Put some squeak in your bubble

Bubble & squeak balls, with sausages & mustard. Yummy

Bubble and squeak may not be a dish of great visual beauty, but by gum, it’s a treat for the taste buds.

And it should, by rights, be an absolute doddle to make.

After all, what could possibly be difficult about some leftover spuds, some leftover veg and a pan with some melted fat?

Well, that’s the stage at which mine gets problematic – the bit where, after heating the fat, you squish the squeak into the pan.

Okay – that’s not the problem: the problem is turning it over or out. It won’t. It simply collapses. I don’t know why – I have followed the recipe in my Two Fat Ladies cookbook to the letter, but it never turns out properly.

Now I have no idea whether this is a universal culinary enigma, but I have found a solution – and it’s every bit as tasty as any other.

But before we get to that, let’s discuss a related issue: sprouts.

What is it with the British? We eat loads of these delicate, gem-green cabbages – not least at Christmas – yet so many people detest them.

Is it a condition of national masochism? ‘Oh, I don’t like them but you have to have them at Christmas.’ Why – not least at that time of year – would you eat something that you don’t like?

That aside, they may get a bad rap for causing flatulence, but that doesn’t seem to have put huge swathes of the population off beans.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing, where early memories are of so many vegetables boiled to a grey pulp that lacked in texture or taste?

Indeed, it’s worth noting that peculiarly British obsession with cooking vegetables ‘al dente’ – or as it often means on these shores, barely bloody cooked at all.

On the latest series of Masterchef: The Professionals, Michel and Monica have already faced undercooked vegetables at least once – and presumably they have a clue what they’re on about.

But maybe it’s a reaction to that overcooked cabbage.

Personally, I’ve long loved sprouts, but in the last couple of years I’ve found a cooking method that seems to make such a radical difference that The Other Half enjoys them more now too.

So, thanks to Joël Robuchon – another French gastronomic giant who can be assumed to know what he’s on about – here’s a wonderful method.

Take your sprouts, trim the stalk and remove the outer leaves. You don’t need to make an incision at the top though; it makes no difference.

For four people, as an accompaniment, use 400g sprouts and put a litre of water on to boil with a teaspoon of course salt.

Pop them in a bowl of cold water with some malt vinegar – two tablespoons to the litre – and leave for two minutes.

Rinse and drain.

Once your water has reached a boil, pop them in and cook briskly for a minute.

Remove into a prepared bowl of iced water, leave for a minute and then drain.

Bring another litre of water to the boil with the same amount of salt and, when that’s just bubbling, pop in the sprouts.

Simmer for 20 minutes – but don’t let the water bubble vigorously this time: gently does it.

Fill another bowl with iced water and pop the cooked sprouts straight in that, drain and then lie out on paper towels or a clean cloth.

When you’re nearing serving your meal, melt around 15g of butter in a pan, add the sprouts, turn the heat to low, add two pinches of salt and one of pepper, and cook, turning gently, for five minutes.

Now you’re probably going to roll your eyes and say: ‘what a fuss’. But one of the advantages of this rather cheffy way of doing them is that you can prepare them well in advance and then just finish them off quickly – which is particularly perfect if you’re a sprouts-on-Christmas-Day kind of person and are juggling loads of thing in the kitchen for the year’s biggest meal.

It goes without saying that, on that occasion, you can also add some diced bacon or some chestnuts to the final cooking in order to ratchet up the festive taste.

But back to good old bubble and squeak, when all of this will already have been done and the vegetables are sitting rather mournfully in a dish feeling not simply left over, but forgotten (it’s worth making extra in the first place just so you have enough for such a ‘left-over’ dish).

Take your sprouts and your spuds and mash them together, with a little extra seasoning if needed.

Heat a generous amount of lard in a frying pan. Yes – lard. This is no time to think about anything as dreadful as marg or even oil, which wouldn’t give you those wonderful crispy bits. And butter can burn too easily. Lard it must be. Or dripping, obviously, and if you have a surfeit and feel posh, then you could probably get away with duck fat.

So heat whatever lovely fat you choose.

And in the meantime, roll your mashed mixture into balls – around the size of a large plum: make them as smooth and as compact as you can. If the mixture is a little dry, add some melted butter, and you may wish to add further seasoning – plenty of pepper anyway.

If you have time, pop them in the fridge for a few minutes to firm up a little.

Then roll them in plain flour and into the hot fat they go. Don’t roll them around too much or too quickly – you want those crispy bits, after all.

Okay, they’ll still leave a little behind in the pan, but nowhere near as much.

And if that doesn’t really make your bubble squeak, then nothing will.

Spilt beans leave a slightly sour aftertaste

Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright

Partly because of my love of food, partly because of my love of English eccentricity, this was a Christmas present from my mother.

Clarissa Dickson Wright is best known as one of TV’s Two Fat Ladies, the culinary duo that travelled the UK on motorbike and sidecar in the 1990s, but she has plenty of other claims to fame.

The youngest female lawyer to be called to the bar, Dickson Wright’s childhood was blighted by her father – a brilliant surgeon, but an alcoholic, brutally violent parent and husband.

But when her beloved mother died, Dickson Wright sank into an alcoholic spiral. She was debarred and ended up broke (having frittered away a lot of money) and homeless.

Getting sober, she helped to build up the London bookshop, Cooks for Books to its present fame, before going on to find TV fame and then becoming an ardent campaigner for the countryside (ie pro-hunting etc).

It’s an interesting book – deceptively light to read given some of the subject matter. But there is a feeling that Dickson Wright rather overdoes it on occasion. There’s no doubting her father’s brutality, but were she and her mother really nursing broken or bruised ribs on the sort of regular basis that she suggests? They’d scarcely have been out of hospital, yet medical treatment is never mentioned.

Having known Tony Blair as a law student, she gets tedious in the extreme over his record as Prime Minister. Castigating Labour voters in general, she claims not to have found anyone who voted “for Tony Blair”, even in Sedgefield. Well no dear, you wouldn’t. Because Westminster politics isn’t like that. Nobody outside of Blair’s constituency could vote for him – they could only vote for candidates in their constituency. And frankly, whether someone is a good constituency MP, representing them in the way that they want to be represented, is higher on many voters' list of priorities than a silly argument about their vote actually being for the party leader.

It’s the sort of disingenuous approach that one finds in rags like the Daily Wail. And from someone who supposedly understands the law, it's crass in the extreme.

And there are other irritants: quite frankly, if any working-class individual described the equivalent of the ‘jolly japes’ that she unapologetically recalls getting up to (or her own friends getting up to), then they’d be regarded as rude and inconsiderate.

Dickson Wright is to be applauded for overcoming many of her demons, and her descriptions of alcoholism and dealing with it, together with her descriptions of fellow alcoholics and their struggles, are informative and, in places, moving. They form the strongest part of this book.

But she’s remarkably quick to dismiss some things in general, such as emotional abuse and bullying. And she seems over keen to blow her own trumpet – yes, of course this is a memoir, but there does seem to be a lot of: ‘I was the first to do this’, ‘I take credit for that’, ‘it’s because of me that’ etc. Perhaps all the demons have not been exorcised – perhaps nobody ever manages that completely.

Dickson Wright has plenty of valid points to make about food, and has embraced the countryside campaigning with the fervour of a true convert.

All in all, interesting. But it doesn’t leave one with a sense of particularly loving the subject of the book.

Broad beans – but no Chianti or liver

The first broad beans of the season were purchased on Good Friday in Borough Market. Well to be accurate, they were Spanish broad beans, imported: I have had no confirmed sightings of British beans yet, but it won't be long. And basking in the glow of the pleasure that the sighting of the first Jersey Royals of the year had created, I bought some anyway.

More were selected from Broadway Market yesterday: I suspect they're also Spanish, but they were in a plain box so I couldn't tell and will thus not reproach myself too much for such an unenvironmental act.

I remember picking fresh broad beans many years ago. It was during one of the peculiar family 'holidays' that we endured at the time. Clergy of my father's denomination were not particularly well paid, and he combined that with a talent for being able to let money trickle through his fingers like sand. Cars and booze accounted for quite a bit, I imagine. But it meant, after my maternal grandfather had died and his widow moved back to share a house with her two sisters in St Helens, we often went without an annual holiday, having no further relatives to stay with.

But on at least three occasions that I can recall, we ended up being loaned the use of a cottage for a fortnight by some well-to-do acquaintance of my father (probably a booze buddy). The idea was, of course, that it was simply essential to "get away". Thus at least one 'holiday' was spent in Todmorden, a small town on the Pennines.

It's bleak and there's bugger all to do there. We were in a cottage right up on the hills. For at least part of the holiday in question, my father did his being-ill routine.

He'd had massive surgery in the 1950s, before I was born. Around 10 years later, he started to become ill – he'd get home at night, from whatever meeting or pastoral visiting he'd been doing, and effectively collapse as soon as he got through the door. My mother would have to haul him up to bed. He'd be flailing around like the most drunken drunk you can imagine, speech slurred to total meaninglessness.

My sister, three years my junior, would lie in her cot and cry. I'd lie in my bed, rigid with something that I cannot find words for. Fear? I don't know that I felt personally threatened by it, but I hated it – it was simply horrible. I'd get up sometimes and attempt to quieten my sister. But it doesn't surprise me, looking back on it, that she later needed a night light to be able to sleep. The darkness was when those awful disturbances would come.

It was some years before doctors eventually worked out what the problem was – all the brain scans, all the tests: and all they eventually needed to do was actually look at his medical history and do a simple blood test. He had pernicious anemia and needs injections once every few weeks.

But while they were still trying to fathom such matters, one imbecile prescribed him barbiturates: Seconal. He got rather fond of it. Black and orange capsules. He'd have them hidden in his study and, when he was out, my mother would have me help her search for them. Then she'd carefully unscrew them, empty the things, replace the drug with sugar and put them back where we'd found them.

Of course, he wasn't refraining from booze at this stage. Or driving. Goodness knows how he didn't smash the car up (more than he did) or do more damage to himself or anyone else. In the end, a prang saw him sent to a different doctor, who worked out what was wrong – the medical history and the blood test did the job.

But on that holiday in Todmorden, he'd obviously got himself some Seconal, was drugged up, was angry and aggressive. We needed food, though, so he was insisting that he'd drive us all into the actual town. My mother had hidden his car keys and told me I'd have to go. He was screaming and threatening, both my mother and me. Ranting and raving.

My little mission was to get the bus and go into the town and get the food my mother needed.

That was Todmorden. On another of these magnificent holidays, we ended up in Ravenglass on the northwest coast. Father heard horror stories from local fishermen (while in the pub) about what they'd fished out of the nearby sea – this wasn't far from Sellafield nuclear power station – and we were banned from going in the water.

I don't recall any particular outbursts from that holiday, but there was a vast kitchen garden, with dead moles hung up on the wire fence around it. We were able to pick and eat what we wanted and that's where I remember picking peas and runner beans and tomatoes – and broad beans.

They're known as fava beans in the US – the sort that Hannibal Lecter might consider an apt accompaniment to human liver, together with a good Chianti, of course. I can't say I've tried them that way ...

They are, apparently, the bean of Jack and his stalk; the bean in 'full of beans' and 'spilling the beans'. And they are darned tasty and an absolute joy in summer. You need to buy about double, because the pods are quite large and weighty.

It's a short summer season and, unfortunately, a lot of Brits don't eat them, so many ordinary greengrocers don't carry them. There was also a day, a few years ago, when I spotted some on a stall in Bethnal Green, but then refused to buy any. I had asked the stallholder for 500g of his lovely broad beans, but he'd refused, saying that he'd only serve people if they asked in old, imperial measurements. He was actually breaking the law, but doubtless considered himself to be one of those pathetic 'metric martyrs'. He didn't get my trade.

I'd have actually had difficulty ordering in anything other than metric. When I started school, we were taught imperial measurement – and then one week we were suddenly taught metric measurement. But the British being the British, we have never actually put a date on stopping using the former, so this crazy duel situation has continued.

Personally, I'd never really needed much in the way of measurements – until I started cooking around eight years ago. Then, needing kitchen scales and opting for a set of old fashioned-styles ones, I had to make a decision – what weights to buy for them: metric or imperial. It seemed ridiculous to opt for anything other than metric – and that's now the only way in which I can think when it comes to weight.

But I'm getting sidetracked again.

Pod your broad beans. Put some boiling water in a pan and, when it's bubbling merrily away, pop the beans in. If they're very small (the size of your thumbnail or smaller) they'll only need three minutes. Give them four or five minutes if the beans are larger or older.

Drain and then let them cool a little. You can eat the skins, but it's worth the slight hassle to remove them. Simply take a bean, nick one end of it between your fingernails, and squeeze gentely. What pops forth is a beautiful little emerald.

There are many ways to use them. They're lovely in salads – brilliant with a good, salty feta or lardons of bacon, fried to a really crispy state. Some years ago, I saw the latter done on the Two Fat Ladies cookery programme. I think it was the late Jennifer Patterson who cooked it: bacon and broad beans, topped with a hard-boiled egg that was pressed through a sieve onto the dish.

Taking that on board, I've just had some. Cooked as above, and then popped out onto a plate with some cooked fine beans, some diced Cantaloupe melon, thinly sliced celery heart and some wonderful Paleta Iberico (a wafer thin Spanish ham, matured for at least 20 months), and all dressed with a light mix of virgin oil, orange juice and black pepper. The Queen B decided that the jamon was good too – indeed, she assumed it was really meant for her and was really quite piqued at being denied.

But whether you eat them with ham or bacon, or feta, don't forget broad beans – they're well worth enjoying for the entirety of their short summer season.