Soup, soup, glorious soup

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.