. A proper cold spell is needed to kill of a number of nasty things.

And second, before the more recent series of wintery winters, The Other Half and I had spent a new year in Amsterdam.

We’d bought thermals for the purpose – and needed them. But among a number of weather-related memories from that trip, a walk in Vondel Park on New Year’s Eve in the morning stands out: with the small lakes iced over, everyone had come out to play.

There were children and adults on ancient skates and sleds. It might have been a grayish day – high cloud, however – but it was joyous.

And after four days, I returned to London feeling really refreshed and invigorated.

Now, the arrival of genuinely seasonal weather also makes the prospect of sitting down to browse assorted cookbooks even more alluring.

I skinned and boned the chicken – really easy – and then cut it into strips and browned these in a little lard.

Removing to a plate, a diced onion took the place of the meat. When that had been softened, plain flour was added, cooked for a minute or so, and then the pan was deglazed with white wine and white wine vinegar.

Once everything was blended, there was a substantial squirt of tomato purée, a good amount of black pepper, an even better amount of a smoked paprika and some chicken stock.

The chicken went back in the pan, together with some sliced mushrooms and the shredded remains of a cabbage from a couple of days previously. And it was all left to simmer away, under a lid, for half an hour or so.

Once everything was cooked, it simply remained to add a couple of dollops of sour cream, stir in gently and reheat just as gently – and the job’s a good one. Serve with rice.

Yesterday morning it was cold – not a namby pamby southern cold, but cold with real frost and beautifully blue skies.

Cheered enormously, and with a list in my pocket, it was time to head back to Broadway Market, which is slowly returning to normal after the break over new year.

With bags full, it was back home and into the kitchen – after a break to provide Otto with the second fuss session of the day.

In this weather, soup is perfection.

Yesterday, I decided to do a River Café one – rustic and chunky, and as comforting as a big woolly sweater.

Diced butternut squash, chopped garlic, a chopped potato and a tin of tomatoes are added to a pan, together with a little light stock and some crushed fennel seeds.

The recipe says tinned tomatoes are fine – but to drain and not use the juice in the can. Now to me, that’s daft. I tin the lot in and rinse out the remaining juice – I don’t have tinned tomatoes with any junk added anyway. And then I use a little less of any other liquid.

Then let it cook. When the potato is done, mash gently. Serve with a drizzle of good, virgin oil, a dollop of Mascarpone and some grated Parmesan. Lovely.

In the evening, it was a return to trying to improve my fish cookery. Cod again – and I came close to messing it up completely – it wasn’t over-cooked, but I seem utterly incapable of turning fish from the skin side to the non-skin side when it’s been cooked initially on the former.

It doesn’t make things any easier – and it made me a lot swearier – when the skin simply stuck to the pan or came off on my fish slice.

Was the pan hot? Yes. Was the oil (rapeseed) hot too? Yes! The fish was at room temperature and nice and dry. You’d really think that something like that would be so simple, wouldn’t you?

We had some leek, some fine beans (a very rare concession to something other than season, UK veg) and some plain, boiled spuds, with butter and good lemon.

But even my annoyance at the less-than-perfect fish presentation, it was warming, comforting food.

If this weather keeps up, there’ll be more where that came from.

It's deconstruction Jacques, but not as we know it

2012-01-11T22:40:00.003Z

So: it's the middle of the week. There's the remains of a leg of lamb sitting in the fridge, but we've already had a post-roast dinner of cold cuts, so how best to use some more of the meat?

The obvious thing was a shepherd's pie.

But an intervention of sorts had come via copy of Food Presenting Secrets by Cara Hobday and Jo Denbury, a copy of which had landed only a couple of days ago.

One of the first ideas I'd noticed was a 'tower' of puréed potato. In essence, the potato is cooked as normal, then put through the ricer and beaten into smooth perfection with butter and good double cream, but then it's packed into buttered rings on a parchment-lined baking tray, before being cooked further in the oven at 200˚C for 20 minutes.

So that was already in mind.

Two small problems had struck me when I'd been making cottage or shepherd's pies in the last few months: first, that the diced carrot needed pre-cooking to get the right texture. Second, that the most natural dish I had to cook it in always encouraged me to make too much.

Slowly but surely, an idea dawned. I've also noticed that using a ring for presentation purposes is actually quite a good way of helping limit portion size.

Put two and two together and what do you get?

I started toying with the idea of a deconstructed shepherd's pie, but after such a thought had flittered through my mind, hot on its heels came a sort of: 'err, exactly what is a deconstructed dish?'

A trendy phrase, but what does it actually mean?

Simply, it's a dish where the ingredients have been separated out - the rather obvious deconstruction bit - but the way it's reconstructed is just as important, while the flavours should still give you a sense of the traditional version.

An interesting challenge.

First, some of the remaining lamb from Sunday's roast was minced. An onion was chopped finely and softened in a little rapeseed oil, before the mince was added and cooking continued at a low heat.

Because it had already been cooked, the meat was dry. I added a little water to moisten, plus a shake of HP sauce.

In the meantime, three potatoes were peeled and boiled, while a carrot was also peeled, cut into slices just over half a centimetre thick and cooked in salted water for around eight minutes - until the point of a sharp knife entered easily. These were then rinsed under cold water and drained.

The oven was pre-heated and my largest rings buttered and placed on a prepared tray. The cooled meat mixture was shared between the rings and packed down, before the potato followed. It was dotted with butter and sprinkled with fleur de sel before being popped into the oven.

Next up, butter is melted gently in a pan and the carrot slices, which have now been cut into small dice, are finished off, with a touch of seasoning. It takes around five minutes.

A small amount of peas were also boiled.

The final question was gravy/sauce. I decided to try a little experiment and thinned down a small amount of HP sauce with some dipping Balsamico. Finding it tasted okay, I made up a bit more.

Plating up was easy. A palate knife was perfect to lift the rings from baking tray to plate. The gravy was easy to dot around - plenty of space on a big plate - and the carrot and peas fitted in easily after that, with a sprig of thyme to top it all off.

It looked great, but it tasted good too. The meat was still a little dry, but it was full of flavour. The potato worked well. The carrot was much better cooked than in my previous, traditional versions. The gravy worked well and added a bit of necessary punch.

Perhaps surprisingly, it didn't take any longer than the usual version. In this case, for instance, I didn't need to pre-cook the peas.

And it was certainly good on the eye!

It might not be deconstructionism as Derrida meant it, but it wasn't bad at all for a first effort.

Some educative cooking

2012-01-09T15:25:00.006Z

In his book, A Life in the Kitchen, Michel Roux Jr comments on the danger of basic losing culinary skills. Developing his theme, he suggests that, while anyone can make a dessert from a recipe, a declining number of people really know how to cook meat or fish.

He has a point. There’s an extent to which much baking and patisserie, for instance, has such a near-scientific precision that it’s not impossible to simply follow a recipe carefully – although that doesn’t mean that no skills are required and no calamities possible (as I’ve found, more than once).

But where and how do you learn those things about cooking meat? For instance, where you learn how to test for doneness with your finger?

Browning meat properly and getting a maillard reaction is more difficult than it seems – or certainly if you haven’t been brought up simply knowing how to do it as a habit so it becomes instinct.

I made some steps forward this last year – not least on getting a maillard reaction. That was massively thanks to Raymond Blanc, as I’ve explained here more than once. And his advice is illustrative of why it’s possibly difficult to learn such things – because the key is to engage more than one of our senses when cooking, and it takes a bit of practise to learn to do this and then to remember to do it every time. Well, it does for me!

But with all this in mind, I’d already decided that I would try to improve some apparently basic skills this year.

First up – fish. Now I love fish, but frequently feel that I’m not much cop at cooking it – and that it’s easy enough to mess up. Meat is a tad more forgiving.

But what had started to dawn in the final months of last year had been the realisation that it also helps if you cook something regularly – not just once every couple of months.

Because of those feelings of piscine inadequacy, I had rather lapsed into cooking fish less frequently. When I did, the emphasis was on poached salmon or pan-fried tuna, with very occasional sole or plaice, grilled with a little butter.

But in recent months, after reading Nigel Slater on the subject, I’ve made a couple of attempts to pan fry cod – with largely improved results.

So on Saturday, taking a lead from Joël Robuchon, I tried the same approach with salmon.

It involved slashing the fillets on the skin side, to just beneath the skin. Then seasoning – and then frying in a small amount of hot, neutral oil for three minutes on the skin side and then a recommended one on the other side – with an allowance that if you want it a bit better done, a further minute is acceptable before it is overcooked.

Such precision in instructions can really help. The result was not bad at all – far better than the last time I attempted to pan fry salmon.

It was served on a bed of Savoy cabbage, which, like sprouts, gets the blanching treatment by Robuchon. Cutting the cabbage up – removing the leaves one at a time and then slicing the core out – it dawned on me how many people probably don’t do that, but then boil it either not enough to properly cook that tough stalk or too much for the more delicate leaf.

The blanching process also helps keep a vibrant colour. After its pre-cooking, the cabbage is squeezed dry and later, cooked for a few minutes in a little butter, before having seasonings and crème fraîche added, lending it a buttery quality, but without too much sweetness.

With a sharp sauce of sherry vinegar, white wine and shallots, finished to glossy glory with crème fraîche and a little butter, this was a pleasing dish. And one that I felt I learned things from.

Continuing the educational theme, for Sunday, I’d bought a leg of lamb. I usually use Delia’s timings – which mean 30 minutes at 190˚C (fan oven) and then 30 minutes per 450g at 160˚C.

I had considered taking Robuchon’s instructions – a much shorter cooking time at a much higher temperature (240˚C – ordinary oven) – but chickened out on the basis of my fears about my oven’s apparent ability to cook things in the time given in some recipes.

However, I did put some lamb trimmings in the roasting dish, and oiled and seasoned the meat à la Robuchon, using sprigs of thyme instead of my old standby of rosemary.

When it was done. I left it on a rack to drain, seasoned with a little fleur de sel, under a tent of foil for 20 minutes, while I finished off everything else.

The trimmings are removed from the roasting tin, together with most of the fat. Add eight tablespoons of water, stir round to scrape any meat from the dish and pop back into the oven, which you’ve turned off.

By the time your meat has rested and you've plated up, you’re left with a very pleasant jus.

In the meantime, there were a couple of potatoes to purée and some sprouts to finish, à la Robuchon again. Getting them to within five minutes of completion earlier in the afternoon was a helpful prep thing. To the pan of seasonings and melted butter I also added four halved artichoke hearts.

And remember what I mentioned a few days ago about how Robuchon asserts that such a process helps digestion? Well, yet again, there was none of the 'traditional' after effect of sprouts. Perhaps he's right? Even ignoring the fart effect – or lack thereof – they taste great: cooked properly, yet with some bite left. Love it!

To finish, I’d made a little sauce, simmering redcurrants in a little water and with a tiny amount of sugar and a couple of sprigs of thyme until it was fit to strain through a sieve.

It was completed with a touch more sugar and some drizzling Balsamico, and then gently reheated just before serving. And very pleasing it was too, contrasting very well with the sweet meat and also adding a shot of vivid colour to the plate.

It wasn’t from any specific recipe, but what gave me a lot of satisfaction was that making it suggested I’d inwardly digested a couple of skills and also some sense of flavour and of combining flavours.

The lamb, I have to say, was wonderful, with utterly glorious fat – crisp and sweet and light as air. Personally, I had just two smallish slices – the fat makes me feel so delightfully sated so quickly. And there's loads left for the coming days.

I will try roasting lamb the Robuchon way – and if I do it relatively soon, so that hopefully it will mean that I can remember this one well enough to understand the differences and make comparisons.

Education is good for you. Good food is possibly even better.

Your January diet of diet stories – digested

2012-01-05T13:16:00.009Z

Being the start of a new year, with all those resolutions flying around, it’s apparently a good time for people to consider diets.

So with that in mind, it’s hardly surprising that a glut of stories on the subject has hit the media in recent days.

In France, a diet ‘guru’ has urged the government to partly grade university students on their weight.

Well of course! After all, being good at your subject is absolutely the same as being a few pounds overweight.

The French are way behind Brits in the fat stakes, but obesity is rising there too, so hence the issue raising its head – including with such idiotic ‘solutions’.

A story from the BBC about entrepreneurs in the US making money by catering for the growing numbers of big people in that country ignored the massive profits made by the entire diet industry, which is as dependent on people being overweight as a drug addict is for their next fix.

The diet industry needs people to be unable to shift that weight permanently and so frequently resort to weight-reduction programmes; and it needs people to be so worried about how they look and their body shape etc that they become repeat customers.

The article and comments section did, however, give some people the opportunity to show off just how nasty, rude and ignorant they can be when the subject at hand is those dangerous fatties who are obviously threatening the entire nation because of their greed and laziness.

What do you mean – you didn’t realise it was that much of a problem?

But fear not – help is at hand: the government has boosted the ongoing Change4Life campaign – with help from supermarkets offering cheaper healthy foods to help families cook cheap but healthy meals.

Good old Ainsley Harriott is involved too, producing a recipe book.

Now the statistics certainly show a big rise in obesity in the UK – British women are the heaviest in Europe, with men in second place for their sex.

And the health problems associated with this are entirely real.

But, setting aside the dire nature of the website itself – is this the answer? Let’s take a bit of a deeper look.

The supermarkets in question are Aldi, Asda and the Co-op.

At the time of writing, the offers at Asda include bagged salads, Auntie Bessie’s “finely chopped vegetables” (£1.50 for 700g), reduced-fat sausages (with assorted additives and only 65% pork), two varieties of oven chips and a kilo of chicken for £2.48; breakfast cereals with sugar and salt, various WeightWatchers products, lashings of Activia and Müller yogurts, and loads of fruit-based drinks with additives aplenty.

Bargain chain Aldi has six items on offer – cabbage, celery, Chantenay carrots, onions, swede and tomatoes – while the Co-op includes bagged salads, lots of Müller yogurts, lots of Co-op yogurts, bags of prepared stir fry veg (£1, reduced from £1.50, for 450g) and bags of vegetables for steaming (two for £2), plus a ‘three for a tenner’ deal on chicken products (including a full bird of almost 1.5kg).

In other words, Aldi apart, there are a lot of 'added value' products being offered as cheap and healthy alternatives here: that is, processed foods that, by nature of being processed, give the producer/retailer better returns.

The supermarket pages also include links to all the rest of the chains’ ranges – so for instance, at the Co-op, you get specific links for “bread and cakes”, “beers and ciders” etc.

Given the fact that most supermarkets are always running (and advertising) offers anyway, isn’t this just another case of the government providing free advertising for big business?

I’m all for encouraging people to cook from scratch, but why this emphasis on supermarkets?

The website aims to get you started with seven “supermeal” recipes that are “low-cost, quick and easy”. Apparently, your ‘supermeal’ for Monday could be “grilled plaintain with fresh salsa”. At just 94 calories, it doesn’t say what else you’re going to need to eat to keep hunger at bay.

Wednesday is cauliflower cheese at under 300cals. Are these really supposed to be a main evening meal?

If so, what are you eating for the rest of the day? Is it assumed you’ll have been tucking into a Maccy D for lunch?

This so-called promotion makes absolutely no inroads on the question of cooking skills, which many people lack.

And frankly, if you want to inspire people to cook more – and in many cases, actually learn to cook – then it might be an idea to make the suggested meals a tad more appetising than Tuesday’s “tasty tuna and sweetcorn pasta”.

Tinned tuna is bland, while many people can’t even digest sweetcorn – and you can buy fresh veg that are cheaper than anything in tins.

This is, in essence, uninspiring student food.

And if these are supposed to be recipes that are cheap, then it might be an idea to work out what to do with the rest of the ingredients that it suggests buying – for instance, you won’t be able to purchase “three celery sticks” on their own, even when that’s all that’s needed of that ingredient for Saturday’s sweet and sour chicken.

There are also two celery sticks required for Thursday’s pork with apples and celery, but that’s it for the week, yet with no explanation of what to with the rest of your celery or where to buy just the five “sticks” required for that week’s recipes.

Strangely enough, people who need to watch pennies as well as the pounds can’t afford to buy ingredients and then throw half of them away.

Monday requires three spring onions and a quarter of a cucumber, while Sunday requires half a savoy cabbage. Guess what – there are no explanations of where you’ll buy these amounts or how to use them up if you have to buy the full amounts.

The example of a week’s planned menus is neither appetising nor coherent.

If you wanted to do the latter, it would be better to start with a Sunday dinner and plan for a piece of meat that will leave you with leftovers that can then be used in the coming days.

So if you have a piece of roast pork, for instance, then you can use some of the pork for a casserole on Monday. If you’ve got some sprouts and spuds left over, you keep them for bubble and squeak.

It’s difficult to see that this is anything except a thinly-disguised attempt to boost big businesses that don’t need it.

In the meantime, as the obsession with how we look shows no signs of letting up, it seems that increasing numbers of British women are having either full cosmetic surgery or non-surgical cosmetic procedures.

At this point, I am going to break my resolution to make no resolutions: I promise that I am not going to have botox (it’s a poison, for fecks sake!) or go under the knife or have my skin stretched to try to look like an expressionless, middle-aged impersonation of a baby.

The line has been drawn at having colour put in my hair, moisturising my skin and tweezing away the moustache that threatens to break out over my top lip: facial hair looks great on men, but I remain unconvinced of it as a female thing.

For better or for worse, my lines and the bits of me that sag where once they didn’t are me; they show some of the story of who I am and who I have been.

And with my fiftieth year now under way, I am damned well not going to buy into the cult of an imagined, airbrushed, artificial eternal youth. Why on Earth would I want to?

When did we become so uncomfortable in our own skins that we started to spend our lives trying to be what we’re not?

Okay, that’s not the reason for the rise in obesity, but perhaps it’s not unconnected. Perhaps part of the problem is that people feel less control in their lives than ever; in feeling that they cannot match the ‘perfection’ that is increasingly demanded of them, they simply give up?

Perhaps too, people are so sick and fed up with being spoon fed the sort of pap that the Change4Life campaign dishes out, as well as the sheer nastiness of the people who, in typical cowardly fashion, hide beneath the anonymity of the internet to mete out their bile against those who are overweight, that they simply stick two fingers up to it all and, if they want to eat nothing but deep-fried Mars bars, do so?

I have no concrete solutions to offer, but at the end of the day, is anyone made even a shred happier by all this?

If there is a key, then, perhaps it’s actually pleasure: pleasure in what you eat – which obviates the desire to eat junk anyway – and a pleasure in the experience of life itself.

Perhaps I should publish something on that theme – a voluptuous manifesto, in other words.

Going German in the kitchen again

2012-01-04T14:57:00.013Z

With the new year now well under way, it’s nice to find something different to eat.

Boxing Day left behind it a wake of ham: a boiled ham with sour brown shallot sauce is our one guaranteed Christmas eating tradition – and the only one with big left overs.

We started with ham, with jacket potatoes and pickles on the side – the pear chutney I’d made back in September was finally opened and proved to have lovely depth of flavour.

Then there was ham, egg and chips – with the latter cooked in dripping from Mary.

It's worth pointing out (again) at this point that real chips are just so, so much better than the frozen ones – and cooking them now involves no more hopeful cubes of bread tossed into the fat to see if it’s hot enough. This time, I remembered that one of my cook’s thermometers would tell me exactly the right moment.

Ham, of course, can go between slabs of bread. And it can sit on a plate with sautéed potatoes and carrots à la Robuchon.

These are sliced no thicker than 0.5cm and cooked gently for 25 minutes in a pan with butter, sugar, a pinch of salt and water just to cover, and topped with a disc of parchment paper that’s cut to shape and has four holes speared into it.

The disc is then removed and the cooking continued at a slightly higher temperature for a further five minutes.

And then there are the pickles again.

By which point, one is getting a tad bored of ham – thank goodness it’s now done!

And what better way to celebrate the end of something that started with a German dish – that sour brown shallot sauce gets a mention in Thomas Mann’s Nobel-cited Buddenbrooks – than with another German dish?

Indeed, some of you may have spotted that, for all my love of French food, lunch on Christmas Day was a bit northern European/Baltic in fashion.

Much as I am a Francophile in so many ways, the older I get, the more I feel a sense of northern-central European roots.

So today was the perfect time for herring with a bacon gravy – or Hering mit speckstippe as it is properly known.

It is a dish that I was introduced to some years ago by George, and it combines sweet with sharp quite beautifully. It's also enormously comforting.

Dice some streaky bacon – smoked or not, that’s your choice.

Take an onion or two and chop to similar-sized dice – not too small, because you don’t want this all to melt away.

Pop these into a pan with a little fat and cook very gently until they’re soft and caramelised.

When he ontroduced me to the dish, George suggested vegetable oil: I suspect he realised that, at that stage in my culinary development, lard would have been a step too far.

Serve over plain boiled potatoes and herrings decanted from the container you bought them in.

I used Mrs Elswood's sweet herring fillets (£3.99 for 500g). You'll often find them in the kosher sections of shops.

The bacon was unsmoked (12 rashers for £1.85). I used six.

I admit that the onions were a bit of a treat – I'd spotted Roscoff onions in La Bouche just before new year and bought a string; many chefs recommend them. Okay, not as cheap as your usual onion (they actually have AOC recognition in France), but boy, are they gorgeously sweet!

So was it good? Was it ever!

It's a magnificent, simple dish – but not one you're likely to find in any cookbook. And thus I have George to thank for telling me about it in the first place – and thus being allowed to spread the word.

I did some frozen peas on the side too, so that it provided two portions of fruit and veg for the day, plus loads of other goodies. And as illustrated above, it's not expensive.

But it really is a wonderful dish.

Being resolved

2012-01-03T13:43:00.007Z

This time of year, by tradition, involves resolutions. Well, not here, of course – apart from a sense of resolve that no resolutions will be made and, therefore, none broken.

Have you noticed how the bulk of the resolutions that you hear about are negative? In effect, they are about denial; about changing behaviour that was, presumably, quite enjoyable, to behaviour that is, following this logic, less enjoyable.

So someone’s giving up booze, for instance, or chocolates. Or going on a general diet.

Why now? Do a massive number of people really eat and drink so much over the festive period that they actually need to diet just to get back to where they were before Advent?

And if they do, will these be some of the same people who, after the flush of new year’s resolution self-satisfaction has worn off, will find Lent cropping up to keep them on the straight and narrow?

If anything, Lent is even more confusing than these new year resolutions.

In recent years, one of the glories of the internet has been the discovery that the popularity of Lent seems to be growing among those who have no religious interest in it.

It has become a time to give up something for something you don’t believe in.

Unless, of course, you do believe in it – and then you get to play pick and mix. I recall an incident a few years ago of a young woman on an internet forum arriving online to declare, with great pride (a sin, surely?) that she was giving up something or other for the duration.

Now, this was someone who had also declared, more than once, her core religiosity.

So, because sometimes I can post faster than it takes my brain to re-think myself out of writing something, I asked whether she hadn’t considered giving up sex outside marriage first (or at least contraception) since these two were far higher on the list of her chosen religion’s ‘bad list’ than the consumption of a few Mars bars.

Then, just as you’ve reached Easter and been able to cheer yourself up a bit, it’s time for the new diet to give you your ‘beach body’.

If you’re really desperate, there’s the much-advertised one where you substitute two proper meals a day for a bowl of torn cardboard pieces, as recommended by a certain major manufacturer of said cardboard bits in a nod in entirely the opposite direction to really sensible and sustainable eating habits.

So it seems that culturally, we spend half the year at least in a state of denial of pleasure – and let’s face it, in the UK, ‘use up your flour and eggs) doesn’t even offer a meaningful blow-out before Lent kicks in.

It all begs a few questions. A cycle of binge, purge, binge, purge is no more healthy than binge, binge – so why not just get your lifestyle sorted out if you really believe that’s a problem?

But then again, is it any coincidence that so many resolutions – at new year and later – involve dieting?

In Western Europe, sales of weight-loss products, excluding prescription medications, topped £900 in 2009. In the US, the weight-loss industry is apparently worth more than $50bn – that’s a whopping £32.4bn. [Story]

The cycle of diet and binge may not do us any good, but it's not bad for some businesses and, therefore, for the economy as a whole.

And when we realise that faddy diets, the desire to be ultra skinny and the obsession with celebrities’ weight are not new, but can, in part at least, be viewed as products of an era that has been characterised as generally puritanical, then it’s hard not to see something inherently unhealthy and unbalanced in the entire matter.

So the only thing I’m going to resolve this January is to try to make this as voluptuous a year as possible.

Here’s to 2012.

Learning with the two Rs

2012-01-02T22:06:00.011Z

One of the things that materialised in my Christmas stocking last year was a copy of Michel Roux’s new volume, Desserts.

With Sauces, Eggs and Pastry having already more than proved their worth in the kitchen, this was a most welcome addition – and it didn’t take long before it was being put to practical use.

The first experiment hardly seemed particularly challenging – individual, cardamon-scented rice puddings with caramel.

Rice pudding has been on my to-do list for some time. I only have vague memories of it from childhood and, to be honest, can’t really remember whether those are of maternal efforts or of school dinners.

So there was an unopened bag of pudding rice in the cupboard, together with all the other necessary ingredients.

Suffice it to say that it was a disaster. Well, the caramel worked well enough – much easier now I have a proper thermometer so I can see what’s going on in the pan in terms of temperature (a boon too when I made chips a day or so later).

But when I went to decant them, the rice had sunk to the bottom, with the milk above, with only a thinnish skin on top.

The key problem, I think, was in mis-interpreting an instruction to cook the rice and milk gently as too gently.

But there you go: you learn by your mistakes.

The following day, I tried something different. This time, a pear and chestnut ‘minestrone’. Now I have no idea why M Roux called it that, but that's what it it is called.

The dish involved puréed pear with cinnamon, topped with diced, poached pear and caremalised chestnut pieces. The nut was perhaps overdone, but the pear was lovely.

So for my next experiment, I moved onto jelly. Very grown-up jelly, it’s worth noting: it’s made from Sauternes, but with tiny pieces of citrus fruit ‘floating’ in it.

You soften the gelatine leaves in cold water and then, having squeezed them, add them to a small amount of your wine, which has been carefully warmed.

Give it 10 minutes and then add that to the rest of the wine and sit the bowl in a bigger bowl of iced water. Stir every two or three minutes and wait for it to start thickening.

In the meantime, you’ve segmented a pink grapefruit and a lemon, then cut the segments into smaller pieces and popped them into the fridge to chill.

The glasses I was using were already chilling in the freezer.

Commeth the moment when the wine has started becoming syrupy, it’s time to decant it into the glasses and start poking bits of the well-drained fruit into each glass with a knife or skewer.

I had a test glass ready too, so after the first attempt saw the fruit float back to the surface, I knew to leave it a little longer. When it’s ready, then getting the fruit where you want it is quite easy – and it looks lovely.

This was the starting point for the New Year's Day dessert. To go with it, I made another chocolate mousse - the same basic Roux recipe I'd used for Christmas Day.

Then it was simply a case of using more of the mandarin dust and the candied citrus peel, with a cape gooseberry to garnish and a few careful dots of double cream. Hey presto!

The jelly was very lightly set and had a sweet freshness, which contrasted well ith the bitter richness of the mousse.

But I also realised that learning from one great R was not enough – and decided that it was also time to start learning from another one: Joël Robuchon.

The Complete Robuchon has been on the shelf since last Christmas, but I haven’t invested the time needed to start really benefiting from it. It’s not, after all, a book with a single illustration in.

This holiday, I’ve spent a little time reading it. And the thing you start to realise quite early is that it’s not just haute cuisine. Indeed, far from it.

I tried a potato dish. Take your spuds, peel and then slice thinly – no thicker than 0.5cm. Rinse and dry them. For this one, you don’t want the starch.

Melt some lard in a pan – around 50g, so not just a tiny amount. Then you cook the potato in the lard, with lardons and a sprig of rosemary. Works very well.

But his recipies for vegetables intrigued me the most. After all, this is a man with a record 26 Michelin stars, so if he suggests an apparently complex way of poking sprouts, there's probably a reason.

The first thing I tried wasa rack of lamb for New Year's Day - but I should have either added a further 10 minutes to compensate for my oven or even switched it to grill or a final blast.

I don't like my meat overdone, but this was going to the other extreme, even though I'd followed the instructions of medium rare.

Mind, experience tells me it'll have been the oven - I just don't know how and what to factor in for any given dish: doing a créme caramel today, I had to give them an extra 15 minutes - but in that circumstance, you don't have other things waiting.

We saved half the lamb for today and I stuck it under a hot grill for five minutes, turning once, as the flesh cooked through properly and the fat crisped up from the rather jelly-like texture it had had. Indeed, it was utterly gorgeous - I don't know whether it had actually benefitted from being cooked in two stages over 24 hours or whether it was just a stunning good piece of meat. It was the first lamb I've bought from The Ginger Pig at Borough Market.

On the side, I sautéed some left-over potatoes - and then decided to concentrate some attention on Robuchon's sprouts.

After the usual prep, they spend about two minutes in a bowl of cold water with malt vinegar - two tablespoons to a litre of water. Then they go into boiling salted water for one minute.

Decant into cold water resting in a bowl of ice. Bring a fresh pan of salted water to the boil. Give them 20 minutes at a very gentle simmer.

Stop the cooking again by popping them carefully into icy water, then rinsing, draining and patting dry very gently in kitchen paper, before finishing off for five minutes in melted butter, with a couple of pinches of salt and one pinch of pepper - yes, the seasoning is that specific too.

Amazingly, given the cooking time, the sprouts were cooked but still with bite, as well as being very tasty.

Robuchon's says that some vegetables benefit from the blanching because it aids digestion. Well, I can only say that there has been no evidence of the notorious side effect of sprouts since dinner. So perhaps this approach has a serious point.

One thing's for certain - I'll be cooking with both the Rs again. And it won't be long before I do so either.

Just enough time to look back

2011-12-29T13:24:00.025Z

It’s the time of the year when, according to tradition, a look back over the preceding 12 months is in order.

And who am I to buck such a trend?

Sometimes this is a general review, but it can be specific to a subject too.

So here – but in no particular order – are a few of my favourite food-based memories from the last 360-odd days.

Meal of the year

It has to be that charity dinner in the spring at The Zetter, with Raymond Blanc and Bruno Loubet cooking, for pretty much obvious reasons.

Memorable it most certainly was – perhaps particularly because we could spot, easily, who was behind which course. And because it was clear that Blanc had brought with him produce from his kitchens at Le Manoir – the baby vegetables that somehow managed to be jam-packed with flavour and the air-dried duck that he’d been demonstrating on the television only a week earlier.

Single course of the year

The marrowbone at 7e Vin in Paris. Utter fabulousness.

I called it food for the soul then – I’m sticking with that now. My first experience of marrowbone in Carcassonne in July was good: this managed to be even better.

Restaurant of the year

Bistrot Bruno Loubet. No longer a discovery for us, but now a firm favourite – consistently wonderful food.

But also a mention for Au Casot in Collioure – not least because it’s wonderful to eat such simple but fresh and first-rate seafood right next to a beach, overlooking such an incredible scene.

Restaurant discovery of the year

Three really.

L'Amphitryon in Collioure. Finally, a genuinely memorable ‘posh’ eatery in our favourite place.

The cod with aïoli (pictured left) was quite superb, while the cassis sorbet re-introduced me to blackcurrants – I could happily have eaten it by the bucket.

Never mind Ribena: this was something very grown up.

Then there was Two Fat Ladies at the Buttery in Glasgow, which came up a really excellent – and stunningly good value – Sunday lunch, and Michael Caines @Abode in Manchester, where I enjoyed an excellent tasting menu.

Best fast food of the year

Fish and chips, done properly, in dripping and with proper mushy peas, in a small cafe on the dock side at Scarborough. It took 10 minutes to cook from the start – so that's 'fast' in my book.

And it was gorgeous.

Book of the year (recipes)

This might be about to be Michel Roux’s Desserts, but otherwise, Raymond Blanc’s Kitchen Secrets.

Book of the year

Raymond Blanc’s A Taste of My Life, for the reasons explained here.

But special mentions also for Matthew Fort’s Eating Up Italy, Nigel Slater’s Toast and the very, very important Shopped: The shocking power of Britain’s supermarkets by Joanna Blythman, which also made me take stock and adjust my life.

Personal achievement of the year

Christmas Day – lunch and dinner, not least for the presentation, but also for managing to plan it effectively enough to stop it being a trial.

And realising that I can now cook a few dishes without constant recourse to a recipe. That felt like a sort of culinary coming of age.

Gadget of the year

The mandolin and the mincer attachment for my mixer are good, but it has to be my potato ricer, which is just fabulous because it makes really fabulous potato purée.

Investment of the year

After umming and erring about it for some time, I finally shelled out for some Le Creuset – and realised instantly why it was worth it.

And after mentioning it here, a number of readers told me that they wouldn’t be without it.

Quality pays off.

Ingredient discovery of the year

Lard. Simple as. After Oliver Thring’s article on the subject in the Guardian early this year, I started exploring the issue – not just of lard, but of natural fats.

And I started cooking with them too, with great results. Lard and dripping are cheaper than the over-promoted artificial, so-called ‘healthy’ fats too. Any connection, one wonders?

But honorable mentions also go to the Bath Soft Cheese Co for Bath Soft and Wyfe of Bath, plus pigeon breasts, which are an all-year pleasure, and frogs’ legs, which were a very pleasant surprise.

And I can't forget blackcurrants – but that was less a discovery and more a re-discovery, as mentioned above.

Favourite ingredient of the year

Rhubarb still rates highly. One of these days I'll manage to create something really special with it, but in the meantime, I edged closer with a number of experiments – some more successful than others – in the early part of the year

Non-eating culinary moment of the year

Meeting Raymond Blanc. Charming and passionate. I’m afraid I was close to being rendered speechless.

Not quite – but it was a close-run thing.

Food TV of the year

Masterchef: The Professionals and Service, both of which saw Michel Roux Jnr soaring in my estimation.

Thank goodness we’ve left the era of chefs having to be shouty bullies. He treated people with respect and understood the difference between objective and subjective criticism.

Both programmes were not just competitions, but were also about giving people real opportunities to develop. And his demonstrations of classic dishes on the former programme were just an education.

The former too was about real people with real talent and skill – something sadly lacking in so much so-called 'reality TV' these days.

But let’s not forget Kitchen Secrets with Raymond Blanc – educational and enormously entertaining.

Cultural surprise of the year

It came late in the year – Christmas Day – but the Disney/Pixar animated feature Ratatouille is a delight – and a big surprise, not least because it champions food as pleasure over food as fuel, and it also links memory and food.

And it’s funny and gloriously animated. The kitchen scenes are extraordinary, full stop. But the realisation of food in an animation is nothing short of astonishing.

I've been fond of animation since I was child – this brilliantly brought this together with food. A wonderful combination!

The eyes can feast too

2011-12-27T16:11:00.013Z

Occasionally, a colleague and fellow foodie asks, in a manner that one knows (and is intended to know) is not really serious, whether I have ever considered applying for Masterchef.

The answer is simple: no. Not likely. And as for Come Dine With Me, that’s freak show telly to gawp at when trapped in a hotel room at night during a business stop over.

Personally, the ultra-competitive re-invention of Masterchef has never appealed to me. Even in my own pre-foodie days, I used to quite enjoy the previous incarnation with Lloyd Grossman.

It was a gentler TV, where – officially at least – the amateur cooks competing on it had no ambition to move into the professional ranks. It was, in other words, a celebration of what amateur means at its best.

Masterchef: The Professionals is a different beast altogether – but let’s leave that one for another day.

But that’s not to say that I’m not hugely competitive – albeit mostly against myself. Indeed, in my pool playing days (five or six nights a week), I was, I like to think, gracious in both victory and defeat – but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be found muttering at myself when I failed to meet the standards I’d set for myself.

And I noticed it recently in the kitchen. Maybe ‘competitive’ is too strong a word, but I enjoy testing myself, and probably set myself challenges that might seem downright bonkers to some. Come to that, I sometimes find myself wondering if they’re not downright bonkers too.

Christmas has been a case in point.

In recent months, while I’ve been practising pies and crumbles and sausages, I’ve also been trying to improve my presentation.

Now how a dish looks isn’t everything, but a feast for the eyes can add to the pleasure of a meal.

I had ideas – but was singularly failing to achieve anything that I really liked. Part of that was because drizzling isn’t as easy as you’d think, but part of it was also the crockery.

There’s a reason restaurants use big, white plates and dishes.

Our set (Argos, two-for-one for £16, if memory serves me) has been a good servant. With its colourful rims, it’s ideal for day-to-day use.

So recently, I picked up a few bits of plain, white stuff – including rectangular dishes.

In my mind’s eye were pictures. On Christmas Day, I got to see if I could recreate them.

Before I’d decided on what we would be eating in the evening, I’d planned lunch.

A little smoked salmon and smoked eel, with some horseradish and crème fraiche, salted cucumber and some good bread.

Nearer the day, that started getting embroidered a little. I didn’t sit down and think: ‘what else can I do with this?’ I simply found something would pop into my head. Like adding some pickled beetroot.

It was the same with the idea to present the fish by weaving it into a checkerboard effect. That was done the night before, before being carefully wrapped in cling film and laid in the fridge with a small weight on it.

Dozing on Christmas morning, the idea of cubing the cucumber occurred. The beetroot followed naturally – after all, this would continue a geometric theme.

Rooting in a cupboard later, I found cornichons and added one to each plate, sliced carefully and spread out concertina fashion.

There were chives in a salad drawer – a perfect garnish. A tiny dollop of caviar added some depth – as well as a further level of fishiness. Lemon – obviously – and then the horseradish-crème fraiche was kept to a minimum.

I was pleased with the flavours and the textures and the colours. But perhaps most of all, I was pleased with how it looked.

Dinner offered more opportunities.

While the consommé was served in rather downmarket style, in cups – a big hit of beefiness, though – deep, plain bowls displayed the linguine to good effect.

I couldn’t manage one single twirl each of the pasta – how do they do that? – but did manage two small ones per bowl, before adding a little virgin olive oil, some shaved white truffle and, to complete things, a garnish/seasoning of truffle fleur de sel.

The venison steaks looked simple but dramatic on plain white, with a rather cack-handed drizzle of the chocolate sauce (drizzling is another art form to work at), with the puréed sprouts (with chopped parsley) adding another touch of drama to the finished plate.

Then there was dessert. As with lunch, I’d been adding components in my mind for some time.

The three layers of a triple chocolate mousse – all based on a recipe from Michel Roux – had been prepared in advance. And thank goodness for seeing someone on Masterchef: The Professionals use a blow torch to un-ring something similar only a few days before!

You can use cling film to make a drum-tight base to a ring.

The candied citrus peel was easy enough – 10 minutes simmering in stock sugar before drying in the lowest oven for an hour or so.

I’d thought that using mandarin dust would add something too, and a search online had produced the specifics of what I supposed would be the basic approach.

That was almost a disaster, because in classic not-reading-the-instructions-properly mode, I’d managed to misread farenheit for centigrade – and then not bother to think that 200 would be far, far too hot.

I got it though – at the third time of asking.

The thinly sliced, dried fruit was then blitzed in my mini processor, with the addition of a pinch of sugar and a pinch of salt, then sieved and packed away.

On the day itself, I had another idea. Well, two actually.

All ants-in-me-pants to be in the kitchen, I made up a small amount of paté sable in the afternoon, rolled it out and cut little biscuits. At the first time of asking, I burnt them. It was second time lucky on this occasion.

When it came to serving, mandarin segments were prepared to add a touch of freshness.

Chocolate swirls were something else I’d never tried. Melted dark chocolate is spread as thin as possible on a baking tray and then, once it’s set enough that the gloss has faded to matte, you gently ease curls up and away with a spatula or palette knife. Done in advance, they could go in the fridge too.

The final part of the equation was intended to be a bravura bit of drizzling with a mix of seriously thick double cream and a coffee liqueur I’d picked up in Paris.

Fortunately, I tried it out in the afternoon. The lines I wanted just weren’t going to be possible – a combination of my erratic technique with the bottle and the sauce itself not being anywhere thick enough to stop it spreading.

In the event, I settled for some almost-but-not-quite-random dots on the plate.

I’d sent The Other Half out of the room between courses: plating up took a while.

His face when he was called back in was a treat. Amazingly, it did just about all come together (the mousses were also dusted with cocoa powder). We sat and looked at them for a moment or so, barely wanting to start attacking the arrangement.

Perhaps it had been a case of watching “too much Masterchef”. But well into Boxing Day, I was still feeling chuffed with myself.

Would it have mattered if I’d just used our day-to-day crockery? Would it have been earth-shatteringly dull if I hadn’t gone a bit mad with the garnishes?

No. But then again, food is also about engaging more than just the taste buds. The eyes – and the nose – can be titivated too. ‘We need to use all our senses’ was what Raymond Blanc had emphasised to me.

One thing is certain – don’t let anyone ever tell you that the plates themselves don’t make a big difference.

Some Christmas prep and a French classic

2011-12-21T22:39:00.010Z

And so we arrive at the middle of the week leading to Christmas itself; the shortest day: milder than of late, but gloomy under a leaden sky.

The biggest struggle now seems to be to stop fretting and realise that I really do have things under control.

The serious preparation began at the weekend. After three days of office jollification - including eating out twice and culminating in the annual Christmas disco (at which much hair was let down) - it was a case of back to Broadway Market and back to the kitchen.

I'd been gradually working out the festive food and, equally gradually, ordering what needs to be ordered.

Having found that, although they farm and sell veal, top-rated butcher The Ginger Pig could not supply me with veal bones, Matthew from Longwood had brought up a 2kg bag of chopped beef ones, including pieces of rib.

On Saturday afternoon, they went into the oven with some olive oil for an hour and a half - a glorious, warming smell filled the flat as they roasted – before spending close to four hours very gently simmering away with carrot, onion, celery, peppercorns and the usual herbs.

After the stock had cooled, around half was bottled and frozen. The rest - destined for consommé on Christmas Day - was then cooked down further, with the addition of some diced beef, before being strained.

Then it was time for the raft. Two beaten egg whites were added to some finely chopped carrot, celery, leek and parsley, and then slightly loosened with a ladle of the stock. This mix is added to the pot, whisked in, and left as everything is brought, very carefully, back to a simmer.

I find myself wondering who worked out this process - and how. The raft looks a mess, but it draws to it the fat in the consommé, leaving the liquid beautifully clear. Well, that's the idea.

After an hour, the raft was moved slightly to one side and the liquid strained carefully through a muslin-lined sieve. The result was remarkably clear - but two further clarifications await.

It's now in the freezer, so when I bring it out to thaw on Christmas Eve, any further fat will have risen to the top before freezing in a layer. That can be removed. And it's worth heating in a wide, shallow pan so that you can also just brush a sheet of kitchen paper over it at the end to pick up any remaining globules.

The aim is complete clarity, with very strong taste to really get the taste buds going, but nothing to fill up your diners. I did one last year for the first time - a mushroom one – and to be honest, it didn't seem to be anywhere near as difficult a task as some might make out. Although I didn't have much left to serve by the end, the intensity of the taste more than made up for it.

There are still questions: as George and Bill commented on Facebook, it can be served with a drop of booze, with finely chopped pancake or with very finely cut and cooked veg, floating like koi carp in the rich, clear liquid. I'll decide later.

In the meantime, there was everyday food to prepare.

Matthew had also jointed a chicken for me, which went into a large bowl with a bouquet garni, celery, carrot, peeled baby onions and peppercorns, plus a bottle and a half of hearty red wine that had been boiled to reduce by a third to intensify the flavour and get rid of the alcohol.

Because, with several possible recipes for coq au vin to work from, I'd chosen a Raymond Blanc one, and that last bit is typical of him.

Then it was all covered with cling film and popped into the fridge for 24 hours.

Saturday night was tuna. The fish is pan-fried simply and served with a light gravy made by reducing white wine with some chopped celery and dried chilli and dried mushrooms in it. At the end, you strain and then thicken with beurre manié.

It's a Rick Stein dish and works very well. He suggests serving with puréed garlicky potatoes, but I opted instead for the comforts of mashed carrot and swede.

Sunday's actual cook was easy: the chicken and veg were drained for an hour and then patted dry before being browned in a little olive oil. The veg followed, before a heaped tablespoon of plain flour, which had been toasted for around 15 minutes in the oven, was added too.

Then in went the marinade and it's stirred over a heat until thickened, when the meat was returned to the pot, before it went into the oven at 140˚C (fan) for about 50 minutes. The recipe had said half an hour, but the chicken pieces were large and I know my oven.

The result was very tasty, but there are things to learn. To start with, when I'd dropped the farm an email to ask for a jointed bird, I should have specified the number of pieces - five was nowhere enough. And second, I need to make the sauce a little thicker. But this is certainly a dish I'll be doing again.

Monday saw my Christmas visit to my parents, while The Other Half stayed in as work started on the kitchen.

The cold tap hasn't worked at all for years, while part of the casing of the hot tap has rotted away with limescale.

The hob was a mess too. We'd bought a new one around three years ago when we'd had to buy a new oven, but ended up in a total debacle with Curry's over fitting, and it had subsequently spent the intervening time in its box in the hall.

The hood should have been replaced then too - but the one we'd ordered had never even arrived, let alone been installed.

Moral of the story: just because John Lewis actually openly and truthfully says they can't arrange installation in your area, don't go elsewhere to buy a product on the basis that some other company claims that they can install it – and then does nothing but have you running around in circles.

And to add to the overall job, there was the small matter of lighting - just a single bulb.

So over Monday and Tuesday morning, the hob was replaced with a ceramic one, a new hood was fitted, the taps were replaced and a new light, with six adjustable spots of 50 watts each, took its place on the ceiling.

The room has been revolutionised! And now all I have to do is adjust to a hob that is around a third more subtle than the old one!

'Too much' Masterchef?

2011-12-16T17:00:00.001Z

It’s apparently the case that I have been watching too much Masterchef. Now I should point out, after yesterday’s lengthy tirade against the dominance of TV in family life, that this is currently one of only a very few TV programmes that I’m watching.

Okay, there’s usually a bit of football most weeks, but other than that, in terms of programmes that I myself select, on a regular basis, there might be University Challenge and very little else.

Nor do I usually follow such competitions as this, but it has been fascinating – not least because of Michel Roux Jnr. He shows respect to all the contestants, he actually knows the difference between objective and subjective opinions – and lets the former rule his judging – and his demonstrations of various classic dishes are just fascinating and incredibly educative.

But how can I have been watching ‘too much’ of this?

Wednesday saw our department Christmas lunch. After the culinary disappointments of the last two years, at gastro pub Harrisons and then Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, I was looking forward to something rather better on the food front.

This year, we were booked into Blacks, a club in the heart of London’s Soho, courtesy of a colleague who is a member being able to book us in.

It was a very pleasant setting, with a small dining room and open fire (not real, but very convincing). There was plenty to be optimistic about.

The menu wasn’t a specifically Christmas one either, which also seemed like a good thing, since that should surely mean that the chefs would be cooking dishes that they were much more familiar with.

I opted for a squid ink tagliatelle, with Cornish crab, chilli and parsley to start.

There could have been more crab and less pasta; it could have been hot, rather than a case of the pasta being barely warm (but cooked), but it was really quite pleasant.

I’d also chosen the pheasant – another chance to continue my game education by having it properly cooked for me. But it was not to be.

My half of a bird arrived in just that condition in a bowl – to look at, that was the dish: just a rather large chunk of meat in a bowl.

A little searching revealed that there was some cavolo nero, the Italian kale, and some pancetta underneath, but the presentation was distinctly lacking.

‘Hey ho,’ I though and dug in. It was woefully overcooked and, as a result, very dry.

Even I know that the biggest difficulty with cooking game birds is keeping them moist. You need it to be a little pink – this was the colour of roast chicken.

It wasn’t helped by comparison with Sunday’s partridge at Bistrot Bruno Loubet either.

By the time a colleague on our table, who was having the same thing, had walked to the kitchen to request some gravy (she’s German, incidentally, and loathe though I am to do stereotypes, they’re bloody good at taking this sort of action), I had grown tired of it and wasn’t in the mood to eat much more.

I stuck with simple caramel ice cream for dessert, which was perfectly tasty – although presented a tad poorly again, being nothing more than the ice cream in a small dish.

A short while later, the maitre d came over and was asking him how the meal had been. I said that the starter had been nice, but also that the pheasant had been overcooked, dry and poorly presented.

He apologised – and gave me an extra glass of wine to compensate a tad.

Later, I told The Other Half what had happened. It was when I got around to mentioning that I’d criticised the presentation that he said I’d been watching too much Masterchef.

Which is not entirely fair. I didn’t expect haute cuisine along Roux lines, but it didn’t take any sort of an expert to realise how poor the presentation was.

At the simplest level, it could have been helped enormously by being jointed – as my partridge had been at the weekend – leaving the cavolo nero and pancetta instantly visible.

Personally, I’d not have served it in a bowl either, but on a plate – again making it easier to see beyond the meat.

So, Masterchef or not, I’m sticking with my critique. And I'd be prepared to wager that Michel would agree with me too.

The Christmas memories come rolling back

2011-12-15T17:00:00.002Z

On a forum elsewhere in the great ether, someone posted a thread about the 10 things at Christmas that take you straight back to your childhood.

In the last couple of years or so, I’ve been pushing at the door to the attic of memory to see what I can find from a past that is, in general, often really rather blurry.

Now in my own version of Proust, I’ve been specifically trying to dredge up food-related memories, and predictably, this set the cogs grinding away once more.

So here is a little selection of seasonal memories – some food related and others not – to perhaps whet your appetite and get your own memories going too.

❅ The arrival of the special double issue of theRadio Times was always something to be met with delight. Even in the days of just three channels, it heralded a lengthy and detailed study as I searched to find films that I loved and those that I'd never seen from Hollywood's golden era.

Just before Christmas itself, my mother and I would sit down and work through it more thoroughly, with a pen and paper to note down the things that the entire family would sit and watch together – because television was the centrepiece of family activity.

And after, like picking the final scraps of meat from the carcass, I’d raid it one final time, snipping out pictures and film details for a scrapbook.

❅ Turkey. I don't miss the big roast – but I do miss the sandwiches on Christmas night, when the far tastier dark meat would be packed between sliced white bread, seasoned well, and served with one of my mother's now cold stuffing balls on the side.

Most of these memories come from our time in Mossley – Christmas before then is rather vague, and even later Christmasses have only occasional concrete memories.

One of those was many years later, when my parents lived in Nottingham. It was one of the last years that the whole immediate family came together – after that, I finally found a little bit of courage to tell my parents I wouldn’t be joining them and would spend the holiday with The Other Half.

On this occasion, my mother was ill after Boxing Day and I suddenly had responsibility for feeding the family – and more to the point, for stripping the final meat from the turkey carcass, something I’d never done anything like before.

I haven’t a clue what I cooked. Perhaps that was a sort of revenge on my mother for never having bothered teach us anything in the kitchen beyond a few prep chores.

I also have vague memories of eating pheasant at Christmas in Mossley – when we'd be invited to a festive dinner by one of my father's parishoners: an elderly spinster who was, frankly, bonkers and, like more than one or two other female members of his congregations down the decades, saw her lay role in the church and her relationship with the minister as a very important part of her life.

You've seen those films where women fixate on the local priest? Well, I always had the sense that it was not far off with my father.

Memory is an odd thing. I do remember a moment from a Christmas a year or so earlier, in Reading, when we were all sat around watching telly. My father’s mother was with us.

Predictably, she was bored and didn’t want to watch whatever was on – so suddenly decided to start an entirely random conversation directed at my mother, asking her, entirely out of the blue: “Do you like tinned salmon?” before my father snapped at her to be quiet.

I suppose all of this is also why I could, quite frankly, live without a TV. Did many other families base so much of their family life around the box in the corner? Was it a particularly British thing? It seemed to have an almost sacred quality: my parents decided what we were watching – and so we all sat around and watched.

It may not have been the case, but I don’t remember there being a choice about whether to sit down and watch or not. There’s a bitter quality to the knowledge that I lost a lot of my youth just sitting there, watching things, without the bottle or the opportunity to go and do something else instead.

New Year’s Eve would be dominated by whatever end-of-year celebration was on, before my father would go outside with a piece of coal, ready to enter at the stroke of midnight.

❅ Carols. This is something I still associate particularly with school. Fairfield High School for Girls had been founded, in part, by the Moravian church, and was linked to the Moravian settlement next door. Each year, we’d have our school carol service in the church there, with Christingles, a traditional symbol of this Bohemian denomination.

Later, at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School, the annual carol service would be held in the Priory. There’s been a church on the site from around 630AD, but the current one dates from a little later, with massive reconstruction work carried out in the early 15th century.

But such an environment always adds to the drama of an occasion – and our carol services benefitted too.

As a member of the school choirs at both schools, we'd have to sing the descant to carols – those for Hark the Herald and Come All Ye Faithful are still totally rooted in my mind.

I’d still be able to sing them today if it wasn’t that my voice has dropped over the years from a mezzo to nearer an alt: my wonderful music teacher, Noel McKee, who trained and then conducted us in those LGGS services, said I had an excellent, almost Russian middle register. I’ve never been entirely sure what that means, but it sounds good.

❅ After scouring the Radio Times there was always telly itself. From the utter boredom of the Queen’s speech, to the peerless pleasure of Morecambe & Wise. I still find the repeats hilarious – Eric was a comic genius. All he had to do was wiggle his glasses around.

The afternoon film once included the TV premiere of Oliver! – and it was love at first viewing.

Back at school, I went without lunch for a couple of weeks to save the money and buy a copy of the score, then sat down at the piano and taught myself to play using that score.

Many years later, when I was regularly penning theatre reviews, I used to write about the National Youth Theatre – indeed, I was the only hack who bothered, until Ed Wilson, the artistic director, scheduled Blitz! one year.

That had been one of composer Lionel Bart’s other shows – and suddenly, the media pack, realising that the man himself wasn’t actually dead, decided it was time to pay attention to the NYT.

Bart wasn’t doing an interviews – he might have been alive, but he was frail. But the following year, when the company revived Maggie May, Ed invited me along to the season launch, with a specific promise that he’d introduce me and that I should tell Bart the story of how I used Oliver! to learn the piano.

After that, Ed told me, I’d have him eating out of my hand and could do – informally – the interview he wasn’t going to give to anyone else. I stood there, almost gawping as he told me about going to the Maggie May after-premiere party with Judy Garland on his arm.

Remember I said I loved the golden age of Hollywood? Here I was, almost touching it.

It was Lionel Bart’s last interview.

Late on a Christmas night, there’d be a classic B&W film on BBC2. My introduction to Humphrey Bogart came in just such a fashion. I was considered old enough to stay up so late and it was The Big Sleep – still one of my favourite movies and, indeed, the subsequent inspiration for some of my O level art course work.

❅ Boredom. We’d get our presents (some of which we knew about, if we’d had the opportunity to sneak into my parents’ bedroom in the weeks preceding the day itself, and take a look on top of the wardrobe) and then have to leave them to go to church.

And then there’d be the wait for my father to actually remember he had a family – and a dinner – to come home to after he'd taken his second service of the day.

To be honest, I don’t know to what degree this actually happened every single year – but it certainly did happen some of the time, and I remember it clearly, not least for the tension of the wait, knowing that there'd be some level of row waiting when he eventually turned up.

❅ Decking the halls always reminds me of doing just that with my mother. It would often be as late as Christmas Eve and there’d be a film on.

I specifically remember Meet Me In Saint Louis being on one year while we were pegging cards to a thread before hanging it – a Judy Garland moment, note – and my father rolling in from somewhere and looking long and hard at the telly, before announcing: “It’s the Wizard of Oz”, to be met by considerable amusement.

It wasn’t bad for him really – after all, he’d clocked that it was Garland and then managed to remember the title of a film she really had appeared in.

❅ Finally, the booze. May parents would have a bottle of something like Blue Nun for Christmas dinner. My sister and I would have Woodpecker cider.

As a Cornish lad, brought up on scrumpy, my father considered it pop - and therefore entirely acceptable for his when we sat down to such a special lunch.

It was my tipple of choice for some years. At some point, my parents decided that, as a teenager, I needed a social life. So they sent me to the fortnightly disco for members’ children at the Conservative Club around the corner.

It was good fun, actually. I’d get enough money for a bottle of the aforementioned brew – but rapidly learned to change that situation by issuing staring-out challenges to random young males, with further cider as the prize.

I was rather good at it – but I don’t know what that says about me and my approach to the opposite sex. And indeed, I’m not sure I’m ready to explore that particular memory any further just yet!

It a birthday, so it must be back to Bruno

2011-12-14T16:00:00.003Z

With the combination of various work and family commitments in the last month or so, I seem to have done a lot of dining out in a whirl that's felt less like a jet-set lifestyle and more like a permanently jet-lagged one.

But when it came to my birthday, there was still only one thing I had in mind.

Our first experience of Bistrot Bruno Loubet was a year ago to the date – and we’d been back three times since, so it’s probably fair to say that it has become established as our favourite London eatery.

Although, to be rather more accurate, it's the first time in London that we've actually found a restaurant that we enjoyed enough to want to go back to, which is precisely why we've eaten out so little when at home previously.

And on Sunday, there we were again.

Contemplating an aperitif, we were sold on the idea of Bruno’s special seasonal infusion, involving Drambuie, gin and cranberry syrup, with subtle spicing.

Incredibly boozy to the nose, but surprisingly subtle to taste – and very refreshing, these were a very pleasant start to the meal.

For my starter, I opted for a ballotine of foie gras, with sour fig marmalade, a lemon glaze and green beans.

It was served not so much with toast, as with very briefly fried bread – which added a superb, light-as-a-feather texture to the dish.

The fig marmalade also provided an excellent foil for the sweetness of the foie gras, while the crunchy beans added another layer of texture.

All in all, very enjoyable indeed.

For my main course, I chose roast partridge – not least because I’ve never actually had a game bird cooked for me in a restaurant. And this is how it's done.

It had been jointed, and came with fresh choucroutte (sauerkraut), sautéed cauliflower and apple, and a cider roasting jus.

Any by gum, it was lovely. The meat was still just pink, but moist and really tasty, with a crispy skin that was also good enough to eat.

The turned, sautéed apple was delightful – as were the tiny pieces of cauliflower. And there was just a little of the choucroutte to add a further texture, while the jus was light but packed with flavour.

We took a much-needed breather after that, before deciding on dessert.

Both of us selected a “bitter chocolate slice with coffee sabayon”, which actually turned out to be less of a “slice” and more of a sort of circle of dense mouse on a light base, topped with a dusting of cocoa powder and a tuile of (I think) praline, while the sabayon sat on the side.

Delicious – rich and gorgeous, with The Other Half raving about the sabayon. And after that, he finished with coffee, while I sipped an Amaretto.

Service was, as always, charming and attentive without ever being over-fussy or formal.

Quite simply, Bistrot Bruno Loubet never disappoints.

Fusion confusion

2011-12-09T14:04:00.004Z

A few weeks ago, in a moment of flighty insanity, I bought a bag of popcorn.

Not just any old popcorn, mind, but one of these trendy new ‘flavoured’ ones. Flavoured, that is, in some way other than salt or sugar.

In this case, it was a bag from a company owned by Julian Metcalfe, who founded Pret a Manger. And the flavouring in question was wasabi.

Mistake.

I took one piece, consumed that – and decided that that was quite enough. I’m quite happy to try things, but that was just wrong.

And then, in the French capital, I came across another potentially intriguing fusion of foods.

A book on gourmet Paris had recommended a chocolatier called Jean-Paul Hévin, who has a number of outlets in the city, including one that’s just around the corner from where we stay.

In the event, we didn’t suss out where it was until our final morning – by which time we’d found a substantial Hévin stall in Galeries Lafayette.

We bought conventional chocolates for ourselves and a box for my mother – before I spotted something that had actually been mentioned in that gourmet guide: cheese chocolates.

Yes, you really did read that correctly. These were small cubes of cheese, covered in chocolate. Me being me, I had to try. There was one small box left, so it came back to London.

What would you expect from such a combination?

One of the four cheeses that Hévin uses is Roquefort – hardly a shrinking violet on the taste and smell front.

My first response then, when I sat down to pay such a confection the time it merits, was pleasant surprise. There wasn’t such a clash as one might have expected. It was as though the chocolate muted the flavour of the cheese, which then only came through later and in a very subtle way.

But the more I thought about it, the more I started to wonder what the point of it actually is. After all, who wants a ‘subtle’ Roquefort?

Perhaps it qualifies as a sort of amuse-bouche – a single-bite appetiser to set the tastebuds tingling? But on that note, I’d suggest that it fails too, simply because it’s too subtle to really excite the palate. It manages to take two wonderful ingredients and render them less exciting than they should be.

And just because something doesn’t taste vile that still doesn’t mean that it really works.

I understand the artistic imperative – the need and desire to experiment and try new things. But I remain unconvinced about the merits of chocolate cheese.

I shall eat the rest – they are, frankly, more chocolate than cheese – and then I shall enjoy Hévin’s proper chocolates over Christmas. And some really good cheese.

Food for the soul in Paris

2011-12-05T22:30:00.013Z

And so, adieu Paris – until the next time! We pulled out Gard du Nord with Sacré Cœur silhouetted on the horizon in the brittle winter sun. And as we picked up speed, La Tour Eiffel rose against the sky like a hand raised in farewell.

The Other Half describes me as a 'romantic Prussian' on occasion, but it is a romanticism that I also feel in Paris; the ghost of a past era seems to permeate the walls. It is almost within reach; almost an aroma that I can smell.

But enough of such intangibles. This was not a trip about romance - but it was (in part at least) a little pre-Christmas gourmet adventure.

We arrived on Thursday evening - too late to dine, and ready only to lounge outside La Terrasse with a glass of something and a cigarette, watching the world go by. But before that, I booked us in for the following evening at Septiéme vin, our favourite eatery in the city.

Just around the corner from where we like to stay, we visit at least once a trip. Olivier, the maitre d' and co-owner, has always been an utterly charming and generous host, making us feel more like returning friends than simply occasional customers.

It's a small place, but comfortable and warm. In the warmer months, we've enjoyed dining outside, but this was most definitely not the time for that. And with the temperature falling, winter food was on the agenda too.

The menu is, if not quite unchanging, one where you know what to expect. But on Friday's specials of the day was something I don't recall seeing there before: marrowbone gratinée. After my introduction to that ingredient in Carcassone in July, there was no question what my starter would be.

What arrived was a piece of bone, around eight inches long, halved lengthways and with a very fine topping of breadcrumbs and garlic over the marrow itself. There was toasted baguette to accompany and fleur de sel to garnish.

Scoop out the jellyish marrow onto toast and eat. This is not haute cuisine. It is not food to worry about eating elegantly. But boy, oh boy, this is the food of the gods. Sweet, with a fabulous mouth feel, and so, so satisfying.

So satisfying, in fact, that I struggled to eat all my main course of scallops with beautifully julienned vegetables and a very nice buerre blanc. It was further evidence of something I'm starting to understand: that fat - the real, natural stuff - makes you feel sated quicker than any other foodstuff.

I had a lemon sorbet to finish - although Olivier suggested having it with vodka and seemed impressed when I named that as a 'colonel'. I'd known about it for ages, but never tried it. I swear he put more booze in there than would be usual: the sorbet was nearly swimming. It's a great - hic! - combination.

The following evening, we made the error of eating at Café de Champs de Mars, just near the tower – my favourite piece of bling in the world. Now this is a fairly touristique spot on a small roundabout, but I love it: it absolutely reeks of the 19th century and 'gay Paree'. However, we had forgotten that it's fine for eating if you stick to their grills or steaks and frites, but less so if you off piste, so to speak.

We both felt like a change and opted for dishes with pasta. Neither was bad - they simply weren't much better than average.

The next night, we went back to see Olivier - with me hoping that the specials would still be the same. They were. So it was a case of the marrowbone redux.

You always worry at least a tiny bit that, on repeating something like that, it won't be as good the second time. Oh, but it was: every bit as good if not even more.

Olivier told me that they pre-cook the bone - as I understand it, in a court bouillon. Whatever they do, it's stunning.

What struck me was just how basic such a food is - how much it plays to our core. And how much the fast and junk food industries spend fortunes trying to replicate the same sort of impact with all their chemicals, additives, sugars and salts.

Now it's a very long time since, in an act of desperation driven by food deprivation, I consumed fodder from one of those such outlets, so things might have changed, but on the basis of memory, they don't come close to what I ate at the weekend.

Marrowbone has plenty to recommend it in terms of the old nose-to-tail eating philosophy alone, but ignoring that, it's a sensational food to taste. Why on each did we stop eating it and when?

If you're still interested, I followed with cod and a little rice and more of those julienned veg - I asked for a small portion, but it was still a bit too much. Y'see what I mean about being sated?

I did manage to cram a first ever taste of Iles flottante - the classic French meringue dish. I expected it to be as meringue that I've tasted has always been: hard and crisp, but it was soft and, well, sort of floppy – the result of having been poached.

But swimming in a quite delightful chilled custard, with a drizzle of caramel, it was very, very nice indeed.

Aside from the eating, there was preparing for future eating. Or put another way, shopping in the food hall at Le Bon Marché, which is an absolute joy, and saw me transformed into something like the archetypal child in a toyshop. And in the kitchen section was the biggest selection of moulds and rings I've seen anywhere outside of the catalogue of professional cooks' suppliers.

There was also a reminder of just how many top-notch chocolatiers and patisseries there are in Paris - every street has at least one of each, it seems! Even a fleeting look in the window and you're drooling like one very happy cat.

So, that was Paris in summary.

But I warn you: it may not be the last you hear of marrowbone.

Fine food amid the madness

2011-11-28T15:45:00.001Z

The last few weeks have been a tad bonkers on the work front – hence the paucity of posts – but the cooking and eating have been maintained reasonably well, even if the time to write everything up has been lacking.

Here’s a sketched view of the eating-out side of things – the home nosh will (I hope!) follow in due course.

Last weekend, I was in Glasgow briefly for work, and on the Saturday, we had our traditional staff dinner – this year, at a restaurant called The Living Room.

For those who may recall the story of our meal this time last year, you’ll be reassured to read that this was much, much better.

Nice service and some very nice food.

I had a chicken liver parfait to start, with a redcurrant and port jelly. Now, it wasn’t so much a “jelly” as a sauce, and the parfait wasn’t really set quite enough, but it did taste good and the presentation was good too.

My main course smoked haddock, with a mustard mash, wilted spinach, a poached egg and hollandaise sauce. Very good; very nice.

And for dessert, a chocolate and salted caramel tart with a little vanilla ice cream. The tart wasn’t as I’d expected, but was light and very tasty.

Portion size was excellent – not ridiculously large – and there was a decent selection of wines that started at under £20. We had a La Croix Vermentino – a sauvignon blanc from the south of France. My colleagues, remembering last year’s debacle over the wine prices, made me select again – simply because I had initially stated that I wouldn’t.

The bottle was £16.75 – the second cheapest on the menu, which kept them all happy. It was light, fresh and had alcohol in it. Personally, I’d have selected something different – but I know where that got me last year!

The service was pleasant and helpful. My only real complain would be the noise. It’s busy to start with, so having an amplified live pianist-singer made it very difficult to converse, even though our party was in a sort of side room.

Glasgow ended chaotically, with my Sunday evening flight back to London cancelled due to fog at City Airport. I was then rescheduled for a Heathrow flight at around the same time. So no problem.

But what I didn’t know was that Heathrow was fogged in too. With my baggage already checked in, they couldn’t transfer me to a Stanstead flight.

When would we be likely to depart? Oh, about sixish. Oh, about eightish. Oh, about tennish.

At that stage, I walked out, went across the road, checked into a Holiday Inn and slept. The following morning, back in the airport itself before 7am, I discovered that one flight had already been cancelled for the same reason – but that they were ‘hopeful’ of things sorting themselves out sometime soon.

I rescued my bag, got a cab back into the city centre and caught a train with five minutes to spare, finally arriving back into London at almost 12.15pm. Knackered.

After just a short respite, it was off again on Thursday – this time, to Leeds for my niece’s graduation.

Staying at the same hotel as my parents, I had to show them the hotel’s menu that evening in order to convince them that it was limited and pricey, and my idea of a nearby restaurant I’d tried, earlier this year, was far better.

I got the three of us into Sous le Nez – and we made it in time to make use of the excellent value early evening menu – £24.95 per person for three courses, plus a half bottle of wine each.

Here, I enjoyed a nice chicken liver parfait – much more set than in Glasgow and, I think, the better for it, even if it didn’t have such a creative source/jelly.

It came with a muffin-like brioche and some piccalilli. Good stuff.

For a main, I opted for seared pigeon breast with mustard horseradish and parsley mash, chorizo and a thyme jus.

The bird was lovely – I did find the large disco of chorizo very tough and, to be honest, I don’t think it really added anything.

For dessert, I went simple, with a duo of sorbets – blackcurrant and lemon.

My parents enjoyed it too – in spite of their general aversion to all things French.

The following night, after an amazing day – and one that was emotionally exhausting, for various reasons – we went to Brasserie Blanc with my niece and her boyfriend, for a celebration dinner.

The restaurant was her choice. My mother, although utterly accepting that it was her granddaughter’s day and her choice, had been nervous.

Two weeks before, I’d sat down and read the entire menu to her over the phone, to reassure her that there would be plenty to choose from that they could eat: French food, in other words, is not just mussels and frogs’ legs and snails.

It’s interesting that, I realised, neither of them had a real clue about the massive influence of classic French cooking.

They started with a celeriac and apple soup – and both raved. I’m afraid I cringed when they ordered rack of lamb – well done – but they enjoyed it and that’s really the only thing that matters.

I opted for confit chicken, haricot bean & prune terrine as a starter – a fascinating creation with remarkably light texture and an intriguing taste.

After that, a special of the day – pork leg confit, with a riff on mushy peas (crushed garden peas with rosemary) and they swapped the new potatoes for a carrot and swede mash for me.

Yes, I know it was all going a bit OTT on the confit front, but I decided I really was just too tempted. Very nice it was too: moist and tasty. The whole dish was delightfully colourful.

For dessert, I just about managed a leafed dark chocolate slice, which was really a slice of torte with three different textures to it: a dense sponge-like centre, with surprises of crispiness, and a ganache on top. Very good.

We had a bottle of rosé between us: the men finished with good whisky, my niece with a champagne cocktail, my mother with coffee and me with a glass of Muscat.

Another most enjoyable meal – and also very good value, and cheaper that the hotel.

Now, more travel awaits: on Tuesday, I head to Birmingham for one night for work. And then, on Thursday evening, it’s off to Paris for some Christmas shopping and, of course, some rather good food.

No bookie would give me odds on the meal on the Eurostar not being massively better than the filled ‘croissant’ that East Coast Mainline served on the way back from Leeds.

Two fine French meals and the trip ends with something inspipid and damp and cold and lacking in any of the buttery crispness and flakiness of the real thing – the real French thing.

Still, it’s probably good to be reminded of how poor food can be sometimes – just so you really do appreciate the good stuff.

The toast sandwich challenge

2011-11-17T16:02:00.008Z

The latest Christmas advert from Waitrose features Heston Blumenthal as a Harry Potteresque magician, creating his pine-scented mince pies as though by magic.

But if the country’s number one exponent of molecular gastronomy makes you wonder at the blurring lines between food and science, then try this.

One group of scientists has decided that the cheapest meal that you can manage in these austere times is a toast sandwich.

But the rather strange confection isn’t new, as it first appeared in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management 150 years ago.

Now, though, it’s been revived by the Royal Society of Chemistry with the claim that, at 7.5p, it’s the cheapest meal possible. They’re so confident that they’re offering a £200 prize to anyone who can beat it.

The sandwich is a slice of toast between two pieces of buttered bread, seasoned with salt and pepper to taste.

RSC employee Jon Edwards said: “In my student days, I thought a meal of 9p noodles from Tesco was thrifty – but a toast sandwich is tastier, quicker, has more calories and comes in at just 7.5p.”

That gives us a quick idea of just what the society’s criteria are: calories per penny, in effect.

In a press release, Dr John Emsley of the RSC said: “We could have gone for one of the thousands of recipes that Mrs Beeton employed, most of them being table-groaning creations full of meats.

“But, given the stern days we are yet to experience, we decided to go for an unknown dish that requires little money and little time, and which she devised to cater for less well-off people.”

After the cost, what are the nutritional benefits, according to the society?

The basics: 3 slices of white bread = 240 calories. Butter = 10g = 90 calories
Total = 330 calories

Toast sandwich nutrients
Protein = 9.5 g
Fat = 12 g
Carbohydrate = 55 g
Fibre = 4.5 grams
Calcium = 120 mg
Iron = 2 mg
Vitamin A = 90 mcg
Vitamin B1 = 0.25 mg
Vitamin B2 = 80 mcg
Vitamin B3 = 4 mg
Vitamin D = 0.08 mcg

Well, I actually think that I can meet this challenge. And my idea is only a slightly modernised take on an old food.

I give you toast and dripping with yeast spread.

Although not that modern: Marmite was launched in 1902 in Burton-on-Trent, while the basis for it had been discovered in the late 19th century by German scientist Justus von Liebig, who had discovered that brewer's yeast could be concentrated, bottled and eaten.

First, how to do it: take two thick slices of white bread. Toast them. Spread dripping on one and scrape some yeast spread onto the other.

Put them together.

Eat.

Now let’s look at the ingredients, with a cost and nutritional analysis.

For prices, I used tesco.com today. Let’s take a thick sliced, white loaf (own-brand) at 47p for 800g. A slice is apparently 44g.

So on that basis, there are 18.1 slices in a bag. For my ease at least, let’s call it 18, which makes it 2.61p per slice.

Tesco has dripping at 72p for 500g (£1.44 per kg). This is cheaper than lard, in case you’re wondering.

Thus 1% of the packet – 5g – is 0.72p.

The best value Marmite is 500g for £4.99 (£1 per 100g) – this is cheaper than smaller bottles.

However, Tesco’s own-brand yeast extract is 240g for £1.89 (79p per 100g).

In which case, it costs 0.0315p for a four-gram serving.

So, two slices of bread costs 5.22p.

Let's say a scraping of yeast extract (2g) costs 1.575p

And 10g of dripping is 2.16p.

So, the total costs of the sandwich – the “meal” – would be 8.955p.

At this point, I’m losing on this basis.

But let’s look at the nutrition next.

The bread works out at 110kcals per 36g slice, so 220kcals for two slices. It has 21g of carbohydrate per slice (so a total of 42g here) and 1.1g of fibre (total 2.2) with a little sodium of 0.2g per slice (so 0.4g), 0.07g fat (0.14g) and 3.6g of protein (7.2g protein).

The dripping is 135kcals for a 15g serving. There’s 15g fat, but no proteins, carbs, fibre or sodium.

One serving (2g) of the Tesco yeast extract provides 5kcal, 1.6g protein and 0.3g carbs (of which only a trace sugars). There’s only a trace of fat and fibre, 0.2g of salt, but 0.15mg of vitamin B1, 1.5 of niacin, 25.0µg of folic acid and 0.15µg of vitamin B12.

As a slight aside, Marmite has half a calorie per 2g and fractionally more protein and carbs, plus 0.14mg riboflavin.

So, the total of calories is 355kcals,
Protein = 7.4g
Carbohydrate = 48.6g
Fibre = 2.7g
Fat = 15.14g.

Calories are up and fat is up.

Now as we know, fat is not bad – our parents and grandparents didn’t have an obesity epidemic while eating bread and dripping. Indeed, this is a combination of that traditional dish and Mrs Beeton’s lesser-known idea, plus my own yeast spread twist.

The fat helps to ensure the eater feels sated. It provides good mouthfeel too and it has plenty of nutritional benefits, such as helping the body absorb plenty of other nutrients, including a number of vitamins.

The yeast spread adds nutrients that the salt and pepper don’t provide, but does give a similar seasoning.

Now, I don’t have the data on iron and calcium (or various other nutrients) for my version of this – and I’m no chemist – but I would suspect they’d be similar at least.

And remember – the challenge, as set out by the society, was not for what is regarded as ‘healthy’ eating these days, but – in effect – as calories for your penny.

There is more fat in my version – but since it’s dripping, it’s a lot, lot cheaper than butter or marg.

If I'd kept it to bread and dripping – and how much more traditional can you get> – that would have been cheaper, but the yeast spread adds an interesting touch and quite a lot of nutritional benefit.

I actually tried a toasted dripping and Marmite sandwich this lunchtime (with wholemeal sliced bread) and I have to say, it was not unpleasant at all.

Mind, this is austerity food – with a royal society uncovering it and promoting it for exactly that reason. It’s not supposed to be about taste. And it's difficult to see how anyone could come up with more calories for less.

But the mood of culinary pessimism seems to be spreading, with a recent article looking back at George Orwell’s comments on British food in the 1940s.

It’s all as depressing as a royal society finding it as appropriate to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Mrs Beeton’s book with a recipe for austere times.

A spot of midweek cheating

2011-11-16T16:00:00.002Z

As I mentioned the other day, I was quite ready to cheat a little on my first attempt to make pie. It was only on reading the ingredients of a ready-made pack of pastry that I decided to do otherwise.

But late last week, although I got back to Broadway Market quite early after work, the butcher was closed. My plan for sausages went out of the window – and I certainly wasn’t tempted to revert to my old habit of buying rubbish, mass-produced ones.

Wandering into a general store to buy a couple of odds and ends, and musing over what to put on the menu, the germ of an idea formed.

I picked up some smoked Mattesson’s sausage (not bad on the ingredients front) and two tins of mushy peas. I midweek cheat was in mind.

Back at home, I peeled and chopped a large carrot, a parsnip, the remainder of the swede we’d had with the pie and a hefty potato. All these were then boiled together until nearly cooked.

After being thoroughly drained, they went into a larger pan with the mushy peas. Some boiling water was added and stirred in very carefully to thin down the peas. The sausage was sliced and added, with chopped parsley going in just before it was finished.

This was heated through very gently with the lid on – and then, hey presto!

This was a seriously easy midweek version of the Dutch classic, Erwtensoep, which I’ve been cooking for some years (there are also very similar versions in German cooking, in the UK of course and pretty much throughout northern Europe).

The full version takes some time (restaurant version pictures above, with smoked bacon on rye bread to accompany) – not least because you have to soak the peas for two hours before cooking everything at one go, very slowly.

The proper version also used more than one kind of meat, but in this circumstance, the smoked sausage was enough. My original recipe would have included celeriac and not parsnip and swede. But using those root vegetables together hardly defied culinary logic.

And the parsley, added just near the end, lends a nice little zing to the finished dish.

This was an easy way to use up some veg – and make something hearty, comforting and decently nutritious, and all in quite short order.

Midweek cheating can work!

The Christmas gifts you really don't need

2011-11-15T15:14:00.004Z

It’s getting to that time of year when people start considering gifts – gifts to buy for others; gifts they’d like themselves.

And of course, this is when companies start bombarding us with ideas for just that.

Food gifts might not rate as highly in the UK as they do in France – strange, that – but foodies are not entirely neglected here.

But some of what is on offer could blow you away.

Currently featuring high in the kitchen gadget TV advert stakes is a Cuisinart soup maker, £140 from Amazon at the time of posting.

Now, before you all observe that:

a) all you need to make soup is a pan, a spoon, a knife and a chopping board – with an optional hand-held blender

or

b) I'm becoming a grumpy old woman, let’s look at what such a shiny new toy would give you.

And the perfect place to find out is the reviews section of Amazon.

There, one reviewer wrote: “We have had our soup maker for about 18 months now, and it tends not to get used much any more, in favour of a simple saucepan followed by blending.”

Okay. Why would that be, then?

“The maximum soup capacity of just 1.4L means that a big family only get small helpings.”

So it doesn’t give you enough size flexibility. Is that all?

“… and, why on earth, with such a good basic design, did they choose NOT to give it automatic intermittent stir? The manual stir means one has to remember to stir at intervals, or it can quickly burn – especially during the initial very hot period. That propensity to burn is the downside of a very effective heater used to fry up ingredients before moving on to liquid addition.”

So you don’t save any time, then, because you have to watch it and you have to stir it when it’s busy – exactly as you would with the conventional method.

But there’s more:

“We had to return the very first machine as the ‘spigot’ which is the drive spindle is some sort of plastic, and it lost its shape very quickly. We have been very careful with the replacement, to make sure we don't put too much drive up into the blender chamber. We do not use it for ice-crushing, for that reason.”

So it broke. And as a result, you don’t feel able to use it for one of it’s intended purposes.

“… If we had not had that experience, we would be giving a 3 or 4 star rating.

“Otherwise, it seems certainly well-made, heavy motor and well-thought-out. So, when the MkII comes out with intermittent stir and 2.5L capacity, we will possibly replace.”

So, to recap: in essence, it gives you next to nowt over and above the conventional method of making soup, takes up a lot more space, is less reliable (pans, knives and chopping boards rarely have a bit of plastic that loses shape) and costs well over a ton. And yet you claim you’d get a bigger one if such a thing existed?

It’s only the other day that I mention the ‘Breville Antony Worrall Thompson VTP099 Gourmet Pie Maker’, with a recommended retail price of £47.99.

Also available is the ‘Professional Cooks Gourmet 4 Slot Electric Pie Maker for a mere £26.

Come on – can anyone name me the “professional cooks” who would use a machine like this?

You can get similar machines for cupcakes, and others that promise to make ‘flapjacks, cake bars and breakfast cereal bars’. There are machines for waffles and canapés too.

Most of these take the form of a clunky piece of machinery that opens up like a book and has the halves of assorted moulds in each bit.

Although there is also a Russell Hobbs “cookie maker” that bucks the trend by looking, frankly, more like something you’d find on the shelves of your local ‘private shop’ and intended for male enhancement.

But how many of these do you get? How much storage space have you got?

To be honest, I’m reaching a point where I’m beginning to think that coffee machines are largely an OTT way of doing something that can be achieved just as simply, with far less expense, far less space taken in the kitchen and no bits of machinery to go wrong or get messed up by hard water with a simple cafetière!

Indeed, perhaps it’s heresy, but is ‘instant’ coffee really so much more ‘instant’ than cafetière?

Take a 200g jar of Douwe Egberts “pure smooth” instant – that’s £6.59. Douwe Egberts “cafetière blend twin pack” is £5.49 for two packs of 250g each.

But one thing is for certain: soup makers of the world unite – you have nothing to throw off but your gadgets!

And here's some I made earlier – the proper way.

A version of a River Café Italian rustic soup: peel and slice a couple of cloves of garlic.

Peel and chop a couple of medium potatoes into dice no bigger than 2cm.

Peel and dice a butternut squash.

Put all these in a pan.

Add a tin of plum tomatoes. Rinse out the juice from the tin with hot water and add this too, along with enough stock to cover.

Add a few crushed fennel seeds.

Grind some black pepper into it.

Cook gently for around 30 minutes and test that the potato is cooked through.

Remove from heat and mash – you want it to still have plenty of texture.

Serve with a drizzle of good virgin oil and, if you want, a dollop of marscarpone.

There. Soup. Made properly. How difficult is it?

The tao of pie

2011-11-11T14:31:00.012Z

Nursery rhymes are a fascinating subject in their own right – and this one might have been about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

In that context, the description of the dish as “dainty” is sarcastic – it’s a wreck of a recipe. But it does tell us that a pie, of itself, would not be considered unsuitable for a monarch.

We don’t really think of savoury pie as a posh dish today – well, perhaps apart from game pie and that’s as much down to the remaining sentiments about game being posh/rich people’s food in England.

But if pie is, in general, the domain of all of us ordinary folk, then up north it takes on a deeper importance and in Lancashire, it’s pretty much a religion.

A few years ago, the Telegraph reported that after a discussion with a northern fan about the half-time pies at her beloved Norwich City, Delia Smith was encouraged to change the club’s supplier to Hollands Pies – from Lancashire. And when news emerged last summer that Hollands had been bought by a non-UK company, there was outrage locally.

Indeed, in recent weeks, I’ve been finding a Hollands meat and potato pie quite acceptable half-time fodder at Manchester City games.

As I mentioned the other week, I have fond memories of eating meat ‘n’ tatty pies – with black peas – at bonfire nights in when we lived in Mossley.

My mother used to buy little pork pies from a local baker in the town, Cakebread. She’d heat them through for tea and serve them with baked beans. The crusts were thick and peppery, and the meat densely packed but moist.

She made her own pork pies too: she’d spend an age trimming and chopping some pork until it was almost mince, then it would be mixed with dried onion that had been rehydrated in a white enamel mug with blue trim, plus grated potato, before being packed into pastry-lined enamel pie tins and topped with more shortcrust.

That, on the savoury pie front, was pretty much my mother’s repertoire. She would do a version of steak and kidney – but not in a pie, cooking the meats separately and serving them on a slice of piping hot pastry. That was Sunday dinner I particularly looked forward to.

If we had a steak and kidney pie (or chicken and mushroom, for that matter), it would be a mini Bird's Eye frozen one: she kept the little foil containers, watched them carefully and then found various uses for them – including as the receptacle for our ration of sweets and chocolate when she divvied this out a couple of times a week.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I spotted a new book by Si King and Dave Myers: The Hairy Bikers’ Perfect Pies: The ultimate pie bible from the kings of pies.

A flick through tempted me, but I left it on the shelf – and then, unable to put it out of my mind, ordered a copy less than two days later.

With the burgeoning sense of food nostalgia inspired initially by Nigel Slater, I had set my course for pie.

I also ordered a trio of old-fashioned pie dishes – three different sizes; all round and with wide rims; enamel with a blue stripe on the rim. And a pie bird – a nod to that nursery rhyme.

Like my Mason Cash mixing bowls, there is something hugely comforting in having such traditional equipment. And it's considerably cheaper than some other options.

For instance, in all honestly and without fear of overstating my culinary skills, I did not feel that I needed the Breville Antony Worrall Thompson VTP099 Gourmet Pie Maker (only £25.46 at Amazon, instead of the RRP of £47.99).

I don’t know what’s worse: that or Marco Pierre White trying to keep a straight face while telling us that Knorr stock (ingredients for the beef stock pots at £1.46 for four of 28g each: Water, Salt, Beef fat (5.0%), Yeast Extract, Vegetables in Varying Proportions (2,3%) (Carrot, Leek), Sugar, Flavourings (contains Milk and Mustard), Beef Extract (1.3%), Vegetable Fats and Oils, Thickeners (Xanthan Gum, Locust Bean Gum), Colour (Burnt Sugar Caramel), Herbs (Parsley, Lovage), Rosemary Extract, Apple Juice Concentrate, Carrot Juice Concentrate, Onion Juice Concentrate, Spices (Pepper, Paprika), Garlic) is every bit as good as the real stuff.

After the goodies arrived, I picked a midweek evening to make my pie debut. The plan was something involving chicken – based on the first recipe in the book, for a creamy chicken, ham and leek pie. Because it was midweek, I was preparing to cheat a tad, using ready-made pastry.

In the shop, I went to pick up a packet of Jus-Rol shortcrust (£2.80 for a kilo). Then I glanced at the ingredients: Wheat Flour, Vegetable Oil, Water, Salt, Lemon Juice, Preservative: Potassium Sorbate.

And I decided that I was damned if my first pie was going to be made with a pastry made with vegetable oil. And lemon juice.

Back in the kitchen, I rubbed together 350g plain flour and 100g each of butter and lard, before adding a large egg that had been whisked up with a tablespoon of chilled water.

It came together well, but fretting a little too much about not letting my warm paws heat it up to much, I probably didn’t press it together quite enough.

Defying convention, Myers and King suggest not putting the pastry into the fridge before rolling it – that makes it harder to roll – but doing that and lining the tin first. This works quite well.

In the meantime, I had skinned and boned four chicken thighs and added the meat to a pan in which I’d been gently cooking some sliced leeks in, in a little lard. Some chopped smoked streaky bacon joined it.

In another pan, I very gently heated some whole milk and a little stock for the sauce, with the chicken skin and bones in, along with the rind from the bacon.

In another pan, some butter was melted and some plain flour added and cooked through for a minute, before I started adding the milk/stock.

When that was a decent consistency – you need it quite thick – I popped the meat and leeks in, together with some chopped parsley and sage, then left it to cool down.

Pop the kettle on. Grab a biscuit. Put your feet up.

And then, after a while, you can decant the filling into the lined dish, roll out some more to make a lid, trim, crimp the edges and, if you want, decorate it.

I opted for a postmodern statement with the latter, cutting out the word ‘pie’ and sticking it on with the egg glaze. Just so nobody would be left in any doubt.

You need to have pre-heated the oven to 200˚C (180˚C fan). Myers and King recommend putting a baking tray in the oven to warm up thoroughly while it’s heating.

And then it’s the matter of a mere 35 minutes before you can remove it, slice it and eat.

I served this with mashed swede, since it needed something on the side, but I didn’t want to add more complex carbs, since there was already pastry involved.

The pastry didn’t look perfect and I hadn’t made it quite thick enough to withstand the serving process, but it was beautifully flakey. The filling was tasty enough to satisfy The Other Half, who tends to be underwhelmed by anything he considers ‘bland’.

One thing is certain. Pie is now firmly on the household agenda. And in keeping with my recent revelation that cooking something regularly helps you get to grips with the skills required, there’ll be another one very, very soon.

The Lancashire hot pot challenge

2011-11-07T17:00:00.001Z

What feels like a very long time ago, I happened to start a sort of research on this blog – and as it started to gain a bit of momentum, I made a sort of promise.

For various reasons, I'd decided to look up Lancashire hot pots via the online supermarkets. Coming across two versions from Tesco, I'd been rather surprised to see just what they cost.

The gist of the matter (and you can read the full story here) was that Tesco's hot pot ordinaire, if you will, rolled in at £2.90 for 450g. Which, as I calculated at the time, would make it around £11.60 for the archetypal family of four.

The weight is important – it’s only 50g more than a standard tin of soup.

But Tesco also retailed a 'Finest' version, at £4.25 per serving – or, using the same calculation as above, £17 for the four-person family.

I said then that the next time I made a Lancashire hot pot myself, I’d “make a note, to the very last penny, of what it costs.” I added: “I make you a promise now: it will not come even close to £4.25 per serving. And it will have good meat and good kidneys in it. And it will be rather bigger servings than the amount mentioned above”.

So, here we are. Almost 11 months later and I haven’t forgotten that little challenge.

And at the weekend, I set out to test my assertions.

Now before we start, a little background. It’s worth remembering that Tesco itself had, in a survey, bemoaned the demise of the classic British dishes – including Lancashire hot pot. Tesco has also, with a startling lack of self-awareness, produced a survey that reveals that only older people really know what joints and cuts of meat to use for what dishes. Each younger generation knows less and less on the subject.

That research didn’t observe that each new generations’ shopping choices have become more and more dominated by supermarkets in the last 30 years, as supermarkets’ share of the UK grocery retail trade has leapt from 20% to 80%.

And as Joanna Blythman showed in Shopped: The shocking power of Britain's supermarkets, the supermarkets in general have also ensured a de-skilling of butchery. They very rarely have staff who know anything about a cut – or can themselves prepare any cut.

Moving on, it’s worth making a quick check on the state of affairs with the supermarkets.

Ocado don't sell anything called a Lancashire hot pot for adults – three baby meals come under such a description.

Sainsbury's has one baby meal under the name – and a recipe for the real thing. The Co-op site reveals nothing.

Tesco no longer has anything listed either and nor does Asda.

So we're still working with Tesco's prices and portion sizes – nothing alters the challenge I set myself.

Now for the shopping list first – and at the risk of seeming overly pernickety, I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible. I went to some of my usual suppliers – I didn’t look around for the ultra cheapest. The bouquet garni was in the cupboard but I have checked the current price for the identical product online, as of yesterday.

Lamb and lambs’ kidneys came from my local butcher with a combined weight of 490g (trimmed). The cost was £1.20 for the kidneys and £3.59 for the chops. Total: £4.79 for the meat.

I bought two large potatoes for 80p, weighing in at around 320g. I used just one. They were both approximately the same size, so let’s call that 40p. It was 30p for one large carrot at around 196g unpeeled and approximately the same for two onions with a combined, unpeeled weight of 246g.

It was 29p for a sachet of bouquet garni and I’m going to calculate 10p for the chicken stock, 20p for a few dots of butter at the end (calculated on the basis of the cost of a small catering pack in the office canteen) and 5p for some lard at the beginning.

That’s a total of £6.43.

But you’ve probably already spotted something else: the combined weight of the ingredients in my dish (not counting the herbs, the stock and the fats) was 1,092g (with all the un-prepped veg). Let’s make this reasonably easy and deduct the whole of that awkward 92g as the peel and other bits, but adding nowt extra for the liquid.

So we’ve got a dish of 1kg.

That was for two people. Portion size was approximately 50g more than the Tesco ones. The cheap range would have cost £5.80 for two, with a total of 100g less.

The 'Finest' version would have cost £8.50 for two people – with 100g less actual food. My fresh version was £6.38 for 1kg.

Or put it another way: if the Tesco cheap range version had been the same size as mine, it would have come in at £6.43 for two portions, while the ‘Finest’ range would have been £9.35 for two.

You're left, of course, with the question of measuring a few other things – heat to cook and the time to make it. It took me 50 minutes to prep, slowly. I've no idea how much it cost to cook, at a moderate heat for two hours and 20 minutes. The fan oven is supposed to save energy.

On the basis of a very approximate (but generous, because I’m not interested in cheating) guesstimate, based on our average electricity bill, we’ll add about 20p for the cooking. And let’s not forget, you still need to cook the ready-made version – a cost that comes on top of what you pay at the checkout.

So even adding the power required, our version is, at £6.63, considerably cheaper than Tesco’s ‘Finest’. And it also included a higher percentage of meat (the previous article includes the full ingredients list for the Tesco versions) and no additives.

The issue of the missing kidney in the Tesco dishes is interesting: I have mused over whether this is because kidney would be more difficult to prep by a machine in a production line, but I've no way of knowing for certain.

Let’s look at it a different way, though. The cheaper Tesco version had 28% meat; the ‘Finest’ version had 36%. Mine had around 49% meat.

Of course, another question, which I didn’t include in the original challenge, is that of the labour. And just how do we calculate that?

Many people claim that the lack of prep required with ready-made food is worth the added cost.

But what about the value added by the food tasting much better, being fresher (and therefore with more nutrients intact) and additive free? And just as an added note, each portion of my own hot pot not only had more meat – it still had enough carrot and onion to count as two portions of each person's fruit and veg for the day, while depending less on potatoes.

I leave all this to your own musings on all this, because I really don’t know where to begin estimating the cost impact of that – although my gut says that they would make my version better value.

In the meantime, here’s how it’s done. The amounts are approximate and based on two people.

Pre-heat your oven to 160˚C (150˚C for a fan oven).

The longest bit is prepping the kidneys. I had four whole ones and two small bits. You need seriously sharp kitchen scissors, but they make the job of coring the kidneys quite easy.

I used three almost boneless ‘chops’, trimming most of the back fat off.

Take a couple of medium onions, peel and slice. Peel and thickly slice a large carrot.

Melt some lard in a casserole and brown the meats. Remove to a plate.

Add the onion and carrot and soften for a few minutes.

Pop your bouquet garni in, plus the meats and a little seasoning, and gently mix together.

Add a small amount of chicken stock – it needs to come up only about a third of the contents.

Peel and thinly slice enough potatoes to cover the dish. Season and dot with butter.

Put in the oven and leave for two hours. Take the lid off and leave for a further 20 minutes. Serve.

The smell as it cooked was divine. The contrasts in textures and the combination of flavours is wonderful. There’s a reason that this is enough of a classic dish that Larousse Gastronomique allots it an individual entry.

And to follow? A large, ripe pear, skinned, cored and diced, and some blackberries, cooked gently with a little brown sugar and a drop or two of water for something like 10 minutes.

Then decanted into a buttered dish and topped with more of the crumble mix that has been sitting in the fridge.

It was cooked in the same oven for 40 minutes after the hot pot had finished, and served with clotted cream – the perfect accompaniment: a joyous jolt of hot and cold in the mouth.

Cooking the great British banger – and refs getting it wrong again

2011-11-05T10:34:00.018Z

After British Food Fortnight, British Cheese Week and Chocolate Week comes British Sausage Week – for which piece of information I have the excellent Matthew Fort to thank.

And is there anything much more British than a good banger?

Well no – but that’s why it can do with a week to boost it: the sausage has been so badly served by mass production, not least as that process adds water to the finished product.

Now at this point, I have a confession to make. Until recently – embarrassingly recently – I just refused to budge from the mass-produced sausage you’d find in any corner shop or supermarket.

Peppa Pig pink and with as little texture as possible – inside or out – this was what a sausage was for me. I just didn’t ‘get’ the better ones.

I don’t really have any strong memories of sausages from childhood. There was my mother’s version of the French dish, sausage and kidney Turbigo – which I now cook, a tad more authentically (in other words, it has real onions) and in my teens, when we visited her mothering St Helens, we’d stop at a local butcher on the way to pick up some tomato sausages for lunch.

We must have had sausages – because I know that the crabapple jelly she’d make from fruit gathered at my grandmother’s was perfect with sausages. Yet I cannot recollect the sausages themselves.

I do remember sausages at college: they would lie there in the morning on the tray in the campus canteen, under light and always rather worryingly suggestive of a row of uncut penises. Or perhaps that was simply the effects of student living on my innocent mind.

For a little added context, this was in the years just following the appearance on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life of the Yorkshire Terrier that could ‘say’ sausages. Titter ye not, Missus!

The thing with sausages, though, is that they're not a quick cook. To get the best out of proper butcher's sausages, you need time.

After The Other Half picked up a pack of venison sausages last weekend, this has proved a big week on the sausage front.

I wasn't completely satisfied with the results of those (the pack did two meals): tasty, but a bit dry. The difficulty, of course, is that lack fat.

On Saturday morning, before a manic day, I sat in bed with a cup of coffeee and browsed various sources for answers.

Delia seems to concentrate on recipes that include sausages, as opposed to basic information about how best to cook them.

I was surprised to discover that as eminent a source as Jane Grigson recommends pricking them before cooking – surely that means losing lots of the juices and fat? Although I seem to remember that my mother pricked them – but then again, I seem to remember that she grilled them. Perhaps we had already moved into a culture of removing fat as much as possible?

But sure enough, Nigel Slater came to the rescue. In Real Cooking, he details the basic method. It's not difficult.

Pop a little fat in a pan – dripping or lard or some oil, but not butter because that would burn, and moist definitely not marg. Pop the sausages in (not pricked!), pop the lid on, turn the heat right down and cook for around 30-40 minutes, turning two or three times.

In other words, you're partially steaming the sausage, but in doing that, also retaining moisture. And because it's a low heat, you don't risk the skins bursting.

The following hours were busy. The Other Half came up to Broadway Market for what was probably my earliest shop there, then we took the bus to Marylebone Station and the train to Wembley to watch the Rugby League double header: Wales v New Zealand, followed by England v Australia.

Suffice it to say that the latter provided some real fireworks – and the referee (who'd only officiated his first professional game earlier this year) dropped a number of clangers. I'm not saying that England would have actually won, but the scoreline could have been rather different from the 20-36 that was on the scoreboard at the end of the 80 minutes.

But then again, Australian coaches could make Alex Ferguson look tame, given their constant whinging and whining about officials and rules. They whinge in advance – just to make sure the officials know how they want the game run.

Still, it's all rather cathartic – and when we got home, I was able to watch the second half of QPR-Manchester City. Unfortunately, we'd booked our Wembley tickets before the football fixture list revealed that the Blues were actually going to be in London on the same day.

It was deeply annoying – but at least we won, albeit after a greater struggle than any other match this term so far.

We're breaking records – and I'm still convinced somebody's going to wake me up any time now, and we'll be in a relegation struggle! In this case, I was convinced that former players Shaun Wright Phillips and Joey Barton were going to come back to haunt us (even though Halloween's been and gone). And indeed, the latter had a strong game – including a hardly unexpected hack at David Silva's legs. Doubtless he tweeted philosophically about it later.

But the difference is right there: Silva's now a City star – not Barton. I still say it was the best bit of football business ever done getting anyone to pay money – let alone nearly £6m – for someone with such a reputation as a thug, on and off the pitch.

Anyway, I was starving but the time we got home. With the rush earlier in the day, I'd had to resort to stadium food. Overpriced and really not very thrilling at all. Chips weren't too bad, but the fried chicken was dry. And why, oh why can't you buy a 'meal' without a vast drink with it?

I found myself missing the pies at Eastlands.

A red onion was peeled and sliced, while a little lard melted in a pan. Then it was left to cook away gently. Shortly afterwards, the sausages – plain butcher's pork – went into another pan, also with a little lard, before being lidded and left on low.

Then it was back to the football with a welcome cup of tea.

I peeled the remainder of some spuds from a bag from the supermarket (yes, I do occasionally shop in supermarkets in midweek) and popped them on to boil. The intention was to put them through the ricer, but the varied sizes from the end of the bag meant that some cooked quicker than others and I was left with a bit of a crumbled mess. It took some draining, so I simply left it as crushed potatoes, which worked perfectly well.

And to finish, a tin of mushy peas – this was becoming a bit of a northern day.

To serve, some of the juices from the sausages dressed the potato, while I opted for a spoon of redcurrant jelly on the side.

The sausages were delightful and the onion was soft and sweet – just starting to crisp a little: as I like it best.

It might have been the end of British Sausage Week, but my sausage education will continue. Watch this space for a first experiment making my own!

Mary, the gift of lard and real roots food

2011-11-03T14:14:00.015Z

I am one very lucky girl. One mention of my difficulties in procuring lard for my culinary shenanigans and a volunteer stepped forward.

Meet Mary, a hospital housekeeper from the Midlands, who brought me a second delivery of lard and dripping today.

Mary – you are an absolute diamond.

I think chips are on the cards – I haven’t made any since July – and this time I’m going to see what the results are like using dripping.

There is also the question of pies. Only yesterday, I noticed that the Hairy Bikers have a new book out all about pies, pies and nothing else but pies.

Since I seem to have dipped into a state of nosh nostalgia – thanks largely to Nigel Slater’s utterly delightful Eating for England – I have been drawn to pies.

Well, that and frequent trips to football matches where, after the hiccough of Manchester City’s legendary chicken balti pie, I have settled into a routine of eating a meat and potato pie at half time.

If I had an extra hand, I’d get a drink of Bovril too: the other day I caught a whiff of the stuff somewhere and I was instantly transported to a wintery, Pennine terrace where that beefy drink acted as half-time anti-freeze.

Slater talks of Marmite but not Bovril: for me, it's the the latter that has a Proustian quality – Proust, that is, given a football makeover.

Why on Earth would anyone consider memories of being so cold with such fondness? A certain innate masochism, perhaps? That might – until the last few years at any rate – explain my love affair with Manchester City.

But back to pies: with the nights crowding in, I want food likes pies. And I want to cook pies. Nothing fancy – but real big-flavoured comforting pies. With lard in the pastry.

It can’t be steak and kidney, since The Other Half doesn’t eat kidney, and even chicken and mushroom seems too fancy Dan for my present mood.

Meat and potato pie, then. It’s the season, I’m sure. I remember eating meat and potato pie, with black peas on the side, at bonfire nights near Mossley. Jacket potatoes too, baked in the fire. And parkin – real parkin.

Simple flavours. Food that was hot in the hands; warming against the cold and the night. The heat and the crackle of the fire; the pop and the fizz of fireworks blossoming in the velvet black above.

This drift into the joys of nostalgia and northern food took another, unexpected boost on Saturday. Shopping at Euston for fodder for the trek to Manchester, I was rendered nearly giddy with delight to find a pack of four small Eccles cakes. It was like coals to Newcastle: they’d been made just up the road from City’s stadium – just down the road from my old school.

I don’t recall having Eccles cakes in my childhood. This is a different nostalgia – something more collective and region based. This is roots food. This is food as something that is about who you are – who you think you are – who you want to be, where you come from.

And this, in so many ways, is what I think we have lost – to a degree at least. It's not that we shouldn't enjoy foods from other culinary cultures. I think, for instance, that Jamie Oliver makes an interesting point about this in his new book/series: that other foods have become our cuisine. Yes – to an extent.

The French have quite taken to couscous in recent years and it has become part of their national cuisine.

But I do think we'd done a bit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in culinary terms. Don't mess around with a Yorkshire pudding, for instance – there's no need, because it's perfect to start with.

London isn't the only place in Britain – and as such, it isn't representative of the country as a whole – but it seems that the bulk of eateries in the places that I move on a daily basis don't serve any British food.

And there's nowt wrong with pie – any more than there's anything wrong with Yorkshire puddings or fish 'n' chips or many, many other dishes.

But let's not get too serious tonight. I need to try making some of those Eccles cakes too – and it occurs to me that lard might be helpful there as well.

Mary – thank you for the gift today (and for your previous delivery). I promise to use it well and appreciate it. And I promise too to write about at least some of what I cook with it.

After the game, some game

2011-10-31T18:51:00.012Z

As we’ve trundled into autumn, with the weather playing its tricks, but the shortening days belying the great temperature con, a new Saturday routine has taken shape more concretely than ever before.

Previous football seasons have seen Manchester City’s schedule jostled all over the place, with several matches moved to a Monday night for the TV.

That means it pretty much impossible for me to make it. But this term – so far at least – we’ve only had one Monday night home fixture and I’ve made every other home league game (plus one stop-over for our midweek Champions’ League debut).

So I’ve been able to develop a routine around match days. Start with a cuppa in my ‘City ’til I die’ mug, do a few bits and pieces and then out of the house at around 10am, getting home approximately 11 hours later, with the light fading to the west.

What this also means is that The Other Half has to do the weekend’s shopping.

This last weekend, I had left suggestions for Sunday’s main meal fairly open-ended: either some venison for a classic stew is Andy was on the market or some beef for the pot if he wasn’t.

A bottle of decent plonk, some herbs and vegetables and you have some darned good autumnal fodder.

What he’d picked up was a packet of venison, osso buco style. Since it’s not a dish that I’m familiar with, first thing yesterday morning it was time to play hunt the recipe.

Osso buco is Italian and means ‘bone with a hole’ – which for those who are interested in these sorts of things, doesn’t seem that far from ossuary, which is pretty much a hole with bones.

In culinary terms, it’s a classic dish from Milan, made of cross-cut veal shanks, which are braised with vegetables, white wine and broth, and often garnished with gremolata, a mix of chopped parsley, garlic and lemon zest.

The original version was flavoured with cinnamon, bay and the gremolata, while the modern version uses tomatoes, without the spicing. The gremolata is optional.

But sure enough, I found a recipe for using venison in a very similar way – and then found myself adjusting.

There was no wine in the version I based the dish on, but because of how it includes sugar, it does need something to deglaze. And after I’d resolved that, I felt that the flavours mitigated against the gremolata.

But here’s my version, anyway.

Heat the oven to 140˚C (that’s for a fan oven).

Take some shallots and peel and halve or quarter them, depending on size (around four shallots or small onions per person).

Chop some cloves of garlic – I used three really fat ones.

Now, heat a round a tablespoon of dripping or lard – oh go on, you can use butter if you want – in a heavy casserole dish and brown the meat. I had around 670g of venison with bone.

Take the meat out and pop the shallots in, together with a generous teaspoon of demerara sugar. Add the garlic and stir gently – and then give it a slug of sherry or red wine vinegar to get any meat off the pan and to absorb the sugar.

Tip in two tins of tomatoes, add a drop or two of beef stock and a spoon of redcurrant jelly, pop the meat back in, bring to the boil, pop the lid in and put into the oven.

After around three hours, take it out, check and then season as necessary.

Relax for another 45 minutes or so and then put some rice on – I used basmati.

After a total of four hours, eat.

The soothing gentleness of the fragrant rice is a perfect foil for the slightly sweet and sour tastes of the dish. The meat was well cooked and seriously flavoursome.

I used all the meat in the dish, but it would have done for three portions – and indeed, I’m saving a portion for later in the week, as we’ll be taking it in turns to work from home in coming days, so it’ll do for a lunch.

That means that, at £5.50 for the meat, it works out at £1.83 per portion – and the cost of the garlic, onion, tinned tomato, vinegar, seasonings and rice won’t have added a lot to that.

In other words, a proper meal, using fresh game, that didn’t take long to prepare and cost barely over £2 a head.

Out of curiosity, I looked at a couple of supermarket websites. Ocado, which delivers for Waitrose, had nothing strictly comparable, but it had 250g of handmade venison tortelloni for £5.99, a pack of two 75g tranches of venison paté with Shetland gin for £3.25 (Welsh Dragon venison liver paté is £3.96 for 120g) and a 1.15kg rack of New Zealand venison is typically £40.24.

The ingredients for the tortelloni were:

Sainsbury’s had some farmed venison steaks at £6.49 for two of 240g each; 340g of “diced wild venison” for £4 and half a dozen venison sausages for £2.59.

The ingredients for the sausages were:

Tesco has a venison Wellington at £10 for 530g; a 750g venison and sloe gin hot pot for £7 (on special offer until 8/11/2011, when it becomes £8 again). It’s a fiver for 350g of diced venison, £2.99 for six sausages and £2.12 for two venison burgers of 227g each.

The ingredients in the burgers are:

Venison (90%), Water, Breadcrumbs (Wholemeal Wheat Flour; Yeast; Salt), Salt, Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Spices, Tomato Powder, Sage, TempText1.

For the hot pot:

Potato, Venison (26%), Parsnip, Red Wine, Carrot, Smoked Bacon, Onion, Vegetable Oil, Redcurrant Jelly, Sloe Gin, Chicken Stock, Cornflour, Muscovado Sugar, Tomato Purée, Pectin, Salt, Garlic Purée, Cocoa Powder, Black Pepper, Bay Leaf. Smoked Bacon contains Pork, Water, Salt, TempText1. Redcurrant Jelly contains Glucose-Fructose Syrup, Redcurrant Juice, Sugar, Pectin, Citric Acid, TempText2. Stock contains, Chicken, Sugar, Water, Salt, Cornflour, Onion Concentrate, Chicken Fat.

Why sugar and cornflour in a stock?

Just to throw a bit more context into this: I bought four large venison burgers from Andy last autumn. They were £4 and they contained only one ingredient: venison. Two did us more than adequately for one meal and I froze the others for a midweek supper.

And on Saturday, The Other Half also picked up a pack of sausages from the same stall. £4.50 for nine venison, basil and tomato sausages. Weight (including packing) 496g. Ingredients? What it says on the label.

Now someone remind me – why do some people think that processed and supermarket food are so great?

And why on Earth do we let 'them' get away with it?

Homage to the humble crumble

2011-10-23T10:34:00.003+01:00

Although Friday was National Apple Day, this fruit has dominated my culinary efforts for the past week – not, though, any other activities. I’d have to be beyond terminal boredom to have done this.

Leaving the apple pie to our friends across the Pond, for whom it has its own special cultural meaning, let’s turn to the humble crumble.

With Sunday’s belly pork cooking away ever so gently, I pulled out Delia’s Complete Cookery Course and turned to the section on puddings.

There is the basic recipe for a crumble topping, with my own calculations beside it for the reduced version for two people.

So, take 25g of diced, unsalted butter at room temperature and rub together with 75g of plain flour, using your hands.

The thing with this is that you need to do it as quickly as possible, so that your hands don’t get over hot and melt the butter further.

Once that’s done, mix in 25g of brown sugar.

That’s all there is to it – your crumble mix is ready to go.

I took three small apples out of the basket, peeled, cored and sliced them quite chunkily. They went into a small pan with a few drops of water and about one heaped dessert spoon of brown sugar, and then were cooked gently for a few minutes until softened.

I had decided to make individual crumbles rather than a large one and greased two small ramekins.

The fruit went in and was patted down, before the crumble mix was sprinkled generously on top, and in they went to a oven preheated to 160˚C, where they stayed for around 40 minutes, before being eaten, from the little pots, with a little very thick double cream on the side.

And they were nice – although I wasn’t completely satisfied with the topping.

Then came the quandary: there was still loads of the topping mix left. What to do? Throw it away, freeze it or …?

I decided to make another one the following day.

One of the things about learning to cook in the home, as opposed to professionally – and perhaps it’s particularly the case when you start late in life – is that you don’t get constant practice on any one dish.

You’re trying to vary what you eat; you’re trying new things. And personally, I obsess about serving up a variety of meals; that it’s some sort of duty to provide a wide range.

It’s only in the last year that I’ve really found that I’ve cooked a few dishes often enough now that I can do so without recourse to a recipe book.

But since we’ve never been a big pudding/dessert household, every time I get the urge to make something, it’s almost like starting from scratch again. And with a big gap until the next time you do it, it’s also difficult to remember any lessons you might have been aware of the last time.

On Monday, I nipped into Waitrose after work for a cat food run. Since they had some there, I picked up a large Bramley cooking apple. Unfortunately, while there are still English strawberries around (grown in polytunnels, presumably), there seems to be a shortage of blackberries, so my plan of a mixed crumble fell at the first hurdle.

Back at home, I prepped the apple and popped it in a pan with the same amount of sugar – and then had the idea that adding some of the left-over cider from Sunday’s belly pork roast, instead of water, might be a neat idea.

The fruit was cooked gently but for a little longer (not deliberately – I wasn’t timing it). Cooking apples – which had gone out of favour a few years ago until a TV chef had caused their revival – cook down much faster. It was pretty much a compote before I knew it.

But there’s no great problem with that. Instead of the cliché of nutmeg, I added a little ground ginger and then decanted the mix into the buttered ramekins for baking in the same way as the day before.

Feeling a tad lazy, I had also bought a tub of custard – there isn’t even any Bird’s in the cupboard. When the crumbles were nearing completion, some of that was whacked into a pan and gently heated through.

Perhaps because the cooking apple had been pre-cooked for longer and had, therefore, collapsed into more of a pulp, it was hotter – seriously, piping hot. Using ginger as the spice works perfectly well.

And so to Friday. After I’d found some blackberries (currently losing out in the shops to blueberries, which seem to be this year’s faddy fav), it was time for an apple and blackberry crumble.

But this time, I also changed the topping proportions, using 100g plain flour and 50g butter, with 25g sugar.

And I made sure too that the sugar was demerara – it had been a soft brown sugar in the previous versions.

The fruit was precooked with just a little water and a dessertspoon of that soft brown sugar, until it was just softened.

Decanted again into ramekins, it was topped and cooked for 45 minutes at 160˚C (temperatures are for a fan oven).

The topping on this version was much more as I expected and wanted – far crumblier, if you will.

The fruit combination is a classic for a good reason – and the inky colour from the blackberries is magnificent.

This was the best of the week – and was the perfect argument against my addiction to variety and for trying things regularly.

An apple a day ...

2011-10-17T15:21:00.009+01:00

It’s apparently National Apple Day today – which seems like the perfect excuse to look at this wonderful fruit.

When you look at an apple, it’s hard to believe it holds such a prominent position at the heart of bad things within our culture.

Not only was an apple the fruit with which Eve tempted Adam in the Bible, but it was also the method of delivering poison to Snow White in the fairy tale of that name.

In terms of religion, it seems that the poor old apple has been at the core of the story of the Fall simply because of a misunderstanding of Latin.

But once that had happened – well, that was it. The prominent larynx in men is known as the ‘Adam’s apple’ from the rather picturesque idea that it had been caused by the fruit of forbidden knowledge getting stuck in Adam’s throat.

Different languages and interpretations mean that what Eve handed over might have been a grape, a tomato (originally considered poisonous), a pomegranate or even a fig – the latter being a long-standing symbol of female sexuality, which at least makes more sense than blaming a Granny Smith.

And after all, in apparent contradiction of all this, we also have the little saying about an 'apple a day keeps the doctor away', while being the apple of someone's eye is hardly an insult. On the other hand, bringing taking an apple to school for teacher might make you unpopular with your fellow pupils.

In A Taste of Britain by Laura Mason and Catherine Brown, there are nearly 50 varieties listed in the index, with some lovely, evocative names, such as Dabinett, Howgate Wonder and Sweet Coppin.

Mark, my organic veg supplier on the market, told me the other week that there were once thousands of different varieties of apple grown in the UK – possible evidence that it wasn’t really a source of great knowledge – but we’ve whittled it an awful lot in recent decades.

To be honest, until around seven years ago, I was only barely aware of a miniscule number of them.

The change, when it came, was simply the first autumn of the revived Broadway Market.

Now obviously I knew about Cox Pippin – and if pushed, I’d have been able to name a Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and possibly Braeburn. But even though time can play distorting tricks on memory, I cannot think of any other that I would have been familiar with.

But now I’m familiar too with varieties such as Spartan and Russet – while there haven’t been any Granny Smiths or any Golden Delicious in the house for years, let alone any Pink Lady.

When I was growing up, ours was not a particularly fruitily inclined household.

There would be a small glass of fruit juice at breakfast and banana sandwiches on the normal Saturday morning.

If it were an abnormal weekend when we were having a full-blown brunch, then it would begin with a half of grapefruit in a bowl, the segments already having been cut away from the pith and skin by a special, serrated knife, ready for the sugar-sprinkled fruit to be consumed with teaspoons.

As a slight aside, it possibly says something that, while my mother taught me almost nothing about cooking, when I went away to college, I was sent with one of the grapefruit knives as well as a serrated tomato knife.

But to return to our subject – it was never a place where there was a fruit bowl around, so I never gained a habit of just picking up and apple and biting in any more than I gained a habit of picking up a piece of confectionary and nibbling away when peckish.

Food was far more formal than that – always needing to be portioned out by my mother at the properly appointed times.

When we lived in Mossley, we had a couple each of gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes. My mother would make crumbles and something that I remember as a Charlotte – although it was nothing like any dish I’ve seen a recipe for since.

What I remember – albeit vaguely – was something more like a crispy crumble topping. Perhaps it was breadcrumbs and coarse brown sugar combined? I shall have to ask.

We’d also occasionally have a fruit salad, which would always involve sliced banana and grated apple, along with whatever else was around, including tinned peach slices and those little mandarin segments.

She’d make fruit flans sometimes too, with fruit set in jelly in a bought sponge flan case.

And then there was rhubarb, which could also be made into crumbles when it wasn’t being stewed gently and served hot with Bird’s Eye custard or cold with your breakfast cereal.

But now is certainly the season of the apple, and I cooked a piece of belly pork on a ‘trivet’ of onion and apple halves on Sunday, with decent quality cider to form a sort of jus with the fruit and the juices from the meat.

It worked rather well – but with the nights pulling in and the temperatures now having fallen to something much more seasonal, there is nothing like a proper English pudding to warm and comfort.

And so began a little experiment to see just how to make a decent crumble. Watch this space!

Getting passionate with Raymond Blanc

2011-10-16T14:20:00.004+01:00

Another Saturday, another glorious autumn morning travelling north. Although these are long days, I enjoy the journeys, as they give me time to think and write, with the catharsis of football as the filling in the middle of this particular sandwich.

It's been a funny old week for various reasons, but a major highlight was meeting Raymond Blanc on Thursday evening.

He was taking part in a conversation at the Arts Theatre - a 'conversation', that is, pretty much in name only. Because as soon as broadcaster Fiona Lindsay asked him a single question, he would be off on a train of memories, anecdote and opinions.

Blanc is an endearing character; utterly charming (it seems genetic with French men) and self deprecating, with the enthusiasm of a child and a tendency to get giggly.

All of which seems at odds with the culinary genius - and the passion. Because while he can tease and cajole and amuse, he is utterly passionate about the state of food in Britain, and there's no fooling around when he hits his straps on that subject.

I'm familiar with Blanc's essential food philosophy - but to hear him expound it himself, and to be one of those to whom he was using the opportunity to direct a specific clarion call for action, is quite different. The fervour is almost evangelical.

I had the opportunity for a brief chat afterwards - as he signed a book for me, explaining briefly how A Taste of My Life had impacted on my own life, with its comments on how we need to rediscover our capacity to really taste food, and also about learning to smell and even listen when you're cooking.

His response was to emphasise, with more of that passion, the vital importance of our sensual selves when we're preparing and eating food.

It was a most enjoyable evening - but it doesn't stand in some sort of splendid isolation.

The end of the week saw an announcement from health secretary Andrew Lansley that the way to solve the UK's obesity epidemic is if we all just ate about 80 calories less a day, cutting a few billion off our collective daily intake.

There are times I want to tear my hair out. Such an analysis is simplistic in the extreme - and indeed, it actually helps to promote one of the biggest fallacies of the last few decades: that of calories in, calories out.

At it's simplest, it seems that one of the biggest issues is the nature of the calories you take in - not the number. In other words, where you get those calories from.

For many years, the basic - 'official', if you will - mantra of dieting was that you should cut out as much fat as possible and fill up instead with complex (starchy) carbohydrates like potatoes, bread, pasta, rice etc.

There's just one little problem. Calories consumed that way are more likely to make you put weight on than lose it. As a simple example: distance runners 'carbo load' before a run - that big bowl of pasta is designed to get them through a very great deal of physical activity: not half an hour in the gym.

And saturated fat, as we've mentioned before, has the advantage of making us feel sated sooner than that bowl of pasta.

This was the point at which another celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, waded in to the argument, slamming the health secretary's comments.

He wants more concrete action - possibly even a 'fat tax', just as Denmark has just created.

I have a number of problems with this. First, since fat is not the chief problem, why tax it - and indeed, why send out the signal, yet again, that it is the central problem?

Lansley may himself entirely believe that calorie intake is the key - there are plenty in the medical profession who still hold to such simplistic views and most health advice from professionals and scientists still tallies with this approach.

Perhaps that's because they imagine that we're not intelligent enough to deal with an issue that is multi-faceted in its complexity.

Exercise is an issue - but not in the sense that we all need to become gym bunnies. I find myself a little shocked by how many people of all ages I see in London getting on a bus to go just one or two stops - and these are not people with any obvious physical disability that prevents them walking those few hundred metres.

Similarly, as a nation we're wedded to the car in a way that sees us turn the ignition key simply to nip around the corner for the paper or a pint of milk - or ferry the children to school.

But we also snack more than, say, the French, while we eat poorly in terms of sitting down with a proper meal. Instead of doing so, many of us prefer to eat while we do something 'more important', such as work or watching TV.

Convenience food is a serious issue - stuffed with additives and rubbish, plus sugar and salt in substantial amounts. I read somewhere recently that some foodstuffs have MSG added in vastly larger quantities than it's used in soy sauce, and that in such amounts, it apparently 'switches off' the body's capacity to announce that it's sated.

Then there are all those man-made fats: liquid oils turned into solid spreads by hydrogenation and marketed so often as 'healthy' alternatives to natural fats. For the most part, they're more expensive too - which might tell you something.

These are just a few things that spring straight to mind. The point is that we don't know the exact reasons that some people get fat and others don't. But we continue to behave as though we do - even when what we think we do know is deeply flawed itself.

Because the authorities - political and medical - have both, in general, fallen for and continued to feed us the same bad advice for so long, I'm far from convinced that either is capable, at present, of producing an answer.

But for the former particularly, with its record of friendship with big business - in this case, particularly the vast food manufacturers and retailers, and even, as I've illustrated previously, its willingness to promote such corporate bodies - one is highly dubious of motives.

Does anything need to be done? Surely what we eat is a matter of personal choice?

Well yes - up to a point. But that's a little more difficult to argue when we're talking about children who are fed rubbish.

There's also the point that, if rising obesity creates problems for the state - and not just via the health system - than it is surely a matter for the state.

But it might also need to involve a level playing field of some sort - and when it comes to food in the UK, there isn't one. Corporations can pour billions into advertising their products; into offering 'free' toys to entice children (to nag their parents to buy).

Big producers can afford to do deals with supermarkets to give their products prominence or put them on special offers.

Successive governments have helped to exacerbate the problem by supporting and helping to promote the bad advice that some in the medical world have also pushed.

And all the time, the great, supermarket-inspired belief that food should be cheap, cheaper and cheaper again, coupled with the con that convenience food is cheaper than fresh ingredients and the time it takes to make those into a meal. It's so absurd that it could have come straight out of a play by Éugene Ionesco.

And there, always at the back of this, of all these things, is Blanc's oft-stated belief that we British have lost our culinary heritage, our relationship with the seasons, with the land - with our land - with our families and with that very sensual, celebratory pleasure of food itself: that we are foundering around in a culinary sea.

Can we do anything about it? Should we do anything about it? And if so, then what?

Perhaps it says everything that it takes a Frenchman to have even pinpointed the heart of the matter. And perhaps that also suggests the solution.

In a stew about gravy

2011-10-09T20:10:00.006+01:00

Some things are best forgotten; left well hidden in the attic of memory, buried away behind the other clutter.

But memories, no matter how deeply interred, have a habit of popping up unexpectedly and coming back to haunt you.

Slouched in an armchair on a Sunday afternoon, wind rattling the plane trees outside, i was delighting to the joys of Nigel Slater's Eating for England, when a brief section suddenly threw the words 'gravy granules' out from the page and directly at me.

From the tender comforts of nostalgia for custard creams and mint cracknel - the latter of which I hadn't hear of in years, the former of which the same book has had me wanting instantly - I found myself slapped across the face by the wet fish of embarrassing memory.

I have to admit that there was a time when the kitchen cupboard housed tubs of beef, chicken and vegetable gravy granules.

That was bad enough, but then more detail flooded through: memories of serving Birds Eye frozen chicken burgers (the breadcrumbed ones, not those with something like Rice Crispies over them).

I felt mortified at the thought. But at least it serves as an illustration of what a difference a decade or so can make.

Mr Slater has a lot to answer for. But he also provided me with the roots of an interesting challenge this weekend.

The first chapterette in the aforementioned book talks of stew - of the great English stew a creation of diced meat, diced vegetables, a jug of water and a bay leaf, all of which comes together as something that is, almost at best, bland.

He compares it, pithily, to the casserole traditions of France, Italy and Spain, with the addition of booze (in the first case, at least) and the use of various herbs and spices.

Returning to the attic of memory - but deliberately this time, and with care - I rooted around for memories of maternal stews.

She cooked a stew rarely and, when she did, it was on a Saturday for a late lunch: it would have some meat of other, together with assorted veg, pearl barley and liquid.

I remember nothing more specific - except the slices of bread that we mopped up with at the end.

As I've mentioned before, she didn't believe in onion - not in an atheistic way, of course, but I have never known her have one in the house, whether a cooking onion ordinaire, one of the red variety or even the milder shallot.

Her culinary belief system did seem to understand that onions were occasionally required, but that was achieved by rehydrating some Whitworths dried fragments in an old, enamelled tin mug and then popping it in the cooking pot.

Well a least that's how I remember things - and I'm not getting the ladder back out and going back into that attic right now to see if I can find more detail.

But all this set me to considering a stew for Sunday, instead of the pot roast I had been contemplating as a way of christening the Le Crueset oval casserole.

I wanted to cook without any specific recipe, but that didn't mean a lack of research before I stepped into the kitchen this afternoon.

Elisabeth Luard's European Peasant Food offered clues in a number of recipes for classic dishes that seemed a tad more authentic than most versions I'd seen before.

For instance, meat was usually caramelised in lard or dripping instead of the currently obligatory 'healthy' option of oil - Which? magazine actually once criticised a Rick Stein book for including dishes involving cream and butter.

And the cooking time was also often considerably longer than I'd usually seen: for instance, I'd never seen a recipe for a daube that saw it cooked for four hours at 120˚C. That was information that I stored for use.

I've also got poor - albeit gradually improving - understanding of cuts of meat. More research suggested that for such a dish, I should use blade (or chuck, as it's also) known. Sure enough, Matthew had some.

It was beautiful meat, delightfully marbled (see picture at the top). This afternoon, I cut it into pieces (large bite size) and then diced onion, celery and carrot - the holy trinity of the mirepoix - plus parsnip.

The meat was browned in dripping first, then removed and replaced with the vegetables.

Once they were softened and a little golden, a tablespoon of plain flour was added, stirred in and allowed to cook through for. Minute, before I started deglazing with Wychwood's Scarecrow organic golden pale ale.

Once it had stopped thickening, I added a couple of springs of thyme, some seasoning and then the meat, topping up the liquid to just cover.

Then it went into the pre-heated over at 115˚C, since I was using a fan oven.

After tasting on 90 minutes, it was a rather bitter - but not in the way the beer would have been if you'd been drinking it out of a glass. I sprinkled in a little demerera, drizzled on a little Maggi sauce, stirred in a decent squirt of tomato purée and turned up the temperature about five degrees. An hour later, this seemed to have sweetened matters - a little.

Later still, something hit me: all the remaining bitterness had gone, leaving something with lovely layers of developing flavour, a general sweetness at the front and a hint of sourness later.

In the past, I've wondered whether I've done something wrong when I've tried meat 'n' beer dishes: they always seemed to have that bitterness. Is that really what the Flemish intended with the traditional carbonade?

The problem, I now realise, is that most modern recipes in the UK seem to regard 'long, slow cooking' as meaning two hours at the max. Presumably, British cooks are assumed to be somehow incapable of cooking anything for any longer – are we too impatient?

For the final 45 minute's cooking, I added dumplings, made of self-raising flour, mustard powder, shredded suet, seasoning, chopped parsley and a little chilled water.

Having left this dish for over four hours, it took a mere one bite to realise that there's a substantial difference when you seriously cook for longer.

I've been curious about slow cooking for some time, but had been struggling to find recipes that seemed to involve anything that was genuinely slow – apart from a Heston Blumenthal belly pork dish that took nine hours.

What a shame I hadn't bothered studying Luard's book earlier and in more detail! With the feeling that I've enjoyed a really tasty success today, I'm going to be studying the book further and actually trying some of the specific recipes - not the least the daube. No wonder my previous efforts have never tasted as I know, in my gut, the dish should!

Well that takes the biscuit

2011-10-08T21:55:00.011+01:00

It was a back-to-normal Broadway Market today, with no crime scenes to disturb anything. Well okay – perhaps "normal" is overdoing it a tad when you look at some of the characters that materialise at the weekend.

And then, quite apart from anything else, is there another market anywhere that is always so rammed not simply with shoppers, but also with a plethora of bikes and buggies, dogs, small children and the widest range of wheeled toys to be found outside Hamleys in the run up to Christmas?

Which is why I try to get up there as early as possible on a Saturday. Today I was a little tardy after sleeping longer than usual, so it was busy by the time I arrived.

Fortunately, as I still had game on my mind, Andy was back - and I was tempted by the opportunity to try wild duck breast for a change, thinking it couldn't be much different from the farmed variety that I'm used to.

My next piece of luck was in spotting that Mark's organic stall had the first quinces of the season. Two are now sitting in the kitchen, hopefully to ripen a little in the coming days.

The third good break came when I found, with unexpected ease, rice flour.

My mind had turned shortbread on my most recent train trip, where I'd been served a small packet with a cup of tea.

As has become habit, I casually cast a glance at the wrapper. Perhaps rather perversely for a shortbread made in Scotland, it was branded under the name Brönte and included clotted cream among the ingredients. More disturbing, though, was the mention of additional 'flavourings'.

Now what on Earth does that mean?

Unless it's a particularly exotic specimen, with vanilla or even chocolate involved, then what other flavouring are required in addition to butter and sugar?

And then, I had been inspired by the nostalgia of Nigel Slater's Eating for England and decided to try my hand at baking some.

I have tried it before, but it was in the dim and distant past and I have no particular memories of it being a great success - which is probably why I haven't made any since: until today.

Felicity Cloake writes a series of articles for the Guardian where she examines 'how to make perfect' versions of some classic culinary confection or other. Surfing for shortbread recipes, I found her take on the matter.

Not only did it have some interesting facts about the history of this queen amongst biscuits, but she had also road-tested a number of different recipes to see which was best.

And that was how I discovered that ground rice or rice flour, used with plain flour, is the great cook's secret ingredient to help give shortbread that slightly gritty quality.

The other main pointer that I discovered was not to roll the bread out with a pin - it makes it too dense - but to pat gently with you hands, trying to keep them as cool as possible.

There's nothing difficult about Cloake's eventual recipe - it's nice and easy to follow.

Cream the butter - and make it really good butter - and then beat in a pinch of salt an some caster sugar, before sifting the flours over and mixing thoroughly.

But I did have to add more butter to get the mix to hold together at all.

It's a deceptive matter. I emptied the crumbly mixture into a lined and greased baking tray, and patted away as delicately as possible. I wasn't sure whether it would actually hold together. But after the required 15 minutes in the fridge, it went into an oven heated to 150˚C for around an hour.

My fan oven being legendarily bloody minded, it took longer. But the result, when it emerged, was pleasingly golden and had smoothed out in the process of cooking.

I sprinkled some demerara sugar over and then left it for a couple of minutes, before transferring to a rack. Remarkably, it held together, although it was clearly fragile.

The smell was divine – and it wasn't long before temptation became too much. A very pleasing effort: crumbly and richly buttery, with the right sort of graininess that I mentioned early, and nicely light.

So pleasing, in fact, that there isn't much left.

I'm curious as to how people make shortbread that doesn't crumble quite as quickly – but then that would hardly be a commercial proposition.

Presumably, for mass production purposes, the lightness has to be compromised in order to get a great tightness that makes it possible to pack and then sell.

I'll be making more – quite possibly tomorrow. It's insanely easy and utterly delicious. And who needs extra 'flavourings'?

Comfort food required

2011-10-07T22:40:00.001+01:00

After the unexpected encore of summer, autumn has returned. It's not simply a case of the shortening days reflecting the season, the temperature has now dropped.

Although it was beautifully bright at the end of the afternoon, it was more than a tad nippy. Waiting for a bus on Euston Road, my still-sandalled feet were jolly cold by the time we got home.

Which was the signal to change into the sort of comforting snuggly clothing I haven't worn in months - and prepare some equally comforting food.

We had popped into a small, local supermarket before getting the bus and, with the need for comfort and the desire for ease in mind, had picked up a pack of frankfurters. Everything else was already in the fridge and cupboards at home.

Sauerkraut is an acquired taste, but it's a taste we acquired some years ago on our first trip to Berlin.

It's easy enough to find in the UK these days and there was already a partly-used jar in the fridge.

It took me some time to find a way of cooking it that The Other Half enjoys, but the following seems to work.

Take your sauerkraut, rinse, drain and then squeeze it to remove as much excess water as possible.

Heat a little lard and very gently sauté the vegetable. At this point, I also added a peeled, cored and finely chopped apple, plus a bay leaf. Finely grated carrot is another good option and if you want to go for a really serious central European taste, then a few crushed caraway seeds won't go amiss.

Barely cover with water or chicken stock and cook very gently for 20-30 minutes, checking the liquid doesn't entirely evaporate too quickly. Season to taste.

The packet of franks suggested cooking in a microwave or grilling or frying. Better yet is the following, far more authentic method.

Pop them in a pan that's large enough for them to lie in. Cover with water and bring gently to boil - you don't want to split them - then put the lid on and leave, off the heat, for 10 minutes.

Serve with boiled potatoes and good German mustard - the first mustard I learned to enjoy, having come from a background that eschewed it, just as any other
Articulately strong tastes were eschewed (no horseradish either).

So, excellent comfort food and easy to cook. And sauerkraut afficionados will tell you that not only is it absolutely NOT pickled cabbage, but is fermented, it's seriously healthy too.

Indeed, there is a long history of the liquor from sauerkraut being consumed as a health drink.

There are inevitably questions over whether mass production methods reduce any of these health benefits - so perhaps sauerkraut should join the list of foods that I intend to try making myself?

What makes the French laugh?

2011-10-05T21:20:00.001+01:00

If you’ve ever wondered whether the French laugh at us Brits for our attitude toward food, then I think I’ve found the confirmation.

A neat little book arrived for me today: I had ordered the now out-of-print Le Creuset Cookbook less for the recipes and more for the promise of details of just how to get the most out of your cast iron cookware.

Since I’ve bothered to invest in some (and then spent part of the weekend tidying out some cupboards to house it – ‘my god, when did I buy this and what is it?’), I decided that a further small investment would be worthwhile.

It’s written by Elisa Vergne and chef David Rathgeber, with food porn photos by Thomas Duval, and was published in France.

I soon spotted the brief section on “A few easy-to-follow healthy cooking rules”.

This included instructions on trimming as much fat as possible off ingredients, adding a minimum of “grease” to any dish (and absolutely not “butter, lard or pork fat”, all of which are “rich in saturated fatty acids”; draining any foods that have initially been fried or sautéed and discarding any fat left in the pan etc.

You get the gist, I’m sure. The message is simple: saturated fat is bad.

Okay. If that’s the way you want to play it …

But then, the recipes start, and the fifth is for foie gras in a terrine.

The eighth is a chicken liver terrine.

Other joyous celebrations of fabulous fattiness include pork belly with buttered cabbage – boy, do I want to try that one! – and, on the following page, ham hock with foie gras.

There’s a blanquette of veal, which includes double cream and egg yolks, and a free-range chicken with cream – a lot of it, judging by the very sexy picture.

And that’s before we reach the baking and desserts sections, on which fatty levels you’ll have to trust me.

This, I admit, tickled me pink. I imagine – and of course I could be wrong – that that original introductory note about naughty fats was designed to placate the US market, for which the book was originally produced.

After which, the French authors, knowingly and with a sly shared wink, went about the business of imparting some recipes that were simply about seriously good food.

In the office today, I bumped into someone I only meet a couple of times a year. The first thing she noted was that I’d lost weight.

We stood around the tea point gassing and sharing stories. She has no illusions about becoming skinny – and doesn’t want to – but is attending a slimmers’ group at present to help with some weight loss.

She asked what my ‘secret’ was – and seemed surprised when I told her that, having given up dieting 12 years ago, I simply ate what I fancied, but that it has involved less and less processed rubbish as the years have gone by and my late-blooming love affair with food has developed.

I suspect the French authors of that book would be less shocked than she was.

On the same general theme, I now have to make a big, big declaration of thanks to Mary – a regular reader who, having noted that I was struggling to find lard locally, brought down 500g of the lovely stuff from the west midlands when she arrived for UNISON’s NEC yesterday, plus 500g of dripping for good measure.

Mary – you’re an absolute gem. And tonight, some of it was used in a midweek toad in the hole, which I sort of borrowed from Nigel Slater and adapted a bit. Thus:

Take six decent butcher’s sausages for two people and, very carefully, skin them.

Wrap the sausages in pancetta or Serrano or streaky bacon.

Sift 125g of plain flour into a bowl with two eggs, 150ml of milk and 150ml of cold water and seasoning. Whisk this up and leave to rest for 15-30 minutes.

In the meantime, preheat your oven to 220˚C.

Pop a gratin dish into the oven with three tablespoons of dripping or lard in it. Once that’s smokingly hot, pour in the batter mix and then lay the wrapped sausages in, together with three stalks of rosemary.

Pop back into the oven and cook for around 25-30 minutes.

In the meantime, slice an onion and soften in oil. Add a tablespoon of plain flour and cook for a minute or so. Then add red wine until I stops thickening. Cook until you need it.

And that, my friends, is a damned fine midweek supper. And one that I don’t think the French would scoff at.

What's really British?

2011-10-04T21:24:00.007+01:00

With British Food Fortnight now over for 2011, it seems the ideal time to consider just what British food really is.

It's fair to say that, in restaurant terms, it's probably never been better. The influence of the Roux brothers and Raymond Blanc in particular has had a massive impact - not simply in terms of record levels of Michelin stars held by establishments on this side of the Channel, but in an approach to cooking that has spread considerably beyond the upper reaches of eating out.

The ideas of seasonality and regional ingredients have become a mantra in the restaurant - and in the home.

But it is not something that has spread to every corner of Britain's food.

Nigel Slater's Eating for England is a collection of pithy essayettes on the cuisine of these islands.

Slater increasingly seems to be to food writing what Alan Bennett is to literature and the stage, with a sense of Englishness at it's most poignant as well as it's most ridiculous, and an understanding of memory and time and place that, in his case, can make you yearn less for a madeleine and more for a custard cream.

Like his volume of autobiography, Toast, much of this book is filled with a sense of nostalgia for the quirkily British foods that we remember from childhood: rice pudding to Murray Mints; the best biscuits for dunking and the sheer regional variety and creativity of the British when it comes to cakes.

But don't get too cosy, basking in the warm glow of nostalgia, because Slater peppers the book with withering comments on the other side of British food; the perennially grey stew; the stock cube that works against the taste of the meat; the high street butchers that are a dying breed because we shop online from our sofas ...

And that is where I start to feel depressed about the state of British food.

Watching Stephen Fry's latest series on language, another thing hit me. He was showing how the words we use have a cultural significance, describing national or regional attitudes.

One of his illustrations of this was a visit to the Basque region of Spain, looking at it's vocabulary and its food. All well and good.

But there's an even better example. Look at all those French phrases about the love of food: bon vivant, bon viveur, gourmand, gourmet and so on. We know these words because we have adopted them.

Try to think of an Anglo-Saxon phrase that describes the same thing - in general, let alone with the different subtleties that the words and phrases convey. We don't have the concept, so we have had to import the words and phrases wholesale.

I'm stymied. 'Foodie' is very recent and, for many, slightly deprecating - which tells its own story.

And that, to me, is the problem. These islands produce some fantastic food, yet most people ignore that and go to the supermarket.

Today, I bought some gilt head bream that was brought ashore in Cornwall only yesterday. If you found anything comparable in a supermarket, it would have been at least a day or two later, given the nature of supermarkets' centralised systems of distribution.

I grilled the fish for around five minutes a side. And served it with some carrot and broccoli. Simples. And very nice.

In the meantime, most people on these islands will probably have pulled something from the freezer, bunged it into the microwave and then sat and eaten while watching the TV.

And that, for me, is always going to be disappointing.

But in the meantime, I continue to enjoy a Yorkshire tea loaf that I tried out on Sunday. Lovely, as it happened! Moist and fruity sweet. And very, very easy.

So here, as an homage to British food, is my recipe for a Yorkshire tea loaf.

Take 500g of mixed fruit and pop it in a bowl with 230g sugar.

Just cover with hot tea (I used three tea bags of Earl Gray) – this should be around 570ml.

Leave overnight.

The next day, heat up your oven to 180˚C (fan oven).

Sift 454g self raising flour into the fruit and tea, together with two eggs. Mix well.

Then share the mixture out between two loaf tins that you've greased, lined, and greased again.

Pop in the oven for five minutes and then turn down the temperature to 140˚C (fan oven).

Leave for an hour – and then test with a skewer. If the skewer doesn't come away clean, then give the loaf another 10-15 minutes.

When the skewer comes out clean, remove the tins and leave for five minutes before lifting the loaves onto a rack and leaving to cool. Then eat with good butter.

This, I promise you, is British food at its best. And I think that Mr Slater would agree.

Summertime in the autumn

2011-10-01T20:28:00.016+01:00

It has been a crazy few days. There we were, slipping into the autumn, with long-term weather forecasts predicting a tough, cold winter – and one that will start early in October – and what happens?

Summer pops it's face back above the parapet and we find ourselves enjoying glorious sunshine and sizzling temperatures.

Yesterday morning, with condensation dotting parked cars and a bank of mist suspended just above the grass in Haggerston Park, the towering buildings of the City beyond seemed almost spectral in the stunning light. The day warmed rapidly and even the night was muggier than any in the usually sweaty August.

There are no complaints here at this reprise of heat and light, but nonetheless, it's had me in a spin on the food front.

There I was, having accepted the departure of summer and starting to relish the bounty of the new season.

We had watched from the office window at work as a white wagtail had stopped for a rest on the nearby sedum roof; a breather on its journey to Africa - the blustery weather had even been sending migrating birds off course.

I was contemplating roasts and casseroles, mushroom heaven, baking blitzes on chilled Sunday afternoons, warming soups and even advance preparations for That Festival at the End of the Year.

And then, in what might sportingly be referred to as a curveball out of left field, our crazy weather forced all that back out of sight, leaving me foundering around with a feeling that I needed to prepare summer dishes again - but with a completely changed larder.

So just what do you eat in such confusing weather? On Saturday morning, sitting outside in the garden in shorts, with notepad and pen, I leafed through Gordon Ramsey's A Chef for All Seasons, hunting inspiration.

It is, I realised – gazing with pleasure on page after page of food porn – not really that difficult.

Ramsey is not a cook who really go in for massively heavy dishes, so even his autumn dishes, making the most of the seasonal produce, are not overwhelming. Pigeon breasts, for instance, which I've been enjoying throughout the summer, would still be perfect now.

With a list drawn up, it was off to Broadway Market.

Then it emerged that Andy was not there with his game stall, which meant a rethink. And at the top end of the street, across the road from London Fields, was a scene of chaos.

It looked like someone had taken one of those huge bins and strewn the contents everywhere. Empty bottles and cans lay all over the place, behind a wide cordon of crime scene tape and police.

It seems that the heat had been bringing people out to party for the previous three nights. In the early hours of Saturday morning, however, it had turned from a boozy street party into someone more serious, as shots were fired and a woman was caught in the crossfire. She is in hospital. It was the third shooting in the borough in a week.

Good old Hackney. However trendy the area becomes, there are still the gangs and there are still the guns; and there are still youngsters with no apparent hope or self respect beyond what they believe such things offer them.

And like August's rooters and looters, torching people's homes and wrecking small businesses only a little further away, they don't give a damn about anyone else getting caught up in their spiral of self-hating and self-destructive violence.

Depressed, I turned away and tried to concentrate on the shopping, but was distracted enough that I forgot the butter and actually had to return a short while later.

Fortunately, an afternoon spent 'watching', via the internet, as Manchester City overcame the week's tribulations by beating Blackburn Rovers 4-0 away from home, cheered me.

But what were today's culinary solutions?

First, for lunch, a salad of endive, with wafer thin red onion, a small Cox apple, blushing pink inside when it was cored and sliced, shavings of Montgomery Cheddar, cob nuts and a dressing of lemon juice, virgin oil and honey.

Full of taste and textural contrasts, and a perfect celebration of English ingredients to mark both the end of British Food Fortnight and British Cheese Week. Seasonal, yet light. It can be done.

It was inspired by a recipe but didn't follow it to the letter – the Cheddar instead of blue cheese, and no blue cheese dressing, cob nuts instead of walnuts.

And the evening presented a similar opportunity. I had been intended to do Ramsey's pan-roasted cod, served on a bed of garlic potato purée, with ceps.

But there was no cod, so I picked up some of Vicki's beautiful smoked haddock instead and did a little adjusting.

In this case, I roasted the fish in a gratin dish, dotted with plenty of butter and covered in foil, at about 155˚C for 20 minutes.

The potato was cooked, pressed through the ricer and then had butter and good double cream beaten into it.

The ceps were thinly sliced and cooked gently in a little butter, before a good squeeze of lemon was added, the pan shaken carefully and then left to heat back up.

And that was pretty much that - except instead of adding garlic to the potato, I seasoned it and the ceps with a little of the truffle salt that I'd bought in Carcassone back in July.

All in all, it was scummy. And suitably seasonal but not too heavy. And also not simply taken straight from a written recipe.

For dessert, a combination of seasonal pear – and downright unseasonable (but English!) strawberries: a match that seemed to completely exemplify the situation.

Later, as The Other Half and I sat outside in the dark, smoking, neighbours enjoyed a barbeque while watching The X Factor on a portable TV. At least not all partying in Hackney is violent.

A little bit of pork

2011-09-27T14:07:00.009+01:00

Late on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with the oven having finally condescended to hit the proper temperature – and stay there – a piece of pork was gently laid on the rack of the roasting tray, scored fat thoroughly seasoned, and placed into 220˚C of heat.

It had been bought the previous day on Broadway Market as a rolled, boned joint. But since this was English Food à la Jane Grigson’s book, I’d cut the string that bound it, stretched it out and seasoned it all over – paying particular attention to the boned side. Then it was covered in foil on a plate and popped back into the fridge.

The meat got 20 minutes at that temperature, before it was lowered to 160˚C (or the fan oven equivalent). At just over a kilo in weight, it was due to have another hour cooking.

In the event, after spearing the joint with a skewer after that hour, and finding the juices running pink, I gave it another 15 minutes.

But for that hour, it was accompanied by two Cox apples, skin scored near the top to prevent them from bursting.

In the meantime, a peeled, quartered parsnip was also roasting away in some lard, on the basis (a bit of a guess, this) that since the temperature was on the low side, it would need longer.

Small potatoes had been peeled carefully, then boiled for 20 minutes (they’re so solid, they don’t fall apart), and were then tipped into a small gratin dish with some melted lard and roasted in an oven that had been whacked back to really hot after the meat (and apples) had been taken out to rest.

I had wondered about adding Yorkshire pudding, after The Other Half pointed out that there really is nothing that says it can only be served with beef. But I decided that the temperatures worked against me on that count – 20 minutes resting time was enough to finish the potatoes decently, but wouldn’t be enough for a pud.

In that last stage, sliced leek was sautéed and then steamed, while gravy was made in the roasting dish, with the fat poured away and flour added to the meat residues, before a brief deglaze with white wine and then a little stock.

The parsnip was overdone – my guesswork really hadn’t worked – but that was the only downside. The pork – although the rind hadn’t crackled – was delicious and moist. The leek was a perfect – if clichéd – compliment, and the roasted apples were a really pleasant change from the more usual sauce.

If I’d thought more and planned better, I’d have got some cider in for the gravy. But there you go.

That’s probably the first time I’ve done a roast dinner on successive Sundays – and by the end of it, I was dripping with sweat! This cooking malarkey probably makes you lose weight!

Let's have a bit of a harvest festival

2011-09-27T07:30:00.001+01:00

Since we’re in the midst of British Food Fortnight, it seemed the perfect opportunity to do some serious British cooking – and also to consider just what 'British food' means in the 21st century.

Since I did roast beef just over a week ago – and what could be more British than that? – a portion of last Friday evening was given over to the question of what to cook this time around.

It was a football Saturday – and an early start – so there could be no sitting up with a coffee in the morning. The list had to be ready in advance for The Other Half to head to Broadway Market.

Jane Grigson’s English Food is, on such occasions, a fascinating read, with dishes from around the country – many of which you’ve never heard of in the first place and a substantial number of which have probably been all but forgotten.

You see the regional ingredients reflected in recipe after recipe – lamb in Cumbria, for instance, where sheep graze the hills from the rolling Lake District to the bleakness of the utterly inappropriately named Eden Valley.

British Food Fortnight was started, 10 years ago, by two vicars, who wanted to revive the tradition of the harvest festival. I've always relished the ripeness of the season, its fecundity, its sensuality and voluptuousness – and it was one of the parts of the religious year that most appealed too when I was growing up.

The fortnight itself, though, has changed since those early days and come to represent something more, but very much with a sense of the celebration of what we produce on these islands.

It was no surprise, though, to see food writer Matthew Fort tweet that supermarkets weren't supporting it or to read, in a column by Oliver Thring, that a Morrison's, sitting right next door to the orchards of Kent, is selling Chinese apples – although one suspects that even if they’d been selling apples from the garden of England, the fruit would probably have been halfway around the UK and back, such is the crackpottery of the centralised supermarket distribution system.

Living in urban areas, it’s all too easy to forget just what an agricultural heritage we have. The journey north by train is always an enjoyable reminder.

The sky above was as pale blue as my shirt on a beautiful morning. At times, the scenery could have been an almost chocolate box vision of England in the early autumn. Sheep and cattle rested in fields. Green hills rolled gently and an increasing number of the trees were wearing the signs of seasonal change.

Narrow boats dotted the landscape as the canals wound their way between the industrial conurbations, with ribbons of smoke drifting upward from slender chimneys.

There were signs of ploughing: bare soil marked with the patterns of agricultural machinery; stubble elsewhere, spiky in the morning light, like an unshaved chin. The occasional small, square church squatted amid neatly arranged gravestones.

Not that this is the only England visible from the train: there’s the manicured golf course that sits incongruously alongside a vast, belching power station, and cloned, modern rabbit-hutch homes within sight of the tracks too. Depending on the route, there is industrial dereliction: buildings with jagged, broken windows like screaming mouths, as forgotten as the productivity they once housed.

Slag heaps are slowly returning to nature. And at Watford, the journey passes by one of England’s new cathedrals, a vast shopping mall in which to worship the buying of things (except food, usually).

So what about the food?

Well, however many of the dishes from Mrs Grigson’s book might have gone out of fashion, one of the staples of British food remains abidingly popular – the banger.

Not, of course, that a love of sausages is limited to these shores. But unlike our Germanic cousins, for instance, we have managed to reduce the banger to a shadow of what it can be.

Things have improved a little since reluctant producers were dragged kicking and screaming into revealing on packets just what percentage of proper meat was in a sausage – as opposed to the delightfully euphemistic ‘meat derivatives’, which now have to be labeled as such.

But that’s not solved the whole problem.

Industrially made sausages are difficult to brown properly because the sheer scale of the production process means that the machines that make them have to be constantly cooled by water, which finds its way into the finished product along with the listed ingredients.

And that’s another big question – what’s in your mass-produced sausage?

Checking Ocado’s website, even the ingredients list for Daylesford’s ‘organic pork chipolatas’, we find: “Antioxidant: Ascorbic Acid, Citric Acid”, plus sugar and sunflower oil.

Then there’s the matter of the right balance of quality meat to fat: yes, you need proper fat and no, sunflower oil does not count.

So there’s more than one reason for buying the best butcher's sausages you can find.

Sausages can be magnificent – but all too often we seem to forget this and treat them as ‘fast food’ in the worst sense of the word; as not being seriously good food that’s worth investing a little time and care in.

So when you’re ready to cook, don’t prick them – you’ll actually lose all those valuable juices that keep the sausage moist.

Heat some fat – lard is brilliant, dripping would be perfect for beef sausages – in a heavy pan and then cook on gently on a low heat, checking frequently. This helps to prevent the skins bursting.

It can easily take 30 minutes, so don’t expect to rush.

There were pork and leek sausages in the fridge when I got back from the football – and I cooked them as described, in the Le Crueset casserole, with a sliced red onion.

On the side – simple boiled spuds and carrot, with good butter. Nothing complicated – but it really doesn’t have to be.

I did, though, have a bit of a revelation the other week, realising that potatoes bought from the organic stall on Broadway Market actually had a different, discernible taste. So too did some new potatoes from the not-quite-organic stall that I’d tried a few days before.

It’s a surprise, because – like so many other people, I suspect – I’ve accepted, over many years, a sense of potato being potato being potato and, generally speaking, just padding. Well, with the exception of Jersey Royals. But I’d certainly never been so conscious of a particular flavour in a maincrop spud.

So the next time I’m on the market, I’ll have to check just what they are.

And in the meantime, I'll contemplate further how to celebrate the joys of the British harvest season.

Good tools can make the job easier

2011-09-25T14:30:00.001+01:00

They say that a good workman never blames his tools – but that doesn’t mean that the quality of your tools isn’t important.

And if I had ever been in any doubts about that, it has been brought home to me in the last week.

A fortnight or so ago, I was cooking a casserole dish in one of my stainless steel pots. We bought them at least 15 years ago, ordered from a Sunday supplement.

They weren’t cheap and they were advertised as being of professional standard.

To be honest, I can’t remember why on Earth we opted for such a set: 12 pieces, comprising four saucepans, two casseroles (one with a steamer insert), two frying pans and a large sauté pan, a sauce pan and a colander. It was before I got remotely interested in food, let alone actual cooking.

Still, we invested and they have been used ever since.

But back to the casserole I was cooking. It dawned on me that this was exactly the sort of dish that yearned for one of the curved, shallow casseroles from Le Creuset.

Now, I'm going to make an admission. I’ve been trying to convince myself for some time that an odd piece of the iconic ironware from that French company would be worthwhile – but the attraction was primarily aesthetic.

But finally, I went out and bought the dish mentioned – a seriously solid piece of kit. And then I waited until last weekend and the chicken chasseur that I mentioned the other day.

What struck me then, however, was not simply how nice it was – but it was also a better cooking experience. Where I have struggled to really brown meat for some time – even since learning a lot more about it from Raymond Blanc – suddenly the chicken really did caramelise beautifully.

Either my own technique had enjoyed a blip or had improved overnight – or something else had made a difference.

With exactly this question in mind, I started experimenting.

The following day, when I made a French onion soup, it was in the same casserole – and sure enough, caramelising the onion was easier.

A couple of days later, I used the dish again for a risotto – it didn’t need caramelisation, but it did improve the cooking experience.

The only possible conclusion, by this stage, was that the ability of my piece of cast iron Le Creuset to conduct heat was better than that of the pans I’d been using for years.

That was clarified during a fag-break conversation with the head chef at the office canteen later in the week, who told me that, over time, the steel pans would have changed chemically – and with that, the ability of them to conduct heat would have changed too.

I was delighted to discover that it wasn’t my imagination or some wishful thinking.

And it struck me then that I should already have known this lesson. A few years ago, I bought an omelette pan in France.

It’s a heavy beast and copper coated. A really traditional one – and not cheap. And it transformed my ability to cook an omelette – and also pancakes.

The great chef, Escoffier, couldn’t believe that people tried to make omelettes without a proper pan. So it's not simply a case of gadgets that do jobs that can be done just as effectively with an 'ordinary' pan.

Last night, I used the same casserole to cook some sliced red onion and good butcher's sausages. Again, good results.

While it's true that tools can't make up for sloppiness or lack of technique, it seems that they can also hinder you.

Food to welcome the autumn

2011-09-20T11:41:00.009+01:00

A grouse bobbed among the stubble. Small birds of prey hovered over fields. A pheasant stalked alongside a hedge. Cotton wool clouds scudded across the blue and a canal wended its way though the countryside like a silver ribbon.

It was a snapshot of the English countryside in September, as my train rushed south from a day’s work in Manchester.

There, on a glorious day, the trees had been showing off their new autumn colours – some way ahead of their southern counterparts.

It was the sort of weather and scenery that sends the mind – and the appetite – on a seasonal journey.

And harvest festivals are not the only festivals around, celebrating the season’s abundance: the 10th British Food Fortnight, which was initially intended to coincide with harvest and revive the celebration of it, is now under way.

And if you fancy something a tad more exotic, then the Sud de France festival is up and running again too, with many events in London promoting the food – and particularly the excellent wine – of the Languedoc-Roussillon.

A football free weekend meant time in the kitchen – indeed, Sunday was the most intensive kitchen day for some months, with a flour-free squidgy chocolate cake, à la Jane Asher, on the agenda as a Monday tonic for hard-working colleagues.

It’s a dark, rich – but texturally surprisingly light – treat, from a lovely, easy recipe that can be found here.

Saturday evening saw a chicken chasseur: for just two of us, four chicken thighs browned in butter, followed by onion and mushroom.

Plain flour is added and cooked through for a minute, before the pan is deglazed with a couple of teaspoons of brandy and then some white wine. It’s at times like this that the smell of cooking is intoxicating.

Add tomato purée, chicken stock and chopped tarragon. Season to taste. Pop the chicken back in, bring to the boil and then cover and reduce the heat.

Cook for around 40-40 minutes – or when the meat is cooked. Serve with freshly chopped parsley and either rice or big croutons.

It’s a great dish and can also be done with game. Indeed, since the ‘chasseur’ refers to hunting, that would be even more traditional.

On Sunday, it was time for a French onion soup for lunch – and then a proper roast dinner in the evening, after baking.

In this case, a rib of beef (more than enough for two), which not only had the bone in, but also plenty of fat.

I don’t think it had ever struck me before, as it did on Saturday, just how much beef is sold for roasting with next to no fat in it. Most seems to be boned and rolled, with a layer of fat wrapped around it.

Since fat carries the flavour – and lubricates the meat – this seems absurd. But then again, British farmers, given the market, have also been rearing pigs with decreasing amounts of fat, as the terror of fat has overtaken the desire for flavour.

The piece I found might not have looked as neat or been as easy to cut as those rolled ones, but it had plenty of fat, cooked very nicely and had no shortage of flavour.

Roast dinners are simple on one level – but require a degree in quantum mechanics on the other.

You need reams of paper to note down the times and temperatures for the joint, for the roast potatoes and for the Yorkshire pudding, together with reminders for when your veg need to go on.

I used beef dripping for both the potatoes and pudding this time – for the latter I might have used too much, although the single pudding, made in a small gratin dish, worked fairly well (I’d have liked it crisper) – but for the former, it was perfect, helping to produce a fabulously crisp but thin outside.

And using the Le Creuset roasting tray that I’d been fortunate enough to win earlier this year meant that, once the meat was resting, I could whack it on the hob, add some sliced onions I’d been cooking, then some flour, a little red wine to deglaze and then water as needed, to produce a decent enough gravy to honour the pud and meat.

Sliced carrots on the side, simply boiled in minimum water, was as complex as I wanted to be after that.

With the nights drawing in and an increasing chill in the air, it was the ideal way to comfort against the impending winter.

Of tinned potatoes and balti pies

2011-09-17T15:20:00.000+01:00

Generally speaking, I think it's fair to say that I have a reasonable knowledge of food matters - I wouldn't want an unreasonable knowledge, that's certain.

Frankly, I'd rather be thought of as something of a bon viveur or a gourmand or even a gourmet.

Choices, choices: which one?

There are intriguing differences in those latter two words. A gourmet is someone who relishes fine food and drink. A gourmand, on the other hand, is someone who simply enjoys food and drink: there's no suggestion here of it having to be haute cuisine.

The latter has seen it's meaning change over the years, initially having been a synonym for a glutton - and one of the Seven Deadly Sins. As that older definition has altered, culinary proponents in France have, apparently, appealed to the Vatican to change the word to gloutonnerie rather than gourmandise.

Once we remove that understanding of the word, then we're left with something expresses a more general pleasure in food - and frankly, while the posh stuff can be very, very good, food doesn't have to be flashy and complicated to be worth eating and taking the greatest amount of pleasure in.

So it's gourmand for me.

But I'm probably something of a food geekette too: years of reading diet 'advice', followed by years of reading why the diet advice was crap, together with goodness knows what other food information in the last couple of years has left me with a certain knowledge.

And so it came as something of a surprise to see, in one of my local shops, a tin of baby new potatoes from French tinned veg specialists Bonduelle.

It seems that, according to the label, potatoes count as one of your five a day. This wasn't just news to me - it'll be news to the NHS when our national treasure finds out.

Because although potatoes are a great source of vitamin C, they are also a starchy or complex carbohydrate and, as such, they don't count as one or your five a day.

I have emailed Bonduelle and queried this, but have thus far only had an automated response - in French. Your food detective is on the case - and will report if she ever hears anything.

But while we're on the subject, there is a perfectly gourmand use for tinned potatoes.

Drain, rinse and pat dry with kitchen paper.

Heat some duck or goose fat - or lard - in a high-sided pan. Pop the potatoes in carefully and cook until turning golden, shaking frequently to help prevent them sticking.

Serve with good sea salt.

With such sophistication in mind, I want to report that I had a new culinary experience the other night: a chicken balti pie, that legendary Manchester City treat.

One bite and my eyes had crossed while I was fanning my mouth desperately.

The packet claimed that it was 'diced' chicken. It wasn't. The filling was a small amount of shredded chicken, some veg, some very hot sauce and a large portion of empty space. The pastry wasn't bad.

Chips, with skin on, were rather better.

The beer that a friend and I discovered after the match, with the somewhat unexpected name of Dizzy Blonde, was better yet. Brewed in Stockport by Robinson's, it was light and almost fruity, at 3.8, less strong than many other beers, and a pleasant surprise.

The Voluptuous Manifesto - now offering a testing service so that you don't have to take the risk!

The unhealthiest shopping basket?

2011-09-14T07:30:00.000+01:00

After the debacle of the missing lard, I needed a few bits and pieces in a midweek shop and decided, for a change, to head to Waitrose – a somewhat more acceptable supermarket than assorted other options, if only on the basis that staff are partners.

There, I found Kerrygold lard – although that's slightly confusing, since as far as I know, Kerrygold produce butter from cows, which doesn’t really suggest piggy products. But hey ho, I’m not complaining.

I did, however, decide that, as a response to all the obsessive, joyless – and downright inaccurate – emphasis on so-called ‘healthy’ eating, I would see just how ‘unhealthy’ a shopping basket I could stomach.

Thus a second block of lard, beef dripping – I’ve never used it before and don’t know when or how I will, but I will – French butter with salt crystals, potato farls (to be grilled and then drenched in butter), cream cheese with garlic (Otto loves this too), nacarons and chocolate, although I did nearly leave that out given positive health reports.

Cooking a French dish at the weekend, I was happily able to employ some of the lard.

The dish was a boeuf à la gardiane – essentially, beef of the cowboys of the Camargue.

Using a recipe from Hot Sun, Cool Shadow: Savouring the Food, History and Mystery of the Languedoc by Angela Murrills, The Other Half had set out to cook this one weekend last year when I was away.

You start by marinading beef that’s been cut into smallish cubes – skirt or a similar cut.

The marinade is based on red wine and includes the usual sort of aromatics.

He told me later that one of the hardest things was being able to tell whether you’ve browned the meat after the marinade has so changed the colour.

I had decided to use a different recipe from Flavours of Provence by Clare Ferguson. Murrills’s book is a delight, but I think that the recipes have been simplified a tad. Ferguson’s version was a little more complex.

It began in the same fashion, although with 50ml of cognac as well as 250ml of robust red wine ion the marinade. I used a couple of onions, peeled and then slashed across the top, with a bay leaf inserted. Two cloves were also pressed into each onion.

These, together with plenty of sprigs of thyme, were added to the marinade, together with salt, pepper and crushed garlic.

It stayed like that for around three hours, before the liquid was strained into a jug and the meat dried off with kitchen paper.

Now the recipe then called for some slices of unsmoked bacon, rind removed and the slices quartered, to be sizzled in a dry pan until there’s enough liquid to cook the beef in two batches.

It occurred to me, as I was waiting for even remotely enough liquid to emerge, that this was bonkers. There was no bacon in the dish we ate last year in Nîmes.

The only reason this bacon was here, I concluded, was to create fat. In the Murrills book, olive oil is used.

The more I start thinking about this, though, the more I see it as unlikely. Why not just use a little lard? It’s difficult not to believe that the French themselves would use duck or goose fat, if not lard.

And where The Other Half had had some difficulty getting the meat properly brown when he’d cooked the dish previously, it’s much easier when you can safely get the fat as hot as is possible with lard.

I could, of course, be entirely wrong. But when you realise just how much the French do use natural fats – and their nose to tail philosophy too – then it’s difficult to imagine whole regional cuisines without such fat.

It’s equally easy to see the likes of Murrills and Ferguson as being persuaded that either such fats aren’t healthy or, more likely, I think, that publishers or readers in North America and the UK just won’t swallow the use of such saturated fats in their cooking.

As for the rest of the dish, I discarded the bacon, added the marinade to the browned meat, then some beef stock (enough to cover) and simmered it away for two hours before adding black olives and cooking for a further half hour.

You then take 50ml of cognac and beat into it a good couple of tablespoons of plain flour, and then add that to the pot, stirring until it’s all melted and gives you a thicker, glossy sauce.

Well, that’s the theory.

It wasn’t bad, but it still wasn’t a patch on the dish we had in Nîmes. I’ve got some way to go to find out just how they make something so fabulous.

And as for that unhealthy shopping basket, I’m now working on a scheme to create a dish that uses all those ingredients.

Because obviously, when people go on about how unhealthy those things are, they presumably imagine that everybody wants to eat nothing but those things, and in copious quantities, all together and all at once.

When did common sense go so out of fashion?

Beauty in different places

2011-09-11T17:42:00.007+01:00

It was just gone 11.20am on Saturday morning and the train was hauling itself out of London. There was Wembley on the right, with Norman Foster's already-iconic arch towering over the skyline.

All those times I passed it and uttered a silent prayer to the gods of football for City to make it there. There was no need for the same prayer on Saturday: we have been, seen and conquered and, if I couldn't get a ticket for last May's FA Cup final victory, at least I was there for the semi win over United.

Saturday itself was the first act of live worship this season, with the visit of Wigan. It continued a mightily impressive start to the term – with a brand of football that really is beautiful on the eye and likely, on occasion, to take the breath away.

I’m still expecting someone to wake me up – and I’ll be on a train to somewhere like Scunthorpe.

So I'm long enough in the tooth as a City fan not to take anything for granted. Things have changed enormously, but there is still a little niggle in the back of my mind, a tiny gnawing doubt that says that we, the club that was famously described as being able to win cups for cock ups, can still do exactly that.

As the train got under way I listened to Beethoven's sonatas for piano and violin. Beautiful.

It's probably ridiculously juvenile, but the juxtaposition of football and 'culture' always tickles me.

It's amused me to wonder what people have thought when, after clocking my football shirt, they'd notice the title of a book that was slightly beyond Janet & John.

Not, I hasten to add, that anyone can hear the Beethoven.

I'm not the only one who has such thoughts, either. A colleague, who is a season ticket holder at Arsenal, was telling me only the other day that she regularly used to go to a match on a Saturday afternoon and then to the English National Opera to see whatever was on there.

And it amused her to wonder how many other people enjoyed such a combination of entertainments.

Even in the 21st century, it seems that we compartmentalise culture - so that we find the idea of a football fan loving opera too as rather odd.

In Italy, of course, opera has long been popular across society's boundaries - not least Verdi, who has long been linked with the Risorgimento, that country's unification movement.

And opera there was also accessible across the social spectrum, unlike in the UK, where it's still often viewed as an elitist form of culture.

Back in 1996, when England was hosting the European Football Championships, I had travelled to Liverpool to report the match between Italy and Russia. My main memory of a less than scintillating encounter was seeing Gianfranco Zola for the first time; the little man getting his foot impossibly high to bring down the ball that then seemed utterly glued to his boot. Such instant control.

But the journey back to London was memorable for being chaotic. One train had been cancelled, so most of the fans were backed into a single train.

Seat reservations were useless unless you were lucky enough to find your seat before someone else with the same number.

I was ticked off by a very young policeman for swearing at one point, and I started the journey standing until doing something very unusual for me and flashing my press card at the train manager (who was trying to hide from the chaos) and demanding that I sit in first class, together with the half a dozen fans whi were also standing in the same corridor.

Press cards have their uses.

But in the coming days, it emerged that a train from Glyndebourne, bound for the capital one night, had been held in order to wait for a business bigwig or two who had been at the opera.

Football has long been known as ‘working man’s ballet’ – the apotheosis of male working-class culture in a country that effectively kept the plebs well away from high art – just as the cult of amateurism in sport was simply a way of keeping working people away from many other sports.

Now, it’s not been quite as simple as that for some time: in the north, for instance, women have attended football for a long time.

And post-war equality opened up opportunities not simply to see art, but also to participate in it. A blossoming of film, theatre, music and architecture all benefitted from the greater social mobility for working people.

But football’s audience has changed again in recent years, as the cost of going to matches has risen. There are good and bad points about this: personally, while I can look back on going to matches in run-down stadia with only one loo for women, I don’t have any sense of rose-tinted, misty-eyed longing to stand at the bottom of a terrace (me being a short arse) and see streams of piss bubbling down between my feet.

The view I have when I go to City games allows me to really be able to watch the game, unhindered.

On the other hand, as with an increasing amount of things, many ordinary people are being priced out of attending. That’s not just about football, though, but about a far wider cultural change that’s been taking place in Britain – and England particularly – for the last 30 years, and to even skate the surface would take a lot more words than you want to read here and now.

But for me at least, to be a football fan doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate opera (or Beethoven) – and visa versa.

In Amadeus, Peter Schaffer portrays Mozart as a musical genius with more in common with Sid Vicious than was entirely in keeping with the polite society of his day. I have little problem imagining Mozart attending football matches as an Ultra.

Beethoven was an awkward sod. So were many other composers – and countless authors and painters and sculptors etc.

For their work to be co-opted by respectable society is rather amusing really. Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, but I wonder sometimes how much some of those who spend small fortunes to be seen at, say, the Royal Opera House, really get of what they see.

And sometimes it’s difficult not to feel that art has, in the UK at least, been largely neutered to make it polite.

A couple of years ago, I saw Daniel Barenboim play some Beethoven piano sonatas at the Royal Festival Hall. All alone on the stage with his piano, it was Beethoven as I’d never seen or heard preformed before – but Beethoven as I suspect it was meant to be: wild and angry and full of Romantic passion and energy.

The vast auditorium flashed away and it was as though I was the only one there, watching something that was as close to its original intent as to suggest I'd been thrown into some time flux and the pianist and composer had become one. It was magnetic and magnificent and deeply intense.

Like music, football is the personal and the public combined. And on Saturday, what I saw was art made flesh. And like the Beethoven, it took my breath away and left me with a sense of awe.

They are not so far apart as some would suppose and as some would like to suppose.

The case of the missing lard

2011-09-05T22:23:00.009+01:00

With the last of a block of lard shrinking gradually, and a very real danger of running out altogether, action was needed.

There’s only one place locally that I’ve been able to buy lard, in one of my close-by grocers. But in the last month or so, they don’t seem to have had any in.

Finally, with the proprietor back from holiday, I was able to check when they would have some in.

There is, it seems, a problem. From what I could gather, trade publication Independent Retail Magazine had carried some sort of item on the subject a number of weeks ago, which was linked to difficulties in getting/supplying the stuff.

The reason, apparently, was that it’s ‘unhealthy’.

Now I’m long enough in the tooth, sceptical enough and a good enough hackette not to simply accept this as gospel – although I do trust my source.

Google, of course, is your friend. So I looked up Independent Retail Magazine and searched that.

A big fat (lardy) nothing.

Metaphorically donning the old deerstalker, I rang the editorial desk. A very helpful gentleman took my call. He couldn’t remember anything, but asked in the office.

Nobody could recall specifics, but it “rang a bell”.

I looked at The Grocer too, but to no obvious avail – although there was plenty of other food for thought.

Via an advert, according to Unilever, those friends of the government and the public health, customers decide to buy a spread – “ie butter, healthy spreads” – “depending on their attitudes to taste and health”.

Don't you just love rocket science?

Now I can’t answer for anyone else, but personally, I choose on the basis of both criteria – hence butter every time. But note that, to Unilever, butter is not healthy.

The myths about fats are widespread even in the retail trade press. In The Grocer, a columnist talked about “calorie porn” in an article that also seemed to believe that we “mortals” had no chance of recreating actual recipes from a TV programme.

And, of course, it enabled a throwaway comment about one dish “looking as healthy as a lard enema”. Because lard is inherently unhealthy.

Mind, you get the feeling that The Grocer really does it have in for poor old lard. In a regular column, one Titania Touché had penned a few comments about producers’ covert attempts to decrease package sizes, while still retaining the same price.

All well and good, but in the context of this, the writer – who understandably is so ashamed of themselves that they hide behind the name of a Shakespearean fairy – notes: “As the momentum behind teeny tiny groceries grows, so our Calories Don’t Count campaign, a covert initiative for long-standing client United Lard, is hitting its stride.

“The Express out-Mailed the Mail this week by reporting that dieting gives you cancer. A fine fillip for the fuller lard-fuelled figure.”

The “lard-fuelled” figure. Because lard, as we know, is the reason behind rising obesity.

Now it strikes me that there are a few possible explanations for all this.

One is because however much some researchers have realised the counterproductive nature of dietery advice on fats (and complex carbohydrates), it really has not sunk through to most of the rest of the populace – including those linked to the food industry itself.

But would it also be entirely cynical of me to point out that lard is considerably cheaper than any of the other fats out there? The one pack available from Ocado, for instance, is just 40p for a standard 250g.

With profitable markets among both foodies for butter and those thinking it’s a healthy choice for marg, both of these have the opportunity for greater profit, particularly in the top ranges – be that for gourmet butters or, say, margarines that have felt the whisper of an olive, thus allowing producers to market them in such a way as to suggest a direct link it to the wonderfully healthy Mediterranean diet.

I am presently no closer to finding out why small retailers are having difficulties getting hold of lard. But I won’t be giving up.

Later, I made the first turbigo of the season: kidneys and sausages, with button mushrooms and baby onions in a velvety sauce of butter and flour and sherry, with beef stock and tomato purée, that becomes richer than ever during the cooking thanks to the kidneys.

Lovely.

As I cooked, I found myself musing on how well it would work using lard at the base. As you brown the meats in butter first, you often have to clean out the pan and melt more butter before browning the onions and starting to cook the mushrooms, because the butter has started to burn.

Unfortunately, that loses a lot of the flavours. But lard is a wonderful cooking fat precisely because it doesn’t burn.

Since you make the sauce by mixing the flour and sherry, before adding the purée and stock, you don’t have to worry about the butter making a roux.

However, since my supply of lard is currently so shrunken, that experiment is on hold.

But have no fear – the lard detective is on the case.

The joy of real food

2011-09-04T22:30:00.005+01:00

It's late on Sunday afternoon: in the oven, a leg of lamb is roasting away, in olive oil, rosemary and garlic. A culinary cliché, chef Rowley Leigh argued recently in the FT, but there are reasons for clichés - and often because they work.

Potatoes are being par-boiled and will finish off in the juices while the meat is resting, along with some similarly par-boiled florets of cauliflower and a small tin of cannelloni beans.

The smell as I sit writing is wonderful, with the promise of magnificent tastes to come.

But this, to me, is not simply good eating in the taste stakes, but there's nothing unhealthy about it either.

I noticed this morning that the media is getting excited again about fat people - more to the point, the obesity epidemic. It helps that Jamie Oliver was involved in the story, thus giving a celebrity angle.

As so often before, the subject allowed space for a rush of bigotry as well as some staggering displays of ignorance in the online comments sections of at least one publication - and experience says that it will not have been unique.

Condemning the overweight has not only taken on the scale of a national obsession, it seems to be the one remaining bigotry that you're allowed. People who would object to racism or sexism or myriad other isms suddenly seem liberated from such squeamishness when the subject of fatties raises it's heavy head, and freely burst out into tirades of nastiness.

But the same people are staggeringly ignorant too. They seem to think that weight is a simple issue: in effect, that it's just a matter of calories in and calories out. That the overweight are simply lazy and greedy.

Well, it isn't that simple. As more and more researchers are discovering.

In fact, it's more complicated than anyone really knows.

We know now that telling people to cut all fat is unhealthy and counterproductive. We know now that the advice to fill up with complex carbohydrates like potatoes and bad and pasta is flawed and actually helped people to pack weight on.

The French, as so often, provide an interesting comparison and some probable pointers. They don't have the same widespread problem - and yet neither are they a nation of gym bunnies. But they do walk more and aren't so obsessed with taking the car on even the shortest journey.

They sit down to eat properly - they don't eat lunch at their desks or dinner in front of the TV, which probably doesn't do much for the digestion.

Although some changes have occurred, they still, by and large, eat proper food - far less processed and fast food. And in one intriguing piece of observation, it's apparently been noted that even with eating at McDonalds, the French actually sit down and eat properly.

They don't have the snacking culture that we do.

Generally speaking, their food is a great deal better than ours - bread is just one example of an area where we fill our food full of rubbish.

There are also question marks over artificial sweeteners - just as there are over artificial fats.

But one thing that struck me about the level of debate is how much there is also an assumption that healthy eating means eating 'health food'. We seem to have reached a point where many people would not consider the meal I described above as 'healthy'.

Now I'm not suggesting that we want to start thinking of food in such terms - quite the contrary. A bit of real joy in eating would be a move in the right direction.

There is a nasty puritanism to those who rant, from the anonymous safety of their keyboards, where their own bodies cannot be judged, about the bad fat people. Similarly, there is an unpleasant puritanism and life-denying joylessness to ideas that to eat healthily, you have to forego anything that's actually nice and take on the attributes of an aesthetic.

The absurdity of thinking that the alternative to a diet of junk food is, say, 'whole foods' and no fats (say bye bye to that mashed potato with butter and cream) seems to be a perfect illustration of just how messed up the food culture in the UK is.

Before the lamb went into the oven, there was plenty of other culinary activity of a distinctly joyful type.

As planned, it was time for chutney: I opted for a pear one from Lynda Brown's The Preserving Book, using pears, a couple of onions, three tomatoes, some sultanas (instead of raisins), ground ginger, chilli flakes (instead of cayenne pepper, which I didn't have in), demerara sugar and, instead of cider vinegar, the remains of a bottle of Breton cider.

The only other change I made to the recipe was to skin the tomatoes first.

It took well over the two and a half hours to cook, but the smell was stunning and it developed to a really rich, dark hue. Now it's all packed into a jar and has been put away to mature for that festival at the end of the year.

With that done, it was onto the blackcurrant jam. A simple matter of the fruit, washed, with a little water, the juice of a lemon and some sugar, all brought to a bubble and then cooked vigorously for a good 10 minutes.

It was another lovely smell - and the taste is fine too. Blackcurrants have naturally high levels of pectin, so a jam sets really easily, while the lemon juice ensures that it's not too sweet.

Now I don't know about you, but that sounds a pretty healthy day's cooking to me.

It's a rum old game

2011-09-02T09:02:00.002+01:00

Perhaps, in years to come, I’ll feel the same way about the arrival of autumn as I do about the arrival of spring, when I make a pilgrimage to find the earliest Jersey Royals and English asparagus, and sit there, grinning like a loon in celebration of this declaration of the end of winter.

In terms of food at least, autumn has plenty to offer – and not least among the pleasures of this time of year is the start of the new game season.

Game, as I mentioned last year, has become bogged down in England with ideas of class – it’s seen as posh food.

It’s different in Scotland, where – like golf – hunting has never been viewed as the sole preserve of the well-to-do. And it’s not just killing for sport either.

A move across the Channel, not just to France but beyond, north, south and east, offers a host of culinary cultures where hunting is far more egalitarian – and game an entirely democratic food.

But then again, most of these places still have ‘common’ land where people can hunt (and forage too): they never enclosed it and felled the forests in order to drive the people into the developing urban areas to become economically ‘active’.

Flying into Berlin takes my breath away with all the wooded areas so near to the city. No wonder the forest looms large in the German psyche. For me, I realise I’ve probably hardly even seen a wood worth the name.

But for the moment at least, let’s get back to game.

In an increasing spirit of welcoming the change in the year, I set about a midweek game dish to brighten the evening.

The game in question was pigeon breast, which isn’t seasonal – indeed, I’ve used it a number of times throughout the summer as the centre of a salad. But this was an attempt at a gutsier dish.

For two people, take a couple of medium onions and chop – not too finely, since you want to retain some texture.

Heat some olive oil in a pan and start to cook the onion gently. This is the time consuming part of the dish, but you want it to start to turn brown.

When it’s at that point, add a seriously generous glug of good, sweet sherry and (if you can get some) another of raspberry wine vinegar and continue to cook gently.

What you want is something that has the consistency of a marmalade. If it’s getting very dry too quickly. Add some more of your sherry and/or vinegar.

Taste – and season accordingly. And once it gets seriously thick, it’s very easy to pour off any excess oil that’s still visible from the start of the cooking process.

Cook the meat in a hot, dry pan – a minute and a half each side at most. Pigeon needs to be really quite rare or it gets very dry, but that’s a great contrast with a nicely caramelised outside.

Serve with the onion and sherry marmalade.

On the side, I added some simple basmati rice – and some shredded cabbage, sautéed in a little lard and then left to steam in the lidded pan for around eight minutes.

And that was not a bad way to welcome the season.

Bottle it up

2011-09-01T11:35:00.005+01:00

After what can, at its most generous, be described as a somewhat erratic August, September made a point of stepping out, fresh and bright this morning.

It soon clouded over, of course, but there are pleasures aplenty to be found at this time of year and the thought of them can make even such grey days brighter.

I have most of Saturday to myself, with The Other Half Yorkshire bound for Castleford’s final home game of the ordinary season.

So what to do?

This is, surely, the season of putting things into jars – and indeed, it’s the perfect time to think about chutneys and so on for the end-of-the-year jollies – it might be September, but I refuse to mention ‘that’ festival by name this early.

Indeed, if I do make chutney, it’ll actually mean that I’ve managed to be more advanced in my culinary planning than at any time previously in my life.

Within the last year, I’ve picked up a copy of Lynda Brown’s The Preserving Book, which is a mouth-watering volume of ideas for a wide variety of preserving styles.

So right at this moment, I don’t know quite what I’ll make, but it will be a pleasure all of its own to spend a couple of evenings browsing and musing.

But continuing the theme, I know that I want to make blackcurrant jam, so Saturday morning will probably see a raid on the local Turkish grocers that has these glorious, grown-up fruits on sale.

And then there’s the possibility of a rather big challenge: for some years, I’ve been trying to get my hands on some crabapples.

My maternal grandmother had crab apple trees in her garden, and every year, we’d collect bags of the fruit, to be made into a beautiful, clear pink jelly by my mother.

These absolute gems make a magnificent savoury condiment that’s utterly divine with good sausages – and other thing, of course. Well, that’s certainly my memory.

Finally, after so long, Mark, the organic greengrocer on Broadway Market, thinks that he can get me some this year.

But on one condition – he’s promised to ‘do me a deal’, on the basis that I’ll make sure there’s a jar of the finished jelly for him too, since he says he’s too busy to make his own.

I’m tickled pink. There is something so gloriously old-fashioned about making such an arrangement. It’s a market working at its best, on a genuinely human scale.

There are one or two other things that tempt me: I know that The Other Half, for instance, is rather hoping that, if I carry out my threat to render pork fat at home and produce my own lard – so that, unlike most shop-available stuff, it hasn’t been pointlessly hydrogenated – I’ll do it when he’s away.

Or perhaps that’s already quite enough for one weekend!

Soup, soup, glorious soup

2011-08-31T15:30:00.000+01:00

There was a certain inevitability to it all. The calendar might still have been registering August, but summer was little more than a memory in the air.

As the bank holiday weekend progressed, the weather teased relentlessly: just as it seemed to have brightened, with the sun out, blue across the heavens and real heat on the skin, cloud would dive over.

It was hardly an encouragement to sit out. At one point, in a flurry of optimism, I rapidly changed from jeans into shorts and plonked myself in a deckchair with a book.

Barely a few minutes later, the sun had disappeared.

That was probably the moment at which I conceded defeat and admitted to myself that there’s now bugger all chance of an extended summer.

It’s not that autumn has really arrived – I can’t smell the difference in the air yet – but with dark now descending by 8.30pm and the days dominated by cloud, comfort is in order.

On Sunday, I’d nipped up to our tiny farmers’ market to pick up a few bits and pieces.

One of the things I needed was a good head of celery – after all, given Saturday’s chicken roasting exploits, a burst of stock making was in order. And there is no stock without a stick or two of celery to go alongside the carrot and onion.

Which left me with a lot of celery.

On Monday, though, I caved in and made soup. Not something chunky and heavy, but cream of celery.

And as has increasingly become the case with soup in the last few years, no book was required. This was cooking by instinct, by experience and knowledge – perhaps even with passion.

The following will give you enough for two people for a lunch.

Take a large shallot and chop finely. Soften in olive oil.

Add a couple of finely chopped garlic cloves and your celery, sliced. I used six or seven sticks – not the very outside ones and not the very heart either.

Once that’s all sweated down a bit, add a glug of white wine for a touch of acid, and let that bubble for a moment or two.

Add chicken stock to cover and grind loads of pepper into it. Add a couple of bay leaves and then let it all simmer away gently for around 20 minutes or so.

Now, this is the one ‘fiddly’ bit – mostly because it does mean you’ve got a few bits to clean up after.

Strain the liquid into a clean pan. Blitz the vegetables and then stir back into the liquid.

At this stage, check the taste again to see what salt you need to add.

Pop in a generous pinch of finely chopped parsley.

Take it all off the heat again and leave for a few minutes to cool a little.

Add a good spoon of really thick cream, stir in and then gently reheat.

Serve with more chopped parsley and some croutons for a nice bit of crunch.

Okay, it ain’t ‘fast food’, but it’s very good and has a surprisingly complex taste, with the pepper adding a real depth that develops as you eat.

What it does demand is really good celery – organic is the best bet, simply because that way you know it’ll have grown properly and won’t just be sticks of flavourless crunch that render any culinary effort utterly pointless.

And just as two years ago – although that was a few weeks later – when my first response to the call of autumn was a light but fragrant and subtle soup (courgette in that case), this made me feel that perhaps all hope is not gone along with that disappointingly fleeting season.

Chocolate is good for you – some newspaper reports are not

2011-08-29T19:10:00.007+01:00

According to the Telegraph, the NHS has finally decided to recommend some ‘superfoods’ to Joe and Joanna Public.

It seems that there might have been some straws and a camel involved along the route to this new approach, as assorted foods and supplements have been promoted to the public as having benefits close to immortality in some cases – and with varying levels of concomitant profit for their producers.

There certainly seems to be some evidence for some of the supplements that are currently popular, as illustrated by the website Snake Oil – the scientific evidence for popular health supplements, which manages to be lovely to look at too as well as very informative.

Also coming in on the matter, another report in the same paper (and elsewhere) claims that chocolate is good for you.

Not that this is new: see the same Snake Oil site above for there being good scientific foundations to believe that chocolate may be beneficial – and that doesn’t even mention it in terms of a mood enhancer.

Indeed, a few years ago, Dutch (I think) scientists produced research collated from a mass of data that purported to show the ‘perfect’ diet.

It was, in essence, the ‘Mediterranean’ diet – with a glass or two of red wine per day and a square or two of proper chocolate.

Much of the advice on ‘superfoods’ will not come as any great revelation to many of us.

But the Telegraph’s report also suggests that you can find these real ‘super’ foods not in your expensive deli, but in the supermarket.

Yes. Abandon your ‘expensive’ deli – which only sells faddy foods, one might assume – and look to ‘supermarket superfoods’.

Why don’t they just go and give the supermarkets a licence to print more damned money?

Not that that’s what the report itself actually says. Miracle Foods and the Media was first published in January this year – and indeed, is dated in February (the pdf address includes this).

No wonder the Telegraph didn’t want to actually provide a link to the report – it’s hardly news and it doesn’t include the supermarket slant.

Not that aren’t issues with health advice in general.

Part of the difficulty today with so many people apparently not eating well is a combination of things, including food faddiness in general and a food culture and heritage so completely denuded by that faddiness and by the supermarkets themselves.

The original report makes some interesting points – but this is bad journalism from something that once actually had a reputation as a decent newspaper.

And it’s odd too politically, since one might have expected the Telegraph to be supportive of farmers and their struggles against the corporate monopoly that supermarkets are close to holding, given their 80% share of the UK grocery market, and the bullying that that enables them to get away with.

In fact, it all simply serves to illustrate what the NHS report was talking about – careless writing.

And by god, the picture of liver at the top of the article looks as though it’s been overcooked into un-appetising dryness.

Food for in-between days

2011-08-29T15:59:00.017+01:00

It may still be August, but it's summer in name only. The early promise of sun and heat has not so much tapered out, but generally proved to be a damp squib.

And with the nights seeming to lurch rather than draw in, it's increasingly difficult to play the menu game.

Sat inside, watching rain and cloud dominate the shortening days, instinct seems to demand comfort.

But if simple salads are hardly the order of the day, it's not yet time for chunky soups and hearty stews.

I had Friday off and wandered up to Broadway Market while it was still quiet, sitting down for a latte under cover and debating the food question.

In the end, I tried a Provençal recipe for lunch – red mullet, cleaned but with the liver intact and the scales still on, dampened and then sprinkled with course salt that is patted into the fish.

It's fried (according to my book) in a hot pan for one and a half minutes on one side and then turned carefully and fried for a further two minutes on the other side.

After that, you can sit with it on a plate and use your fingers to pull off the skin, which comes away easy with the salt-encrusted scales. The point is also to eat the liver.

Served with a simple persillade on the side, it smells divine. Unfortunately, the timings were not enough and it wasn't cooked properly below the flesh nearest the surface, so I didn't get to the liver either. But you really can pull the skin right off, easily and cleanly with your fingers.

Remember that I said I'm far from an expert when it comes to cooking with fish? Well, ya lives and ya learns. This is certainly worth trying again sometime, remembering the timings.

Given plenty of time, for the evening I tried something new. Making a bread dough with a little olive oil, it formed the base of a Catalan-style pissaladiere.

In essence, pissaladiere is a form of pizza from Provence, with a topping of onions that have been cooked long and slow, then a lattice pattern of anchovies and olives.

But when we'd had a version of it in Collioure at the end of our trip a year ago, the onion had been replaced with tomato. Which makes regional sense, in that the Catalans on both sides of the Pyrenees eat pan tomate – toasted bread rubbed with a cut garlic clove and then a ripe tomato, seasoned with a drizzle of olive oil and good salt.

Here then was a combination. And I'm pleased to say that, although no recipe seems to exist, it was a success.

The weekend proper left me with further questions. In the end, I bought a chicken and decided that, instead of my usual way of cooking such a bird, à la River Café Easy Two, I'd used another recipe from the same book that the mullet had come from, Flavours of Provence by Clare Ferguson – chicken with 40 cloves.

Now I've done this before, in the past. But not quite like this.

Previously, it had involved a fairly standard roasting, with unpeeled cloves scattered around. Well, that's how I remember it.

This recipe involves scattering a few anchovies in a roasting dish, together with some rinsed/drained capers. The bird goes on top, stuffed with masses of thyme (in my case, with some rosemary too, plus the remains of a left-over lemon and a few loose garlic cloves).

Rub it with a little olive oil (I used that from the tin of anchovies – waste not, want not and so on), season and add a bulb of garlic per person to the roasting dish.

Now Ferguson instructs that you cut the base off each bulb and then pop it into the dish with the rest of the bulb on top. This is a fiddle – not least when the stem of the garlic in the centre is so difficult to cut through that you risk all the individual cloves coming loose.

I made a cut in each to facilitate exchanges of flavour, but didn't try to cut them through fully.

Roast at 200˚C (ordinary oven) for 30 minutes – at which point, Ferguson says to remove the garlic, as it should be cooked. In other words, soft enough to squeeze out and spread on a piece of bread. No chance – well, not in my oven. So after turning the oven down (180˚C) I left it for longer.

The bird – and the author is calculating on one of around 1.5kg here – should then need around 35-40 minutes further. Which seemed to work fine – I even checked the internal temperature just to be sure.

Remove the chicken and garlic to a warm place and, on a hob, add a good glug of robust red wine to the juices and stir well. Add a couple of cloves of the garlic, squeezed from their papery skins and then pulped into the jus.

There's no need to add extra seasoning, as you already have the anchovies and capers. Just skim or drain the fat off and you're ready to go.

Serve – rather obviously – with good bread and the jus on the side.

And very nice it is too. In case you think that that amount of garlic sounds overwhelming, it becomes gloriously sweet and much milder when roasted like this.

For afters, I'd made creme Catalan earlier in the day – a set custard that's lighter than crème brûlée and flavoured with lemon, before being given a burnt sugar topping.

Not quite summer – not quite autumn.

The perfect sort of food for such in-between days.

Store cupboard risotto

2011-08-24T15:31:00.003+01:00

Having arrived home yesterday and realised that what I’d planned to cook would, in reality, take too long for a week night, it became a question of store cupboard cooking.

There was no shortage of vegetables available, so after a brief rootle through Valentina Harris’s Risotto! Risotto!, I came up with a plan.

Since our return from holiday, I haven’t quite got the full compliment of essentials back in the kitchen.

I am woefully lacking in decent lemons, for instance. And the small remaining chilis from a packet are a bit wrinkly.

But miraculously, there were two shallots hiding away at the bottom of a salad drawer in the fridge, granting me the proper start to a risotto.

It had to be stock from a bottle, though, since there wasn’t time to defrost the final tub of homemade stuff.

So, into some olive oil went the finely chopped shallot, followed by some finely chopped garlic – that 1kg bunch I hauled back from France isn’t going to last very long at this rate – and then some sliced courgette. All was softened.

The rice goes in next and absorbs all the remaining oil. Then a good glug of white wine and, when that’s absorbed too, you can start adding the stock, a ladle at a time.

While that was going on, a few peas were podded, briefly boiled and drained.

I checked the seasoning. I thought about the flavour. And then the germ of an idea knocked on the door of my mind. One of the little pots I’d bought back from Roque Anchois was a cream of anchovy. This was exactly the sort of dish to add a good dollop to.

And it worked rather well too, adding a remarkably subtle layer of flavour to the finished dish.

All in all, not bad for something that wasn’t planned and was based entirely on what was actually in!

Espresso yourself

2011-08-23T15:30:00.000+01:00

Travel, so they say, broadens the mind. It can certainly be an education in more ways than one – and one of the subjects on which we finally got ourselves rather more educated this year was that of coffee.

It’s not that we didn’t like coffee, you understand. More that we have been suckered into over-complicating the subject.

I’d drunk black coffee on and off over the years – usually as a diet thing – it was only six years ago, when we visited France and Spain for the first time that I really appreciated it.

Well, to be accurate, it wasn’t so much a ‘black coffee’ – or a mug of coffee without any sugar or milk added – as it was an introduction to proper espresso.

I remember sitting in central Perpignan, outside a café and alongside the canal, drinking a cup that came with a small square of dark, dark chocolate – a superb double kick.

We returned from that trip with cups and saucers in a Gaudíesque design, determined to continue our new-found delight in espresso.

The old filter machine at home was leaking, which gave us a great opportunity to replace it. Thinking that serious coffee required serious investment, we bought a vast contraption that had deposited the fresh coffee into a large vacuum jug.

The advantage of this was that no further heat was applied, thus avoiding the coffee being stewed if you couldn’t get through four mugs in five minutes.

This, we thought, was being intelligent in the coffee stakes. Now admittedly neither of us have any knowledge about the correct temperature at which you brew coffee or any of the other technicalities that apparently exist.

I do know that you don’t pour boiling water on coffee and that rinsing the dregs down the sink is a good cleaner for the drain – but that’s the limit.

However, on top of that, we picked up an espresso maker. Apparently the smallest on the market, it was a heavy thing that looked like a miniature Imperial walker from Star Wars.

We used it a few times, but regardless of whether we ground our own beans or bought ready-ground ones, the results were never quite what we’d hoped for – from either machine.

Two years ago, on our first self-catering stay in Collioure, we encountered a cafetiere or French press for the first time.

We used the same one last year, when we returned to the same house.

This year, our different accommodation revealed that it seems to be a popular method of brewing coffee domestically in France. The owner had two – large and small. The small, we soon discovered, did us a nice two espresso cups each in a morning.

When we arrived, a previous guest had left the remains of a packet of Lavazza in the fridge – so we didn’t spot it until we’d already bought a packet.

But opting to use that up first, we quickly realised that the small French press required three heaped teaspoons of powder to get a good, strong brew.

Thus was coffee lesson number one learned: we’ve not been using enough beans/powder to made anything that doesn’t (to me at least) taste rather insipid and unimpressive. No wonder I’d rather gone off coffee.

Second lesson – you don’t need to grind your own beans to get decent coffee.

Third – you don’t need some overblown piece of kit to make decent coffee.

As it happens, the filter machine at home has been playing up – which may have had something to do with limescale.

And when we went to try the espresso machine, it refused to even open.

There seemed only one sensible move – and it wasn’t investing close to £2,000 in the most expensive piece of kit that John Lewis sells for making coffee, but going back to basics.

A French press will do just fine – and it even saves me a vast amount of valuable work surface in the kitchen!

All brawn and no brain?

2011-08-21T19:00:00.013+01:00

The worst thing about holidays is that they end. Well, some holidays at least. I can think of one or two where I've been relieved to get home.

A case in point was a fortnight's canal trip around the 'Leicester Ring' in 1999. We had done brief narrow boat cruises before, but this was the big one. This was going to be two whole weeks of getting away from it all.

It rained almost non stop. The Other Half, insisting that the division of labour was traditional, did the driving bit, as this was, apparently, technical. I, as the woman, was assigned the locks.

Over a hundred of the bleedin' things, including a full flight at Foxton, where I had the pleasure of helping to provide the entertainment for the gongoozlers - those people who go and stand by locks and watch others do the hard slog.

In between, I made bacon buttes and mugs of tea, handing them up from the cabin for The Other Half to consume while driving us along. And spent much of the rest of the time sitting inside, away from the grey and the drizzle, trying to teach myself to play solitaire or reading a biography of Robert Kennedy.

The only thing I remember with pleasure was Eiffel 65's hit single, Blue, which was featuring heavily on the scratchy radio at the time.

I cooked in the evenings too, even though this was before my days of culinary please (let alone culinary know how), but this too seemed to be part of the supposedly fair division of labour. For some reason, I retain vague memories of sausages and peeling spuds and boring, bland vegetables.

In Leicester itself - a city I had carefully avoided since being invalided off my degree course some 17 years earlier - it peed down, illustrating how fanciful were the claims of the manufacturer of my kagool to have made something vaguely waterproof.

There I was, standing on the towpath, struggling with a lock that wouldn't budge, getting rapidly soaked and cursing aloud, while the self-appointed skipper told me to calm down.

We had set ourselves far too tight a schedule for a fortnight: there was no chance to spend a day moored up, talking to the teenage ducks and simply relaxing – or going ashore and visiting something – if we were to stand a chance of getting the boat back to the yard on time - which, as it happened, we didn't quite manage anyway.

'No,' I said later. 'Never again!'

Returning from France does not, however, involve the same sense of relief, strangely.

Don't get me wrong – I enjoy my work, I like my colleagues and I absolutely missed the cats.

But riot-torn Hackney sometimes lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. And it's expensive too. For the first time, I've realised how much more it costs for a loaf of decent bread in London than in the south of France.

A quarter of a large, round loaf cost us €1.40 in Collioure. A half cost me well over £3.50 yesterday. For three weeks, I ate the stuff happily; nibbling away and appreciating texture and taste, rarely needing – or wanting – anything on it.

Now even the artisan stuff seems mediocre. So not only can I now not enjoy the fruit I could out there, I have to pay considerably more for a decent version of that most basic commodity, a loaf of bread.

And yet, for all the cost, the reality is the same: in the UK, we spend a smaller percentage of our household income on food than anywhere else in Europe – and still think it's too much. And let's face it, I'm making an effort to buy the better stuff.

But it's not haute cuisine we're talking about here – hell, I can't even get brawn, or 'head cheese' as the French call it. Why? Because it was banned in the wake of the BSE outbreak – that disease caused because profit came before safety, and UK farmers were allowed not simply to feed the remains of sheep to those well-known bovine carnivores, but they were allowed to cook it at a lower temperature, thus making it cheaper, but not killing off the scrapie in the sheep.

But no, the problem wasn't this – the problem was brawn itself, so it has to be on the banned list for us Brits.

As as for the cheese ...

But markets in general are fascinating across the Channel. The produce might be cheaper – but they seem to take even more care over it. The way stalls are laid out, for instance, always delights me.

And just look how beautiful these little cheeses were at the quay side Sunday market in Bordeaux.

Perhaps it's expecting too much for common sense to prevail over brawn – just as it seems to be to hope for a culture in the UK where food is actually taken seriously and valued, and those who do this are not viewed as a wealthy and greedy minority.

Oh well ... I shall just have to knuckle down to an autumn of serious cooking to try to compensate for such joys as the bacon sandwich I had last week for breakfast one day, when my appetite got the better of my common sense and experience: cold, over-cooked bacon, on stale bread.

And people wonder why I rate France so highly ...

Black gold

2011-08-20T18:14:00.005+01:00

It wasn't a quick job: picking through almost a kilo of blackcurrants, gently easing off the stalks from the tiny, ripe globes, dark red juice staining fingers.

But eventually, the colander was full of rich, almost-black fruit - almost 970g. Rinsed gently, it all goes into a large pan with a scant amount of water - around 75 ml - and 300g of caster sugar.

Lidded and on a gentle heat, everything comes to a simmer. Stirred once or twice carefully, to make sure that all the fruit and sugar gets a brief cooking, it takes a while.

Once the sugar has dissolved, everything is strained over a jug, pressed through a sieve with the back of a ladle.

Time to taste. It's rich but tart. This is the moment for a decision: if you like something that's a little less sharp, add more sugar, remembering that the freezing process will cut the sweetness a tad.

If your preferred taste is for something with even more bite, add a little fresh lemon juice.

In this case, it stayed as it was.

Allowed to cool, the syrup is eventually decanted into a large, freezer-proof container and then popped into the freezer. It's checked after about an hour and given a whisk to break down any ice crystals, a process that's repeated until it's fully frozen.

The memory of that cassis sorbet in Collioure was with me as I headed to Broadway Market for a first Saturday shop since our return to Blighty.

The big question was whether I could actually buy blackcurrants anywhere. I already knew that Ocado didn't sell any - only blackcurrant products.

When I was growing up in Mossley, we had a couple of blackcurrant bushes in the garden: there'd be enough fruit for my mother to make a pie or two: that deep stain where the fruit had leaked out onto the pastry around the edge of the enamel tin; the smell as you pushed your spoon beneath the surface; my sister's face, screwed up at the tartness that I loved.

I am rather ashamed to have forgotten blackcurrants - until that sorbet.

A slow, careful stroll up the market saw the realisation dawn that this was not going to be easy. I asked at Chegworth, a stall that specialises in orchard fruits. No likelihood.

Yet around the corner, hunting for herbs that seemed to be almost as elusive this week, something caught my eye outside one of our local Turkish grocers: punnets of blackcurrants from Kent.

With no weight specified, I simply grabbed all nine little plastic boxes that were there and stuck them in a basket, with protective glances over my shoulder. It could have been black gold that I had found.

Why so few places sell this wonderful fruit it's difficult to guess. Browsing the internet, one page proclaimed it a fruit with dessert limits. Really? Pies and sorbets, plus ice cream presumably and compotes - the latter to eat with a creamy, rich yogurt, perhaps. And that's without mentioning jam.

How many dessert possibilities do gooseberries have?

But perhaps it's not as surprising when you think that the most popular blackcurrant product that you can find on supermarket shelves is Ribena, while the French have come up with crème de cassis.

One of the strangest things about browsing for recipes for a sorbet was that several of the ones that came up included egg whites – why on earth would you add egg whites to a sorbet? And I dismissed too those that required glucose. As the recipe above illustrates, you only need the most straightfoward and simple ingredients.

It does take a long while to freeze, but that's hardly the end of the world. And the result is incredibly flavoursome and refreshing.

What a shame that we seem to believe that the best use for such a wonderfully rich, tart fruit is as a child's cordial. As a sorbet shows, blackcurrants are really very grown up and sophisticated.

The ancient simplicity of fish, bread and wine

2011-08-16T15:31:00.001+01:00

Week two of a stay in Collioure means a move across the bay to St Vincent Plage, a stonier, but somehow more 'grown-up' beach.

I always feel slightly embarrassed, because Cyril at Bora Bora is brilliant and I feel a tad guilty at taking my custom elsewhere, given that he has been so welcoming over recent years. But even the sun is better - or at least you get it for longer - and there's much better snorkelling.

Since the previous few days had seen pretty high winds - although nothing approaching the famed local tramontane - the local beach club owners had not been putting parasols out. More than one, not planted firmly enough in the sand, had flown past us in a flurry of vivid colour.

This forced us to be more grown up than usual about our St Vincent experience - use sun tan lotion liberally and often, but actually get more sun instead of hiding in shade as much.

The other advantage of this beach move is lunch: specifically, the wonderful Au Casot, which is my favourite Collioure eatery. I like the wait - the anticipation.

It's right at the back of the beach - almost a large beach hut with a canopy-shaded terrace from which you can step right onto the pebbles - and no matter how genteel you might expect the clientele to sometimes make it feel, there is something faintly anarchic at it's heart.

But the food is the real draw - it could be haute cuisine for beach bums and surf dudes.

On our first day, it was so busy that we stood and queued for almost half an hour, without a single grumble, to get a table. I ate baby squid, perfectly caramelised on the outside, tender to the bite, and the tentacles served just crisped.

It tickled our waiter when I commented, with relish, as it arrived, that I'd been waiting a year for it.

Traditional aïoli came on the side, with a jacket potato in foil (never having seen the inside of a microwave) and garnished with cream, plus half of a big tomato, grilled, and a very neat persillade.

The tomato says it all, really: not simply a bit of easy garnish, but something scrumptious in its own right.

To follow, my beloved combination of coffee ice cream and apricot sorbet, learned here a few years since, and combining sweet, cleansing freshness with a pleasing bitterness.

The next day, I perched on the edge of my transat as lunch approached to see when they started unstacking the chairs ready for service. I had no intention of waiting again. And the combination of reading a book about food and the smells that were drifting my way had already set the saliva glands going.

This time around, gambas, perfectly cooked again, with a delicate dressing of pastis - a regional aniseedy spirit, usually consumed as a long drink, diluted with lots of ice cold water - and lemon.

To accompany, a small portion of sliced potato, onion and herb - a sort of light boulangerie - and that obligatory tomato. And the word 'pastis' in thick vinegar on the back of my plate; an unexpected surf riff on posher establishments.

Dessert was a repeat.

Day three, and it was the scallops - a rare menu item in Collioure - tender and creamy, wrapped in Serrano ham and skewered to cook over a gently flame.

Day four, the special: squid stuffed with pork and served in a ragu. The are essentially only two ways to cook squid - either as a fleetingly as the kiss of a breeze on a hot day or for ages. The latter works perfectly for such a dish and again, it had been executed superbly by the female chef, who beavers away, bandana-crowned and laughing, for hours in the tiny kitchen.

It is very simple food and a very short menu that is almost unchanging with each passing year. But more than any other restaurant, I dream of it between visits.

Not that its situation does it any harm: there's the pleasure of sitting in welcome shade after a morning's sun worship has burnished the skin, with a super view from pretty much any angle.

But if the food at Au Casot is gloriously simple - and simply glorious - then it's not quite as simple as food can get in this part of the world.

On our final market day in Collioure, I had been shopping early and, after realising that I was in danger of letting the holiday pass without cooking any fish, picked up two medium-sized dorade (sea bream) for that evening.

Beautiful and shiny, with not even the barest hint of an aroma, they were packaged up carefully and went straight into the fridge when I returned to the house.

Some hours later, I filleted one - The Other Half isn't keen on having a full fish on his plate - and then popped the unfilleted one on a greased tray, around 10cm below a hot grill. Turning it on around seven minutes - I'd timed for five minutes initially, but it needed more until the skin was starting to crisp properly - I added the fillets and turned them around half way through the second cooking period.

Much as I love fish, I'm not particularly good at cooking it - I lack confidence as well as serious knowledge and practice. So this was sort of guesswork, by and large, with a bit of experience lurking in the background.

To serve, there was a slice of good lemon, the smell of which is ecstasy when you cut into it, bread from the boulangerie's afternoon bake, Roussillon sea salt and a bottle of rosè.

Well, however much it was a case of guesstronomy, it worked. The flesh was perfectly cooked and so, so sweet to taste. Not hindered, I imagine, by being immaculately fresh, for which I can claim not an ounce of credit.

Bread, fish and wine: more biblical than ever. Timeless food, in an area where they have fished the seas and grown grapes since before a carpenter reputedly turned water into wine, bade others become 'fishers of men' and fed a mass of people with a few loaves and fish.

In other words, these are foodstuffs that have a deep symbolism and meaning within Western culture. But whether you believe those stories or not, tasting such things in such a way has something of the religious about it - not least when you realise the incomparable glories of things so basic and simple and timeless.

A fishy outing

2011-08-15T15:30:00.001+01:00

In a week of erratic weather – ie, some cloudiness and even one spell of rain - we found ourselves exploring things to do in Collioure other than sunning oneself on the beach.

Quite a lot of that, to be fair, involved sitting out on the little terrace at the house we were renting, with books, fags and coffee to hand.

But on one such day, after we'd whiled away a morning in such pleasant fashion, the weather was showing signs of improvement and we decided to be up and out.

One of the things I've been meaning to get around to doing in Collioure for at least the last three years is to visit one of the two anchovy houses that still operate there.

Both apparently allow you to have a look around, including watching the women who still fillet these tiny, pungent fish by hand.

Have finally sussed where one of them was, we decided to start a general afternoon perambulation by paying a visit.

There was a door quite clearly marked, suggesting that you enter to visit the production area. But I'm still a reserved English person, so I checked in the shop first.

'Of course; go on up - it's the first floor - you can taste the anchovies too.'

We climbed the short staircase. A door stood before us, telling us to enter, but not to knock.

So we did - and we didn't.

In a large old room two women were at work; one filleting, one taking the result and packing them into jars and weighing them.

The only obvious difference from the past, which I'd seen via photographs, was that they wore the regulation hygienic attire and that the surfaces they were working at were stainless steel. Otherwise, this was as old as the hills.

I asked if photography were okay. The woman doing the filleting said yes, barely interrupting her work.

It was fascinating. She had a pile of fresh anchovies next to her and a box for the discarded spines on her knee.

She took a fish and stripped it open and removed the spine with deceptively easy movements, laying each completed half neatly on a paper towel in front of her, just overlapping the piece before.

When a paper towel was full, her colleague then took it, picked a handful of the delicate fish up, overlapping as they were, and started lining the jars, then measuring them on a scale to check the net weight.

The uniform might be new, but this was a skill that dated back centuries.

I was astonished that we could wander around freely. To be honest, I'd expected to be allowed only to see anything from behind glass: but whisper it quietly, this is a Eurocrat-free zone. Concessions, fine - ie the uniform. All-out change - no way!

There, in one, is another reason I love the French. They love rules - but they know the rules to love and those to ignore.

So, for instance, they are close to religious about having at least one boulangerie in every village, no matter how small (there are at least four in Collioure that we know of) and they are serious about laws on democracy and the press that mean that, if you want to stock one newspaper (with one opinion), then you stock them all (with all opinions).

We tasted both types of anchovy - the dark brown ones are very salty and I find them a bit bony, to be honest, but they're still very tasty. The silvery ones are known as boquerones (or roquerones, as they're called by the company in question, Roque Anchois) and they're a tangy mouthful, marinated in vinegar. These have no bones left at all.

Downstairs and back in the shop, it was time for a little stocking up - not on anchovies themselves, which I can easily get in London – but on some of the other products that the company has developed, including small pots of anchovy cream and sauce (one of which can be thinned to use either as a salad dressing or as the base for a soup, according to the absolutely charming woman who chatted with us for some time), plus a jar of monkfish liver, which is a new one on me - and I'm seriously curious - and a little jar of a mustard with Banyuls, the local fortified wine, and honey.

I resisted a jar of green olives, stuffed with almonds, which had been arranged so beautifully in jars that they resembled pineapples, and heaven alone knows how many other tempting goodies, but the bags were already in panic mode at what was already waiting to make the long journey back to England.

The coming months will see some serious experimentation in the Catalan cooking stakes.