Success and Failure

Last Friday with The Dear Leader (confusion to her enemies) off diving, and Sternest Critic starting his new job, I had the house to myself with my last commission in hand despatched to the editor the previous day. Being 84.7 per cent retired is enjoyable, or at least it is for those of us with some resources financial and personal. I'd not want every day to myself, but the occasional one is a rare treat. Naturally I chose to spend the majority of it in the kitchen.


Of late I've been baking a lot of bread, in fact I haven't bought a loaf for I'd guess three weeks. I got fed up with either tasteless dross or stupidly expensive 'artisan' offerings (that may not be very artisan). With the freezer stocked there was no need for standard stuff, so I opted to go the more exotic route and try two of Ursula Ferrigno's Italian recipes for richer loaves. One succeeded, one failed - my fault not hers.


The success was an egg-enriched flatbread, flavoured with vanilla extract (not essence, crude oil derivatives don't tempt me) and as I lacked one stipulated ingredient, with rosewater. It rose nicely, came out golden and with a pleasing texture between chewy and soft, and was very tasty. The failure was fig bread, a bit like a pannetone. It was a salutary lesson in not just following the instructions, but thinking them through. It came out claggy, far too dense at the bottom, because I used some home-made figs soaked in alcohol, but still included the juice of three oranges the recipe included for wetting dried figs. It has actually improved over the days, probably drying out a bit, and toasting helps, but I'm annoyed at not seeing the problem coming.


You live and learn. I will give the fig bread another go, maybe near Christmas. The flatbread, and others in the same vein, will appear on our table shortly. Anna del Conte's book on Northern Italian cooking features a savoury one with walnuts and rosemary; Ursula Ferrigno has others that intrigue. I've improvised my own with spare dough, baked with loads of fried onions and some herbs on top, Not that I'm obsessing, but I'm about to re-read Elizabeth David's huge tome on English bread and yeast cookery with an eye to making some enriched breads and rolls of more local heritage. We're lucky that filler-upper bread is not a major component of our diet, but good bread - from the smell as it bakes to the taste as you get outside it - can be such a joy.

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. 

Eggs! Eggs! Damn All Eggs! (But Not All Cookery Writers)

So, as regards the eggs, said Lord Worplesdon, as all right thinking people will be aware. The title is prompted by the number of eggs now in our kitchen, seemingly increasing whenever my back is turned, and how to make the most of them.

For a cook it's actually quite a nice problem to have, if it qualifies as a problem at all. We breakfast on them every two or three days, and have enough for scrambled eggs to be served up as more than a small yellow stain on toast. An omelette or fritatta appears on the dinner menu about once a week; egg mayonnaise sandwiches occur at lunch with the same frequency; eggs boiled or poached are added to green salads with lardons and walnuts. The list of favourites goes on, but it's good to add new ways to use them up.

I was drawn to refer to Elizabeth David for eggy ideas recently. Inevitably an excellent one was rapidly found, and it suited another of our gluts - tomatoes ripening on the conservatory windowsill. Every cook has his or her favourite writers, Ms David one of my sacred quartet along with Jane Grigson, de Pomiane, and HF-W. I am pushed to ponder here, rather appositely, a chicken and egg question: have I chosen those four because they suit my cooking and tastes; or did they create my cooking and tastes?

David and Grigson were the first food writers who entranced me as a callow twenty-something, by which time, however, I was already fascinated by and reasonably adept at cookery; de Pomiane came to my notice rather later; and HF-W is younger than I, which points towards them fitting what I look for in a food writer as the correct answer to the above query. That they write well, or extremely well, comes high up the list; that they are rooted in French, Italian and British cookery before other styles is also important; and that their dishes are about making the most of ingredients, not making a show of them, is vital too.

The Elizabeth David dish by the way (from that holiest of texts, French Provincial Cookery) was an hors d'oeuvre of thinly sliced toms layered in a shallow dish with sliced boiled eggs, each layer of tomatoes seasoned as you go, some finely chopped onion strewn on top, the lot dressed with oil and vinegar. So simple, but so satisfying and tasty. It could be tarted up with chopped parsley, gherkins, capers, or olives and not suffer (though it would be wrong to add more than one or two of these).

How Fast is Fast Food?

With the Dear Leader away at a conference of super villains - she's giving a paper titled 'When Minions Betray Us - Towards a Theory of Creative Executions' - I was only cooking for two last night, Sternest Critic being home for Easter. The temptation was to do steak as we're blokes. Actually, if I understand the TV adverts, real men don't cook even that, they only ring for takeaway.

I made us some Chinese-ish food, (having travelled many a time and oft in China, and worked with Chinese businessmen throughout South East Asia, I know that a) there is no such thing as 'Chinese food', and b) My version of what I've eaten there is not at all authentic) as I'd been busy doing stuff and it was getting to the point that post-gym SC was turning a cannibal eye on me. Dinner was ready in about 15 minutes, 20 tops. On the very rare occasions we do dial for 'fast' food they always say 'about half an hour', and it takes closer to 60 minutes.

Anyone brave enough to have read early posts on this blog will perhaps recall that my favourite ever cookery programme was a dramatised take on de Pomiane's finest work, French Cooking in 10 Minutes. Think Jamie Oliver, but avec charm and sans annoying Essexisms. And half a century before the pukka prat was the first person ever to discover rapid cookery. The book and the programme show how you can produce four and five courses in 10 minutes (charcuterie starter, fruit as pud, cheese, there's three with no cooking needed). You're limited (no roasts, bakes, slow simmers etc), but it's not the idea to do this all the time.

Our two substantial dishes took twice de Pomiane's target, but for something with plenty of healthy protein and veg, and a bit of carb, not one morsel of which remained uneaten, it's still not a bad effort. Thanks for asking, stir-fried chicken with mushrooms and broccoli, and prawn and crab (tinned white meat) with bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, sweet pepper and fine egg noodles. The former had chili added, the latter plenty of garlic, both had soy sauce and sesame oil.

I could have griddled the chicken thighs and served them on tinned lentils perked up with mushrooms and garlic, with a green salad to follow and cut the time down below 10 minutes. Or done a chicken salad in the same time. Or any number of other possibilites.

My point is that to have something toothsome on the table rapidly need not involve a phone call and paying a small fortune for what may well be cook-chill stuff. So to the Just Eat campaign we say Just Piss Off.

Right and Wrong

One of my favourite food writers was, is, Elizabeth David. This in spite of her undoubted snobbishness, and her highly prescriptive thoughts on certain foods. She, though not with 100 per cent consistency, believed in authenticity. Pizza was one such food she tended to see as to be done in a particular way or not at all. It was right (her way) or wrong (any other way).

I can agree that the dumping ground pizza - anything and everything added to one - is horrible. Again my kindergarten kids mixing paint analogy, you add too many colours and you just get muddy brown. But as the pizza base is such a great carrier of toppings I don't see it should be limited to tomato, mozarella and maybe an olive or three.

The smell of pizza dough is drifting through the study door even now, ready to form four bases. Just 500g of flour, 325ml of water, a sachet of dried yeast, 13g of salt and two tbsps of olive oil so the cost is well under 50p. A Sainsbury's basic mozarella (I've tried others, and only the pizza mozarella from Waitrose makes any real difference, and that's a trek across town) is I think 45p, to be used on two of the four, along with to be spread as taste fits: five or six cloves of garlic, a small red chilli, an onion, and a basic red pepper, another 45p the lot, and a tin of chopped toms 32p.

We have a small amount of turkey-breast leftover from Sunday's crown, that with some defrosted sweetcorn will add a few more pennies. A £1 taster-pack of peperone will make the basis of another topping, with three or four mushrooms, and an 80p tin of anchovies plus a few leftover olives a third. A few leaves from a £1 bag of baby spinach leaves will find a home on one of them, probably the turkey jobbie, the balance to make a small salad to assuage the guilt. So three pizzas, a garlic bread, and a small salad will set us back under £5.

None of those is going to be authentic, in Elizabeth David's terms, except maybe the garlic bread. But my son when we go out for pizza often goes for chicken and sweetcorn; and spinach with cheese of any sort is great. Plus an Italian peasant of yore would have done the same thing - it is pan y companatico, bread and something that goes with bread - when we had the whole Serrano ham slivers of that went perfectly.

Authenticity be buggered, this is just the best thing to eat on our one night where we slob out and dine in front of the TV.

Austerity and Horsemeat

Recent events have pointed to the fact that there are two ways to be economical in the kitchen: the first is to buy cheap rubbish; the second to devote some time to making the best of basic ingredients.

It is not a massive shock that processed foods at the very bottom end of the market should be the ones where inexplicably horsemeat has been discovered. The explanations that spring to mind are that somewhere in the chain there was a genuine error; or that in that same chain someone did it deliberately. It is hard to imagine circumstances in which 29 per cent of a burger could be horsemeat by accidental contamination, but you never know. 

Behind that, however, is the fact that the continual downward pressure on suppliers by supermarkets is likely to end in some sort of error: if your prices are shaved to the bone you cannot afford the very best monitoring systems, best people, most reliable suppliers of your own raw materials, the numbers on duty you would want, etc. So the supermarket buyer filling the trolley with the very cheapest stuff is not - generally - getting the best and purest - big shock.

With burgers, the product that has caused the furore, it is pretty easy to make your own for not very much, and to enjoy the process rather than the processed. Buy some mince from a reliable supplier; use some stale bread to make breadcrumbs; chop an onion finely; mix together with an egg for binding and seasoning to taste, then form the burgers in your floured hands and grill or fry them. 

I started this post saying it was economical buying rubbish, but that is not really true. As Elizabeth David once wrote, a bad meal is expensive at any price. 

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

Real austerity of course would mean doing without the second part of that pairing (the book by Elizabeth David my introduction to her writing by the way, a step change in my culinary existence), but the simplicity of an omelette and its easy co-existence with a glass of wine mean they are cosmically made for one another. And the wine, unless an addition to the eggs clashes, can be either red or white, full bodied or thin. Just not sweet unless you are going pre-war with a jam omelette.

Last night's first course was an omelette, with a load of Parmesan grated in with the beaten eggs, a pinch of salt and a turn of pepper. Fried in olive oil and butter it was ready in five minutes from cracking the eggs to table, which doubtless some 'easy-cook' microwaved dish for twice the price or more would also take to prepare.

We have 'free' eggs from our own hens (and tasty too with all those worms and things they forage when let out), but even bought the four eggs and cheese, enough to feed the two of us (one absentee last night) would have cost around £1. I often include herbs from the garden as a clean-tasting way of changing the flavours, and they are essentially for nothing: parsley, par-cel (leaf-celery for those not in the know, easy to grow and prolific, no sticks to speak of but tons of taste in the leaves), tarragon...

Omelettes are not for every day, though nutritionists (as so often) cannot make their minds up about the 'dangers' of eggs. But they are for regular consumption.

The book An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, as mentioned above, was something of a game changer for me, but an omelette was the first thing I ever learned to cook, and very badly too, as a sixth former. Onion fried for 30 seconds if that, bacon cut into thin bits the same, sometimes tiny potato cubes too, before the eggs were added. But it was a start, and I learned from my crunchy under-cooked mistakes. Making omelettes was how I started my son cooking (rather earlier than the sixth form), and he has fared a lot better than I did.

Bang for Your Buck

A recent piece for Lovefood.com http://www.lovefood.com/journal/opinions/14049/family-mains-course-meals-for-under-3 had me considering the question of maximising flavour for minimal outlay. In that piece I suggested fresh ginger as one of the best ingredients in that light. Garlic is another winner of course. Wild garlic in season, not too far off now, is even better, given if you can find a source where you are allowed, you can pick it for nothing: we are lucky, at the bottom of our garden it grows in wild profusion.

I was pushed to think about this topic again by seeing an advert by the fancy herb and spice bottle people Schwartz. A recipe card series where each includes various herbs etc to make the particular dish is being advertised. Sainsbury's have a rosemary roasted chicken and potatoes one on sale for 99p, down from £1.99, which hopefully means they are failing to take off. In price/weight terms I still think the reduced one will be horrifically expensive for what you get.

If you can't cook, buy a good cookbook - Delia, David, Grigson or pretty much anyone where words are more significant than pictures -  and invest in a few packets of herbs and spices - there is no difference I dare say between own-brand dried rosemary and branded - and learn to cook properly. It is one of life's pleasures, not a chore. Learn the techniques so you don't end up a slave to producers, those recipe cards a reminder of what you'll end up paying for supposed convenience.