Mulling some Dickensian seasonal pleasures

With snow-filled clouds heading toward London, it was the perfect night for the staff social club to show Oliver! to a small but perfectly formed audience, for the purposes of some pre-Christmas singing practice.

Fortunately, the boss who referred to me, a month or so ago, as being "really a gay man" was not around to witness just how many of the lyrics I know without having to read any subtitles.

In an effort to get fully into the mood, eggnog and little mussels in brine were available – with the latter offering Colin the inevitable opportunity to see if he couldn't manage to make a new version of a retro snack by spearing a mussel and a ball of Butterkist popcorn onto the same cocktail stick. Well, it makes a change from cheese and pineapple.

Mulled wine was, un-fortunately, not on the menu for technical reasons (the lack of any obvious way to heat it in the staff bar), although it must be said that the stuff is never quite as good when supped indoors. I didn't use to think it any great shakes until visiting Amsterdam for new year in 2008. Then, sitting outside in glorious sunshine but freezing cold, glühwein metamorphosed into simply the most wonderful drink in the world.

I had a large paper cup full at Borough Market last Friday – it was the perfect weather for such a thoroughly Dickensian treat.

Like so many things, though, forms of mulled wine are popular around the world – and it pre-dates Dickens by some considerable margin. The oldest known glühwein tankard belonged to one Count John IV of Katzenelnbogen – the first Riesling grower in the world – in around 1420, but drinking heated wine dates back to ancient times, when spoilt plonk was made drinkable again by adding spices and honey and heating it.

Of course, if we'd had access to serious heating, we could have had jacket potatoes too.

For some reason or other, I was astonished to read, in Kate Colquhoun's Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking that baked spuds had been massively popular street food in the 19th century.

But probably not stuffed with the leftovers from the previous day's dinner, as is the wont of the staff canteen where I work.

Imagine it if you will: jacket potatoes, stuffed with the remnants of a 'beef bourguignon' that hasn't even seen any red wine, let alone a Burgundy; a dish that, in the reality of our self-styled 'deli bar', resembles a certain French classic about as much as I resemble Catherine Deneuve.

The Other Half perpetually describes jacket potatoes as "student food". And indeed, it's difficult sometimes to realise that they do pre-date microwaves. Which in turn makes you tend to forget just how good they can really be.

But not when stuffed with a faux bourguignon. Or baked beans and grated plastic cheese, for that matter.

The best method I've found for baking spuds is one from Delia, with a skewer adaptation from me (it doesn't only help the cooking, but makes them easier to handle and gives you the basis for testing if they're ready).

Preheat the oven to 190˚.

Take your spuds and make sure they’re clean and dry.

Prick them a few times with a skewer – and then skewer them all the way through, lengthways.

Brush them all over with some olive oil and then sprinkle salt over.

Balance the skewers over an oven-proof dish and stick in the oven to cook.

Depending on size, they'll need at least an hour and 15 minutes.

To test, if the skewer comes out easily, they're done.

Serve with nothing more than good butter, salt and pepper.

And this is the perfect season for real jacket potatoes, when you're all cooked out after Christmas and Boxing Day, and you've got loads of left-over meat to use up. With some chutneys and pickles on the side, you've got an easy and simple meal.

The madness of a £200 pud – and thoughts of the '80s

There is madness – and then there is madness. It might not be the apotheosis of madness in these generally rather crazy times, but you could be forgiven for feeling that everything gone a bit surreal when you read of puddings that cost £200.

Yes, you did read that figure correctly. Heston Blumenthal's Christmas pudding for Waitrose – the one with the whole orange in the middle – sells for £13.99. But with the retailer apparently running out (according to the Telegraph), people are taking the opportunity to put them on sale on eBay.

And with seven days, five hours and 54 minutes left before the auction ends, one of 129 such puds on the auction site had a single bid of £200 beside it (plus a fiver for postage and packing).

£200? Two people could, I am reliably informed, each feast on the tasting menu at Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant for that money.

Okay, the basic appeal of the pud isn’t too difficult to understand. But just make a traditional one of your own and add (unwaxed) orange rind and some juice. You'll be left with a load of change out of £200 – or even the £77 that has been bid on another of the puddings.

It's all a bit déjà vu: next thing you know, we'll have Harry Enfield waving a load of notes at us and, while it's meant to ironic, there'll be City boys and girls taking up its message literally as they collect their bonuses.

Goodness – we've got a government that's slashing public services, we've got students rioting and there's a royal wedding booked for next year: it's 1980-81 all over again. I've even seen adverts for compilations of '80s pop. Okay, I like '80s pop, so it isn't all bad.

But please, please ... somebody promise me that we won't have to do padded shoulders – and I won't have to go through that decade in a food sense again!

It's actually interesting to look at the core philosophy of nouvelle cuisine and see how we now accept many of its tenets as an orthodoxy: freshness of ingredients, simplification of preparation, and regional influences. But, as with the hype of the Beaujolais nouveau run, the idea seemed to be stretched almost out of recognition in the UK during the 1980s and '90s.

Even now, when you mention nouvelle cuisine, many people think of tiny portions of food that still seemed overly fiddly.

My own culinary memories of that decade centre around egg dishes made from whites only, tinned tuna, cottage cheese, rice cakes and plates piled high with boiled cabbage, heavily salted. There was also TVP – textured vegetable protein – a meat substitute that was a bit like minced cardboard and the edibility of which could be improved by having Bovril or Marmite added to it. The former rather decreased TVP's vegetarian credentials, though.

I suppose there are two other distinct food memories from that time (or three, in a way, but two of them have a common link).

The first was being taken by a male friend who had just seduced me to what was supposed to be a rather posh steak house in the town we lived in: it was my first experience of steak and I wasn't impressed: it was tough. And something of an anti-climax. I couldn't fathom why people raved about steak. It wasn't until around 15 years later, visiting Amsterdam, that I bothered to try it again (in one of that city's Argentinian steak houses) – and finally had the proper moment of revelation.

The other foodie memories both involve trout. An earlier boyfriend used to go fishing and occasionally he'd drop me off a freshly-caught trout. The only way I knew how to cook it successfully was via one of the very few cookbooks I had at the time, Floyd on Fish (how very 1980s), and involved wrapping it newspaper, soaking that under the tap and then sticking it the oven until the paper had dried out. When you carefully lifted the paper off, the skin would be carried away with it.

As the decade neared its end, I did as Norman Tebbit instructed and 'got on my bike' (well, my parents picked me up in the car, to be more precise) and left the north west to find work in London. I stayed with them in Reading for 18 months, commuting every day to a string of sales jobs that sometimes barely paid for my travel.

My mother decided that it was a good eight years since I'd had a holiday, so I was going with them to Torquay for a fortnight. Not 'would you like to go', but 'you're going'. It was meant kindly and I acquiesced. Which was, in general, a mistake, for a whole host of reasons that can pretty readily be guessed at, even though I was nobody's idea of a raver (at the time).

But we stayed on full board in a small hotel run by a nephew of JRR Tolkien. He cooked and, each week, trout with almonds would be on the menu one night. Passé it might have been, but this individual, who at the time loved so little else concerning food, loved it, and revelled in ordering it with a "glass of dry white wine", which I had taken to, for some reason.

It seems that somewhere in that mad decade of personal culinary deprivation, an embryonic foodie was making the first tentative efforts to get out.

Time for curry

With the early-season snow having finally started descending on London overnight, the question of dinner reared its head over lunchtime coffee, under the awning and heater of the pub opposite work.

The trouble is that The Other Half wants to do the northern European bit even more than me. I'm all for comfort – indeed, I was mulling over the idea of a velouté sauce with poached smoked haddock and mushrooms, to be served with pasta.

To me, that sounds warming, soothing and comforting. To The Other Half, it apparently doesn't. With hefty snowdrops swirling their way onto the table, he declared emphatically that pasta is "a southern food" and he's a northern boy needing northern food.

With BBC4 having got their German season underway yesterday, I'm tempted to finish the current jar of sauerkraut – but what with? Bratwurst or franks? Don’t get me wrong, I love such things, but we had sausages last night and I do like to avoid eating meat every day.

So just what can I get away with that avoids meat but is considered suitably warming by The Other Half? What about curry – a vegetable curry?

I've never been a particular curry hound – although these days, we live within walking distance of Brick Lane.

Mind, that I eat any hot or spicy foods at all is progress, given my upbringing.

As I've mentioned before, I have no memories of my mother using spices in her food, aside from Christmas puddings and cakes, and bought hot cross buns at Easter. Spices, it seems, were for religious occasions only.

And as for heat …

I didn't eat anything hot until I was 19 and about to go to polytechnic.

It was early 1982. We lived in Lancaster at the time, and a parishoner of my father's, who’d worked in the theatre and taken me under his wing, took me down to the Royal Exchange Manchester to see Sophocles's Philoctetes, starring Robert Lindsay.

It's worth pointing out at this stage that, when I say he'd "taken me under his wing", it was entirely that. Apparently my mother was convinced otherwise and, years later, my father (who has always loved such opportunities to attempt to play divide and rule) told me that she'd read my diaries to see if there was some sort of affair going on. There are times with my parents when it's difficult to know which of them I most want to smack.

And besides, she must have been the only person around that didn’t realise that Robert was gay.

But anyway. There we were at the Royal Exchange with Robert treating me to a meal before the performance. In a fit of culinary experimentation that I'd never had the chance to exercise previously, I opted for some curry.

I would say that it blew me away. In reality, it just nearly blew my mouth into oblivion.

In retrospect, I have no idea whether it really was hot or not – or whether it was simply a matter of a first encounter with chili was always going to have a massive effect after a lifetime of relatively bland food.

I couldn't eat much of it – but enough to leave me nursing a burnt mouth for days after. And I didn’t touch curry – or any other hot dishes – for years.

Once ensconced in London, I'd eat the occasional korma if out with friends, but it was only in recent years that I dared to start using chilies in my own cooking.

I have also done the thing of toasting the spices myself – but on a midweek evening, it's always going to be paste from a jar. And yes, it's still korma.

Onion softened, then plenty of curry paste. Add chopped butternut squash, parsnip, carrot, a tin of chopped tomatoes and some water, cover and simmer until the vegetables are cooked. Serve with rice.

It's not a 'proper' curry and it's hardly ambitious cooking, but it's hearty and really quite healthy.

Lancashire hotpot: a culinary treasure

It probably seems the most ridiculous link in culinary history, but in preparing to cook the first Lancashire hotpot of the season yesterday, Gordon Ramsay's name entered the equation.

'Gordon Ramsay?' you query, eyebrow rising à la Roger Moore. ‘And a Lancashire hotpot?'

Now stop looking like that – it was all for quite a good reason.

Rick Stein once opined that, were this France, hotpot would be a nationally hailed dish – and the French would seem to agree.

It even merits an individual mention in Larousse, where it’s described as "a classic British dish". There’s a second individual entry for the county in this bible of gastronomy, the other being "delicious" Lancashire cheese, plus a mention of hotpot and another Lancashire dish, Hindle Wakes, in the 'England' section, together with mentions in the 'Great Britain' section.

Yorkshire merits a solitary specific mention for the famous pudding, and nowhere near as many mentions in the GB and England sections.

You see – even on a culinary front, the Wars of the Roses went the way of the red rose.

Tragically – but perhaps unsurprisingly – a 2008 survey from Tesco revealed hotpot as being one of 10 traditional British dishes that were dying out.

The same Telegraph article also reported that high street butchers were dying at the rate of 23 a month. Not that the likes of Tesco has in any way affected that depressing statistic.

The rest of this sad list of endangered dishes was made up of spotted dick, beef Wellington, jam roly-poly, steak and kidney pie, coronation chicken (which hasn’t even been around very long), sherry trifle, bread and butter pudding, toad in the hole and fish pie.

That survey was almost three years ago: it's to be hoped that gastro pubs are increasingly keeping alive such cuisine, because there's a few classy dishes in that list that really do not deserve to go the way of all flesh.

I don't recall my mother ever cooking a hotpot – it may have happened, but it's not something that springs readily to mind when thinking of food in my childhood.

Indeed, when I start to think about it, I don't really remember there being much in the way of casserole dishes in her repertoire.

She used to make a stew occasionally – I remember little about it, except that we'd have slices of white bread to mop up the juices.

The recipe I've always used for hotpot comes from Catherine Rothwell's Lancashire Cookbook, a volume that George gave me some years ago.

For the meat, it specifies lamb chops, which work fine. But in somewhat more ambitious mode last week, I decided to see what would have been a more traditional cut.

Even with Google, this wasn’t quite as obvious as one might imagine. But then I came across not one but two recipes from the shouty one in the Times.

Both had been published within four months of each other – 14 June 2007 and 3 Oct 2007 – and both had Ramsay saying that they were originally from Lanky lad and fellow chef Marcus Wareing.

There are, remarkably, quite a few differences between. One opts for chops, but the second mentions middle neck. The latter seems more traditional.

It also suggests getting the meat boned, but then using the bones to make a lamb stock, which seemed like an excellent and authentic idea. After all, in the days when women made a hotpot and took it to the local baker to cook, long and slow after the bread had finished baking, while they did a shift in the local cotton mill, the stock probably wouldn’t have been made from a cube.

Although the invention is attributed to Nicolas Appert in 1831, bouillon cubes were first commercially produced by Maggi in 1908, with Oxo coming up with a meat extract one a couple of years later. By 1913, there were apparently at least 10 brands available – containing an astonishing 59-72% of salt, according to a 2005 article in the Journal of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry – which seems like another good reason to make your own stock.

And then there's the flavour issue – and indeed, the whole thing of not wasting anything.

So yesterday morning, I roasted the bones for 25 minutes (the recipe said 15, but then Gordon doesn't have to deal with my oven) and simmered stock for an hour and a half. That provided enough for two hotpots.

The recipes also differ as to whether they include lambs' kidneys: for me, this is an absolute essential. At one time, oysters were included, but it’s some years since they were ‘poor people's' food. Gordon also suggests red wine in one version – but that's a step too far in my book.

Of course, there are probably as many different versions of Lancashire hotpot as there are people who have cooked it. An intriguing recipe from 1937, which is apparently based one in Elizabeth Craig’s 1936 Cookery Illustrated and Household Management, uses both oysters and kidneys for the dish, together with best end neck of mutton cutlets.

It’s difficult, then, to say that there’s ever been a single ‘authentic' recipe.

So my Lancashire hotpot this time was really a mix of versions.

If you can't get middle neck of lamb because you haven't got access to one of those proper butchers that concerned-for-our-culinary-heritage Tesco and co have helped drive into the ground, then lamb chops will do just fine.

Ms Rothwell says to set the oven to a "moderate” heat – I go for around 150˚ in my fan-assisted (and awkward) one.

For two people, I used around 500g of boned middle neck and five kidneys. If someone doesn’t like kidneys (as The Other Half doesn’t), then adjust the amounts accordingly and just give the kidneys to those who like them – but don't cut them out: they really add an important richness to the dish.

Halve and core the kidneys, remove any excess fat from the meat and chop it into largish pieces, then brown everything in some oil. Remove from the pan.

Pop in some herbs – could be bouquet garni or just some dried rosemary and/or thyme.

Put the meat back in. Arrange sliced onion and chopped carrot on top.

Then pour in around 300ml of stock – it should come about half way up.

Peel some potatoes and slice (around the thickness of a pound coin). Layer these on top and then dot with butter. Cover and pop into the oven for around two hours.

Remove the lid and give it another 20 minutes.

Serve – if you want to be really traditional, with some pickled red cabbage on the side.

It's perfect food for this weather – even the aromas from the kitchen are warming and comforting while it simmers away gently.

I was really pleased with this version: the meat was lovely – almost melting but still holding together. It was worth the effort of finding such a cut – and it wasn’t expensive.

This isn't a dish that should need saving. But then again, as Rick Stein effectively said: this isn't France.

What's up, cook?

Is it recipes, other instructions, the oven or me? That’s the question exercising my brain today, after something close to another culinary debacle last night.

A week or so ago, via Twitter, Liz Upton alerted followers to an article in Slate, discussing how poor cookery writers are at guessing how long it takes to prepare a meal.

The same subject has recently reared its head on this side of The Pond with Jamie Oliver’s new series (and accompanying book), Jamie’s 30-minute Meals.

I’ve watched a couple of the programmes, which do prove that Jamie at least really can prepare and cook some quite complex meals in the time alotted – although letters have appeared in the various parts of the media claiming it just ain’t possible: or at least, that other people find it takes slightly longer.

To be honest, I’ve never really worried about preparation guidelines: they’re just that, to my mind – guidelines.

But what does increasingly get me is actual cooking times.

And not just, as I’ve mentioned before, cooking times as given on, say, a bag of pasta. It’s all well and good to talk of pasta or vegetables or rice in a risotto as needing to be al dente, but I’m beginning to think that, on this little island of ours at least, we really do not understand what that means.

Whereas I have, more than once, had vegetables served to me here that were, in essence, not cooked, it doesn’t happen when on the other side of the Channel (or in good restaurants).

If I were to pay strict attention to timings on packets of pasta, I’d be struggling to munch though it. And the same goes for the cooking times usually given for risotto. I made that mistake in style the first time I attempted to cook risotto, having never actually eaten one before and, therefore, having nothing to judge it against.

But when I ate pasta for the first time in Italy itself earlier this year, and when I've eaten risotto in France (or even in UK restaurants), it’s been far softer. So adjusting the times given in books or on packets, I’ve come closer to achieving that effect at home.

However, there’s another aspect of timings that particularly frustrates me and it’s far harder to know how to deal with it.

A couple of years ago, when the cheap oven that had been part of our shared-ownership flat since the day we’d moved in was dying (it had done a very long stint that belied its initial cheapness), we bought a new oven – a Neff.

Now it’s a fan oven – good and environmental, and cheaper on electricity. A win-win situation, indeed.

Or so we thought.

But for cooking some things, it’s an absolute 'mare.

Now it’ll probably be fine with today’s Lancashire hotpot (about which, more tomorrow), but I never seem to be able to get a potatoes boulangerie right – is that me or that any instructions I’ve seen allow far too little time? Yet potatoes dauphinoise never seems a problem.

On Friday, with a day off in lieu of last weekend’s working, I headed to Borough Market. I had a few things to get, but it’s always a pleasure to wander around – not least on days and at times when it is not absolutely knee-deep in tourists.

There’s a small French shop there and, after sipping a wonderfully warming mulled wine (so much better in freezing open air than inside) I was planning a purchase of foie gras in my continuing campaign to be seen as more evil than the little Austrian with a chip on his shoulder.

What I hadn’t calculated on was spotting a beautifully dressed piece of rabbit, wrapped around with a strip of fat, stuffed with rabbit meat and prunes and topped by two of the same fruits. Wow.

I tried calling The Other Half to see if he’d try it (he doesn’t usually like prunes), but couldn’t get through to him. I gave up and took the chance.

"200˚ for 20 minutes," said the thoroughly delightful French woman working there.

"Non – 180", said her male colleague, which was followed by banter (with accompanying winks in my direction) about how long for the lower temperature.

As a slight aside, this delightful French lady gave me a complimentary goat’s cheese – which was very pleasantly tangy – but that may have been partly because of the discussion we had about foie gras. She’d heard about the Guardian article, but not about the crass responses, and shook her head in utter amazement.

Oh well, that’s another French person who probably thinks a lot of us are simply barking. Memo to self – never accept any offer to be an ambassador for these islands.

But let's get back to Bugs.

Knowing the difficulties with the aforementioned oven, I set the temperature for the correct equivalent of 180˚, but organised everything else to allow the meat longer than 20 minutes.

In the meantime, I diced carrots and started them off very gently in a little butter, prepped some broccoli and par-boiled some spuds, which were then dried, sliced and popped into hot olive oil to become sautéed potatoes. All the time, watching the clock carefully.

The meat didn’t seem to be browning at all. I turned the temperature up and gave it longer. The potatoes started to get a little browner than I would have wanted. I took them off and popped them in kitchen paper.

Eventually, I removed out the meat, left it for a minute or two, and then started to carve. It was still very much uncooked in the middle – and The Other Half in particular really does not like extremely rare meat.

Quickly washing and drying a pan, I heated some olive oil and bunged in the bunny.

It didn’t take long, but by the time I served everything, the potatoes were on the cool side and the carrots were closer to fried than the perfectly softened little cubes that I'd been aiming for.

The meat was tasty enough, but bloody hell – this was frustrating beyond belief.

Now I'm nobody's molecular gastronome, but really … shouldn’t cooking be a tad more scientific than trying to read tealeaves to see how long the next royal marriage will last?

So, is it recipes or other instructions? Is it the oven or is that I’m really rather an incompetent would-be cook with ideas far above my cooking station?

And if it's the oven – how on Earth do I work out a reliable method of knowing what's going to happen, at what temperature and in what time?

Yours, h'exasperated of Hackney.

Complain, complain, complain

Complain, complain, complain. That’s what it feels like today – a non-stop complaint. But at least there are various flavours of complaint here – and you, my readers, come out of it glowing like something that’s escaped from Sellafield.

To start with, I must have been tempting fate. On Tuesday, I mentioned that my culinary aims for the weeks ahead (and particularly this weekend) include things that involve foie gras.

Then, in yesterday’s Guardian, the excellent Oliver Thring was
considering the issue of that gorgeous treat.

It's an interesting piece – but some of the comments that have flowed forth since are utterly hilarious in their absurdity and vitriol.

It seems that food is becoming one of the new religion substitutes – which rather begs the question of whether the original is preferable to the substitute, as say, in the case of butter and margarine, which brought Mr Thring’s writing to my attention.

Let me share with you a soupçon of the idiocy on display. One poster asserted: “Humans who enjoy eating foie gras may as well just eat their young children after torturingly overfeeding them to the point of their most deliciousness, especially if they realise the despicable reality of this and do it anyway.”

Have you seriously ever read such utterly hysterical, hyperbolic rubbish?

Another poster stated with religious certainty: “No decent person would eat this foodstuff. No moral, decent, pleasant-natured person would consider it.”

Wow. The entire being of anyone (myself included) can be judged, over the internet, on the basis of a foodstuff that I enjoy, which others disapprove of. It’s a view that was voiced by a substantial number of posters.

I can’t help musing that these are probably the self same cretins who ride their bikes pavements and claim that it’s my responsibility, as a pedestrian, to get out of their way while they’re breaking the law.

But then that’s just one of my little bugbears – I have no evidence on which to base such a leap. Just as they lack any basis for assuming that, because I eat foie gras, I’m akin to a really, really evil mix of Hitler, child abusers and generally all-round bad eggs (although obviously, when eating unborn baby chickie-wicks – and I do love them soft-boiled – I try to avoid the bad ones).

But what also riled me was the Puritanical decrying of pleasure: one poster claimed that they enjoyed their food, but they ‘ate to live, not lived to eat’, and detested those who take serious pleasure in food.

Now on that basis, one must be able to decide on and recognise a line in the culinary sand over which one’s pleasure doth not stray.

Which is a pretty bonkers idea, when you think about it. And that's without asking just what is actually wrong with pleasure? There's a certain religiosity in objecting to people taking pleasure in pleasurable things – a bit like claiming that all sex should be for the purposes of procreation alone and that the 'sex-for-pleasure mentality', as I once saw it described, is something beyond the pale.

Of course anyone's completely within their rights to dislike a particular foodstuff on whatever grounds – and to say that. That doesn't get to excuse them from displays of ultra-stupidity, though.

And so such stupidity is complaint number one in today’s litany of Sybaritic whinging (and trust me, writing it down is proving very pleasurable).

Complaint number two is the announcement that I have printed off my Piccolino post – and am sending it, with covering note, to the company that ultimately owns that chain, with a request for a response.

Let’s see what they have to say for themselves – I’ll let you know.

Complaint three is nothing to do with food – although the English reluctance to complain properly about anything (no, complaining over a pint in your local doesn’t count) is a serious point and includes complaints about food and service, such as the Piccolino case.

I got to the Angel on my bus this morning and then got a 476, which was apparently heading for its usual end-of-journey destination at Euston.

Then, outside the old Thamesmead station, we were all informed that it wasn’t going any further and that we’d have to get off.

Now, I know it was only three further stops until my usual destination (I walked), but that’s not the point. The point, as I, err, pointed out, is that this has happened before (I always take care to check the advertised destination before boarding a 476), and I wish to know why the bus company feels that it is entirely acceptable to break the contract that it makes with me, as a customer, unilaterally and without warning.

Because breaking a form of contract is what it amounts to, when I pay for something on the basis of the service advertised and then, for no understandable reason (such as an accident or break-down etc), the terms of that service are changed before what I paid for has been realised.

I await a response.

Now, that’s quite enough complaining for one day.

But wait – I’ve forgotten to mention why you, my readers, come out of all this complaining so well.

It’s simple: whatever any of you may feel about foie gras, none of you would dream of making such ignorant and crass comments as the kind that I quoted above.

I’m lucky to know you as readers.

Culinary aims for the weeks ahead

Having worked through last weekend – this is beginning to feel like a very long stretch now – I’m looking forward to a nicely extended weekend, starting on Friday.

And the obvious first thing to do on Friday is to get myself down to Borough Market, which then raises the very pleasant question of just what culinary projects to set myself for the weekend.

Something that’s been tempting me for quite a while if foie gras – not the paté, but the fresh stuff. And at Borough, there’s a stall that sell it. It’s not cheap, of course, but I am wondering whether to get some, eat a little myself for Friday lunch and then make the rest into a paté. We’ll see.

This weekend really does have to see a test run of consommé – I think I’m going to try a mushroom one, as it’ll be much cheaper than trying game. The main thing is the clarification, anyway.

I also need to tie down ideas for the big eating days – and then make sure that all my favourite suppliers are going to be at Broadway Market on Christmas Eve. I’m away the previous weekend and it’s getting dangerously near to needing to place orders and check such details.

But another project I now have in mind is completing the classic ‘French mother sauces’.

This is one of those fascinating pieces of information that I discovered when looking up something else – in this case, hollandaise, as a result of Friday’s risotto.

Apparently, these sauces are the foundation of classical sauce making. They are:

Velouté – done this via a couple of Gordon Ramsay pasta recipes;

Bechamel – done this too;

Tomato – pretty obvious;

Espagnole – done this too, for the sour brown shallot sauce that I serve with our Boxing day ham every year;

Hollandaise – not done this yet.

So, actually not very far to go on completing the ‘set’. Interestingly, I saw a definition online for a “more contemporary definition of mother sauces”, which was vinagrette, demi glace, beurre blanc, aioli/mayonnaise and sauce a la crème.

Now I’ve only ever tackled one of those – the aioli – so that leaves me with a whole new set of challenges in future.

But one of the reasons I want to learn hollandaise in particular is that it’s considered the key to béarnaise, which I’ve once with steak and would love to be able to make.

So, that gives me a series of things to think about – and if one thing’s certain, Borough will give me plenty more to think about.