The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: Dundee cake

With Britain in lockdown (although quite frankly Allison and I were already working from home before the Prime Minister ordered the country into lockdown on Monday evening), our thoughts have turned to what we can do while we’re having to stay at home.

Quite a lot, as it happens. The kitchen in particular has been subject to a cleaning regime the likes of which it hasn’t seen since we moved in, and we’re growing plenty of things in the garden and even on a window-sill (more on these in later posts).

But first, some baking.

I’ve not made any bread for a while, although given the amount of flour we already had it’s only a matter of time.

Cakes, though? That’s another matter. In times of national crisis, there’s nothing like a nice cake to lift the mood, right?

We went through the cupboards to see what we had before deciding what sort of cake to make. Checking the cupboards can reveal some interesting things, especially if you’ve not done it for a while. We, it turns out, had a fairly random assortment of dried fruits (currants, raisins, etc) – items that had been bought on a one-off basis and sometimes left over from Allison’s cooking club.

Based on this, a fruitcake of sorts looked do-able so I consulted the oracle (a very well-used paperback version of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course) and came up with Dundee cake. This is an old family favourite (my grandma used to make it) and it’s called Dundee cake because it reputedly originated courtesy of Keiller’s, the Dundee-based marmalade producer which mass-produced the cake in the nineteenth century. As with most Delia Smith recipes, it’s online. 

The quantities of the various dried fruits in the recipe did not of course match what we had in the cupboard (we didn’t have any glace cherries, for example), but I reckoned that if we added up the total weight of all the dried fruits and then put in what we had up to that weight, it should be OK. On the recipe, currants, sultanas, glace cherries and mixed dried peel weigh in at 450g (more or less a pound in imperial), and we were able to get enough currants, sultanas, dried mixed fruit and raisins to get to that level (using up everything but the raisins, as it happens). 

We also didn’t have a small orange and a small lemon to zest, but we did have some large lemons in the fridge so I just zested that. Also, we didn’t quite have enough blanched almonds left to meet Delia’s requirement, but that’s just for decorating the top of the cake anyway (the trick is to put them on lightly and not press them down). So I went with a simple cross rather than arranging them in concentric circles. Although with the outer circle, it’s really a Celtic cross!

When making cakes I do get apprehensive about cooking times as the last thing I want is for it not to be done properly on the inside (the opposite of those foolish contestants on Masterchef who seem to think that they’re going to be the ones who can do the perfect chocolate fondant, which clearly started out as underdone chocolate cake). 

Only once the Dundee cake had cooled could I cut it open to check...

Thank goodness it was done in the middle! The result goes very well with a cup of tea in the afternoon.

Mushroom Bolognese

In the kitchen, and looking for something healthy, what with it being January and all. It just so happened that we noticed a recipe in the latest edition of the BBC’s Olive magazine for mushroom bolognese. Well, we like pasta and we like mushrooms, so why not give it a go?

I have form when it comes to bolognaise sauce. For a long time, spaghetti bolognese – ‘spag bol’ – was the only Italian dish I could cook (it took me a while to get carbonara right, often ending up with a sort of scrambled egg with pasta). I learned how to make spag bol in the Scouts, when the sauce only needed three ingredients; an onion, beef mince and the contents of a pasta sauce jar. And spaghetti, of course. When cooking in the comfort of an actual kitchen rather than a mess-tent, I usually used the sauce recipe in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Collection (listed as Ragu bolognese, “really the all-purpose Italian pasta sauce: it can form the basis of Lasagne or Baked meat and macaroni pie (see the recipes on pages 332 and 334)”) although I sometimes skipped the chicken liver as it wasn’t always the easiest thing to get hold of.

Now I am well aware that any actual Italians would be appalled by spag bol, which is not something that you will find in Italy; in Bologna, where bolognese sauce comes from, they’d use tagliatelle, not spaghetti which is more of a southern Italian pasta. That said, Rick Stein recently came across an actual spaghetti bolognaise recipe during the course of his recent Rick Stein’s Long Weekends TV show (“hey Rick, where’re you going this weekend?”). This actual spaghetti bolognese is a dish “which the locals cook of a Friday fish day, made with tomatoes, tuna and dry pasta”. Not mince. But that’s something for another time.

Anyway – the mushroom one. First of all, there’s no spaghetti, for Olive magazine is being geographically correct by stating that this is a dish that goes with tagliatelle. It was an easy-to-follow recipe involving two types of mushroom – porcini (soaked in water, which also gets used) and chestnut mushrooms, along with plenty of veg – carrots and celery as well as onions. And we still have thyme and rosemary growing in the garden, adding a nice homely touch. The two adaptations we made were to skip the star anise, because that sounded a bit out-of-place, and add more water than the recipe suggested – it was looking dry even before we started on the final “cook for 30 minutes” stage, so I filled the empty tomato-tin with water and added that.

The result – delicious! Provided, of course, that you like mushrooms…

Welsh rarebit, courtesy of Ainsley Harriott

Browsing in a charity shop a couple of weeks ago, I happened across a cookery book by Ainsley Harriott. Remember him? He was a TV cook back in the Nineties, appearing on shows like Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook and Good Morning with Anne and Nick. I recall that one year, Alex and I bought one of his books, Ainsley Harriott’s Barbecue Bible, as a birthday present for Dad. Like quite a few other things that were big in Britain in the Nineties, such as Frank Skinner and Red Dwarf, his star may have waned but he’s still doing stuff, having resurfaced on Strictly a couple of years ago (Frank Skinner and Red Dwarf, by the way, are also still going, although the former isn’t as funny as he used to be and the latter is on Dave rather than the BBC these days).

Ainsley is still keeping his hand in with the cooking, for the book that I found was a (relatively) recent offering, published in 2009 by BBC Books no less. Just Five Ingredients is just what it says on the cover, offering (so says the blurb) “a collection of mouth-watering dishes that use a maximum of five ingredients – perfect for the time-short, budget-conscious cook.” Funnily enough, that’s the concept behind Jamie Oliver’s latest book, so you could say that Ainsley is ahead of the curve.

On flipping through Just Five Ingredients I saw a few recipes that I liked the sound of, so I bought the book which now stands next to another recent acquisition, Rick Stein’s Long Weekends. The first recipe as made from the book was Welsh rarebit – cheese on toast, but with the cheese grated and made into a sauce of sorts before being put onto the bread and toasted. No rabbits are involved (much like the toads that are absent from toad-in-the-hole and the woodcock that doesn’t appear in Scotch woodcock), and quite why it’s spelt ‘rarebit’ rather than ‘rabbit’ I am not entirely sure, although this dish is the only time when ‘rabbit’ is spelt as ‘rarebit’.

What goes into the sauce as well as grated cheese is a matter for debate; looking through some of our other cook books, there are a few variations although Worcestershire sauce and mustard of some sort (usually but not always English) are common features. Nigel Slater (in Real Fast Food) complains of “mixtures that will not thicken or that turn irretrievably lumpy”; he reckons on adding butter and a couple of tablespoons of beer, with the result to be eaten “as a snack with the rest of the beer”. Delia Smith has a Welsh Rarebit Soufflé (in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course) and Welsh Rarebit Jacket Potatoes (in Delia’s How to Cook: Book One); the former includes butter, flour, French mustard, milk, eggs and cayenne pepper, while the latter has finely grated onion and “1 tablespoon Red Onion, Tomato and Chilli Relish (see page 188)”. Jamie Oliver’s, which can be found in Jamie at Home, is not just Welsh rarebit but “Welsh rarebit with attitude”, containing eggs, crème fraiche and “4 tablespoons of cheeky chilli-pepper chutney (see page 321) or shop-bought chilli jam”; like Slater, he says it’s best to have it with beer. Common consensus is that the cheese to be used is Cheddar, although Slater hedges his bets; “Stilton or Cheddar have enough of a tang to be interesting, Caerphilly or Wensleydale less so”. Going way back, Mrs Beeton calls for Cheshire or Gloucester cheese (she, of course, was writing at a time before Cheddar became the nation’s cheese of choice); she didn’t grate it, advocating that the cheese be sliced, toasted and then have “a little made mustard and a seasoning of pepper” spread over it. Mrs Beeton also has a recipe for Scotch Rarebit which involves a contraption called a “cheese toaster with hot-water reservoir”.

Ainsley’s five ingredients are vintage Cheddar cheese, eggs, English mustard, Worcesteshire sauce and, or course, bread (as far as he’s concerned, salt and pepper aren’t counted among the five ingredients, which is fair enough). The cheese is grated, the egg is separated. The yolk, along with the mustard and the Worecestershire sauce, is mixed in with the cheese. Then the egg white is whisked into stiff peaks – on reading this I groaned, for here was a job for the electric mixer which would in turn involve more washing-up afterwards than I’d hoped. Anyway, once whisked, the egg whites are folded into the mix (just like in Delia’s soufflé; Jamie, by contrast, only uses the yolks). It’s then baked in the oven until “risen and lightly browned”.

The result was very nice indeed. On the basis of this, I shall be using other recipes from this book, or maybe even using this one for other recipes, for Ainsley says that it can also be used to cover his salmon fish pie “(see page 130)”, or for “an interesting twist on cauliflower cheese!”

Curried ox kidneys

What do you do, cooking-wise, with ox kidney? Aside from steak and kidney pie or steak and kidney pudding, of course. Determined to have this piece of offal for dinner, for it had been taken out of the freezer and was calmly defrosting in the fridge, I took a look in the recipe books to see what I could find.

I would not be finding anything relating to what to do with an ox kidney in our latest acquisition, a slim hardback called The Curious Cookbook by Peter Ross. Peter Ross is a senior figure at the Guildhall Library down in the City, and it has the largest collection of historical cookery books of any British public library; turns out they did an exhibition on this very subject the other year. Mr Ross has been trawling this (doubtless fascinating) collection and has come up with over a hundred recipes from all points between the late fourteenth century and the Second World War. These are from the bizarre or absurd end of Britain’s long culinary history.

If you’ve ever wondered how to make ‘porpoise with wheat porridge’ (a delicacy from 1450, that one), ‘stewed sparrows on toast’, ‘a pint of gruel for invalids’ or that medieval dish where you sew the front end of a cockerel onto the rear end of a pig (a ‘cokyntryce’, in case you were wondering), then this is the book for you.

Alternatively, if you’re after tips on what to do with hedgehogs, badgers (“there are very few recipes for cooking badger, which has been said to taste like gamey beef”) or squirrels, or if you want to know ‘how to avoid a bitter rook stew’ (that one being from the War, a time when ‘eating crow’ was clearly more than just an expression used by the GIs) then the answers can be found within these pages.

It just goes to show, as they saying goes, that the past is a foreign country and they do things differently there – as Mr Ross says in the introduction, “what we ate in the past now seems extraordinarily strange, intriguing, revolting, or just plain curious”. He’s not kidding, and having read this engrossing and thought-provoking book, I am drawn to wonder what people in the future might think about what we in the present eat, and how they might in their own minds judge us for our culinary choices. Hopefully they will have a food historian who, like Mr Ross, manages to use the commentary to put the recipes in the context of the time when they were written.

As for ox kidneys, I would need to find a recipe of a more recent vintage although as far as offal is concerned Mr Ross hits the nail on the head with his comment that “the decline in the eating of offal can be mapped in direct relation to the increase in wealth of the British population who, given the choice, will often opt for more expensive and simply prepared cuts of meat”.

I found an ox kidney recipe courtesy of Delia Smith, who explains (in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course) that, as well as being “an essential ingredient for steak and kidney pie or pudding” because “no other type of kidney will give it the proper, traditional flavour”, ox kidney is “not recommended for grilling or frying”. However, Delia goes on to state that “it is excellent stewed, braised, or especially curried”. Curried? Hmm. Curried ox kidney (“another very economical, yet rather special, curry”) it would be, then. Most of the ingredients for that were already in the house. The ox kidney is cut into pieces and any bits of fat removed; it’s then browned and put to one side. Then some chopped onion is fried, and to that is added ground coriander, ground turmeric and cumin seeds – followed by natural yoghurt, tomato purée, water and garlic. To this, the kidney parts are added with some chopped-up green chilli and the lot is then brought to be boil and then put on simmer. Easy enough.

But what to have with it? Rice is the obvious accompaniment for curry, but I’d had enough of rice because I’d been working my way through a leftover risotto which had been my lunch for most of the week. So what else? Potatoes? I turned to Camellia Panjabi’s 50 Great Curries of India which has a tried-and-tested recipe for potatoes with peanuts – boil the potatoes in water with some salt and turmeric, then heat up some oil, add cumin seeds and a chopped green chilli, then add the potatoes and roughly-ground peanuts and stir. That would do nicely.

And as a side? How about something involving carrots, since there were some of those kicking around? I found in the Panjabi book a recipe for carrot koshumbir. What, I hear you wonder, is that? Well, it’s a type of cachumber which, Ms Panjabi explains, “is to an Indian meal what salsa is to a Mexican one. It provides raw vegetables with a tangy touch … In Western India, in Maharashtra and along the west coast, cachumbers are particularly popular and varied, and are known as koshumbir … They are so tasty that they can be served as a salad or side vegetable.” I must admit I was a bit unsure about serving myself a raw vegetable as a side, but I figured I might as well have a go. All I had to do was grate up some carrot, mix it in with a small amount of dessicated coconut and add lime juice, sugar, salt and yet more roughly-ground peanuts. Then heat up some (more) cumin seeds and green chilli (to be honest I just used some of the cumin and chilli from the potato recipe) and add those.

So that’s what I did – curried ox kidney, served with potatoes with peanuts and a side of carrot koshumbir. And it was delicious.

Something fishy...

To Southwold once again, where on our last day we drove down to the harbour for lunch before heading home on the A12. Located about a mile south of the town, Southwold Harbour is home to the local fishing fleet and a variety of huts that appear a little ramshackle at first glance. Don’t be fooled, though; one of these is home to the Sole Bay Fish Company which, in addition to having a fantastic fish counter where you can buy fish directly from the people who caught them (and in some cases smoked them too), has its own fish restaurant that’s only open at lunchtime.

Lunch was really good – although we were told before we even ordered that we couldn’t order anything from the giant fish-tank which contains North Sea fish! After oysters and crevettes (large prawns) for starters, we went for fish and chips, served on wooden platters with the chips in a metal container, in contrast to the mixed selection of plates on the table that we had used for the starters (I had the Dover sole, while Allison went for the lobster!). A lovely little restaurant, and full of character – we’ll be going there again, I have no doubt.

Although this was the first time we’ve eaten there, we have popped into the Sole Bay Fish Company for fish-buying purposes before – last time we were there, we got some very reasonably-priced Dover soles which we took home and, after consulting our recipe books, used to make sole meunière as laid out in Rick Stein’s Seafood (which also had instructions for skinning and pan-frying a flat fish; nice touch). This time, we had a look at the counter and picked up a smoked mackerel and a monkfish tail; fancy, that last one, but no doubt it would be delicious. They were kind enough to put a bag of ice in with the fish for the journey home.

Back home, there was one thing to do with the magnificent-looking smoked mackerel and that was to make the smoked mackerel paté in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Collection that’s been a favourite of mine for years (usually, we just use supermarket-bought fillets for it); quite simply, the ingredients – mackerel (suitably filleted), cottage cheese, crème fraiche, lemon juice – all get blitzed in a food-processor, with some pepper, salt and nutmeg mixed in.

And what of the monkfish? That was clearly another question for our cookery book collection, and I found the answer (once again) in Rick Stein’s Seafood – roast monkfish with crushed potatoes, olive oil and watercress; something of a less-is-more approach which I have come across in Rick Stein’s recipes before. For him, the fish is very much the main event here, with no need for too much extravagance to back it up. I like that.

The tail required filleting – an easy enough task (I speak as someone who’s done a seafood cookery course at Billingsgate Market and owns a suitably thin and suitably sharp fish-cutting knife); it was then salted and left for 15 minutes while I boiled up some new potatoes. The fish was fried in olive oil before being popped in the oven – the intention was to brown it although mine were still white after the recommended frying-time.

While the fish cooked, I sorted out the potatoes. Rick Stein’s recipe said to add watercress to the potatoes once they’d been crushed but we didn’t have that; we did have some rocket, though, so I improvised – the rocket was wilted in the frying-pan I’d used for the fish, and when I’d drained and crushed the potatoes with some olive oil (with a fork, as suggested!) the rocket was mixed in.

I must admit I was a bit sceptical – this sounded a little bit too easy. Also, the fish hadn’t exactly browned in the frying-pan, and they were still most definitely white when they came out of the oven. So after slicing them I quickly did them in the pan on a high heat for a couple of minutes to give them some colour. Oh, and some olive oil and balsamic (I am not a fan of vinegar but I went along with that) were drizzled on the side.

The result looked pretty fancy; which, I suppose, is what comes from serving the main event on top of the potatoes rather than next to them, and drizzling oil and balsamic around the sides. More to the point, it tasted very good too.

Honeyed shoulder of lamb with flageolet beans

What to have for Sunday dinner at Easter? There are several options; if you look up suggestions for an Easter Sunday roast online you’ll find options involving pork, beef and chicken. However, the meat that is most traditionally associated with Easter is lamb. It’s closely associated with spring, and the religious symbolism – the Last Supper having been a Passover meal, and lamb being the meat most associated with the Passover – is a strong one.

It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that while British lamb isn’t as intensively farmed as (say) beef and pork, lamb for the “ever-reliable” Easter market comes from flocks specially managed for autumn lambing, according to The River Cottage Meat Book (most flocks would be lambing in the spring if left to their own devices). Specifically, we opted for shoulder – which, according to Hugh F-W in the above book, is “wrongly thought of as the poor man’s leg … plenty of tender meat, albeit in a form that is not easy to carve.”

We already had a recipe for lamb shoulder that we’ve used before, and liked – and it’s a bit different, as the main accompaniment is flageolet beans (“a high-class variation of the haricot, and quite delicious”, according to Delia Smith) rather than roast potatoes. We’re not entirely sure how we came to have this recipe (it was clipped from a magazine called Good Taste which apparently promotes food from Lincolnshire, not a county that Allison and I have visited – so goodness knows how we got hold of it). It’s also not the best-written of recipes, as it calls for lemon juice and zest in the ingredients but doesn’t mention what to do with the zest in the instructions, while oil (type and quantity unknown) is omitted from the ingredients but mentioned in the instructions. We also didn’t have all of the required herbs in ‘fresh’ form so we did what we could, and what’s presented here is a somewhat modified recipe.

Mix the juice and zest of a lemon with two tablespoons of honey, two tablespoons of olive oil and a couple of generous pinches of dried oregano. Cut a head of garlic in half (horizontally) and place both halves in a lined roasting tin; place a 1.4kg (3lb) shoulder of lamb on top of this and rub it with the mixture. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the lamb, and place sprigs of rosemary and thyme – four or five of each – atop and beside it. Add 150ml of stock (chicken or vegetable will do) to the tin, and stick in an oven pre-heated to 180°C (or 400°F, or gas mark 6).

Cook for 2½ hours, and allow to rest for 30 minutes after that. In the meantime, melt 30g butter in a sauté pan, then add one chopped onion and two or three finely-chopped cloves of garlic. When these have been sweated for 5-10 minutes, add the (drained) contents of two tins of flageolet beans and approximately one teaspoon of finely chopped rosemary leaves. After coating the beans, add 100ml of stock and bring to the boil, then simmer for three minutes. Add three tablespoons of double cream and bring to the boil again; season with salt and pepper.

Once the lamb has been transferred from the roasting tin to the carving-plate, strain the liquid, syphon off the fat and thicken the liquid if required to serve as an accompanying jus.

We served ours with pan-fried kale. Delicious – another winner!

As it happens, we actually used a somewhat larger shoulder than specified in the recipe, so we modified the cooking time accordingly. This left us with a fair amount of leftover lamb meat, as well as the bones. What to do with those? Stay tuned…

Hot cross buns

Easter is a time for baking (there’s something allegorical about the dough rising), and this year I thought: Why not give hot cross buns a try?

Although they are very much an Easter food, hot cross buns can be purchased throughout the year these days – although a local pub only does its “hot cross burger” at this time of year (yes, that is what you think it is and no, I haven’t tried it).

Hot cross buns are an old English delicacy traditionally associated with Good Friday, and there’s a religious symbolism in the ingredients – the dough refers to bread served at communion, the spices allude to the spices that were wrapped with Jesus’s body and the cross is, well, self-evident. Their provenance, though, is a bit hazy – some say they go back to Roman times (the Romans are known to have made buns with crosses on them, but this may have been so they could easily be broken into four parts), while others reckon they’re a Saxon thing (associating them with the worship of the pagan goddess Eostre). There are various superstitions and traditions about hot cross buns being used medicinally and being hung in the kitchen to protect against fire (in this tradition, the hanging bun – said not to go mouldy if baked on Good Friday – is replaced annually). However, there are no written records about them until Elizabethan times, when their consumption was restricted to festive periods, and the earliest recipes for them date from the eighteenth century.

After trawling through our recipe-books, I decided to go for the hot cross bun recipe in my copy of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course (“a new edition for the 1990s”). Like many a festive recipe, hot cross buns have a much wider ingredients list than more everyday bread-based products, and as is the case with the traditional Ukrainian paska that I made last year, a case could be made for associating the extra ingredients – the butter, the eggs – with the end of Lent. The hot cross bun recipe called for a trip to the shops for a couple of items (while I still had some currants left over from the raisin loaf, the likes of ground mixed spice and cut mixed peel were not things that I already had).

So where to begin? Yeast first – Delia said to use the dried stuff, mixed with caster sugar and “hand-hot” water and left “until a good frothy ‘beer’ head forms”. Meanwhile, the dried goods – plain flour, salt, mixed spice, sugar, currants and mixed peel, were mixed together in a bowl, to which was added all of the wet goods – the yeast mix, milk (“again hand-hot”), melted butter and a beaten egg. I must admit to being a bit worried that that last one would scramble, what with the butter having just come off the stove, but in the event it didn’t. This was kneaded together and, though sticky at first, it did end up being “smooth and elastic”, just as Delia had promised it would be (although I bake a fair bit, I must confess to being a bit sceptical at times about sticky dough acquiring a smoothness without the addition of more flour, especially when using a recipe I haven’t tried before; that said, the kneading is always my favourite part).

One rising and knocking-down later, I divided the mix into twelve portions (is this supposed to be symbolic of the Disciples?) and arranged them on a baking tray. I then made a deep cross on each of them with a knife – this is how the crosses on hot cross buns were originally done – before considering the note that the bottom that mentioned that, for “more distinct crosses, use a flour-and-water paste”. Unfortunately I had by now ran out of plain flour, so I used wholemeal instead (it was that or self-raising). The paste was rolled out into thin strips which were placed atop the buns which I then left to rise.

After just fifteen minutes in the oven, the buns were ready! One last thing to do, though – brush them with a sugar-and-water solution as soon as they emerged, in order to make them sticky.

Sticky they most certainly are. While I am not entirely happy with the crosses (should’ve gone to get some more plain flour, plus they’re a bit on the thick side), I’m pleased with the way the buns have turned out. I won’t be serving them with burgers, though.

James Bond's scrambled eggs

There’s a little-known short story by Ian Fleming whose title never has, and probably never will, be used as a title for a Bond film. It’s called ‘007 in New York’ and for many years it was unpublished in Britain. It was written for the American version of a travelogue that Fleming wrote; he was so negative about New York that his publishers persuaded him to add a little something involving James Bond visiting said city in order to avoid antagonising his readers in the US.

It is less than ten pages long. The main plot, such as there is one, is about a mission concerning a woman who used to work for MI6 and whose boyfriend works at the UN; unbeknown to her, he’s actually a KGB agent who’s on the verge of being found out by the FBI. Bond has travelled incognito to New York to warn her (this probably forms the basis of the final scene in Quantum of Solace where Bond meets a Canadian agent whose boyfriend is the ex-lover of Vesper Lynd; by warning her of the man’s intentions, he saves her from a similar fate).

A lot of the story concerns food. Bond arrives feeling a bit queasy due to his having consumed “the BOAC version of ‘An English Country House Breakfast’” on the flight, and after some consideration he decides to have lunch at the Edwardian Room at the Plaza rather than the Oyster Bar at Grand Central (“the best meal in New York – oyster stew with cream, crackers and Miller High Life”). The former is a place where his friend Felix Leiter knows the head waiter, and on a previous visit Bond had instructed the staff on how to make his particular version of scrambled eggs which he intends to have with smoked salmon.

Oddly, he’s prepared to order this despite his poor airline breakfast having presumably contained eggs of some description, and his evident belief that eggs in New York are of poor quality compared to those back home; “one could never tell with American food. As long as they got their steaks and sea-food right, the rest could go to hell … flavour had gone from all American food except the Italian” – one wonders just how scathing Fleming had been about New York in the first place if this is what he was like when he trying to avoid annoying the locals!

That said, the Bond of the books is, like his creator, very partial to scrambled eggs; he eats them in most of the novels. What’s notable about ‘007 in New York’ is that it includes what was apparently Fleming’s favourite scrambled egg recipe.

Why not have a go? The recipe is for four “individualists” and calls for a dozen eggs, so that’s three per person, and between five and six ounces of butter – after dividing that by four and measuring it out, I noted that that’s more than double (maybe even triple) the amount of butter that I’d usually use for scrambled eggs.

Admittedly, when I do scrambled eggs it’s usually because that’s what happens when omelette-making doesn’t quite go according to plan. Wondering about Fleming’s egg-scrambling technique, I consulted the oracle – Delia Smith (in this instance, volume one of How to Cook) – and was mildly surprised to find that, while going for two eggs per person and considerably less butter, Delia’s method is more or less identical – melt some (between half and two-thirds) of the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, turn the heat down, add eggs, stir continuously until the eggs aren’t quite ready, then take off the heat, add the rest of the butter and keep stirring. I tend not to add any butter at the later stage, and it’s been a while since I took the eggs off the heat to finish them, if I ever did.

But I did so this time, following the Fleming recipe to the extent of adding some finely-chopped chives (since we have chives in the garden) although I didn’t go for his serving recommendation. He reckoned that the result should be served “on hot buttered toast in individual copper dishes (for appearance only) with pink champagne (Taittinger) and low music.” Hot buttered toast I could do, but I have neither copper dishes nor pink bubbly, so I just had mine on a plate with some coffee.

It was, of course, delicious (anything with that amount of butter would be), although a little on the wet side. Proper egg-scrambling is truly an art that has to be mastered. In terms of quantities, though, I reckon I’ll stick with Delia in future.

Baked Hungarian pork chop

On the menu tonight was baked Hungarian pork chop, courtesy of Delia Smith’s One is Fun!. There are a couple of great pork chop-related recipes in this book (the other one is porc au poivre, which has a wine and cream sauce), and what I like about them is the relatively small amount of ingredients involved. Less is more. Simplicity is the key.

The oil pre-heats in an oven-proof dish (oven at 190°C/375°F) while I slice the potato and the onion. The chop is dried and then coated with the spices – a pinch of cayenne pepper and a teaspoon of paprika, along with some salt and pepper. Once the oven has pre-heated, the ingredients are layered in the dish – onions at the bottom, then the potato and finally the coated chop, which is sprinkled with caraway seeds and topped with a knob of butter. 

After half an hour in the oven, the cream is poured over and the dish then bakes for another 15 minutes.

And thus is dinner ready! Delia recommends having it with stir-fried red cabbage (there’s also a recipe for that in the book), but this time around I opted for broccoli instead.

Delicious!

An evening with Delia

We own many, many cookery books and it’s safe to say that most of them are Allison’s. Of those that are mine, I have a particular fondness for Delia Smith’s One is Fun!, in which the queen of British TV cookery explores cooking for the lone diner. Written in the 1980s, some of the recipes can seem a bit old-fashioned these days but the basic premise of this book is that it’s sometimes difficult to scale down recipes for four to a recipe for one (how, for example, do you add half an egg to something?), so within its covers are presented recipes designed with one person in mind.

Tricky? No. This, after all, is Delia Smith – the woman who has always done her best to make cooking look simple. No glossy TV shows involving shouting at waiters or using liquid nitrogen, just basic home cooking that makes the viewer think ‘I could make that’. You cannot go wrong with Delia.

You will not be surprised to learn that in our flat, One is Fun! usually gets an airing when Allison is out for the evening and I have to fend for myself in the kitchen.

Last Friday was a case in point, and Gratinée of eggs Savoyard à la Delia was on the menu.

Ingredients-wise, it looked eminently do-able. Eggs, a potato, bacon, an onion, olive oil, cheese, salt and pepper are all there is.  What could go wrong?

First of all, I diced the potato and put it into the frying-pan with the oil. This had to be browned and then cooked for ten minutes before the bacon and onion could be added, to be cooked for a further ten minutes.

While all this was going on, I turned on the grill and greased a Pyrex oven dish. The contents of the pan were tipped into the dish, and two depressions were made with the back of a spoon. Onto this I broke the eggs, seasoned them and topped the whole lot with grated cheese. This then went under the grill for (Delia reckoned) about seven minutes for soft-set eggs.

What, you may be wondering, about a vegetable accompaniment? I went for cabbage, which means that, basically speaking, this meal was using the same ingredients as would be used for a fry-up with bubble-and-squeak – just cooked differently!

The meal was delicious, although next time I think I will grill it for just a little bit longer as I’d like the eggs to be done a bit more, although there’s a balance between this and making sure that the cheese topping doesn’t burn.  

Dinner over, I went to the pub to watch the football. Delia would definitely approve of that!

Making bread

For several years I have experimented in making my own bread. I think it’s the kneading that I like the most – it’s rather therapeutic. Plus, I’m the sort of home cook who likes to follow recipes to the letter, so I am OK with baking. Unfortunately, though, the bread-making process is not a regular event for me as it tends to require a full day when I’ll be at home for some if not most of the time, what with the whole thing about waiting for four or five hours before I can do the next stage. It’s something that has to be reserved for those weekends when we’re not really doing anything else.

My forays into break-making started a few years ago when I found a fairly straightforward white bread recipe in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course and wondered how hard it could be to make a loaf of bread for my sandwiches rather than buying one. I subsequently progressed to specialist baking tomes such as Richard Bertinet’s Dough (which contained a step-by-step guide, with photos, about how to knead bread properly), making such delights as walnut bread, dark rye bread and rock salt and rosemary focaccia.

My masterpiece was épi de blé, a rustic version of the French stick that Allison clipped from a copy of Canadian Living, which goes very well with soup, although I also do a mean kolach at Christmas.

Things stepped up a gear a couple of years ago, with the acquisition of Beyond Nose to Tail. This is the second volume of the legendary Fergus Henderson’s cookbook, and it’s the one with the baking chapter .

For those who don’t know, Fergus Henderson is credited with having revived the concept of nose-to-tail eating in the 1990s. His view is that, having killed the animal, making sure that you make use of all of it is the decent and polite thing to do. As such, many of his recipes are devoted to doing all sorts of things with offal. Now I have always liked liver and am ready to give any cut of meat a go, but I must confess that I find Henderson to be a bit hard-core; I’d never even heard of chitterlings before I read his book (pig intestines, in case you were wondering). His main restaurant, St John, is appropriately located just around the corner from Smithfield Market and is highly recommended (order the bone marrow and parsley salad).

Naturally, Fergus Henderson’s people make their own bread. As one would expect, the chapter on baking isn’t for novices. Henderson’s was the first book I came across that seriously advocated sourdough, that naturally leavened bread made from a living, breathing starter – meaning you don’t need to buy yeast. The flip-side is that this involves making (creating?) the starter a week before you can actually begin to use it to make some bread.

Henderson refers to the starter as ‘the Mother’ (with capital ‘M’), although Allison and I prefer to call it ‘the science experiment’. It’s been with us for two years now, and is in fact the only one of three science experiments that I’ve undertaken in our flat that is still in existence; of the other two, sloe gin made with actual sloe berries was an unqualified success, and home-made lime pickle was an absolute disaster (that was from Floyd on Africa, and as I followed the recipe to the letter I suspect the great man may have been drinking when he wrote it).

Getting back on topic, the only problem I have found is that since this starter has come into existence, I have hardly made any other type of bread. The starter, after all, is sitting in the fridge waiting to be used. It’d be rude not to.

Anyway – the bread. But not quite, for if it hasn’t been used for a while the starter needs to be ‘woken’ a day in advance. This is done by taking it out of the fridge, adding flour and water and then leaving it for 24 hours. If it’s bubbling after this time, it has woken and can be used.

Making a loaf of bread is an all-day affair, so first thing in the morning (well, second thing – a cup of tea comes first) it’s time to fire up the stand-mixer and use the dough-hook implement to mix the starter with flour (strong bread flour preferred) and water.

Henderson’s is the only cook-book I have so far come across that advocates adding a ‘bathe’ to the dough after it’s been mixed together. This basically means adding more water but, unlike the water that’s added first of all, this has to be cold and has to be added in three stages. I have no idea what it’s supposed to do, but it’s in the recipe so in it goes.

There follow a series of periods in which you’re best off going away and doing something else. It has to stand for 20 minutes before the salt can be added, then an hour in the fridge before kneading (my favourite part!) followed by three hours in a warm place. The phrase ‘hurry up and do nothing’ could’ve been coined for bread-making.

The shaping of the loaf comes next and that’s the bit I have trouble with. My efforts at free-standing loaves end up looking like blobs on a baking-sheet so I prefer to use a loaf tin.

Four or five hours later, it’s ready for the oven. A bowl of water at the bottom of said oven helps to form a better crust (who knew?), and after 40 minutes (taking the water out with ten to go), the lovely smell of freshly-baked bread pervades through the flat, and the bread is done!