Ribbons on a Bashed up Pair of Jeans

My Christmas reading of Anna del Conte's tome on Northern Italian cookery has helped add a few new standards to my repertoire. One of these is such a simple way of making roast vegetables a bit more interesting and a lot more appealing to the eye than normal, and I've made it twice in the last fortnight, once more or less to her instructions, once tarted up a bit.


Her dish uses courgette, potato, aubergine and red pepper, all of them cut and sliced into neat pieces then laid in stripes on a bed of finely chopped onions, with a few blobs of passata on the onions then on the upper veg. With seasoning and a drizzle of olive oil it is quickly prepared, then left to cook - it doesn't even need the recommended occasional basting at a pinch - at 160C for 90 minutes it comes out looking colourful, smelling appetising, and giving cook and diner alike a feeling of virtue. I won't buy courgettes in winter, and had no decent spuds to hand, so my version used aubergine, red peppers, and sweet potato.


The second effort a week or more on used the same vegetables, but I couldn't leave well alone, so added a dividing strip of green chili rings, a load of garlic cloves peeled but whole, and another dividing strip of cherry toms. It worked again, but was not as satisfying as the original, simpler dish. Sometimes embellishments work, sometimes they don't. These didn't: the tomatoes - strange given the passata that's part of the original - jarred, and the chili felt out of place. The garlic, sweet and tender, fared best of the three additions. But overall it felt like I'd added ribbons to a pair of comfortably worn in jeans.


Cooking, domestic and professional, should be about trying things, making changes here and there. I dislike those interminable arguments about the one true recipe for xyz, where departure from someone's fixed idea of what's right is deemed heretical... Paella is one example where such debate seems particularly fatuous, given there are many regional and local variations, and the Valencian original began as a peasant dish where people used - and still use - what they had/have to hand. And Paella, like that roast veg idea, invites experiment. That said there are limits: I'm no fan of  'fusion' cookery, partly because it can seem false, forced, and worse, arch. So the bad boy/girl chef who uses AdC's idea and introduces coconut milk, curry spice and guavas won't get my applause. That would be like ripping big holes in the knees of those old jeans, and who'd be daft enough to do that?

What Makes a Good Cookery Book?

Mentioning yesterday Anna del Conte's book The Classic Food of Northern Italy got me thinking about what actually makes a good cookery book. 

I have a bad feeling that photography is for many a decisive factor. The bookshops are full of glossy tomes illustrated with images that make the mouth water. But having once looked at the sexy pictures, do people cook from these books? Do they learn anything from them other than how a finished dish, well lit, oiled to glisten, on carefully chosen crockery and perched on perfect furniture, will look? Or do they go to restaurants where such ideally plated dishes can be obtained?

A few years ago I wrote a piece for Lovefood about cookbooks I wouldn't be without. It was easy to choose most of them, as I just went to the shelves and selected the most beaten up, sauce stained, fat splashed volumes. Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book, Alan Davidson's North Atlantic Seafood, Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cookery and HFW's work on meat caught the attention first. Backs broken or even missing; dog-eared pages; forgotten bookmarks poking out; the occasional loose page. The first three of those books have at most pencil drawings; the fourth has some good images, but is text heavy. So I want text.

Food, and food writing, should also at its best and most worthwhile be an exploration of cultures. Davidson and David both do that with great learning, one focusing on a single country (but several cuisines and cultures); the other covering pretty much every country with an Atlantic coastline. As a read David's book is hard to better, full of anecdote, history and literary links, the fruit of half a lifetime's experience. I want to be entertained and educated by a good food book. I want it to be so packed with information that new discoveries are made - noticed - every time the pages are dipped into.

It may seem high falutin', but a bit of philosophical reflection doesn't go amiss either. So HFW scores highly - all his work explores morality and ethics around food, no bad thing. 

Of course, they should also make me want to cook and eat. I still return to all four of those volumes (less so the meat one, given The Dear Leader's (hail the Dear Leader) meatless diet now) for inspiration and for guidance. 

In the end, I guess, a good food book is one that endures - not a beginner's guide to some fad; not all teeth and no knickers as my late mother would have said (I am thinking of two celebrity cooks/chefs when writing those words, one male, one female). They should be destined for the bedside table and the kitchen table, not the coffee table. 

Reading (and Viewing) and Cooking, and My Bread Recipe

Reading and cooking are two of my favourite things, so an informative and literate cookbook is always a joy. Like the wonderful Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe I can read such works as if they are thrillers. This Christmas The Dear Leader (lingering agony to her enemies) bought me Anna del Conte's tome on the cooking of Northern Italy, and it has duly been read cover to cover.


With that AdC book it has been the baking that has grabbed my attention the most. I've pretty much given up buying bread from the supermarket: sourdough that uses vinegar; leathery, pappy French sticks whose production should be punishable by death; Sainsbury's 101 ways to present tasteless white rubbish. Instead I bake batches two or three times a week, freezing the spare stuff for later. That fascination has now extended to other baked goods: yesterday I made some onion 'biscuits' from one of her recipes, and very good they were too. Biscuits, however, is a misnomer, as they are more like tiny scones, and only baked once to boot.


For many people these days I imagine TV is more likely to be the spark to ignite their culinary creativity. I've never watched GBBO, and probably never will, but I'm glad that for a very small percentage of its fans the programme has led to actual cooking at home. The shops have far more bakery equipment of a practical nature on sale; supermarkets are stocking a huge range of ingredients for fancy cake making etc. A quick scan of the shelves at one supermarket today suggests that the look of the thing, and sweet items, are what has grabbed the attention most - far more variety in cake decoration than in bread flour as a yardstick. But I really hope that, the bug having bitten, people who have not done so already will move on to making their own bread, pizzas, rolls... Sadly, however, it is probably not yet the moment to sell off your shares in Deliveroo.


For what it's worth, here's my infallible recipe for making two large loaves, or one large loaf and about 10 small rolls. It uses a lot of yeast, but as I buy mine from Aldi for 59p for 8 sachets, and it has yet to fail me, no matter.


Just in case this is needed: hot ovens can burn you; so can heated baking sheets. Use oven gloves (and common sense) to protect your hands from such hot surfaces.


1: In a large mixing bowl make a 'sponge' with 125g strong white flour (though plain would be ok), 150ml hand-hot water, and two sachets of dried yeast. Stir them together and leave for one to two hours, covered with a tea-towel, in the airing cupboard or another warm spot. The messy putty-looking mix you put in comes out more or less flat, pocked with bubble holes.


2: To that sponge add 300g of strong white flour, 300g of wholemeal or seeded granary or similar flavoursome flour, two more sachets of dried yeast, 2.5tbsp of olive oil, 2 tsp of fine salt, and 425ml of hand-hot water. Mix it, then plop it out on a floured work surface, flour your hands, and knead for about five minutes. If you knead too much the flavour suffers; too little and the texture is wrong. I go by the dough feeling 'silky' and stretching nicely to the hand - sorry there is no more scientific way of putting it.


3: When the dough is right, put it back in the mixing bowl, pour a tbsp of olive oil over it and turn so the surface gets a sheen, though there's no need to be too fussy, and then cover with the tea towel again and put it in the warm spot to rise for another hour to two hours. It has to double in size, more or less.


4: Dig your fingers into the risen dough to knock it back (get the air out of it), form into whatever loaf shape you want and put these on a floured baking sheet, or put some half way up a greased loaf tin, and again give it two hours to rise. Again the loaves or rolls should double in size.


5: Pre-heat the oven (here's where it gets difficult - everybody's oven is different, conditions and ingredients likewise), I bake at 210C, in a fan oven, it works for me. When I've gone hotter the bread's surface has been tougher but not crusty; cooler and the texture is denser. Slide the baking sheet with the loaves on onto another that has heated up in the oven (so you have one baking sheet on top of the other), and leave for 15 minutes for rolls, 25 to 40 minutes for loaves, depending on their size.


6: When they are done (looks, smell, their bottoms giving a nice hollow sound when tapped) put the bread/rolls on a wire rack to cool for at least 10 minutes (it helps the finished texture) before succumbing to temptation.


There are few culinary pleasures to match eating fresh, hot-to-warm bread spread with butter that melts into the crumb as you watch. I tend to use organic flour, no additives, so while the bread is good for a day or two, it doesn't keep like commercial stuff. But then it generally doesn't get the chance.