One Flame Navarin and Alice B Toklas

My culinary reading currently is The Cookbook of Alice B. Toklas. It is usual to follow her name with a put-down something like 'the lover of Gertrude Stein', but as her memoirs-cum-cookbook is far more interesting than stream of consciousness rubbish by the latter, let's not.

I read cookbooks for ideas, and historic cookbooks for a real feel for period. Parson Woodforde was on a daily basis far more concerned with tracklements than treaties. Food history is demotic. Alice B's work gives a nice insight into the world of arty (and rich) Americans in Paris in the first half of the 20th century, and the section dealing with their struggles in the countryside of Eastern France in WWII is fascinating.

As with other works though, including some contemporary hits, you do wonder if some of the dishes were ever cooked. Chicken browned briefly in butter then roasted in a medium oven for 35 minutes invites food poisoning. And her Navarin recipe is far too complicated. This is country cooking. It did inspire me to make a Navarin of lamb, however, which is another one flame dish worth noting.

The vital ingredient in Navarin of lamb (apart from the lamb) is turnips, young, small, sweet and something we don't make enough of in this country. On the allotment we grow several varieties, my favourite the purple topped Milan ones, but Snowball is elegant too. Elegant turnips. They are wonderful raw in salads (a salade de racines the best hotel fodder I ever tasted in France), glazed as a vegetable in their own right, or as Creme a la Vierge (still can't do accents here), a delicate soup.

So to the Navarin.

Five small turnips were peeled, quartered and browned in olive oil then removed. I had bought three leg chops for the meat cut into big chunks and likewise browned along with an onion diced small. Flour stirred in followed by boiling chicken stock (I cheated with a cube, ok) and a small glass of brandy (no wine open) made a thin-cream-consistency  sauce. Seasoned with salt, plenty of pepper and a pinch of nutmeg this was left to simmer for 45 minutes with a few bay leaves and twigs of thyme from the garden, then four carrots sliced thinly, a few smallish new potatoes in walnut-sized chunks, and the browned turnips added to cook for 20 more. At the end a big handful of frozen peas was dropped in, left to heat through and then the thing was ready, with a bit of corrective seasoning.

Classic one pot cookery that is forgiving of time until the veg go in. The meat could have cooked for twice the time, but not the potatoes which must retain a bit of bite.

RIP Parson Woodforde

I finished reading Parson Woodforde's diary at the weekend, and was strangely moved as I saw the last words were about food, roast beef in fact. I have never read a more engrossing book, the little dramas, passing friendships, his mixture of charity and snobbery, were far more fascinating than television crime dramas or block-buster movies. I can almost (not quite) begin to see the attraction of reality TV. Except the people on those shows generally seem to be arses. Posh arses, common arses, celebrity arses, obnoxious arses. Arses.

From the austerity cook's point of view there is much to learn from the parson's household. Not of course the dinners he gave when entertaining, as he so often did (not in the party sense, but feeding friends, relations,  the squire and his wife, so rather than entertaining hosting may be a better word), which would feature several different meats - maybe roast leg of mutton, roast beef, boiled chickens, boiled roots and a variety of tarts and puddings along with fruit and nuts as what he then termed dessert. No, the things his cook prepared for him when it was just the parson and his niece-companion Nancy at home are of greater interest to the careful cook.

I am intrigued, for example, by how pig's face (a frequent dish at his table) was prepared. Giblet soup I can understand better. The bonier cuts too - breast of veal, neck of mutton and suchlike - were reserved for such ordinary meals. And the humble fish - flounders, mackerel, plaice and so on - that were fetched from market at Norwich - speak volumes about making the best of ordinary ingredients.

More unusual for our times, at least for native Brits if we can use the term, was his enjoyment of freshwater fish like tench, carp, eels, pike and perch. Our coarse fishermen tend to throw back their catch (probably best to do so with eels which are in decline here currently), but then a lot of sea anglers don't actually like to eat fish, which is decidedly odd.

I've eaten perch in France and Switzerland, and love pike quenelles when prepared by a good chef. Perch is actually quite tasty, slightly reminiscent of dab to my palate. Our dream once son has flown the nest is to downsize to a cottage with enough land for a small orchard, and to have a fishing pool - his at one time Woodforde's greatest diversion and almost obsession. Visiting religious houses like Furness Abbey always at some point leads to the spot where the monks kept fish in vast ponds and pools. Yet we now only keep Koi Carp and similarly decorative creatures, whose owners would blanch at the idea of eating them. As our population grows and our grasp on the world's resources loosens we may revert to such medieval models of self-sufficiency (or better, self-reliance), though as Woodforde's facility showed we were still keen on this just a couple of centuries ago.

One Flame Fishy Dish

My favourite evening meal fishy dish is the flexible fish pie, generally made with mash as a topping and with a mixture of white fish and tinned kippers (no bones, loads of flavour). Next to that comes tonight's fish fest, the equally flexible chowder, another one pot and thus one flame extravaganza.

As with just about every soup I make it begins with frying some chopped onion in butter, to which equally finely chopped veg as available in the fridge and shelves will be added: tonight I'd guess carrot, red pepper, and celery. As the garden still has a little stand of par-cel some of that will be chopped super fine with a mezzoluna to be added near the end of cooking. A mixture of chicken or veg stock (if I stir myself I can actually defrost some ham stock which goes equally well, otherwise it is from a cube today) and milk is added, then chunky diced potatoes (either waxy to keep the shape or floury to collapse nicely, it doesn't matter) dropped in to cook (best not to fry them even briefly with the veg, they seem to take longer to cook in the liquid that way) for about 15 minutes, along with defrosted pollack fillet and about a cupful of frozen sweetcorn. A crushed garlic clove gives a nice edge, and lots of pepper.

It is economical - I will only use about £1.25 of fish, and the rest of the ingredients won't take the total above £2.50 - and pretty virtuous, made with  semi-skimmed milk, but the juices are fabulous, perfect to soak up with thick slices - more like slabs - of buttered brown bread. Three of us will easily see off a small loaf, so add £0.50p (Morrison's offer on exceedingly tasty seeded wholemeal, £1 for two small loaves).

This will be the New Year's resolution (at least) once a week fish dish for our evening meal; as Saturday's homemade Chinese was veggie I only have one more non-meat dish to keep to my programme. We won't be short of protein, however, Sunday lunch was top rump wet roasted, and a turkey thigh joint (top bargain and very tasty) plain roasted beside it.

That latter meal was not exactly Parson Woodforde, who would regularly have rabbit smothered in onions, chicken, pig's face, a leg of mutton with caper sauce, and a piece of bacon or similar for workaday dinners, but two joints for £12 can seem more generous than one for £15. And we have the remains left for sandwiches, though the thicker of two leftover pieces of turkey removed from the table at the end of the meal didn't make it intact to the kitchen, mysteriously.

Parson Woodforde and the Great British Pie

Not that I am stuck in the past, but my new reading is Parson Woodforde's diary, or at least the Folio Society's selections from it. Somewhat less than brilliant observations: how did the middle classes and above actually manage to stand in the 18th century? The good parson drank vast quantities of wine, cider, beer, arack, punch, rum and brandy, yet it was his brother Jack who was the sot. And what did it do to their livers? One wonders if the frequent reports of deaths of apoplexy were the terminal points of organ damage caused by alcohol.

From the foodie point of view (or has foodie become as unacceptable and derogatory as luvvie now?) there is much to be gleaned from the pages of his journal. He lived well, and his guests could generally rely on a table laden with several major main-course components - a fowl, boiled pork, rost (his spelling) beef, perhaps a leg of mutton.

Somewhat inspired by this at the weekend I served visiting friends a roast chicken and a venison and beef pie, along with vegetables various. Not unsurprisingly the pie was the hit - everybody loves a pie. Please someone commission me for that TV series/book/world pie-tasting tour. Venison from Lidl, beef from Henry Rowntree, both meats cooked together in a low (125C) oven with bay, thyme, carrots and onions for two and a half hours, then freshly cooked onions, carrots and turnips added and the lot covered with cheaty Jus-Rol puff pastry. I am a fan of own brands, but for some reason the Jus-Rol stuff seemed better than the last lot of Sainsbury's I used - though they may be made together for all I know. The juice from the oven cooking was reduced and thickened with cornflour (how terribly unfashionable) then half of it spooned into the meat and veg before the pastry lid went on. About 30 minutes at 180C finished the thing off, the puff pastry lifting clear of the filling at the end. This was a pie, a Great British Pie.