One Pot Two Dishes - One Flame Rides Again

My son, aka Sternest Critic, has some quirky dislikes. One is that he likes meat that is stewed (let's face it he likes meat), but hates it to come with the liquid in which it cooked. A neat solution to this enjoyed last week was a version of the French Pot au Feu, where the liquid is served as a soup before the rest makes it to table as a main course. Two courses, one pot.

It helped the soup part that the dish was made with stock prepared previously using free bones from the butcher (I've taken to doing this when buying a load of meat, and never get any hassle) and another from the freezer, the penultimate bit of our Serrano ham bone. Those had cooked with some veg and other flavour enhancers, so the stock itself would have done as a soup (some more in fact did at the weekend, with mushrooms, noodles and star anise). But after it had in addition been the cooking medium for chuck steak and shin, with more veg, it was excellent - served without any thickening, likewise sans meat and veg, it was a really really good beef consome.

The original stock benefited btw from a beetroot being one of the vegetables, giving an earthy depth, but more importantly a fine colour.

The solid components were tasty enough, the beef not needing a knife to cut it, but not in the same league as the soup.

I've been trying to think of similar two-dishes-one-pot stuff, with little success. The only one that sprang to mind could in fact be a threefor, doing a similar stew for the soup and solids, but cooking a sweet dumpling or several in with the savoury bits. To modern eyes that may seem odd, but to cooks of centuries past (including the last one) with limited cooking equipment it made sense, and our contemporary separation of sweet and savoury would seem weird to medieval cooks in particular, but even our grandmothers (for those of us in the third decade of our thirties) were not averse to such things.

I have made apple dumplings in this way to eat as pudding, the edge with its meaty tang not putting anyone off devouring them.

One Flame Pudding II - Something in Toast

Having finished Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book I have moved on to Gervase Markham, more or less contemporary with her. Early in the book Panperdy (Pain Perdu) features, which prompted me to cook a version of that treat for breakfast today - French toast in other words.

For such a simple dish it has many sides. It is something we know was popular in late medieval times if not earlier, the cinnamon and sugar used in it almost ubiquitous then, for the well-to-do at least. The way some Americans eat it, accompanying a meat element like bacon, is reminiscent of such days too. It is for the economical cook a way of using bread heading towards staleness, though as this morning I used four eggs (albeit two were tiny ones from our newest hen) it is stretching things to call it an austerity dish. And it is both a breakfast classic and a quickly made pudding as the case arises.

The secrets for me of decent French toast, and everyone has their own version, are: stretch the eggs with a splash of milk, which helps the beaten mix soak better into the bread; sugar and cinnamon (and a tiny pinch of salt) to be added with that mix and the first two sprinkled on the surface again after cooking; cut white bread into quite thin slices; allow at least five minutes for the bread to soak up the eggy stuff, turning it so both sides are coated; use unsalted butter and not too much for the frying; and a low-ish heat for the cooking. I don't toast the bread as some do, so my version is probably more accurately called eggy bread.

With a small glug of sweet sherry (sweet Vermouth, Marsala or Madeira would probably work too) added to the fluid this becomes the beautifully-named Poor Knights of Windsor, a pretty pudding that looks best if the bread is cut into fingers - soldiers perhaps the apposite term.

Like most cooking the worst thing to do is rush it - unless the egg mix has reached the centre of the bread it isn't right.

The Markham book is one of the excellent Penguin Great Food series, an extract from the original volume The English Huswife.