The Greasy Spoon | It's not just about Haute Cuisine...

Mireille Johnston

 

 

I've had fun re-watching some of the programmes from Keith Floyd's "Floyd on France". This was a brilliant (and intelligent) television series made during the 1980's, exploring the regional cooking of France. It made the radical innovation of filming in real-life kitchens, in real time; a sort of antithesis to the likes of Auntie Delia and the scary Mrs Cradock. Floyd's anarchic antics were, of course, very amusing too. But, oh, what a contrast "Floyd in France" makes with the formulaic, yoof-orientated rubbish peddled on the television (or computer screens) of today!

 

 

 

 

Which suddenly reminded me of Mireille Johnston and her French Cookery Course. I had forgotten all about her. In her BBC television series from the early 90's, Mireille comes across as a dishy and sophisticated French housewife, with a drop-dead sexy accent that will break your heart- a lip smackin' mid-life male fantasy. In reality, she was a dishy- and sophisticated- academic; a Fulbright scholar, and translator; she held a doctorate in comperative literature and taught at Yale. In her "Cook's Tour of France", like Floyd, she travelled across the regions of France investigating the local food and sharing the secrets of various Michelin starred restaurants. I'm sure that if we had ever met, I would have liked her. A Lot.

Her book was published by the BBC in two volumes. I bought the first yonks ago and, to my chagrin now, barely looked at it. But it was still there at the back of the shelf- a little yellow in places, slightly dusty and tired, but crying out to be used and loved. And what a terrific book it is!  As I get older, I'm really coming to the conclusion that the simple and classic food of the cuisine bourgeoise is The Way Forward for home cooks.

So far, I've made Poule au Pot Farcie (Poached chicken with a chicken liver and spinach stuffing), Poulet au Vinaigre (chicken with vinegar and cucumber), Marmite Dieppoise (creamy mixed fish and seafood flavoured with curry), and Salmon aux Lentilles (salmon with lentils). I love the integrity, simplicity and relative sophistication of local French food. Incidentally, the Salmon with Lentils dish could easily be rustled up as an after-work thing; it's essentially a pan-fried salmon filet served with a creamy lentil sauce.

Mireilles' recipes are easy to make, work brilliantly, don't require strange ingredients and look beautiful on the plate. But I am of course, typing the obvious. All these classic recipes have been handed down from generation to generation, and have been tried, tested, discussed, argued over and refined over many, many, many years. They smack of authenticity. How different from today's so-called celebrity cook books, rushed out for the Christmas market, peppered with mistakes, so often leaving you slightly disappointed; with over-complicated recipes that don't really work. 

Mireille Johnston's Complete Cookery Course is currently being peddled on amazon for a penny. I've posted up two videos of Mireille from youtube. If you're a subscriber you may have to have a look at The Greasy Spoon via your web-browser to see them.

 

 

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Particular Delights

 

 

I'm very aware that I haven't written anything since last month. Having said that, I'm not especially keen on the blogger who only posts sporadically, with accompanying gushy excuses about "being incredibly busy" and "life is hectic". You will know the type. It's a bit like people who are late for meetings complaining about the "awful traffic". In Soho, Covent Garden or St James's.

But this time, I have a proper excuse: I've been working for the last six months on my new online decorative antiques shop (www.lukehoney.co.uk). I don't normally plug my "other life" on The Greasy Spoon, but this time I'm going to. Unashamedly. It's currently a holding page, although you can quite easily log on, and sign up for my regular newsletter. I'm expecting the site to go officially live over the next few days.

Although I'm currently known in the business as a specialist in antique games (you know the sort of thing- ivory chess sets, leather backgammon boards, eighteenth century gambling chips, mah jong, interesting antique roulette wheels) I'm also going to be dealing in other Country House goodies: Regency reverse glass mezzotints, Fornasetti, Modern British paintings and prints, Gothic revival furniture, old ikats, Chinese blue and white ceramics, convex Empire mirrors, library ladders, vintage globes, fascinating old medical charts. There's going to be a blog too, linked to the site. A new blog on antiques, architecture, design and the like; anything that grabs me- and as you've probably worked out by now, I've got eclectic interests.

In the meantime, back to the food- and long may that continue. Grub Street very kindly sent me an advance copy of Nathalie Hambro's Particular Delights through the post. I'm a big fan of Grub Street. They publish foodie authors of interest, and I love the quality of their production: lovely smooth, creamy paper; well sewn bindings, soothing typography, tasteful illustrations.

Particular Delights was first published in 1981 and won the Glenfiddich Award for food writing, and it's been a favourite on my bookshelf for some time now. Some of Nathalie Hambro's recipes are a bit weird, (I seem to remember a scrambled egg studded with kidney beans, and a celery and banana salad), but that would be missing the point; the book is stunningly original. I like the sound of Grape and Radish salad (sliced radishes, black and white grapes, bound in a yoghurt and dill dressing) and Smoked Oysters steamed in Vine Leaves (vine leaves stuffed with ricottta cheese, smoked oysters, dried fungi, coriander, spinach and spring onions and seasoned with cayenne pepper, mace and salt).

I like cooks who invent their own dishes. If this sort of thing floats your boat, have a look at Sybil Kapoor's Taste, A New Way to Cook; and Niki Segnit's The Flavour Thesaurus. Experimentation and Creativity are the way forward!

 

 

The Recipes That Made A Million

 

 

 

Not mine, I'm afraid. Franco Lagattolla's. It's the title of a fun book that I bought the other day for the princely sum of £2.50. That's right, £2.50. One of the things I love about second-hand book hunting is the amount of pleasure old books can bring you for say, the price of some awful paper cup of cold take-away coffee, otherwise known as a "Mocha Light Frappucino Blended Beverage- To Go". The coffee's gone in an instant, but the book stays on your shelf, to be poured over again and again; the cover, typography and graphics to be re-admired, the contents to be savoured and used as a spark for new ideas, or more simply, to dispel the gloom of a boring Sunday afternoon. Oh yes, I love old books. They're like trusty friends. And I like, especially, forgotten books from around forty years ago.

I've written about Franco before. As the blurb on the dust jacket of The Recipes That Made A Million says: "What did Michael Caine, Gregory Peck and Frank Sinatra all have in common? Answer: they all dined at Mario & Franco's superb Italian restaurants in London- the eating success story with the 'beautiful' people in the swinging sixties". 

 

Franco Lagattolla and Mario Cassandro; former waiters at The Mirabelle, first opened the starry La Trattoria Terrazza in Romilly Street, Soho, in 1959. It's hard to believe now, but La Terrazza was the first restaurant in Britain to serve genuine regional dishes from all over Italy. Their story is covered admirably by Alasdair Scott Sutherland in The Spaghetti Tree, Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution, which I would recommend without hesitation.

 

 

Here's a recipe I liked the look of from "The Recipes That Made a Million". It's for Pȇches Flambées, otherwise known as Peaches flamed in kirsch. Those of you with pyromaniacal tendencies will appreciate it:

"Peel four firm but ripe peaches. Poach them in plain water and sugar syrup until barely tender. Do not over-cook. Keep them warm.

In a copper pan melt 25g (1oz) of castor sugar and allow it to take on the slightest colour over a low flame. Add the juice of one orange, four tablespoons of the poaching liquor and a string of lemon peel. Dissolve the caramelising sugar, moving it around with the back of a spoon. Now stir in two tablespoons of Melba sauce and add the poached peaches. 

Bring up the heat a little and, turing the peaches gently, glaze them in the syrupy sauce. Pour in a large wine glass of kirsch. Prick the peaches so that they absorb some of the flavours. Pull the pan sharply across the fire, and stand well back while the whole lot bursts into beautiful flames".

Melba Sauce, by the way, is just a pureé of rasberry jam, diluted with a little water and simmered for a few minutes, then strained.

 

 

Pierre Koffmann's Memories of Gascony

 

 

 

I've just had this for my birthday- it's Pierre Koffmann's Memories of Gascony. The book was originally published in 1990, and became a cult classic. Until this sumptious reprint, it was relatively hard to find, and was horribly expensive second-hand. Koffmann opened La Tante Claire in 1977.

 

I love the food in this book. It's simple, gutsy food of the French rural persuasion. Lots of armagnac, garlic, foie gras, duck... I'm tempted to have a shot at "Gratin d'Haricots Verts": green French beans in a creamy, garlic sauce, served with Bayonne Ham. Either that or the "Terrine de Foie Gras", soaked in armagnac. Or maybe "Lièvre à la Royale"?  Stuffed Hare in a White Wine. But where to start? It's all fabulous.

 

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Richard Olney

 

 

Do you remember remainder bookshops? Back in the bad old days of the Net Book Agreement, I used to hang around the plethora of pop-up shops that had spawned, like some form of bibliomanical penicillin in the Charing Cross Road. They were slighty seedy; often with open fronts, exposed to heavy traffic and all the debris of the London street scene: soggy newspapers, discarded McDonald's cartons, broken glass from the neighbouring ale house; and with an 'adult' department down rickety staircases. This was in the days when booksellers could return unsold copies to the publisher on a "sale, or return" basis. This made life easier for the harrassed rep. He could persuade the bookseller to take, say, twenty copies of Bernard Manning's kiss and tell autobiography, when the hard truth was that the bookshop might just about sell one copy if they were lucky, and on a sunny day at that. The remaining copies would be returned to the publisher to be pulped- or remaindered. It was all a terrific waste of trees.

But amongst the dross- the Z list celebrity memoirs, the regurgitated encylopedias of Ancient Egypt, gardening handbooks by people you had never heard of, picture books of The River Thames in CameraColour, Jane's "Handbook of American Warships" and "The Reader's Digest Book of English Villages", you could discover some gems. One such find was Richard Olney's "French Menu Cookbook".

 

Richard Olney was an interesting character. An American, he had lived almost his entire adult life in Solliès-Toucas, Provence, mingling with the Anglo-American bohemian set, including the likes of the avant-garde occultist and filmmaker, Kenneth Anger. Olney died of a heart attack in 1992. His books are beautifully written and have become highly sought after, although I see that you can currently buy my rather lovely edition of "The French Menu Cookbook" for a few pounds on amazon.

 

 

"Simple French Food' (republished by Grub Street in 2003, first published in 1974) is another Olney book well worth adding to your library. Simple it ain't. I'm looking at his recipe for Raviolis aux Grenouilles (Frog Ravioli) as I write, and it involves a fumet, a parsley, chive, tarragon and frog stuffing, and a noodle dough. He liked stuffing things, did Richard Olney. The ingredient list for his Terrine de Poissons, Crème Mousseline Tomatée (Fish Terrine, Whipped Tomato Cream) spreads out over two pages. No, this is relatively sophisticated cooking for a more lesiurely age- for a long, hot, dusty French August, with the dahlias coming into bloom- and all the better for that.

I gather that he enjoyed a mild feud with Julia Child. I love "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", but of the two of them, I think I would naturally gravitate towards Olney at the cocktail party (there was just something a bit strange about Mrs Child). Richard Olney's languid prose can be almost Proustian at times:

"Happily a stew is rarely subject to quite such a complicated and uncertain conceptual process...fired by the touching and too human desire to flatter a Sybaritic guest, to compose a menu, each of the parts of which may be of an exquisite purity, but which, in its plethoric whole, adds up to something in the way of barbaric orgy..."

From "Simple French Food"

 

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The Last Days of The Raj: Food in British India

 

 

The Veerasawmy, from an old postcard

 

The Veeraswamy (99-101 Regent Street, London W1) is said to to be the oldest Indian restaurant in Britain. It was founded in 1926 by Edward Palmer, a retired Indian army officer. Palmer is an interesting character. From an Anglo-Indian family, his grandfather founded a Hyderabad banking house in the 18th century, and his grandmother was Indian. His great grandmother was the Princess Begum Fyze Baksh. Palmer's company E. P. Veerasawmy & Co. (note the slightly different spelling) ran the Indian foods section at the British Empire exhibiton in 1924, selling spices, chutneys and curry pastes to the British public- this must have seemed deeply exotic at the time.

 

 

 

In 1936 he published "Indian Cookery: For Use in All Countries". This is a rare book in first edition, and difficult to find, but I see that a paperback edition, published by Mayflower in 1972, is readily available, and there are various other fun editions you can get your teeth into:

 

 

 

In 1930, The Veerasawmy was taken over by the Conservative MP, Sir William Steward. The restaurant was popular with all the usual Society suspects of the day: Edward, Prince of Wales, Mrs Simpson, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin. And it's still there (although you will find the decor much changed), managed by the owners of Chutney Mary, and the brilliant and highly affordable chain, Masala Zone- which I would recommend without hesitation. 

I'm interested in Anglo-Indian food. Like so many other people in this country, I have (or have had) relations who lived in India. My great uncle, from memory, had been in the Indian Army. One of my all-time favourite dishes is kedgeree- that savoury Anglo-Indian confection of rice, smoked fish, chopped eggs and "curry" flavourings. Piccallili (which I wrote about yesterday) is another example. It's sort of in the blood. There are some who will say that Anglo-Indian food is not authentic; a bastardised version of the real McCoy. This may or may not be the case, but it exists (if slightly out of fashion) and for me, that's as real as it gets.

I've built up a modest collection of books on the topic:

 

David Burton, "The Raj at Table", Faber, 1994

 

Jennifer Brennan, "Curries & Bugles",  Harper Collins, 1990

 

Lizzie Collingham, "Curry, A Tale of Cooks & Conquerors", Random House, 2006

 

Rhona Aitken, The Memsahib's Cookbook, Piatkus Books, 1993

 

Pat Chapman's "The Taste of The Raj", Hodder & Stoughton, 1997

 

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The Dilemma of Tomato Ketchup

 

 

Henry Heinz, the genius behind the "57 varieties"

 

And now for something completely different. I'm never entirely sure about tomato ketchup. Not the classic stuff in bottles, that sauce made by Heinz- but the various recipes you come across telling you a) how to make it and b) how much better it is than the shop version.

It's the same thing with several famous and established classic brands. Is fresh corn-off-the-cob really that much better than Jolly Green Giant niblet sweetcorn in the tin? I remember the Roux brothers admitting on camera that they most certainly used tinned sweetcorn ("it is a good quality product"). Are home-made baked beans really that much better than the Heinz version?  Isn't it a case of the Emperors' New Clothes?

The more I think about it, there's a group of food brands and products which are, frankly, sacrosanct. Many of them were dreamt up in the Victorian, Edwardian or early 20th century periods. It's partly do to with childhood nostalgia, it's partly to do with the packaging. It may have something to do with the taste. Like old friends, they've just got that je ne sais quoi, they never let you down. The following, in my opinion, are members of this august club: Heinz Baked Beans, Kit-Kat, Mars Bars, Heinz Tomato Soup, Jolly Green Giant Sweetcorn, Lea & Perrin's Worcestershire Sauce, Schweppes Tonic Water, Hellman's Mayonnaise, Colman's Mustard, Marmite, Coca-Cola, Jaffa Cakes, H.P. Sauce, Tabasco, Angostura Bitters, Cadbury's plain chocolate digestives, Pimm's, J & B Rare blended whisky, Bournville dark chocolate, Camp coffee. 

Do you notice how most of these brands have more-or-less never changed the general style of the package design, although there may well have been very subtle changes to the overall packaging over the decades? Tamper with the classics at your peril! I'm not at all happy with what Heinz have done to our very own Lea & Perrins. They've simplified the label, and introduced nasty thick funeral black borders. Mr Lea and Mr Perrin, I think, have disappeared too. Having said that, the last time I was at the supermarket, I saw a shelf newly stacked with bottles of the old design, so it looks possible that the re-branding has failed, and Heinz have been forced to revert to the original packaging.

Another disaster (from my point of view, I have no idea if they have increased sales or not) is what the Kraft corporation have done to the classic Terry's All Gold, first produced in 1932. It's now a completely different product, split into two separate boxes, one for plain and one for milk chocolate. The fondants taste different. And where's the barrel of rum?

Anyway. Back to the Tomato Ketchup. If you feel like running against the grain, here's Lindsey Bareham's recipe for fresh tomato sauce, from her excellent Big Red Book of Tomatoes, published by Grub Street: 

Cut 350g tomatoes in half lengthways, then grate the tomatoes with the cut side facing the grater. Discard the skins and season with salt, pepper, a tablespoon of vinegar and a crushed clove of garlic. Beat in four tablespoons of olive oil, and shred basil over the top. 

 

 

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Robert Carrier and Drinking in Vogue

 

 

 

It's hard trying to be a food writer when you haven't got a kitchen. It's the reason why you've had a series of posts from me on cocktails over the last few days. You're also going to get quite a bit about books over the next few weeks or so; that is until the dust settles, the builders are banished and the ribbon, unveiling the new kitchen, is cut. I might even post up a photograph of the whole shooting match when it's finished.

For this one, I'm combining the two by recommending Drinking in Vogue, written by Henry McNulty, first published in 1978. Condé Nast published a series of excellent design and style books in the 60's, 70's and 80's; all of which are now becoming highly collectable. Henry Piper McNulty sounds like one of those splendid old school Henry Jamesy Americans. His Princeton obituary describes him as "a man of the world". I like the dry, spare irony of his biographical entry on the back flap of Drinking in Vogue: "Henry McNulty was born in Soochow, China, the son of missionary parents..."

And what a useful little book is Drinking in Vogue; peppered with amusing stories and witty asides:

"Learning to appreciate wine is a bit like falling in love. It happens to you without you actually encouraging it. But unlike love there is little chance that divorce will set in, unless your doctor intervenes".

He's also disarmingly candid: " I make no claim to wine expertise. I just like wine. My personal preference is for red over white, and French over others, and Bordeaux over Burgundy..." 

 

 

 

Hintlesham Hall, Suffolk

 

I was amused to see Henry McNulty mentioning a recipe for the "Hintlesham White Lady" (gin and lemon juice in equal measures, a dash of cointreau, a touch of sugar to taste, shaken with the white of an egg and ice). Oh, crikey, that's a trip down memory lane. Back in the late 70's, Hintlesham Hall was the fashionable country house restaurant owned by the starry American food writer and television "chef", Robert Carrier. Hintlesham was the sort of place where the waiters would count to three, and lift their silver tureen lids in unison. I buy old Robert Carrier books whenever I see them. They go for a song.

 

 

Mr Carrier in action for the BBC

 

It's funny how nobody seems to remember Robert Carrier anymore. In his day, he was huge: a contributor to Vogue, the proprietor of a trendy cookery school, author of many urbane cookery books, the inventor of the wipeable Robert Carrier Cookery Card System- a novel concept at the time. Food, Wine & Friends (the book of his now long forgotten 1979 television series) remains a particular favourite. If I can find my copy, I'll post up some photographs from the book at a later date. You will find them highly entertaining. His "friends", of course, included glamour girls like Joanna Lumley, Liv Ullmann, Susannah York, and Valentina Cortese. 

 

 

Robert Carrier's dining room at Hintlesham, "Robert Carrier's Entertaining", Sidgwick & Jackson, 1977 

 

 

And he was a terribly nice man to deal with: a very long time ago, as a junior auction specialist at a well know auctioneers in New Bond Street, I was told to telephone Mr Carrier to tell him that his rather camp 17th century wood carvings (gilt-wood angels, heavenly cherubs, South German putti- that sort of thing) had failed to sell. He was utterly charming, shouted "good, good!" down the telephone and told me he was delighted to be "getting his old friends back".

There's hardly anything featuring Robert Carrier on youtube, but I did find him trying to flog Magimixes in an old ad from the 1980's:

 

          

 

 

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Rex Whistler and The Tate Gallery Restaurant

 

 

Rex Whistler (1905-1944), "Self-Portrait", 1940, National Army Museum

One of my favourite biographies of the 1980's is Laurence Whistler's The Laughter and The Urn, an affectionate portrait of his brother, the artist and illustrator, Rex Whistler. Rex was killed in July 1944 as the Guards Armoured Division attempted to break out of the salient at Caen. His languid self-portrait, painted in 1940, is now in the possession of the National Army Museum. He's sitting on the edge of the balcony of one of those Nash stucco terraces in Regent's Park, self-aware in his new uniform of the Welsh Guards; Sam Browne belt unbuckled, cocktail tray and paint brushes at the ready.

Rex Whistler died at far too young an age. He is remembered now for his charming, delightful, whimsical if frivolous, illustrations (Beverley Nichol's Down the Garden Path, immediately comes to mind); he was after all, a friend of Stephen Tennant and a Bright Young Thing, but his later work shows the promise of greater things. Here's his portrait of Sargeant Isaacs, Welsh Guards:

 

 

Rex Whistler (1905-1944) "The Master Cook", Sergeant Isaacs of the Welsh Guards, 1940 or 1941.

 

 

Rex Whistler (1905-1944), "Caroline Paget", circa 1938

 

In 1926, The Tate Gallery commissioned Whistler to redecorate the murals of their then refreshment room, now the Rex Whistler Restaurant at Tate Britain (the restaurant is currently closed for re-fururbishment until 2013).

With quirky wit, Rex called his murals The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats: "a hunting party is formed, including a princess and her maid, a prince, a colonel, a captain, a pantry boy and the son of an impoverished nobleman. At the start of the mural they are seen leaving a palace and riding across the countryside, spearing sturgeon, hunting for truffles and other delicacies. The hunters encounter wild and mythical beasts on their journey through the mountains and forests including a leopard and a unicorn".

 

 

Rex Whistler (1905-1944), "The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats", Tate Gallery, London, 1927

 

Yesterday I mentioned my "cook books to save in the event of a fire shelf". I've got another one to add (this is growing by the day). It's The Tate Cookbook, by Paul King and Michael Driver, published by The Tate Gallery in 1996. It might just be still available new, otherwise you should easily be able to track one down through amazon or abebooks. I really love it. Published in an elegant format, with a terrific dust-jacket by William Strang ("Bank Holiday", painted in 1912) it's generously illustrated with food-related paintings and drawings by the likes of William Nicholson, Vanessa Bell, Elisabeth Blackadder, William Scott, Duncan Grant, Stanley Spencer and Walter Sickert.

Inside, there's a selection of relatively simple, elegant (like "iconic", a much over-used word, but I'm going to use it again without hesitation in this case), recipes with a British, even Nursery twist: buttered crab, venison pâté en croûte with Cumberland Sauce, poached pears with stilton walnut quennelles, omelette arnold bennett, breast of pheasant with pâté croutons and Madeira sauce, whisky and coffee ice cream, brioche and butter pudding, lemon soufflé. All this is similar, in some ways, to the 1920s' and 30's recipes in Arabella Boxer's Book of English Food.

 

 

William Strang (1859-1921), "Bank Holiday", 1912, dust-jacket design for The Tate Cookbook

 

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Jackie Kennedy's Shepherd's Pie

 

 

That famous photograph, Ron Galella in pursuit

 

I've always admired Jacqueline Kennedy's taste, especially in antiques, pictures and books. The Sotheby's catalogue (The Estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, April 23-26, 1996) was a revelation; proving that she had an excellent, understated eye (from memory as the catalogue's currently in storage) for: old master drawings, charming hand-coloured Regency and Biedermeier prints, John Singer Sargent sketches, creamware Corinthian candlesticks, Louis XVI furniture, natural history engravings by Audubon. Everything was slightly tatty, too. I liked that: her books had been well thumbed, and well-read; the antithesis of the immaculate coffee table books you see piled up in interior design magazines.

 

 

 

Then trawling the internet one day, I came across "Cooking for Madam, Recipes & Reminiscences from the Home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis", by Martha Sgubin (with Nancy Nicholas). Martha Sgubin was Mrs Onassis's cook, or private chef. 

To be honest, initially I thought the book was going to be a bit of a joke. Cringy title. A slightly embarrasing buy, not quite at the brown paper bag stage, but you will get the drift. How wrong I was!  It was a terrific buy, and it's now got pride of place on that shelf of cookery books I'd rescue if the house caught fire (which is more than likely with the full-scale renovations currently in progress); alongside The Harry's Bar Cookbook, The Prawn Cocktail Years, Lindsey Bareham's Just One Pot and Arabella Boxer's English Food.

Martha Sgubin cooks the sort of food I know I'd love if- and when- we ever get round to employing a private chef. Simple but relatively sophisticated; unpretentious, Anglo-American with a French and Italian influence. Honest food cooked extremely well- and with style. Flicking through at random, we have: Mussel Salad, Shepherd's Pie, Frozen Lemon Soufflé, Pear Sorbet, Green Risotto, Tarragon Chicken, Warm Lobster Salad with Basil Viniagrette, Truffle Soup and Strawberry Shortcake.

I now have something shocking to admit to you. I have declared this house "A Mashed Potato Free Zone". For some reason, I loathe mashed potato. It's weird, I know. I can quite happily tuck into waxy new potatoes; sautéed potatoes are good, chips are divine. But mashed potato is the Mark of the Beast. It may be something to do with the floury texture. It may be something to do with school (antique Irish cooks at Dotheboy's Hall, fags dangling from their pursed lips, blue nylon housecoats) or those robotic alien creatures which peddled instant mashed potatoes for Cadbury's back in the 70's. Mash Get Smash. But for today only, I'm going to lift my ban, and actually recommend a dish which includes the evil substance. I'm quite happy to serve this up to our guests. Just bear in mind that I won't touch it. But if it's good enough for Mrs Onassis...

Here's the recipe for Jackie Kennedy's Shepherd's Pie, as cooked by Martha Sgubin, and adapted by The Greasy Spoon:

 

 

 

4 cups chopped cooked lamb or roast beef (the meat must be rare)

2 large cloves of garlic

1 large onion, chopped

1 teaspoon of fresh rosemary leaves

8 Tablespoons (1 stick) butter, divided

3 Tablespoons flour

1 cup beef stock

Salt and Pepper

4 cups mashed potatoes

 

Preheat your oven to 350°. Combine the lamb, garlic, onion and rosemary and put them through a meat grinder twice. It does need to be a meat grinder.

Melt six tablespoons of the butter in a large pan, and stir in the flour. Stir constantly on a low heat to form a roux. You'll need to do this for a few minutes so that the flour cooks.

Add the ground lamb mixture and stir it in. Add sea salt flakes and pepper to taste. Pour the combined mixture into an oven-proof oval casserole dish. Spread the mashed potatoes over the top. Make sure the lamb mixture is completey covered and that the potato is spread evenly, touching the rim of the dish. Take a fork and rake a design across the potato. Long grooves across the width could be a good plan. Dot with butter. Bake in the oven for 40 minutes until the filling is hot and the potato has browned.

 

 

Cooking For Madam, Recipes and Reminiscences from the Home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by Marta Sgubin (and Nancy Nicholas), published by Scribner, New York, 1998.

 

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Old Covent Garden Market

 

 

 

We spent yesterday evening watching Julien Temple's brilliant film, London: The Modern Babylon: a slightly surreal scrapbook of London images, beautifully edited, thought-provoking and at times, moving. It's a more than a worthy addition to the growing backlist of London documentaries, which include Norman Cohen's The London Nobody Knows (1969) and Patrick Keiller's London (1994). Julien Temple has caught the zeitgeist: with the success of the Olympics, London's suddenly very much the place to be at the moment; there's a positive vibe in the air. With all its chaos.

 

 

All this coincides with the re-publication in paperback of photographer Clive Boursnell's Old Covent Garden; an evocative collection of images taken during the 1960s' and 70's, before the fruit, vegetable and flower market was relocated to the brutalist wasteland of Nine Elms. I can just about remember the old market as a child- we must have driven past it on the way to the theatre. Newspapers lying on the cobbles, cartons of rancid fruit, Victorian green painted barrows, the smell of sulphuric, rotting cabbage. To think that the bowler hatted bureaucrats had plans to drive a motorway right through the middle of it! Can you imagine?

 

Alfred Hitchcock set one of his last films, Frenzy, there, two years before the market closed. I'm also a huge fan of Cecil Beaton's romanticised designs for My Fair Lady.

Old Covent Garden: The Fruit, Vegetable and Flower Markets by Clive Boursnell is published by Frances Lincoln in paperback and is priced at £12.99.

 

 

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Harry's Bar, Venice

 

 

 

 

I'm not sure how many "Harry's Bars" there are in the world. Quite a few, I expect. There's that famous pub in Paris, there's the late Mark Birley's smart dining club in London; I would imagine there are some pretty divey bars in god-forsaken fleshpots using the name. But for me, the one and only, the place that can truly describe itself as "Harry's Bar" is the famous institution in Venice, opened by Giuseppe Cipriani in 1931.

I've unashamedly described my love for this place over the years- and I make no apologies for it. I like its wooden simplicity (a bit like a saloon in a varnished schooner), I like the fact that the food is prepared by "cooks" rather than "chefs"- suggesting a remarkable honesty, at least when it comes to the food. I like the immaculate service- the way you can return a decade later, and there will be the same barman behind the counter, I like the continuity; the idea that the ghosts of Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, Truman Capote and Peggy Guggenheim might just, if you played your cards right, come over and say hello.

 

Very many years ago, as a callow youth (all of nineteen years old) I developed an interest in the Dry Martini. I was in Venice with my girlfriend of the time. We were shy and naive. We had never been to Harry's before. We plucked up courage and pushed through the hallowed swing doors. It was pouring with rain. We found a seat at the bar and ordered two dry martinis. Harry's serve them in tiny, rather stylish little tumblers with their famous Deco motif, frosted, very cold and straight from the 'fridge. The barman- Mr Claudio Ponzio please step forward- was charming and treated us as if we were royalty, even though starry people like Roger Moore and Michael Caine happened to be sitting over in the corner. The next day we came back, and Claudio had "your usual, sir?" waiting for us before we had even arrived, served up with a wry smile. Now, that's why I like Harrys' Bar.

 

        Mr Claudio Ponzio in action

There will be certain people- visitors to Venice- who will grumble about the place "not being as good as it used to be". They will complain about the quality of the Bellinis; about the number of badly dressed tourists packing out the downstairs bar, they will dismiss the exorbitant prices in the separate restaurant. Despite its fame, Harry's remains remarkably unpretentious- and this, I think, might be the cause of the trouble.

But I do think- and I've been meaning to say this for some time- that's it's often a question of respect, which Venice, as one of the greatest tourist destinations in the world often doesn't get. The last time we were there (a few months ago) we were greeted with a reserved charm, and offered a little dish of canapés. Just for us. We had just been to La Fenice- or possibly High Mass at St Mark's (I forget which, my wife is a Catholic) and were dressed appropriately, a suit for me, my wife as immaculate as ever. You get back what you give.

 

 

 

May I also recommend The Harrys' Bar Cookbook by Arrigo Cipriani? If our house ever caught fire, this would be first cookery book that I would try and save. We use it the whole time. The recipe for Minestrone is certainly the best version I've made- so far. Pollo alla Veneta and Insalata di Cape Sante are particular favourites.

 

 

Claudia Roden's Picnics

 

 

Another terrific reprint. This time it's Picnics by Claudia Roden, first published by Jill Norman in 1981. For some reason, food writers seem to have avoided the subject, which in some ways, seems surprising. This one fills a gap in the market.

The book's very much an international affair; an erudite and idiosyncratic discource on picnics, and the art of picnicking. As Claudia Roden says in her introduction: "Everything tastes better outdoors." Picnics is published by Grub Street, priced at £14.99.

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Polpo & English Food

 

 

 

Two new cookery books hot off the presses: Polpo, a Venetian Cookbook (Of Sorts) by Russell Norman, and a reprint of Arabella Boxer's English Food in hardback.

One of the things I find exciting about this country is our excellence in book design. And what a beautiful thing is Russell Norman's Polpo. The design and typography are exquisite; Bloomsbury have done something clever with the spine (it's just the edges of the paper, sewn- if that makes sense), so that the book lies completely flat when open. The paper is creamy and smooth. The typeface is elegant. The photography is evocative. The book even smells right.

For those of you more interested in the food, Polpo is based on the recipes used in Russell Norman's successful London restaurants. I've got a thing about Venetian food. Not that awful trat stuff you get near St Marks' Square, but the genuine, regional cooking you'll find in out of the way restaurants like the wonderful Corte Sconta or in standup working men's bars tucked away down sinister alleyways. We're talking about Warm Squid Salad with Cavolo Nero and Chickpeas, Broad Bean, Mint & Ricotta Bruschette, Grilled Fennel & White Anchovy Skewers, Chopped Chicken Liver Crostini. Polpo, a Venetian Cookbook of Sorts is published by Bloomsbury and is priced at twenty five pounds.

 

Another recent publication which caught my eye is a reprint of Arabella Boxer's classic Book of English Food (published by Fig Tree/Penguin in hardback, and priced at £20). It's another sumptuous effort of high quality, with a fabulous Art Nouveau dustjacket, sumptious creamy paper and a decent typeface. The book was first published back in 1991. I've got a Penguin paperback edition, which I seem to remember cost me an arm and a leg second hand. Lady Arabella's book is a terrific read, and covers Country House and restaurant food of the 1920's and 30's. It's a gem.

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Last Dinner on The Titanic

 

 

Like so many others with slightly macabre sensibilities, I have a near obsession with The Titanic. And I've had this for as long as I can remember, long before all the recent media hype and the James Cameron blockbuster of 1997.

I've got a very real problem with the latter: am I alone in thinking that this film is an example of the worst possible taste?  A very tragic real-life disaster, in which over a thousand people died, is reduced to a simplistic, anachronistic teen romance, fermented by a trite, retarded script; the Titanic's passenger list reduced to "them" and "us": "them" being the 'orrible upper classes- all cruel snobs with phoney Oxford accents and twirling waxed moustaches, and "us" being the brave, true, noble, kind, hard-working, down-trodden working class, on their way to create a Brave New America- except that they don't, 'cos they all drown at the expense of the cowardly toffs who dress up in drag to get to the life-boats before the women and children.

An interesting historical fact by the way- before we all get too revolutionary here- is that around double the amount of men in Third Class survived when compared to the poor old burghers in Second Class who suffered, I think, the worst survival rate of all, a terrifying 8.33 per cent.

And then there's all that bizarre cruciform spread-eagled arm waving stuff going on in the film, Leonardo and Kate at the bows of the great ship, offset by corny Irish folksy flutey music (why does modern day Hollywood have a thing about this? Although I'll grudgingly admit that the Titanic was made in Belfast) and the wailings- nay, shrieking- courtesy of the Franco-Canadian diva, Ms. Celine Dion.

 

 

A Night to Remember, 1958

No, I don't like "Titanic". Instead, have a look at William McQuitty's excellent A Night to Remember, directed by the late Roy Ward Baker and starring Kenneth More and a very young Honor Blackman (aka Mrs Gale). Yup, it's in black and white, yup, it was made in 1958. Yup, it requires a bit of effort to watch. Yup, it's got Kenneth More with a plummy accent, and it's all very Stiff Upper Lip. These are good things.

The Times today ran an article entitled "The other last supper". The byline said: "...inspired by the final Titanic meal, chefs around the world are serving variations of its first-class menu". Again, although fascinating, isn't this just a little dubious?  Not the Times article, which was interesting, but the idea that restaurants all around the world are staging "Last Dinner on The Titanic" banquets?

In the spirit of all this fun, one of my more recent second-hand buys has been, yes, you guessed it Last Dinner on The Titanic...Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner, by Rick Archbold and Diana McCauley, with a forward by Walter Lord. Walter Lord, by the way, wrote the book on the Titanic disaster, which I would recommend without hesitation.

 

So why not amuse and entertain your boss and his lady wife by inviting them to a Titanic dinner party?  If they're first class guests you could serve them eleven courses, consisting at a glance of: Oysters à la Russe, Poached Salmon with Mousseline sauce, Vegetable Marrow Farci, Chậteau potatoes, Asparagus Salad with Champagne-Saffron vinagrette (I like the sound of this one), and Waldorf pudding. If your guests warrant the second class menu, there's a choice of Baked Haddock with Sharp Sauce, Curried Chicken and Rice, Turnip Purée, Wine Jelly and American Ice Cream. Steerage gets, amongst other things, Roasted Pork with Sage, Vegetable Soup, Green Peas and Plum Pudding with Sweet Sauce.

Here's the recipe for the Asparagus Salad with Champagne-Saffron vinagrette (courtesy of "Last Dinner on The Titanic"):

Snap off the woody ends of the fresh asparagus stalks, and chuck them away. Plunge the asparagus into salted boiling water and cook them for 3 to 5 minutes until tender. Drain them under cold water- which will help to set the colour and will stop them cooking.

Meanwhile, soak some saffron strands in a few teaspoons of boiling water, and let it stand for a few minutes, until the saffron softens (you'll find that the water turns yellow). Stir in about a tablespoon or so of champagne vinegar, half a teaspoon of smooth Dijon mustard and a good pinch of white sugar. Whisk until smooth, and drizzle in three tablespoons of olive oil, until it forms an emulsion. Season with salt and white pepper. Toss with the asparagus and red and/or yellow peppers, finely diced. Arrange on a plate with a selection of designer lettuce leaves- those things in plastic bags you can buy from the supermarkets.

 

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In praise of Lindsey Bareham

 

Followers of this blog will know that I'm a fan of Simon Hopkinson; "Roast Chicken and Other Stories" and "The Prawn Cocktail Years" are particular favourites. But if Simon Hopkinson's a culinary Batman, Lindsey Bareham has to be Robin: she was the co-writer on both books. Or maybe it should be the other way round, as Ms Bareham, in her understated way, has produced a large number of extraordinarily good cookery books over the years, as well as writing an inspirational column for the Evening Standard, read by thousands on their way back from work on The Tube.

Rummaging around in a cardboard box of discarded books, I came across Just One Pot, published by Cassell in 2004. The rather boring cover doesn't do the book justice- this has suddenly become one of my all-time favourite reads. I'm currently working through the recipes one-by-one. It's aimed at busy people who like to cook, but come back from work knackered and hungry. Everything can be made in one pot, in less than an hour. Ingredients are readily available from supermarkets.

Lindsey's food is gutsy, I detect the influence (of course) of Elizabeth David; she likes North African, Italian and Spanish flavours. So lots of chorizo, tomato, saffron, beans, the generous use of sea salt and herbs. I've noticed that she doesn't seem to use much stock; instead often adding salt and spices to onion and garlic at the frying stage. Her flavour combinations are imaginative and fabulous. She seems to be very keen on saffron, egg and almonds as a combination; this works beautifully.

So far we've had (in no particular order): Moroccan Chicken, Egg and Almond Tagine, Chicken Pilaf (this one was especially delicious, again with that saffron, almond and egg combination), Chorozio and White Bean Stew, Chicken with Bacon and Lentils, Lamb with Cumin and Aubergine.

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Floyd Remembered

 

 

 

I've just put up some old clips from the television series "Floyd on France" on the new Greasy Spoon Facebook page. I loved this series when it was first shown on British television back in September 1987. Floyd had actually made three series before that ("Floyd on Fish", "Floyd on a Pub Run", and "Floyd on Food"), but it was "Floyd on France", produced by David Pritchard, that put him on the map. I think it may have been one of the first cookery programmes in which food was cooked in real restaurant kitchens, in real time. At the time it seemed fresh, original and amusing. I remember my mother tut-tutting with disapproval, but as she ain't that keen on France, alcoholics, or people who stick their fingers into the sauce, it was kind of understandable. The rest of us loved it.

I'm afraid that I'm a bit sniffy about the later Floyd programmes- they lacked the magic of "Floyd on France", and by the end ("Floyd's India" and "Floyd's Fjord Fiesta", both 2001) had degenerated into formulaic early evening programming which lacked the integrity and passion of the earlier serieses. I remember Floyd wearily admitting at the end of "Floyd's India' how much he disliked the country- can you imagine him saying that about his beloved France?

 

 

Of course, with hindsight, "Floyd on France" was very much a certain type of Englishman's take on France, the view of a Private Eye reading 80's Rabelasian seen through rose-coloured glasses: panama hats and paunches, the Garrick Club tie and the Citroen 2CV; affordable French farmhouses and never-ending supplies of the local red. Peter Mayle carried on the tradition in his "A Year in Provence" (1989).

I would love to be able to see the complete series again. I've got the official video- but it's an edited version, and vast chunks of the original series have been cut. Even so, it's a rare old thing, and I gather might cost you £30 or so, to buy one second hand. The complete series doesn't seem to be available on DVD, no doubt because of the usual copyright problems.

Keith Floyd's first cookbook "Floyd's Food" (1981) has been re-printed and is now available brand new from amazon. I've got the original (albeit dog-eared and splattered) first edition: it's now extremely rare, and as I write, not one copy seems to be available for sale online. In any event, it's a terrific little book, full of simple but heart-felt ideas, and as the re-issued version's not very expensive, would make a lovely present for someone if you felt so inclined: I can almost guarantee they won't already have it.

 

 

 

 

Simon Hopkinson: The First Verdict

 

 

Various things I want- no, need to get off my hairy chest:

Did you watch the first episode of Simon Hopkinson's new television series "The Good Cook" (BBC1, Fridays, 7.30pm)?  The incidental music drove me nuts. 95% of the programme is accompanied with a loud, retro soundtrack: Stevie Wonder, Northern Soul; that sort of thing. Now, I love the music of Mr Marvyn Gaye and his friends; trust me, I really do. But not in this context. Not as a consistantly loud, in-your-face, soundtrack to a potentially decent food programme. It's along similar lines to that Sophie Dahl series: some hip, acned producer has fallen for the "let's go for the Jamie Oliver yoof culture" angle: it's all a huge shame. Simon Hopkinson is one of our best food writers, and he certainly doesn't need his new series dressed up with ersatz production values.

Because of the distracting music, I couldn't grasp anything he was saying. I'm not very good at multi-tasking, I have to admit. But am I alone in genuinely wanting to hear what Mr Hopkinson had to say for himself?  Am I one of that rare breed which actually watches a television programme for its own sake, rather than turning it on as some sort of background entertainment- as they all do in Los Angeles?  One of those saddos who buys the "Radio Times" at Christmas, and rings the programmes he wants to record in black felt-tip?  Am I turning into my parents?

And then there was all that ridiculous "freeze frame", macro close-up stuff going on- as, say, he poured flour into his Cornishware blue and white stiped sick bowl. I'm trying so hard not to turn into a grumpy old man. But in the modern world, this is becoming incredibly difficult. I'm swimming against the tide.

Having said that, my friend Miles pointed out that at least Hoppo was being introduced to a younger generation, and that surely, is a good thing. He could well be right. I had a quick look at the BBC website for the programme, and reckon that half the commentators liked the background music, and the other half couldn't stand it. I suspect that this later half is over 40 years in age. I need to move with the times.

On a completely different tack: has anyone out there attempted to make my "Gratin of Marrow with White Beans and Rocket Pesto"?  If you haven't yet, don't. I made it a few days ago; followed my own instructions to the letter- and the result was bloody awful. I steamed the marrow and then amalgamated it with the bean stew. The stew was fine: nice and thick. But the steamed marrow was stringy, and reminded me of the austere fare they served up at Dotheby's Hall. I need to go back to the drawing board with this one. As the great Eric Thompson (of Dougal and the Blue Cat Fame) one said: "If you can't fail, you can't do anything".

The Old Original Bookbinder's Restaurant Cookbook

 

 

I've just bought this book for the princely sum of £4.50. From a little bookshop in the quaint Cotswold town of Chipping Camden, of all places. It's the 1961 edition of the official "Old Original Bookbinder's Restaurant Cookbook", by Charlotte Adams.

Bookbinder's was a distinguished American restaurant, first founded as a Philadelphia oyster saloon back in 1893. It's wikipedia entry describes its 1950s' heydey as ''a hot spot where red-jacketed waiters scurried through dark-panelled rooms festooned with photographs of VIPS; redolent of cigar smoke tinged with shellfish." This sounds very much my sort of place. I gather that the restaurant fell on hard times, lost its exclusive allure, became a tourist trap, and is now quite probably defunct. A pity, because I miss this sort of joint: the type of restaurant where a fawning mess-jacketed waiter might flamb-ay something jaw-droppingly expensive at M'sieur's very own table.

 

I've picked out two recipes at random, which I haven't tried yet, but, I think, with a bit of tweaking, could be good. The first one's for the obscene sounding "Crab Balls". I would suggest that you make these very small in size, and serve them as canapés- perhaps with some sort of a dipping sauce to go with them:

In a bowl mix together: one tablespoon of chopped green pepper, one tablespoon of finely chopped onion, one tablespoon of finely chopped celery, one tablespoon of minced pimento (ie sweet red pepper), and a teaspoon of fresh thyme leaves. Season with salt, black pepper and a dash of Worcestershire Sauce. Sweat in butter over a lowish heat for about ten minutes.

Sprinkle in four tablespoons of flour (this sounds like quite a bit, even too much; so I would suggest that you go easy on this) and stir in to the vegetable mix. Cook for a further five minutes. Next pour in a cup of milk, and stir until thickened (in effect you've made an old-fashioned white sauce). Then add a pound of crabmeat. Take off the heat, mix in well and chill the mixture in the 'fridge.

When it's cold enough, you take out the crab mixture and roll it into small balls. The balls are then dipped into beaten egg, coated with breadcrumbs- or even more authentically Yankee- crushed up cream crackers, and fried in deep fat until golden brown.

The second recipe is for "Bookbinder's Shrimp Chowder":

Sweat chopped onions in butter until golden, and put to one side. Make a smooth white sauce in the usual way from butter, two tablespoons of flour and four cups of hot milk. The sauce is then placed over a bain-marie, seasoned with salt, pepper and a blade of mace. Pre-Cooked shrimps (large prawns in England) are added and the whole thing cooked gently for twenty minutes. The mace is removed, and the chowder finished off with an extra cup of hot cream and the onion flavoured butter which you've previously strained off. On second thoughts, I'm not exactly sure about this recipe. It could be a bit bland: it's certainly a heart attack in a bowl- not that I'm one of those Cromwellian types pulsating with disapproval at any symptom of a sybaritic lifestyle. I'm not even sure if it's a genuine chowder; I suspect that it isn't.

In complete contrast, I had the most divine thing at the Canton yesterday evening. It was a vegetarian marrow gratin, served piping hot in one of those dinky orange Le Creuset dishes. Half a marrow- cut in half, and scooped out. Covered in Italian Borlotti white beans, and flavoured with a stock, perhaps, and most certainly salt and black pepper. Persillade (ie garlic and parsley finely chopped and crushed together) dotted the top, and the dish was finished off with grated parmesan and butter, before being flashed under a hot grill. At least, I think that how it was made. There may have been tomatoes in there as well. C'etait formidable.

 

Simon Hopkinson: The Good Cook

 

 

 

I'm a massive fan of Simon Hopkinson and I was thrilled to learn that he's got a new book out; although I couldn't find any news about the publication date. It's a tie-in for his new television series. This is really good news: the current crop of so-called "celebrity" chefs are, in my opinion, dire (with the notable exception of one Nigel Slater). Can't wait.

The Penguin Great Food Series

 

 

 

"In this memoir-turned-cookbook, Alice B. Toklas describes her life with partner Gertrude Stein and their famed Paris salon, which entertained the great avant-garde and literary figures of their day. With dry wit and characteristic understatement Toklas ponders the ethics of killing a carp in her kitchen before stuffing it with chestnuts, decorating a fish to amuse Picasso at lunch and travelling across France during the First World War in an old delivery truck..."

 

Here's Alice B. Toklas's "Murder in the Kitchen" from the new Penguin Great Food Series, the cover designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. Despite the threat from the sinister Kindle, I happen to think that this country is enjoying a "golden age of book design", and I often unashamedly buy new books as much for the design of their dust-jackets or typography, as for their contents. The pleasure book-collecting has given me over the last few years has been immense, and you'll find that paperbacks such as these are not only eminently collectable, but also affordable too.

 

But I have a major quibble- and Penguin Books, I hope you're reading. Why-oh-why did you decide to issue this potentially marvellous series in abridged form? They're slim little critters, priced at seven golden nuggs a piece- and remind me of those freebie books you're given now and again with "The Times" or "The Daily Telegraph". I loved Colonel Wyvern's "Notes from Madras", and am now desperate to read more of it. A slim 78 or so pages ain't enough! Is this a form of dumbing down?  Do Penguin think that buyers are incapable of reading the complete book?

Tom Ripley's Venetian Lemon Chicken

 

 

I bought an amusing little book yesterday. It's called Recipe for Murder: Frightfully Good Food Inspired by Fiction by Estérelle Payany. The blurb on the back says: "Allow yourself to be lured into the kitchen by the great gourmet-villains of popular literature, from Lady Macbeth to Dr. Jekyll, to the Marquis de Sade and Hannibal Lecter". It's enormous fun, and there are lots of stylish illustrations by Jean-François Martin in the manner of Richard Hamilton.

I like the look of Count Dracula's "Paprika Hendl" and Fantomas' "Truffled Eggs without Truffles". But the recipe that immediately leapt out of the page was "Tom Ripley's Venetian Lemon Chicken". I'm a massive fan of Patricia Highsmith's "Ripliade"- the five crime novels published between 1955 and 1991, featuring the cultured and sophisticated Mr Ripley- the reluctant con-man, murderer and art fraudster.

 

I made this dish last night and the results were fabulous. A worthy candidate for "The Best of The Greasy Spoon" - when (and if) I ever publish it.

You take a chicken breast and beat it out flat to form an escallop. You fry the escallop in hot olive oil until it is cooked on each side, flipping it over in the process, which should take a minute or so on each side.

The fried chicken is then removed and put to one side. You chop up half a large red onion into dice and sweat it in the oil (with the heat turned down to low) until translucent. The juice of two large lemons, the zest of half a lemon, and a tablespoon or so of honey are added.

You return the fried chicken to the pan, and cook it gently in the tangy sauce for about five minutes. Finally, fresh thyme leaves are sprinkled over the sauce (making sure that the leaves are pulled off the woody stalks), and the dish is seasoned with salt and pepper, in the time honoured tradition.

It's a remarkably pretty dish: rose-pink in colour (from the red onions); studded with the fresh green of the thyme, and it has a deep citrusy taste; healthy too: just fresh lemon juice and honey. No stock, no cream; fast cooking. Ideal for a quick summer lunch al fresco.

Incidentally, I've got no idea if this is indeed a genuine Venetian recipe (I couldn't find anything similar in any of the books I've got on Venetian food), or actually features in any of the Ripley books; although I have a vague memory of Tom eating this in the last few pages of "The Talented Mr Ripley". An excuse to re-read the entire Ripley series over the coming summer.

 

The Sainsbury Classic Cookbook Series

 

Stocking problems at our local Sainsbury's continue: on a very recent visit I was unable to buy fresh leeks, tinned artichoke, tinned asparagus or Clamato juice, yet fennel bulbs and fresh mint could be found in abundance- two ingredients they seem to run out of on a regular basis. Their stocking policies seem bizarre. If you want to buy fresh dill there, forget it- but yet, just now and again, you will find it there: masses of it, heaped up untidily on the otherwise near-empty shelves. It's like a store from the bad old days of the Soviet controlled Eastern Bloc. Very hit or miss. And sad too, as there was a time back in the '80's when Sainsbury's had a reputation for quality, value and service.

Why do you bother going there then, I hear you ask? It's a fair comment. The answer's not especially one I'm proud of: out of sheer laziness. The supermarket's about a five minute drive away. But I'm on the verge of ditching Sainsbury's completely and switching one hundred percent to the excellent and wonderful Waitrose. Incidentally, The Girl introduced me to the equally excellent John Lewis Food Hall, which can be found in Cavendish Square. As with the superb Wholefoods, whoever manages its stocking deserves some sort of award.

 

Anyway, back to Sainsbury's. About twenty years ago, they produced a charming series of cook-books, edited by one of the most famous editors in the food business, Jill Norman, and published by the excellent Walker Books (better known for their beautifully illustrated children's books). It's hard to believe now these lovely books were associated with the very same supermarket we're discussing, as frankly, the original "Sainsbury Classic Cookbook" series could have come from another planet.

 

So far, I've bought three of them, for a few pounds each: "Simple Fare" by Nathalie Hambro (with illustrations by Sally Davies),  "Classic French Cooking" by Ann Willan (with illustrations by Susan Alcantarilla) and my latest find, "Fish and Shellfish" by George Lassalle, with illustrations by Alan Cracknell.

 

Alan Cracknell's work reminds me of Kit Williams and his "Masquerade". In case you've forgotten, he's that bearded artist chap (similar in his style of painting to David Inshaw and the Brotherhood of Ruralists) who fashioned a hare made from beaten gold, buried it in a field near Tewksbury and then published a book with all manner of esoteric clues to the golden hare's whereabouts hidden within the illustrations.

The Flavour Thesaurus

 

 

 

This was a brilliant Christmas present from The Girl. A signed copy, too. One of the most satisfying things in life is coming up with the idea for a brand new recipe- which you've completely invented yourself; no cookery books used ('onest Guv'), and then discovering that it works; or at least that your guests clamour for a second helping.

If you're in the mood for invention, simplicity is the way forward. If you then log on to the internet and find out that others out there have come up with the same idea, not to worry; there's a good chance that the flavours you've come up with well, work- and that's why someone's been there before you.

And that's why Niki Segnit's "The Flavour Thesaurus" is such an inspiring book. It lists various foods in an alphabetical order, and then suggests suitable flavour combinations. This is creative stuff.

I looked up "chicken": I had a very boring packet of mass-produced chicken thighs (which said "Sainsbury's" all over) and wanted to do something different with it.  

The Thesaurus suggested "pear" as an interesting combination. So I chopped up an onion and sautéed it until soft, added some smoked bacon lardons, and fried the chicken thighs (sprinkled with seasoned white flour) until golden brown. I poured in some decent stock and a generous slug of a dryish white wine: bubbled off the alcohol, and then added the pears, which had I had previously peeled and sliced. The dish was finished off with fresh thyme (with the leaves pulled off the stalk).

The flavours worked well: chicken, bacon, pear and aromatic thyme. But The Girl thought that there was something missing, and I think she was probably spot on. Although I''m not exactly sure what?  The dish, I have to confess, was slightly anemic to look at. A trifle bland; at least visually, though perhaps not in taste? Maybe it needed more colour? Tomatoes?  Not sure about that one. What do you reckon? Any ideas?

Paul Levy's "The Feast of Christmas"

 

 

Of the numerous "Christmas" cook books, Paul Levy's The Feast of Christmas is without doubt my favourite, combining as it does, a literate and erudite examination of Christmas customs and folklore, and some excellent recipes from the likes of Ken Hom, Claudia Roden, Frances Bissell, Raymond Blanc and M.F.K Fisher.  Apparently, on Christmas Day they all gather around Paul's scrubbed kitchen table, and take turns to cook.  Can you imagine?

The "Feast of Christmas" was published by Channel 4 to co-incide with his Channel 4 television series, made back in 1992;  when Channel 4 was a challenging and intelligent television channel, rather than what it has become now.  In the good old days, before they churned out cheaply-made dross.  Before Big Brother. You should be able to buy a second-hand copy of "The Feast of Christmas" through either amazon.co.uk or abebooks.co.uk for a very affordable price.  I've currently got a paperback copy, and need to upgrade to the hardback.

There are other Christmas books on the market: Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities, and that old chestnut, Delia Smith's Christmas. They are both still on the bestseller lists. I've got mixed feeling about both of those two. Delia's recipes are often good (I detect the influence of Simon Hopkinson), but there is just something too perfectionist and goody-goody (butter's a sin!) about her style.

 

Nigella's the opposite: she looks fab (a lip smackin' mid-life fantasy), but I'm disturbed by all the late night 'fridge raiding "finger in the taramasalata" stuff going on- and I hate to say it, I'm not sure that her slightly mucky recipes are up to the ticket, either. Dunno.

Elizabeth David's Christmas is another good 'un. Published after her death, and edited by Jill Norman, Elizabeth David's Christmas includes 150 Christmas recipes from her private papers. These include Marcel Boulestin's  "Turkey, Roast Capon with Tomatoes and Rice and Walnut Stuffing", "Fish Consommé", and "Lemon and Celery Sauce".

Egon Ronay

 

 

 

Sad news about old Egon Ronay, who has just died at the grand old age of 94. A year or so ago, I wrote this post:

Remember Egon Ronay?  He was that rather dapper Hungarian who published a series of restaurant guides; in vogue a few years ago. One of the favourite books in my modest cookery library is Egon's "The Unforgettable Dishes of My Life', published in 1989. If you're interested in getting hold of a copy, you should be able to get track one down from either amazon.co.uk, or that marvellous antiquarian book website, abebooks.com.

The book's very much a personal thing, with recipes that have held meaning to him for various reasons over the years. That's something I like about food: the way a certain dish can bring back memories, or have some literary or historical connotation. Without, I hope, getting too hyper-intellectual, wasn't that what Proust was all about?  You know, the madeline dipped into the lemon scented tea and all that?

Anyway, here's his recipe for "Roast Red Mullet with Cumin Sauce". Hopefully you will be able to buy one from your local fishmonger- if you have any left in your neighbourhood that is.  In London, they're more or less gone, and have been replaced by the fish counters of your local supermarket. And Sainsbury's ain't nearly as good as it used to be.

Clean and gut a red mullet, keeping back the bones and the livers. Cut off the heads and the tail. Put the heads, tail, and bones into a saucepan, and add leeks, shallots, white wine, and salt. Pour in two pints of water, and bring to the boil. Skim off the scum as it floats to the top. Cover the saucepan, and simmer for about twenty minutes. Hey presto! You will have a fish stock.

Add two teaspoons of cumin seeds and reduce three quarters of a pint of the stock, until the it takes on a syrupy consistency. Add half a pint of double cream and the red mullet livers, and boil for fifteen seconds. Liquidise in your magimix or blender, and then pass it through a sieve. That's the sauce finished.

Brush the cleaned mullet with oil, and wrap it in foil, first seasoning it with a generous amount of sea salt and chunky black pepper. Place the fish on a baking tray, and cook in the oven at 220C (425F) until the fish is cooked. The flesh will flake up a bit when it's done. Arrange the cooked fish on a plate, and pour the sauce around it.

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Melon Sorbet with Iced Bison Vodka

 

 

 

I'm a big fan of sorbets, especially as they're so easy to make; even for those living with tiny kitchens, and without the luxury of expensive ice-cream makers. All you need is a deep freeze (however small), a terrine-shaped metal container, a blender, and lots of patience. Once you've mastered the technique, the sky's the limit, and great fun can be had by one and all inventing interesting new flavour combinations.

Here's an idea for a melon sorbet, seved with Polish bison vodka. The grassy taste of the vodka works well the summery flavours going on in the melon.

Take a cantaloupe melon and remove the skin. Cut it into chunks and take out the seeds and any pith. Put it to one side.  You could of course use any melon you liked the look of; experimentation is the key. In the meantime, dissolve three quarters of a cup of white sugar in three quarters of a cup of water, and heat gently to make a syrup. When it's properly dissolved, pour it into the metal terrine, and stick it into the 'fridge to cool down.

Whizz the melon up in your magimix or blender, until it's smooth. I happen to prefer my sorbets to be very smooth, and I don't like nasty bits floating around in it, so I would then push the blended melon through a sieve. Once that's done, pour the blended, sieved melon into the metal terrine and mix it around with the cooled syrup, adding a squeeze of lemon juice as you go. Stick it into the deep freeze.

Now it's a matter of patience. Wait until the sorbet is almost frozen, and then take it out of the deep freeze and mash it up with a fork. Put it back into the freezer. Wait again until it's almost frozen, take it out and mash it up. To finish it off, wait until it's almost frozen, take it out, but this time whizz it up in a blender, return it to its container and re-freeze.

To serve the sorbet, I pour iced Zubrowka bison vodka over it. Zubrowka vodka is curious stuff, which has a very distinctive grassy taste ( a bit like that evocative summer smell of freshly cut grass and petrol lawn mowers). To quote from the hilarious marketing blurb on the label: "In a remote corner of Poland in the North Podlaise Lowland lies a mysterious place called Bialowieza, the last primeval forest in Europe, home to Europe's last remaining herd of bison and to a distinctively, aromatic plant- Bison grass...since the 14th century, Bison-grass has been used to infuse a unique vodka, Zubrowka, a singular spirit of supreme smoothness..."

I'm not sure I like Zubrowka as a neat vodka, but I think it works brilliantly when used in conjunction with other foods. (Incidentally, there's no point adding vodka directly to the sorbet mix, as the alcohol won't freeze properly).

For the bibliophiles amongst you, it might be worth your while tracking down a copy of Elizabeth David's "Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices", edited by Jill Norman, and published by Michael Joseph in 1994. I've got a feeling that this book was published in a small print run, and several years ago, scarce used copies were scarily expensive. But that was before the internet, and there's now a reasonable selection of copies available on Abebooks.

 

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Marinated Haddock with Prawns, Dill and Spring Onions

 

 

 

This recipe comes from Nathalie Hambro's "Simple Fare" (1986), one of the more interesting cook books in my collection. As well as being a fashion designer, and an all-round style guru, Nathalie Hambro is one of the most innovative and inspiring cookery writers out there, and if you are looking for fresh ideas I whole-heartedly recommend her books. Most of them, I think, are out of print but can be bought easily from amazon.co.uk, or abebooks.co.uk. I like this recipe for its Baltic, or Nordic, overtones, and it's very easily made with the simplest of ingredients. In concept, it's very similar to Gravlax.

 

 

 

Line a dish with tin foil. Spread some fresh dill over the foil, and season with sugar, Maldon salt, and black pepper. Next, place a fresh smoked haddock fillet over the dill. Normally I would use undyed haddock, but for this recipe I've found that the dyed yellow haddock works better. The Haddock needs to be as fresh as you can get it.

Cover the fish with more dill, sugar, sea salt and pepper. It's best to use more sugar than salt, and to go easy with the pepper. Sprinkle some large peeled prawns on top. Wrap the whole thing up tightly with the tin foil, and stick it into the 'fridge, with a weight on top, for at least twenty four hours- preferably longer.

When it's ready, slice the haddock into long, thin pieces. It's a bit like Japanese sushumi. Arrange in a serving dish with the prawns. 

Finally, take some spring onions, and cut them in four lengthways. Soak them in a bowl of ice-cold water- after a few minutes the green tops will start to curl up; this looks impressive. Zero effort. Take them out, drain them; and stick them in with the marinated haddock and the rest of the prawns.

Floyd bows out...

 

Sad news about old Keith Floyd. If his more recent appearances seemed a bit contrived, world weary and lacking in genuine enthusiasm, his earlier programmes (such as Floyd on Fish and Floyd on France) were wonderful.

According to today's Evening Standard, Floyd's last lunch consisted of: Champagne, Pouilly Vinzelles 2006, oysters, potted shrimps, Nature Perrin and Fils Conte de Rhone 2007, Red-legged partridge with bread sauce, and pear cider "perry" jelly.

And who can forget Mimi of Biarritz and the correct way to cook piperade?

 

Lüchow's German Cookbook

 

 

Here's an interesting and reasonably scarce book I've just bought on ebay for a few pounds. It's Lüchow's German Cookbook, written by Jan Mitchell, and first published in 1955.  Actually, this is the first British Edition, and the first American edition was published a few years earlier.

According to wikipedia:

"Lüchow's was a restaurant in New York City formerly located at 110-112 East 14th Street, with the property running clear through the block to 13th street. It was founded in 1882 when a waiter, August Lüchow, purchased the German restaurant and beer garden he had been working at, and remained in operation for a full century, closing in 1982 after a suspicious fire gutted the building.

The decor included over sixty paintings, many by well-known artists such as Francisco Goya, Anthony Van Dyck, Van Mienis, Snydes and Sweden's August Haagborg. The Haagborg was purchased by Lüchow at the 1904 St Louis World Fair. There was also a collection of over two hundred beer steins, and a number of mounted hunting trophies made from animals shot by Lüchow. In 1957, the restaurant included seven dining rooms, among them the Hunting Room, which contained the trophies, and the Niebelungen Room, decorated with murals based on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle operas."

I was amused to see that none other than the great Marlene Dietrich was a regular patronne (of course she was!), and that her favourite dish was Vienna Backhaänderl, with which she drank Moselle (of course she did!). 

Those were the days. How refreshing to be able to stroll into your local German restaurant, sit underneath a Goya say, or a Van Dyck and order a Schnitzel Hostein, washed down with an excellent sweetish Hock. 

Here's the Lüchow recipe for "Marlene Dietrich's Vienna Backhaänderl", aka "Viennese Baked Chicken":

3 young chickens (about 2 ½ pounds each), cleaned and drawn

1 tablespoon of salt

1 cup flour

3 eggs, beaten with ¼ cup of water

2 ½ cups fine bread crumbs

Fat for deep frying

1 lemon, sliced

 

Rinse chickens; drain. Cut each in half, pat dry. Sprinkle with salt. Roll each piece in flour. Dip in egg, then in crumbs. Fry in hot fat, lowering each piece carefully into fat to avoid shaking crumbs off. When golden brown, place in baking pan, and bake in hot oven (400℉) until well browned. Lower heat to 325℉ after crust is firm, and continue baking until done; about 40 minutes in all. Place on thick paper towelling in a pan; set in oven, but leave oven door open. Season lightly with salt. Garnish with lemon, and serve on warmed dish. Serves 6.

 

 

Mario and Franco and London's Trattoria Revolution

 

 

I've just heard Alasdair Scott Sutherland talking about his interesting new book on BBC Radio London. It's called The Spaghetti Tree: Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution and looks at the growth of Italian restaurants in Sixties London, and in particular, the careers of Franco Lagattolla and Mario Cassandro; former waiters at The Mirabelle who opened the starry La Trattoria Terrazza in Romilly Street, Soho, in 1959; subsequently patronised by the likes of David Bailey, Michael Caine and Princess Margaret (I'm finding that "Princess Margaret ate here" is fast becoming a favourite mantra).

 

 

 

 

Franco Lagattolla published his own cookbook (with illustrations by Enzo Apicella) in 1978. It's called: The Recipes that Made a Million.  Here's his recipe for Salsa Verde.  Do you remember all the trouble and angst I had to go through when I attempted to make Elizabeth David's walnut sauce? Franco's version leaves out the walnuts, and is quite definitely served cold:

"Soak two tablespoons of fresh, white breadcrumbs in vinegar and then squeeze them out. Work one hard-boiled egg yolk to a paste, mix together with the bread and add four tablespoons of very finely chopped parsley, one finely chopped garlic clove and one teaspoon of chopped capers. Blend in one cup of olive oil. Season with salt and milled black pepper. If necessary, sharpen with a little more vinegar. Let this piquant sauce stand for at least one hour."

Boiled Bacon and Cabbage with Parsley Sauce

 

 

 

The Greasy Spoon's Book of the Month for April is A Life With Food by Peter Langan, annotated and with a memoir by none other than Brian Sewell. I love this book. It's an idiosyncratic account of the life of the late, eccentric restauranteur, Peter Langan, his restaurants and his art collections.

Odin's has some fabulous Modern and Edwardian British paintings, which is not surprising as many of them were chosen by the great Mr Sewell himself. There's a terrific Laura Knight to the right of the main entrance, a fabulous Harold Gilman in the main dining room and a naughty drawing by Ron Kitaj displayed at table level. 

Here's a very Irish recipe from the book for Boiled Bacon and Cabbage with Parsley Sauce:     

"There are two dishes that are Irish to the core- this is one of them. If it is smoked gammon, soak it overnight in water, and then put it into fresh cold water and bring it to the boil. Remove, skim and simmer for 30 minutes per lb.

The old Irish way is to add the cut up cabbage to the pot for half an hour toward the end. I do not like this. I prefer to boil the cabbage separately for 3-5 minutes. It is a crisp foil to the slowly cooked bacon.

The parsley sauce is simple. Melt 1oz of butter, add 1 oz of flour and cook until the flour is well blended. Add 1/2 pint of the cooking liquid slowly to begin with then the 1/2 pint of milk, stir, bring to the boil and simmer. Add a bunch of freshly chopped parsley- do not cook it in as most idiot restaurants do.

The bacon, crisp cabbage, and fresh parsley sauce could be the country's greatest dish. Serve it with floury boiled potatoes in their skins."

 

 

Philadelphia Dreaming

 

 

One of the fascinations of old cookery books is the way they reflect the social history of their time.  A few years ago I came across a copy of The Philadelphia Cookbook of Town and Country, written by a certain Mrs Anna Wetherill Reed, and published by Barrow & Co. of New York in 1940.

The American East Coast in 1940!  This was the pre-war world of Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in George Cukor's Bringing Up Baby- or, at least, as imagined by Hollywood film producers in Los Angeles, and later reinvented by Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart: a world of clipped, almost English accents, foxhunting, tail-gate picnics, drystone walls, Bloody Marys, gymkhanas, rambling clapboard houses, cosy family Christmases, Dry Martini cocktails, expensive cars and luxury household gadgets.  And it was, if I may make so bold Master Copperfield, a pretty darn good place to be - as long as you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or even perhaps, a silver plated spoon.

 

In The Philadelphia Cookbook, Mrs Wetherill Reed gives us useful suggestions for "Supper After the Opera", "A Colonial Dinner on Washington's Birthday", "A Formal Dinner for a Debutante", "Luncheon Before the Spring Races", "Luncheon on the Terrace After Swimming", "Dinner for a Well-to-do Bachelor Uncle", and slightly bizarrely, a "Gay Nineties Dinner for Grandma on Mother's Day".  I'm sure you're getting the drift, if not already crooking your little finger.

But slightly surprisingly, there are masses of practical recipes in there that you could easily make today without raising an eyebrow. So often old cook books fail miserably in this area; especially for some reason if they were published in the early 1970's, and written by a one Mr. Vincent Price. Picked at random (and in no particular order) we have: Hell Fire Stew (that's really devilled Navarin of Lamb with Worcestershire sauce), Veal and Ham Pie  (recipe kindly provided by The Philadephia Club), Mushroom Filling for Wild Duck, Maryland Mint Julep, Welsh Rabbit a la Yale Club, Dandelion Salad and Frizzled Beef a la King (recipe most kindly provided by The Cosmopolitan Club).

I quite liked the look of Jellied Essence of Tomato. First, you soak a leaf of gelatine in cold water. Next you heat up strained tomato juice, clarified chicken stock, a piece of lemon rind and the juice of half an onion. You add the dissolved gelatine, and stir it around, until it is well mixed in. Finally, you strain it, season with salt and a dash of cayenne pepper, turn it into a wet mould, and chill.

Okay, it's a trifle weird, I admit- but don't you think it might be a good base for something slightly more up to date and of greater interest? I would definitely use a clear and delicious tomato consommé (tomato pulp and a bit of sea-salt placed in a sieve, and left to drain overnight in the 'fridge), go a bit easy on the gelatine (to avoid the rubber effect) and get rid of the onion juice (what on earth was that all about?).

Instead of turning it into moulds, I suggest it would look better in ramekin dishes, and I think it definitely needs something juicy suspended in it.  Crayfish Tails?  They would work very well with the slightly spicy tomato.  Maybe it needs to be slightly spicier? What about a dash of Tabasco?  Does anyone out there in cyberspace have any bright ideas? This could be the birth of a famous new dish...

 

Leon: Tried and Tested

 

 

I bought this book after hearing its author, Allegra McEvedy, talking about her restaurant chain, Leon, on the Robert Elms show on BBC Radio London. The first Leon restaurant was in Carnaby Street, and they now have branches in Spitafields, Bankside, Regent Street and Ludgate Circus- serving gutsy, healthy, organic fast-food.

We put the book to the test; over the last week, I've made their Chilli Con Carne, Mima's Risi e Bisi, and John and Katie's (not too) Spicy Chicken Cous-Cous. Incidentally, the Leon cookbook is a wonderfully quirky exercise in retro graphics, and is beautifully designed; with the first half of the book concentrating on ingredients and technique, and the second half on the recipes themselves.

I've noticed that the Leon recipes often seem to include a twist: their Chilli Con Carne for example, includes sliced carrots- not exactly a requisite of the classic version, but I found it worked incredibly well with the aromatic cumin and coriander seeds used in the recipe. Mima's Risi e Bisi was a straightforward chicken, pea and bacon risotto, except- and it's a big except- the dish uses brown basmati rice, instead of the more usual Arborio or Carnaroli rice. The Spicy Chicken Cous-Cous was an exercise in pine nuts, mint, lemon juice, chili flakes, cous-cous, and chicken- and would be the perfect dish to rustle up after a hard day's work.

This sort of cooking is not rocket science: it's simple, healthy, comfort food at its best, and the recipes are well thought out, and easy to make. I'm impressed: Leon is going to be The Greasy Spoon's next official Book of the Month.

Kitchen of Horrors

 

 

My attempt to make Salsa di Noci ended in failure. Here's what happened: the walnuts and parsley mashed up well enough to make a paste, and did indeed turn a bright green colour ("stokethefires" please take note.) I stirred in two tablespoons of breadcrumbs, but then poured in far too much oil. (Mrs David says 'half a coffee cup', meaning, with hindsight, half a coffee can). Like a fool, I used about half a mug's worth. The resulting sauce was far too oily. I tried whizzing it up in the Magimix, and then added a squeeze of lemon juice and some more salt. I finished it off with a few tablespoons of single cream, as instructed.

If you ignored the oil slick, it tasted all right. It looked all right too, but it seemed a bit odd to serve it cold. Italian Food doesn't happen to mention this. I thought I could get away with warming it up, but then of course, the inevitable happened, it curdled and ended up looking like a beige coloured vomit. So it's back to the old drawing board with this one.

Talking of vomit, I bought an amusing little book the other day. It's Vincent Price's Cooking Price Wise, published by Corgi paperbacks back in 1971.  It seems that Vinnie hosted some sort of a gourmet cookery show for Thames Television, and this was the book of the television series.

Cookery books from the 1970's are hilarious. For monsieur, how about a bacon moussé, or perhaps, tournedos Victor Hugo, served on a delicate bed of glorious technicolor? For cocktail parties, Vincent suggests you make his Crocodile Cucumber- that's a cucumber on cocktail sticks (to look like legs), and garnished with tinned pineapple and peppers, spiked all over like some sort of a hedgehog. You make the eyes from cheddar cheese.

There's also his bizarre Melon Monsters. This is a hollowed out melon, filled with mayonnaise, grated cheese, sherry, paprika, bacon, chives, prawns and raw celery. You then spike the thing with stuffed olives on cocktail sticks to look like eyes.  A corn kernel substitutes as a nose. They're supposed to look like aliens.

Wasn't the world a simpler place?

 

 

The Feast of Christmas

 

 

 

It's December, it's Advent. Here in London, it's suddenly cold. With the run up to Christmas, I'm going to be concentrating on Christmas food, but we're going to kick off with a look the dreaded Christmas cookery book market.  

Come mid-November, the bookshops are suddenly awash with Christmas themed cookery books. I had a quick look at the best-selling lists on amazon.co.uk:  Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities is currently in the lead at number one, with that old chestnut, Delia Smith's Christmas coming up fast from behind at number three.  I've got mixed feeling about both of those two.  Delia's recipes are often good (I detect the influence of Simon Hopkinson), but there is just something too perfectionist and goody-goody (butter's a sin!) about her style. Nigella's the opposite: she-er- looks fab (a saliva inducing mid-life fantasy) but  I'm disturbed by all the late night 'fridge raiding "finger in the taramasalata" stuff going on- and I hate to say it, I'm not sure that her rather mucky recipes are up to the ticket, either.

No, for me, the Christmas book of choice has to be Paul Levy's The Feast of Christmas. This is one of my all-time favourite food books, if not my favourite book of all time. Paul Levy is a highly literate food critic, and writes beautifully. The Feast of Christmas was originally a publisher's tie-in for a television series shown some time ago on good old Channel Four (back in those halcyon days when it was producing stimulating and intelligent television programmes). Paul Levy looks at the mythology and history behind Christmas, and includes Christmas recipes from food writers such as Claudia Roden, Ken Hom, Frances Bissell and M.F.K. Fisher. It's The Greasy Spoon's Book of the Month.

Elizabeth David's Christmas is another good 'un. Published after her death, and edited by Jill Norman, Elizabeth David's Christmas includes 150 Christmas recipes from her private papers.  These include Marcel Boulestin's Turkey, Roast Capon with tomatoes and rice and walnut stuffing, Fish Consommé, and Lemon and Celery Sauce.

Colonel Skinner's Mango Chutney

 

 

At Dotheboys Hall, I remember being fascinated by an ancient copy of Hobson Jobson which I found hidden away on a dusty shelf in the school's Victorian Gothic library. First published in 1903, Hobson was an etymological glossary of Anglo-Indian words and language. A study of words such as Pajama, Veranda, Bungalow, Tiffin, Kedgeree and of course, our very own Curry.

Anglo-Indian food is another fascinating study, in its own right. One of the best books on the subject is David Burton's The Raj at Table, published by Faber & Faber.

Here's a recipe for Colonel Skinner's Mango Chutney. Today, there are various brands out there using this name. Actually, Colonel Skinner's Mango Chutney is something that you will find in the old Anglo-Indian cookery books and the original recipe involved leaving the chutney outside in the backyard to fester under the hot sun for a few days. I tried to find out who the original Colonel Skinner was (sounds Irish?), but without success.

Chop up the following ingredients in your Magimix or otherwise trendy food processor: twelve ounces of dried mangoes, half a pound of brown sugar, ginger, raisins, chillis and garlic to taste. Once they're chopped up, spoon the mixture into a large preserving pan.  Add two and half pints of vinegar and season with salt. Bring to the boil and simmer for an hour. Transfer into sterlilised jars and store in a dark cupboard.

 

Collecting Rare and Vintage Cookery Books

 

 

I've just been sorting out my collection of books on food and wine. I never intentionally set out to collect this sort of thing; but being a second-hand bookshop junkie, have, over the years, amassed a wide assortment of interesting old books on all sorts of different subjects. Above is a first edition of Michael Smith's Fine English Cookery, published in 1973. And how things have changed!  Michael Smith, for example, tells us how to make a traditional kedgeree using tinned salmon. And that's what's interesting about these fascinating old books. Who today would make Bon Viveur's blue-dyed egg canapes, with anchovy garnish, and lover-ly piped mashed potato?

 

 

 

 

The internet has had a beneficial knock-on effect on the price of some of these books, and it's now easy to get online, and discover just how much that old dog-eared copy might actually be worth. Take Floyd's Food, for example. I've got a slightly grubby copy of it, much used over the years, and stained with the shipwreck of time. But it's rather valuable. This was one of the very early Keith Floyd books, published in a tiny print run by a local Bristol publisher just before "Floyd on France" made him famous. For Floyd "completists", that's the hard one to track down. The first edition of Marco Pierre White's White Heat is another sought after title.

 

I'm currently looking out for cookery books published in the pre-war era. They're the sort of thing which you used to be able to find relatively easily, but now are becoming increasingly scarce. Books from the 60's and 70's are still available- and could be a good area for starting a collection. They're also fun- and often have great graphics. One of these is The Bachelor Chef. Written by the elusive "Simon Tiffany", and published by Arlington Books of St James's in 1965, it's full of dodgy recipes involving cans of this, and cans of that; a self-help manual for wannabe playboys, and international men of mystery. Lots of hilariously kitsch drawings too, in the manner of the late Stephen Ward.

 

 

The Savoy Cocktail Book

 

 

Harry Craddock, The Savoy Cocktail Book, first published 1930

When I was eighteen, my father was extremely generous about all that male-bonding "rites of passage" stuff. This included a pint of warm bitter at our local Buckinghamshire pub, The White Hart, where by chance, a troupe of bearded civil servants from Slough, masquerading as Morris Men in skin hugging white breeches, pranced around to the strains of "zummer-is-a-cummin-in".

More promising, was my first visit to The Savoy Hotel, where my father introduced me to the legendary Peter Dorelli, then head man at The American Bar. We had Dry Martinis- of course we did. And Dry Martinis, mixed properly; none of that bizarre Fleming "shaken not stirred" piffle. Instead, the iced gin was poured into a pitcher with ice, stirred around with a few drops of Noilly Pratt, and then strained out into a small iced tumbler, with a twist of lemon. If you want to learn more, the bible of choice is "Stirred not Shaken, the History of the Dry Martini", written by my father's old colleague, John Doxat, with an introduction by Kingsley Amies.

For those of you fascinated by cocktails, the best book on the subject is "The Savoy Cocktail Book". This was first published in 1930, with recipes compiled by Harry Craddock, and the "decorations" by Gilbert Rumbold. The first edition's got a fabulously striking Art Deco cover with foil embellishments, and for antiquarian book nuts, is eminently collectable. The 1999 revised edition has a number of new cocktails by Peter Dorelli. If you come across a first edition in a second hand book shop, buy it immediately, as the grander rare book dealers sell it for big bucks. Over and Out.

 

 

The legendary Peter Dorelli mixes a Dry Martini.

Going Japanese...

 

 

If I'm to be totally honest, I know hardly anything about Japanese Food. I used to work for a rare book auctioneers off Hanover Square, which was a good thing- mainly because of the numerous small Japanese restaurants in the area, and lunching at these places on a regular basis, I managed to shed several pounds off the old spare tyre.

Most Londoners assume that Japanese Food is all about sushi and sashimi. I'm very aware that it isn't, and there's much more to it than that. So, I was delighted to discover Peter and Joan Martin's Japanese Cooking, published by the Penguin Cookery Library back in 1970. It's all amazingly simple, and I'm encouraged by the fact that most of the ingredients you need are readily available over here.

In contrast, my interest in Mexican Food has hit the wall, because so many of the ingredients you need are almost impossible to find in Britain, unless you buy them in mail order.

Here's their oh-so-simple recipe for sauteed broad beans. First you shell the beans. Next you heat up your trusty wok (an authentic one from Chinatown please, NOT the non-stick version), and pour in some oil. Cook the broad beans on a high heat, tossing them with a spatula, until they start turning brown. Add a splash of soy sauce, a tablespoon of sugar, and a dash of sake. When the beans are tender, serve.

Oh, and I forgot to mention- the Martins' recommend that you add a pinch of monsodium glutamate. Before you all bombard me with outraged emails, I have a suspicion that MSG was (is even) a regular component of authentic Japanese cooking. If you google "MSG" you will find that that this sinister substance is actually a natural product made "by fermenting certain strands of bacteria, and is found naturally in both molasses, and tomatoes". Hmmm...

Arabella Boxer's Book of English Food

 

 

I think this has to be one of the most interesting books available on English Food. Arabella Boxer's book covers English Food of the 1920's and 30's.

It's so similar to what we eat today, yet so different- if that makes any sense at all: lots of savouries; tomato things in jellied rings, shrimp paste, Rhubarb sorbet, Mrs Anderson's fish cakes, Apricot Jam Sauce, Paradise Pudding.

Here's her recipe for Haddock Monte Carlo. I've adapted it for The Greasy Spoon. Take two large smoked (but undyed, ie not yellow) haddock fillets and cook them in milk and water, with a bayleaf.

A useful tip to get perfectly cooked fish: bring the milk and water mixture to just under the boil, and then turn off the gas. Leave the fish in the hot liquid until the flesh begins to slightly flake off the bone. That's a sign that it's perfectly cooked.

Remove the flesh from the bone of the fish- trying (as far as possible) to keep the fillets intact. Arrange the fish in a buttered fireproof dish, and then slice some tomatoes, and arrange them on top. Season with salt and pepper. Reduce the milky water (which you've kept back) by half, so that it thickens slightly, and the flavours are intensified.

Add some double cream, stir, and pour over the fish and tomatoes. Finish off in the oven (ie flash the dish under the grill), and place some poached eggs on top. Garnish with chopped parsley.

Egon Ronay's Roast Red Mullet with Cumin Sauce

 

Remember Egon Ronay? He was that rather dapper Hungarian who published a series of restaurant guides, in vogue a few years back. One of the favourite books in my modest cookery library is none other than Egon's "The Unforgettable Dishes of My Life', published back in 1989. You should be able to get hold of a copy relatively easily from either amazon.co.uk, or that marvellous antiquarian book website, abebooks.com.

His book's a personal thing, with lots of unpretentious recipes that have held some meaning to him over the years. That's something I like about food: the way a certain dish can bring back memories, or have some literary or historical connotation. Without getting too pretentious; wasn't that, in many ways, what Proust was all about? You know, the madeline dipped into the lemon tea and all that?

Anyway, here's his recipe for Roast Red Mullet with Cumin Sauce. I've posted a picture of the critter above, so that you can recognise one when you go to your local fishmonger- if you have any left in your neighbourhood that is; in London, they're all more or less gone, and have been replaced by Starbucks, Gap, and various other chains of a dubious sort.

Clean and gut a red mullet, keeping back the bones and the livers. Cut off the heads and the tail. Put the heads, tail, and bones into a saucepan, and add leeks, shallots, white wine, and salt. Pour in two pints of water, and bring to the boil. Skim off the scum as it floats to the top. Cover the saucepan, and simmer for about twenty minutes.

Hey presto! You will have a fish stock. Reduce 3/4 pint of this fish stock, first adding two teaspoons of cumin seeds, until the stock takes on a syrupy consistency. Add half a pint of double cream and the Red Mullet livers, and boil for fifteen seconds. Liquidise in your magimix or blender, and then pass it through a sieve. That's the sauce finished.

Brush the cleaned mullet with oil, and wrap it in foil, first seasoning it with a generous amount of sea salt and chunky black pepper. Place the fish on a baking tray, and cook in the oven at 220C (425F) until the fish is cooked. The flesh will flake slightly when it is done. Arrange the cooked fish on a plate, and pour the sauce around it. Eat.

Auguste Escoffier, King of Chefs

 

 

If you trawl through my previous posts, you'll see that the name of Auguste Escoffier seems to crop up quite a bit. Of all the great chefs, Escoffier, perhaps, is the greatest of them all, and his influence is still with us today, albeit in a diluted form.

Auguste Escoffier was born in 1846, and with Cesar Ritz, took over the Savoy Hotel in London: using this as a base, the pair opened various Ritz hotels around the world. Escoffier was eventually forced out of the Savoy Hotel after an investigation revealed that Escoffier had been receiving back-handers from his suppliers.

Escoffier took the sophisticated cusine of Antoine Careme, and then rewrote it with a simplified twist. He championed "service a la Russe", where dishes were served in order; as on today's printed menus, rather than all at once- as had previously been the case. Genius.

If you pick up a cookery book from the 1960's, you will see that the Escoffier influence reigns supreme. Rich sauces made from stock, with added cream; meat flambeed in cognac, puddings such as Peach Melba, lots of aspic.

Then in the late 80's and 90's there was a change in taste; and the peasant food of the Mediterranean became popular. It was lighter in touch, and healthier too; using simple fresh ingredients. This new style of cooking coincided with an huge improvement in living standards and the general availability of ingredients in supermarkets, which ordinary working people could buy for the first time.

Many of the relatively sophisticated dishes published today, would have been impossible to make back in the 1950's and 60's, as the ingredients (arborio rice, pancetta, sun-dried tomatoes, butternut squash, bird's eye chilis et al) weren't available- unless, perhaps you visited a specialist delicatessen. In Michael Smith's "Fine English Cookery" published in 1973 (hugely acclaimed at the time), kedgeree is made with tinned salmon. We've come a long way since then.

Having said that, I have to say that I'm a fan of classic French cuisine, and aspiring cooks and chefs should ignore Escoffier at their peril. I was in Hatchard's bookshop the other day, and it was revealing to see that the French section  in the cookery department was far smaller than say, the Indian or Italian section. The same goes with wine shelves at the local supermarket. The French section is smaller than the New World sections. I would like to see a return to the appreciation of French food (at least in this country). It's still pretty good, and if so inpsired, Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire, will help you with your all-important technique. Once you've mastered the basics, the battle's almost half won.

 

Books for Cooks

If you live in London, you may already know Books for Cooks, in Notting Hill, just off the Portobello Road. It's a gem of a place, with hundreds, if not thousands, of cookery titles neatly arranged on floor to ceiling shelves and a test kitchen at the back of the shop where they give cookery demonstrations. As a result, you're greeted with wonderfully rich food and wine smells when you step over the threshold.

They've also published their own run of excellent cookery books. most of which are still available either from "Books for Cooks" themselves, or amazon.co.uk. By popular request, here's one of their best recipes (taken from Patricia Wells' At Home in Provence: Chicken Stewed with Saffron & Fennel, with Red Pepper Aioli.

First, take some chicken thighs; remove the skins and bone, and chop them in half. Season them with salt and pepper and then fry them in olive oil, until golden. Take the chicken out of the pan and add two crushed garlic cloves, a pinch of saffron threads, a teaspoon of fennel seeds, three sprigs of thyme, two bay leaves, two tablespoons of tomato puree, a dash of Pernod, a cup of dry white wine, and two cups of chicken stock. Stir, and bring it to the boil. You'll get a lovely, Saffron infused, rose-coloured sauce.

Next, add the chicken pieces and some quartered and peeled potatoes, and simmer slowly for about twenty minutes. In practice, you may find that you need to par-boil the potatoes first, as they seem to take longer than twenty minutes to cook- especially if you're simmering the dish on a lowish heat.

The Red Pepper Aioli is straightforward. First char-grill some red peppers. All this means is placing some quartered peppers directly onto the gas flame. Once they start charring, you will find it easier to peel off the skin. To help this along, put the hot peppers into a bowl and cover the bowl with a cloth.

In your Magimix, whizz up the skinned red peppers, with two egg yolks, six crushed garlic cloves and some salt and pepper. Slowly drizzle in the olive oil and make a mayonnaise in the usual way. You will end up with a pink-coloured, garlicky aioli. Season with Cayenne Pepper and serve with the Chicken Stew.

Shirred Eggs with Scallops

 

 

Working as I do in the antiques and auction business, I'm often lucky enough to pick up interesting bargains. The latest acquisition to my modest cookery library is a copy of the Bestway Cookery Gift Book, circa 1938. It's a smallish, slightly stained volume, which has the added plus of having once been part of the Anton Mosimann Collection. If you see any similar books from the 1930's, I would urge you to buy them, as cook-books from this period are becoming increasingly hard to track down.

I had a look to see if there were any recipes which I could post on The Greasy Spoon. Tastes change, and I reckoned that dishes like Gooseberry Custard, and Monday Pudding, wouldn't go down that well in today's world of sun-dried tomatoes, and properly cooked squid-ink risotto.

However, I found a simple recipe for Shirred Eggs with Scallops, which I think, would make an excellent first course. I've adapted it slightly.

Take some fresh, medium-sized scallops, cut them into quarters, and flash-fry them in a pan. They will need very little cooking. Put the scallops into a ramekin dish. Next, make a white sauce in the usual way. Remember, that's butter, flour, and then milk, and a bit of nutmeg. Pour the white sauce over the scallops, and then break a fresh egg onto the top. Season with salt and pepper and add a knob of unsalted butter. Bake in a medium oven, until the eggs are set; and then decorate with some chopped parsley. Ideally, you want the egg yolks to remain soft, and slightly runny.

Marinated Haddock with Prawns and Dill

 

 

 

This recipe comes from Nathalie Hambro's Simple Fare (1986), one of the more interesting cook books in my collection. As well as being a fashion designer, and all-round style guru, Nathalie Hambro is one of the most innovative and inspiring cookery writers out there, and if you are looking for fresh ideas, I whole-heartedly recommend her books. Most of them, I think, are out of print, but can be bought easily from amazon.co.uk, or abebooks.co.uk.

I like this recipe for its Baltic, or Nordic, overtones, and it's very easily made with the simplest of ingredients. Here's how you do it: Line a dish with tin foil. Spread some dill over the foil, and season with sugar, Maldon salt, and black pepper.

Next, place a fresh smoked haddock fillet over the dill. Normally I would use undyed haddock, but for this recipe I've found that the dyed yellow haddock works better. The Haddock needs to be as fresh as you can get it. Cover the fish with more dill, sugar, salt and pepper. It's best to use more sugar than salt, and to go easy with the pepper. Sprinkle some large peeled prawns on top. Wrap the whole thing up tightly with the tin foil, and stick it into the 'fridge, with a weight on top, for at least 24 hours- preferably longer.

When it's ready, slice the haddock into long, thin pieces. It's slightly like Japanese sushumi. Arrange it in a serving dish, with the prawns. Take some spring onions, and cut them in four lengthways. Soak them in a bowl of ice-cold water- after a few minutes the green tops with start to curl-up- which looks impressive, for virtually zero effort. Take them out, drain them; and stick them in with the marinated haddock and the rest of the prawns.

The Prawn Cocktail Years

 

 

          

 

Not so long ago, at at time when Mrs Peel was still kicking her kinky boots on late night television, my parents used to hold urbane dinner parties. And the first course was more often than not, Prawn Cocktail. You may snigger at the thought of it, but I can assure you that back in the 1970's this was considered the height of chic. Juicy prawns bound in a smooth Marie-Rose sauce, served in a wine glass with a lemon slice perched cheekily on the edge of the glass.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this dish, it's just that as certain classics become popularised (like Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, or Renoir's La Loge), over-familiarity can, regrettably, breed contempt. And that's what Lindsey Bareham and Simon Hopkinson's brilliant book, The Prawn Cocktail Years, is all about.

I've become rather bored of the Jamie Oliver school of Mediterranean cooking which seems to have affected every gastro-pub and restaurant in the land. Drizzles of olive oil on this, sun-dried tomatoes on that. Basil with everything. Hang on, this is Britain isn't it? Like it or not, we don't live on the Amalfi Coast; so I'm not sure that I really want to tuck into olive oil and rocket surprise on a raw English winter's afternoon.

Anyway, The Prawn Cocktail Years takes you back to forgotten classics such as Steak Diane, Omelette Arnold Bennett, Chicken Maryland (that's chicken with banana fritters!), Swedish Meatballs, Sole Veronique, and one of my all-time favourites, Crepes Suzette; and instructs you how to cook them properly. These were the sort of dishes that the revolving Post Office Tower Restaurant was serving to its well-heeled clientele back in 1972.

 

           

 

Crepes Suzette is a law unto itself. It's the combination of the smooth pancakes, tangy orange juice, cognac, and rich buttery sauce, preferably flambeed in style at the table, which gets my taste buds salivating. You can order The Prawn Cocktail Years from amazon.co.uk by clicking the link below. You won't regret it, and as I'm currently on five percent, your hard-earned cash will go towards keeping The Greasy Spoon up and running.

 

             

The Genius of Edouard de Pomiane

 

 

One of my all-time favourite cookery writers is Edouard de Pomiane. Born in 1875, He was a dietician, amateur gourmand, and academic at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, and approached food with a simple enthusiasm that I find, even now, refreshing and inspirational.

His food was of the French Country school- those time honoured dishes that you will encounter on driving holidays across France, and I whole heartedly recommend his two most well-known books: Cooking in 10 minutes, and Cooking with Pomiane. They may well be out of print, but you will be able to buy them from sites such as amazon, and abebooks.co.uk. Here's his receipe for "Snails": 

Buy a dozen snails from a conscientious tradesman, that is to say, a man who will use good butter for stuffing his snails. Arrange the twelve snails on a large fireproof dish. It is not as easy as it sounds. The opening of the shell must face upwards. Otherwise as soon as the butter melts it runs out of the shell and the snail becomes dry and tough. When you have arranged the shells properly, pour a little water into the dish. Put the dish on the fire for three or four minutes, just long enough to warm it. Then put it under the grill. In five to six minutes the butter has melted and the snails are hot. Eat them as long as they burn your fingers.

Isn't that marvellous?