the new english kitchen
changing the way you shop, cook and eat
rose prince

to dominic

contents

cover

title page

praise

dedication

introduction

part one

1: bread and flour

2: store

3: stock

4: poultry

5: beef, pork and lamb

6: game and wild meat

part two

7: fish and shellfish

8: gluts of fruit and vegetables

9: eggs

10: dairy

shopping guide

index

acknowledgements

keep reading

about the author

copyright

about the publisher

introduction

When you eat a langoustine, it gives you a present of its shell. Take that shell, toast it in a pan with some others, then boil in water – and you have a broth. That broth becomes one to pour over rice noodles with spices … You bought something good for a meal and it gave you two things good.

This simple idea not only enables you to eat well – twice – but is also a solution to the contemporary kitchen dilemma: how to make better-quality food something everyone can eat every day. This is possible not only through clever recycling – making, say, roast chicken leftovers into stock and so bringing to the table a second dish of risotto plus a third of smooth vegetable soup – but also by finding economical ways of buying the best, such as buying direct from farms using home delivery, or scouting vegetable stalls for good deals on seasonally abundant vegetables.

The New English Kitchen was born of a furious determination to connect the paths of two parallel stories. The first is a happy tale of lovely food, made using good recipes created by television chefs. It has been hard to ignore the cookery boom in all its guises. Up front, the message is all-embracing: consume, and choose what you want; it is all there in the lifestyle pages of the weekend supplements for the taking, cooking and eating.

The second story is unsettling. Looking regularly at the daily papers, it is clear that there is something wrong: the food chain is in crisis. Resources have buckled under consumer and retailer pressure to produce cheap food. Unpleasant stories emerge about food-related diseases in livestock and humans; UK farming faces financial ruin, the global market unfair, food is adulterated with chemicals and a growing number of children so unhealthy due to overeating fatty, sugary food that their parents may well outlive them. Rarely does a week pass without headlines reporting more trouble in the food industry.

Flick back to the recipe feature in the magazine – and to be quite frank you could be on another planet. Enjoy! Chargrill some more tiger prawns – to hell with the devastating effect warm-water prawn farming has had on the mangrove forests! Teriyaki another chicken breast – never mind where it comes from!

But beyond the headlines, there is a fledgling army of farmers, food producers, campaigners and food writers who are giving food and cookery back their integrity. More vital still is the consumer who wants to buy the best in order to eat well every day. This book is for you. It will help your good intentions into practical reality, proving that sustained good eating need not use up all your money and time.

The New English Kitchen’s philosophy could equally be applied in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the United States of America, Australia and Canada. It already exists in many European countries where the culture of home cooking has not faltered over the generations in the way that it has here. Focusing on English food was not an attempt to narrow the style but to broaden it, taking on the incredible variety of foods available in this province. True English food has always gone far beyond the Mrs Beeton concept of plain food economically produced. The national cuisine may be fossilised in people’s minds as pies, roasts and nursery puddings, but there is now no reason why it could not include the rice noodle dishes of Southeast Asia or the delicious food of the Mediterranean. This is after all a country with a five-hundred-year-old history of food piracy: borrowing ideas from other shores, importing their raw materials and learning to cultivate them in our own soil, or rear new animal species on our pastures.

Then there is the impact of the last 50 years’ food writing tradition. Without the great, inspirational books of those very English writers, Constance Spry, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, the good food renaissance would have been snail-pace slow. Multiculturalism and affordable worldwide travel have conspired to make English food in the 21st century more interesting still. So among the recipes in The New English Kitchen you will find pilaffs and soufflés, noodle soups and pasta dishes. They have every right to be considered as English as beef and Dover sole. There is one proviso: as far as possible, all the recipes must make use of UK-grown ingredients.

UK specialist and artisan food producers face a tough future, and in England the situation is uniquely difficult. I work in London but escape to a rented cottage in the West Country whenever possible. Bridging both worlds, urban and rural, has been insightful; essential to both my research and to the formation of the New English Kitchen concept. The English rural vote is small – and it affects the future of the food produced in the countryside. Small-scale farmers have often described as plain hostile the attitude of our authorities towards them. Enterprise is threatened constantly by both overseas competition and the crippling cost of the regulatory regime imposed on the food industry. Loyalty to the best that the country can produce will go a long way to help protect artisan food from extinction. Inside every shopper’s wallet is power, no matter how large or small the amount.

There is much to take in. The commitment needed means a little sacrifice and asks that you take on more responsibility. My book won’t solve every problem; indeed, confronting some of the information on its pages will add to your troubles and concern. Much of the methodology is easy to carry out but no, it won’t make life easier. It will make it very different, though, because the idea is to empower you. A new enjoyment will creep into each day, infecting everyone in your home, literally engraving good aromas on to minds. The New English Kitchen is my own kitchen; these are my experiences with food, grasped at ground level through my work and in my home – now it’s over to you.

part one

the chapters that follow feature foods that are especially suitable to roll into several meals. bread, stock, store vegetables, grains and pulses, poultry, meat and game are flexible enough to adapt for many uses.

1 bread and flour

Bread can pull off a feat that few cooked foods are capable of: as it matures, it develops new and interesting uses. In other words, it ages gracefully. Once past its sandwich era, older bread fits easily into simple recipes: it lies beneath radiant vegetable broths, turns up in a bread, red wine and onion soup, blends smoothly into a clove-infused sauce, and can be sweetly saturated by a creamy, eggy custard with spices and fruit. There’s always toast, too, an edible plate for favourite things. The bread that can do all this is not sliced and wrapped, sometimes costing little more than a first-class stamp, but made in the slower tradition. This bread has real integrity but it costs a bit more – which is why it is worth knowing how to use it as it ages.

The life of a good loaf of bread could unfold in the following way. On day one, it is as fresh as can be, the interior deliciously elastic and the crust crisp as an eggshell. A day or two later the crumb begins to dry, the crust to soften, and it’s good for toast. Toast brushed with flavoured oil, then topped with salad leaves and soft fresh cheese; toast with creamy scrambled egg and marinated fish; or, best of all, toast spread with real beef dripping from yesterday’s roast. Next day, put a slice of the now drying bread into a bowl and ladle over some vegetable broth. Or, if you are having a supper party, you might use the bread to make a toffee pudding or a fruit charlotte. By the end of the week, anything left from the loaf can be made into breadcrumbs. Eat them spiked with lemon zest beside roast poultry or game; mix them with garlic, herbs and olive oil for stuffing vegetables; or store them in the freezer for bread sauce. By now, I think it would be safe to say your loaf has earned its keep. You bought it to make a sandwich and it has contributed to at least four meals.

The economics of bread have an interesting pattern. A loaf of sliced, wrapped bread costs about 50 pence – although supermarket price wars have seen it drop down to 20 pence as a ‘loss leader’. Better-grade, high-street-baked sliced white costs about £1. Handmade traditional bread is twice that, at around £2, but a loaf made at home with best-quality flour costs about 50 pence – again.

This leaves two choices: buy better, more expensive bread and learn how to reap more from it – as the recipes in this chapter will show – or bake bread at home and spend no more than usual. Obviously there’s yet more to gain from baking your own bread and letting it earn its keep as it ages. I look at it this way: the time investment made when baking bread at home rewards you financially, leaving you more money to spend on other things. Having said that, it occurs to me that it is in fact quicker to make good bread than to go off and seek it out. Bread machines have made it easier still for busy people. But, putting the economics to one side, you can take real satisfaction in the fact that the bread you make in your own home will be the best. Unadulterated, wholesome bread is something of an endangered species nowadays …

the currency of bread

If the essence of this book is to know the value of food and make the most of it, then bread is the currency. Bread is money. It is slang for money and when you’re on the breadline you have run out money. Two bestselling books that differ in their account of the value of bread wryly tickle. In Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt (Flamingo, 1996), a poverty-stricken boy glimpses through a Limerick window a piece of bread spread with jam. His mouth-watering description of it is enough to prove that even at a young age he knows the value of bread. The other book, Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution (Vermilion, 1999), advises avoiding bread – or carbohydrates. Dr Atkins says that mixing carbs with protein, or meat, makes us obese – and so bread must be banished. It goes without saying that Dr Atkins’ book is not a bestseller in the developing world. It walks off the shelves in Britain and America, however, because most of these countries’ inhabitants are rich enough not to need bread.

the giant bread machine

‘All our bakers are master bakers,’ the factory manager told me. At that moment a master baker, dressed in regulation cover-up clothing, pushed a button and the bread production line swung into action.

Real master bakers are trained to use their hands to judge the texture of the dough, feeling its elasticity and warmth. They learn their trade in high-street bakeries or medium-sized bread wholesalers, where the bread is made at night. After leaving school, I worked as a shop assistant in a traditional bakery for nearly two years. The baker arrived at one in the morning to start the baking and clocked off at 8 a.m., half an hour after we turned the door sign to read ‘open’. The hardship of beginning work at 7 a.m. was tempered by that gorgeous smell of bread emerging from the oven. As I walked to the bakery in the dark early morning, the aroma grew gradually more powerful until I was close enough to see a spectre of steam puffing out of the basement. The baker, Steve, who had spent time ‘inside’ after a fight, controlled his aggression with an interest in martial arts. But he also loved to bake. He liked the science and enjoyed using his skill – judging the readiness of the dough at every stage, shaping it by hand, and baking it in a century-old brick oven. He even liked to be up at night working while everyone else slept. His hours were strictly controlled by his trade union, in spite of his lonely job. Any slight alteration to the weekly timetable was subject to intense negotiation: well-muscled Steve versus a skinny shop manager, hell bent on not provoking the baker to lose his temper.

In the Midlands factory I visited many years later, the bakers use their hands only to push buttons during their eight-hour shift. This bread is made via the Chorleywood Process, the revolutionary high-speed mechanical baking system invented in 1961. The factory never rests, baking around the clock. It takes just one and three-quarter hours for a loaf to make its journey along the production line, helped by extra yeast and water and high-speed mixers. It is necessary to add flour ‘improvers’, usually in the form of soya flour, to ensure that the bread will literally rise to the occasion in such an artificially short space of time. Enzyme processing aids, softening agents, sugars, fats and preservatives are also sometimes added. These ingredients combine to speed up the natural breadmaking process, resulting in a soft, sweetish loaf with a long shelf life, which fits neatly into the modern maxim that shopping should happen just once a week.

And where do you, the consumer, fit in? The bread factories would say that all this is done for your benefit. This is the bread you want, and indeed for many, soft, sweet bread is easy to like; children in particular are swiftly seduced.

The high-tech mechanisation of bread comes at the cost of its integrity, however. Compare factory-produced bread to Italian dried durum wheat pasta, most of which is now made speedily in giant factories. The mixing is done high in their ceilings, the dough passes through giant tubes, is pressed through the various dies that make the shapes and then travels into vast drying machines that imitate the Neapolitan sun and sea breezes. But it still contains just flour and water. Pasta is perfect for mechanisation – the food itself never loses its integrity. Bread, on the other hand, needs a whole lot of help by way of additives if it is to survive the Chorleywood palaver.

bread in society

When I criticised sliced and wrapped bread in a newspaper for the first time, it provoked a reaction from the industry that both surprised and annoyed me. Their letters of complaint did not exactly defend their process; instead, they justified it by saying that it ‘allowed everyone to eat cheap white bread’. This polemic takes us back over 140 years, when refined white bread had status. The upper classes ate white bread, the poor could afford only the rough, wholegrain type. Flour was ground between stones and then painstakingly sifted to remove the wheatgerm, leaving the flour pure and white – an expensive process.

Then roller mills were invented and suddenly white flour was cheaper to produce. The china rollers removed the brown (good) bits in the flour efficiently. This flour was the forerunner of our modern sliced and wrapped bread. It did indeed give cheap white bread to the poor, but I find it sickening that the modern industry is still arguing that this is the point of high-speed mechanisation. I believe that what it is really saying is: ‘You’re poor, so you get bread with additives, too much yeast, and no flavour; its integral goodness has been milled out, artificial vitamins have been added to replace it – but you can lump it because you are eating white bread, you lucky people.’

Food snobbery is alive and well, sadly. And highly divisive. There is still one form of nutrition for one group in society and one for another. What can you say in a country that still has two different words for the meal eaten in the middle of the day?

Mechanised breadmaking is no longer about feeding everyone white bread; it is about profit. It is about producing more for less, faster – and to hell with breadmaking tradition. But breadmaking, just like winemaking or rearing a beef steer naturally, is a slow process that yields results that are worth the wait. The recipes in this chapter help to solve the problem of how to afford good bread. They show that bread can be made inexpensively and retain its integrity, and they also show how to use every last crumb. This is bread for all.

how to recognise good bread

There has been a definite surge of interest in handmade or craft bread. This is bread made in the traditional way with two fermentations, during which time it builds true flavour. Good flour is essential. Bread made from stoneground flour retains wheatgerm, even if the ‘brown’ has been sifted out. Some bakers are interested again in good flour, in the slower baking process and also in traditional ovens – there are now commercial bakeries with domed brick ovens, offering all kinds of loaves made from a wide variety of grains.

When you buy bread, take a good look at it. The crust should not be too thick but its outer veneer should be brittle and crisp. The shape should be as the baker intended – bread that has been hurried will have a lopsided appearance where the interior has risen too fast, breaking through the crust. Smell the bread, too. The aroma of new baking should cling to a fresh loaf. Once it begins to fade, your bread is ready to use for toast or in recipes.

Feel the bread. The interior crumb should have elasticity, tearing when pulled rather than breaking. Despite its bubbly appearance, it should feel heavy for its size. Compare the weight of a piece of factory-produced sliced bread to a similar-sized slice of bread made with stoneground flour at traditional speed. Dry, crumbly bread has either been incorrectly made or is no longer fresh.

Finally, when you taste the bread, you should be able to detect the flavour of the grain. Even in white bread, if the flour is stoneground the flavour will be enhanced by traces of the oils that remain in it, and which are diminished in ordinary, roller-milled flour. Good bread will also taste ripe, indicating that it has been given a good long time to rise. This is most pronounced in sourdough bread, which undergoes a lengthy fermentation.

where to buy bread

Craft bakeries – Independent small bakers making bread using traditional techniques are still few in number but well worth seeking out. Don’t forget that bread freezes very well, so a journey to buy good bread is a worthwhile mission. Keep an eye on the food media – magazines, weekend newspapers, local press – for new bakery businesses starting up and give them a try.

High-street bakery chains – Home to the ubiquitous jam doughnut and bizarrely decorated buns and biscuits, the chains on the high street vary immensely but I have bought excellent bread from some of these shops. They can be a source of good everyday bread sold in whole loaves that can be sliced and bagged the moment you buy – a preferable alternative to ready sliced and wrapped.

Farmers’ markets and other specialist food markets – Worth visiting for good bakery stalls.

Urban local shops and delis – Many corner shops now sell French-style baguettes and loaves ‘baked on the premises’. The dough is made elsewhere, though, and the lack of labelling leaves you wondering how. But these Continental loaves often contain an element of authentic sourness, and I’d choose them over sliced and wrapped any day.

Food chains and smaller supermarket chains – Shops such as Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and some Spar stores have responded to the demand for craft-made breads. While never as good as true artisan-made bread, because they are produced in considerable quantities, there are some imaginatively made loaves with plenty of flavour and a good crust.

Supermarkets – The vast majority of bread sold in the Big Four supermarket chains (Asda, Morrison, Sainsbury’s and Tesco) is sliced and wrapped but again they are making inroads to supplying traditional-style bread and flour and need your encouragement. Your questions and demands concerning bread and flour will be heard. Vote, as always, for good food with the power that your own money holds. Choosing craft bread over sliced and wrapped will send messages to the industry that it has no choice but to absorb.

organic bread and good flour

Many new craft bakers use organic flours milled with wheat that has been grown naturally. Organic grain farmers are permitted to use a very few fertilisers and pesticides that are deemed safe, but this is often criticised by the conventional food industry. However, it is undeniable that traditionally made bread using organic flour tastes wonderful. The technique is partly responsible for the flavour, but with organic flour the species of wheat also has an impact.

Organic farmers tend to use traditional grain varieties that are slow to grow but are more resistant to pests and disease. Some claim that the good health of the soil has an impact on the flavour of food. This makes sense, but the organic sector would be the first to say that more research is needed into the flavour and vitality of organic food. Independent research needs Treasury money – something that has not exactly been forthcoming since the popularity of organic food has quadrupled in recent times.

All craft bakers are interested in the flour they use because flour is bread’s personality, its character. A craft baker will seek out good-quality flour, which may or may not be organic, for the greater good of the bread they bake. There is one simple way to find out – ask them. Good food producers love to talk about the food they make.

making bread at home

I make bread twice a week in a food mixer with an attached dough hook. Each batch of two loaves takes ten minutes to mix and knead. Two hours later I shape it, and about an hour later the bread is baked. There is very little physical work – bread needs your presence more than anything else. People who go out to work will find breadmaking machines useful. Alternatively you can make the dough in a mixer, put it in the fridge for the day and shape and bake it when you get home.

hands versus machine

Making bread by hand is a real pleasure, but you will need to set aside a good 15 minutes to knead the dough. Food mixers make smooth, elastic dough. I have a KitchenAid but have also used a Kenwood mixer in the past. Use mixers fitted with a dough hook on a low setting.

Busy people swear by their bread machines. They can do the whole job for you, or be set to stop when the dough is ready so it can be shaped and cooked in a conventional oven. Beware of the manufacturer’s recipe books. Some of them include recipes that are simply aping the factory process, with too much yeast and milk powder so the bread will be big and soft. Use traditional recipes instead, using the quantities given in the manufacturer’s recipe book as a guide, and you will be very pleased with what a bread machine can do.

kitchen note

Look for used Kenwood mixers in local papers and car boot sales – a heavy old one with a good motor will go on for years.

the cost of bread

At the time of writing, I buy flour in bulk and it costs me approximately 50 pence to make a loaf, plus negligible costs for yeast, oil and oven power. A loose calculation based on baking four good-quality loaves a week shows that I can save up to £312 a year on buying bread of comparable quality – money for treats.

buying flour

I used to be hopeless at making scones. When I worked at the bakery, we threw away more scones than we sold because they were always dry, weighty and crumbly. Twenty years later I nibbled a sample scone from a stall at a farmers’ market. Light and chewy, without a hint of dryness, this was the scone we were never able to make in the bakery. The stall-holder, slightly taken aback by the passionate interrogation I inflicted on her, casually remarked, ‘Oh, it’s the flour.’ She bought her flour from Cann Mills, a local water mill in Dorset. She did not know why it was so good, it just was.

I wanted to know more, so I visited the mill. The miller, Michael Stoate, took up the story of good wheat flour, the type most commonly used for making bread, scones and cakes. The modern milling industry rolls the grain to remove the bran, taking out the wheatgerm and the flour’s natural oil as it does so. This also removes a vital source of vitamins, which means that they have to be added back to the flour artificially. The wheatgerm oil is very valuable to the pharmaceutical industry, which puts it into creams to go on the outside of our bodies – oh, the irony of it. What’s more, commercial bakers need not mention that it is missing from the flour. About 70 per cent of the bread bought in the UK is made from roller-milled white flour. That is a scandalous amount of missing wheatgerm from what most of us presume is a wholefood.

Stoneground flour, whether white or brown, still contains the wheatgerm – the white flour is simply sifted to remove the bran. Michael Stoate uses millstones to grind all his flour, including the white flour that was used in those scones, with their delightful texture. Traditionally milled stoneground flour can be bought direct from mills, and in some cases delivered to your home (see the Shopping Guide). Look also in specialist independent food shops, farm shops or farmers’ markets, and on the internet. Some supermarkets stock British flour from traditional mills, but do check the label carefully.

Store flour in a sealed bin to keep out pests, or buy it in smaller bulk bags of about 5 kilos that can be sealed between use.

Bread baked in tins or shaped into high rounds needs strong flour, made from ‘hard’ wheat species. These contain a greater amount of glutenin and gliadin, essential for the bread to rise well and form a nice, elastic crumb. In the past, hard wheat was grown mainly in North America for the British bread industry, but with selective breeding it has been adapted over the last few decades to grow well in British conditions. Do not confuse strong flour with hard durum wheat flour, or semolina, which is used specifically for pasta making.

Soft wheat flour, sold as plain flour, is suitable for cake and pastry making and can also be used for soda bread and scones.

other types of flour

While the gluten in wheat flour is vital for the standard bread recipe, a percentage of another type of cereal flour can be added for variety, such as rye, barley, buckwheat or oats. These cereals, however, contain little gluten, and yeast bread made with rye, barley or oat flour alone will be heavy, and does not keep well. Alternative types of flour, made from vegetables like chick peas or potato, are more useful in other forms of cookery. There are recipes using these flours (here.

yeast

Fast-action, or easy-blend, yeast is now the most widely available type. It can be mixed straight into the flour, speeding up breadmaking by about half an hour. Conventional dried yeast, sold loose in tins, should be used in the same quantity but must be dissolved in warm water first. Compressed or fresh yeast is not always easy to find now. The best places to try are independent bakeries and some health-food shops. It should be dissolved in warm water or milk before adding it to the dry ingredients. If substituting fresh yeast for dried, you will need double the quantity stated in the recipe.

a little bread science

The breadmaking process is easier to understand once you know a little piece of molecular chemistry. Yeast gives dough its oomph, but it needs gluten to do so. Live yeast makes bubbles of carbon dioxide in the soft, elastic dough. The legend of the first yeast goes that a cook left a piece of dough near a vat of beer and some of the wild yeasts from the ale got into the dough. The cook noticed the bubbles in the bread – the rest is history.

When water comes into contact with flour, it swells the proteins in it. Kneading the dough by hand or machine allows these proteins to blend, changing the molecular structure and forming the all-important gluten.

You must choose if you want to add fat to your bread. Fat improves bread’s keeping qualities and gives it a denser texture. It can, however, prevent the dough becoming soft and elastic if it is rubbed into the flour before the water is added, because this delays the essential formation of gluten. Gluten is to dough what steel frames are to skyscraper construction. Its strength allows large spaces of air to form and hold within the dough. The best way to get bread going quickly is to add fat after the water. I do this by oiling the bowl that holds the dough as it rises, then mixing it in before the bread is shaped.

It is fine to leave fat out of bread; it simply results in a lighter dough with large bubbles. If you make small quantities of bread frequently, or rolls, there is no real need to add fat.

Two things kill yeast: too much salt, and heat. Don’t be too free with salt – follow the amount specified in recipes until you get to the stage where experience teaches you how much to add. And don’t leave the dough to rise anywhere too hot, such as on a radiator or beside a fire. In fact, bread doesn’t have to be left in a warm place to rise at all, and will even rise perfectly happily – though slowly – in the fridge. The important thing is that it should be in a draught-free place.

how to knead bread by hand

Take the dough, which will still be sticky, out of the bowl and place it on a floured work surface. Use both hands to pull and stretch the bread, folding it back on itself, pulling and stretching again, giving it a quarter turn each time. Persevere for several minutes – 15 is best. The process helps the gluten develop, making the dough silky, soft and elastic. Be robust when kneading – you can be as aggressive as you want, since it will speed up the process.

basic yeast bread

This recipe works well in a food mixer and can be used for the classic, rectangular tin loaf or for any other shape. Strong white flour, malted wheat, wholemeal or a mixture all work well.

Makes 2 small loaves

700g/1 ¹/₂lb flour

2 x 7g sachets of fast-action (easy-blend) yeast

1 heaped teaspoon fine salt or 2 teaspoons soft sea salt crystals

1 heaped teaspoon unrefined sugar

425ml/14fl oz water, at blood temperature

1 tablespoon vegetable or olive oil (optional – see here)

Put the flour in a large bowl with the yeast, salt and sugar and stir until combined. Make a well in the centre and add the warm water, stirring all the time until the ingredients form a sticky dough. Continue to knead the bread – by hand (see above) for 15 minutes, or for 5 minutes on the slow setting of a food mixer fitted with a dough hook. If the dough is too sticky, add more flour; if it is too dry, work in a little water.

The dough will become smooth and elastic as the gluten forms. When you have finished kneading it, put it into an oiled bowl (if you are using the oil), cover with a cloth and leave in a warm, draught-free spot for 1 1/2–2 hours, until doubled in size (or leave for longer at cool room temperature, or overnight in the fridge).

Knock the air out of the dough, kneading the oil into it. Prepare two 480g/1lb loaf tins by brushing all over the inside surface with a little oil. Divide the dough in half, shape each piece into a fat sausage and put into a tin or make 2 rounds and place each in the centre of a baking sheet. Scatter flour on top, cut a slash lengthways down the centre with a sharp knife and leave to rise again, uncovered, for 20–30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 230°C/450°F/Gas Mark 8.

Bake the loaves for 30–40 minutes. They are ready when they come easily out of the tin and sound hollow when tapped on the base with a finger.

kitchen notes

To improve the quality of the crust, put a roasting tin half filled with water in the oven as you preheat it and leave in during baking.

If bread goes wrong, it could be the weather. Ambience affects bread: on humid days the dough needs slightly less water; when the weather is dry, it will need more.

You can freeze bread at almost any stage of the preparation – before the dough has risen; after knocking it back, or after baking.

more adventures with dough

Once you are hooked on making bread at home, it is easy to adjust the recipe or substitute different flours and ingredients. I am not crazy about adding olives, Parmesan, sun-dried tomatoes or fried onions to bread – I’d rather eat those things another way – but working fresh herbs or aromatics into the dough does have a good effect. A few chopped rosemary leaves or sage make a nice savoury bread. Steeping some saffron threads in the warm liquid before you add it to the flour makes a beautiful saffron-scented loaf, delicious with dry-cured meats and fresh cheeses.

To make tea bread, set aside a piece of dough and roll it into a rectangle. Scatter over a little brown sugar and some chopped dried fruit (figs, raisins, prunes or apricots), then roll it up into a Swiss roll shape. Either brush it with beaten egg and bake whole, or cut it into slices to make Chelsea buns, lay these on a greased baking sheet, brush with egg and bake. Scatter some golden caster sugar on Chelsea buns when they come out of the oven.

Substituting milk for water in your dough will make a softer, sweeter tea bread.

sourdough bread

Sourdough bread is a treat to buy from a specialist baker and can be eaten fresh or used in recipes. I admit I often beg mine from my sister and brother-in-law, Sam and Sam Clark. With apologies to the late M. Poîlaine, creator of the famous sourdough loaf, pain Poîlaine (see the Shopping Guide), and, honestly, no sibling conspiracy, I believe their experiments at their restaurant, Moro, have resulted in the absolute best there is. A recipe for it is given in Moro – The Cookbook (Ebury, 2001).

Slow fermentation of the yeast in bread makes a sour dough. You can make your own yeast, beginning with a combination of flour and fruit juice and ‘feeding’ the bacteria, but there are simpler methods for home kitchens. Leaving the dough to rise overnight in the fridge, rather than giving it a quick rise in a warm place, produces a more sour dough. You can also knead into it a piece of dough left over from breadmaking a few days earlier (keep it in the fridge, wrapped in cling film; it will sour as it matures). When you make your bread, use only half the yeast specified in the recipe and work the older dough into the new. Allow your dough to rise in the fridge either overnight or during the day. Once baked, the bread will have a full, ripe, savoury taste and the scent of toasted nuts. It will have a strong, tactile crumb, and larger bubbles even if you have used fat. There is no doubt at all that the inner crumb of sourdough keeps its elasticity longer. Nor will the flavour diminish as it ages: old sourdough bread will be as good eaten fresh as it is in your cooking.

soda bread

If you don’t have any yeast, or prefer not to eat it, soda bread is a wonderful quick standby and the best bread to eat, buttered, with smoked fish or pastrami. While yeast comes to life with the changing temperature and moisture in the dough, bicarbonate of soda reacts with sour milk or buttermilk, making bubbles that raise the dough and set when baked.

480g/1lb wholemeal flour (or a 50/50 mix of white and wholemeal

flour for a paler loaf)

1 teaspoon fine oatmeal

1¹/₂ teaspoons fine salt

1¹/₂ teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

30g/1oz butter

500ml/16fl oz sour milk (see Kitchen Note overleaf) or buttermilk

(or low-fat yoghurt)

Preheat the oven to 230°C/450°F/Gas Mark 8. In a large bowl, mix together the flour, oatmeal, salt and soda, then rub in the butter. Make a well in the centre and slowly add the liquid, mixing all the time. Work the flour in using your hand, until you have a soft but not sticky dough. Turn it out on to a board and shape lightly into a smooth round. Place on a greased baking sheet, scatter with a little extra flour and cut a deep cross on the top with a sharp knife. Bake for 30–35 minutes, turning down the heat to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6 halfway through. The loaf is ready when the base sounds hollow when tapped with a finger. If the loaf is soggy underneath, bake it upside down for a further 5 minutes.

kitchen notes

To sour milk, warm it slightly, add about a teaspoon of lemon juice and leave to stand for a few minutes.

Soda bread makes good breadcrumbs but can be dry and rubbery when toasted, so it is best made frequently in small quantities.

savoury pan scones

Try to find stoneground white flour for these scones; it will give them a lovely chewiness. A really heavy-based frying pan or flat griddle is essential if you cook them on the hob, otherwise they’ll burn.

The nicest way to eat pan scones is while they are still warm, halved and buttered.

Makes 8–10 scones

480g/1lb plain flour

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

2 teaspoons salt

90g/3oz beef dripping (see here) or butter (or 6 tablespoons

olive oil)

300ml/¹/₂ pint sour milk (see above), buttermilk or low-fat yoghurt

Sift all the dry ingredients into a bowl and rub in the fat. Make a well in the centre and stir in the milk, buttermilk or yoghurt to make a smooth dough.

With floured hands, quickly shape the dough into small rounds, 2cm/3/4 inch thick. Heat a heavy-based frying pan or a flat griddle and cook the scones for 4 minutes on each side, until golden and slightly puffed. Alternatively, bake them in an oven preheated to 230°C/450°F/Gas Mark 8 for 10 minutes.

kitchen note

You can play around with the flavour of scones, adding grated or chopped cheese (it’s a good way to use cheese that is no longer presentable on the table). Try to use one of the many interesting British farmhouse hard cheeses. Crumbled pork crackling makes them wickedly delicious, too. Alternatively, try chopped spring onions, dried thyme or rosemary.

drop scones

I include these because they were one of the first things I ever made myself, and because my mother often made them for tea to eat with golden syrup and butter. The ingredients are pure store cupboard, so you won’t have to rush out and buy biscuits on a Sunday when someone drops in for tea. The recipe is from a much-Sellotaped 1950s copy of The Constance Spry Cookery Book – one of my bibles.

Makes about 12

240g/8oz plain flour

¹/₂ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

¹/₂ teaspoon cream of tartar

¹/₂ teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon golden caster sugar

a nut of butter

1 tablespoon golden syrup

about 300ml/¹/₂ pint milk

1 egg

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, then rub in the butter and add the syrup. Add half the milk, mixing well with a wooden spoon. Break in the egg and beat well, then add the remaining milk. The mixture should just drop from the spoon. Allow to stand for 10–15 minutes, not more.

Heat an oiled flat griddle or heavy-based frying pan. When it is moderately hot, drop in the mixture in spoonfuls and cook for 2–3 minutes, until small bubbles appear on the surface. Flip the drop scones over and cook for about 30 seconds to brown the other side. Wrap the scones in a tea towel to keep them warm while you cook the rest, then serve with butter, jam and syrup.

kitchen note

It won’t be necessary to re-grease the pan as you cook each batch; the drop scones are all the better for being cooked without much oil at all.

flat breads

The earliest breads were unleavened – they did not contain yeast. They were rolled or pressed out and baked absolutely flat. The offspring of these ancient flat breads can still be found in the Middle East, where there are hundreds of versions, including breads no thicker than card but floppy enough to wrap around herbs and salty cheese, and slightly thicker, round flat breads, which are put to use as a jacket for kebabs. I remember when pitta bread was considered avant garde, but now flat breads in every guise can be bought from Middle Eastern and Asian shops; even supermarkets sell several versions of flat bread, or ‘wraps’ – a word that came from the United States. There are soft breads such as Indian naan and chapatis or Mexican tortillas, crisp breads like lavash to crumble into soups and salads, or flaky roti to parcel up West Indian curries.

Making flat breads at home is good economics: a batch of up to ten can be made from 360g of good flour, worth less than 50 pence, which comes in at approximately a third of the cost of ten tortilla wraps or pitta breads.

basic flat bread

I cannot even begin to give an authentic recipe for every kind of flat bread but the recipe below, adapted from Tom Jaine’s Making Bread at Home (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995), makes a good, crisp, flat bread that can be broken into soup or a leafy salad, or used to scoop food into your mouth. It uses yeast, but you could use a little dough left over from the previous baking instead for the same lightening effect.

The secret of all flat breads is to rest the dough in the fridge. This gives the gluten time to relax, so that you can roll or press the bread out very flat. It also sours the dough slightly, adding flavour.

Makes 8–10

360g/12oz unbleached strong white flour (or 240g/8oz flour and 180g/6oz stored dough from the last bread)

1 teaspoon salt

7g sachet of fast-action (easy-blend) yeast

240g/8oz low-fat yoghurt

Mix together all the dry ingredients, then stir in the yoghurt. Knead, in a machine or by hand (see here and here), until the dough is smooth and elastic. Cover with cling film and store in the fridge for at least 4 hours, or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 230°C/450°F/Gas Mark 8. Divide the dough into balls the size of a large walnut. Roll out each one on a floured work surface until it is very thin. Place on an oiled baking sheet, allow to rest for 5–10 minutes then bake for 8–12 minutes, until the flat breads are crisp and light golden in places.

kitchen note

You can also make these breads from maize flour (polenta), chestnut flour or gram (chick pea) flour, using them to replace a third of the ordinary flour.

dry flat bread

Bought and home-made flat breads become stale quickly but they can still be worked into other meals. If they are still soft, tear them up, then toast until dry. Alternatively fry gently in olive oil. Store in jars ready for use in salads or soups.

bread salad

Cut or tear a dry or toasted flat bread into postage-stamp-sized pieces. Make a salad with the bread, Cos or romaine lettuce hearts, spinach or other leaves, herbs (parsley and dill), sliced tomatoes – the juice soaks nicely into the bread – and cucumber. Dress with just extra virgin olive or walnut oil and lemon juice, salt and pepper.

pizza margherita

San Gennaro is the patron saint of Naples, the birthplace of spaghetti and that other international fast food, pizza. It is also the name above the door of our local pizzeria in London. We are lucky. At San Gennaro they make pizza in the traditional way, with ingredients from Campania, the region around Naples that is famous for its wheat, tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella. The proprietor, Enzo, operates on Neapolitan hours – the door never opens before 5.30 p.m. and it closes in the small hours. I first walked into this south London pizzeria late one August night. A few people were sitting at the bar drinking small glasses of home-made limoncello. We could have been in Campania itself and that was before we ate the pizza.

Good pizza dough is almost flaky, the air barely held inside, and breaks easily. It has a slight sourness, a faint smoky flavour where it has been charred by the heat of the oven. The secret of this recipe was revealed to me after an evening spent deep in the basement of San Gennaro, watching José make the dough. He refrigerates it overnight, so that it can be stretched to incredible thinness the following day.

‘Anyone can make good pizza,’ says Enzo. ‘You can be from Ecuador, Nigeria or London, but you need two things: authentic ingredients and “the knowledge”.’

Makes 2

4 tablespoons olive oil

8 basil leaves

6 tablespoons Tomato Sauce (see here)

120g/4oz buffalo mozzarella, cut into 1cm/¹/₂ inch pieces

freshly ground black pepper

extra virgin olive oil, to serve

For the dough:

540g/1lb 2oz plain flour

¹/₂ teaspoon salt

7g sachet of fast-action (easy-blend) yeast

150ml/¹/₄ pint milk, warmed to blood temperature

200ml/7fl oz water, warmed to blood temperature

2 tablespoons olive oil

Put the flour, salt and yeast in a mixing bowl and slowly add the milk and water, mixing until it forms a dough. Knead by hand (see here) or in a food mixer until the dough is smooth and elastic. Add a little more flour if the dough is too sticky. Pour the oil into a large, clean bowl, add the dough and turn to coat it in the oil. Cover and place in the fridge for a minimum of 8 hours and up to 24 hours (you can use it sooner, after 2 hours, but it will not be pliable).

Preheat the oven to its highest setting (a commercial pizza oven cooks pizza at 350°C). A preheated pizza stone or perforated pizza baking dish helps; use in place of a baking sheet.

If you have time, bring the dough to room temperature before you shape the pizzas. Take half the dough and use your fingers to press it into a circle. Then pick it up and ‘open’ it with your hands by holding the edges and turning it about 45 degrees at a time. The pizza base should measure 30cm/12 inches across. Place on a baking sheet (or on the preheated pizza stone – but work fast when adding the tomato and cheese). Repeat for the second pizza.

Stir the oil and basil into the tomato sauce, then smear the sauce on to each circle of dough and scatter the mozzarella on top. Bake until the outer edge bubbles and turns crisp and the mozzarella is melted but not browned. Shake over a little extra virgin oil and grind over some black pepper before you eat the pizza.

kitchen note

Liquidised canned Italian tomatoes or passata can be used in place of the tomato sauce, but the pizza must cook fast at a high temperature for the tomatoes to sweeten and the juice to evaporate.

other uses for pizza dough

Try the Tuscan Schiacciata con l’uva, which is eaten during the grape harvest. Roll out the dough to a thin rectangle, sprinkle over a little Pernod or aniseed-flavoured alcohol, then fold it in three and roll again to about 5mm/1/4 inch thick. Scatter over a few red grapes – red wine grapes, if available, because their thin skins make them good for cooking. Bake at your oven’s highest setting until the dough is crisp, then serve sprinkled with a little sugar.

To make garlic bread, infuse 2 chopped garlic in 4 tablespoons of olive oil for an hour or two, then shake it over the uncooked pizza bases. Cut a few slashes in the centre of each one and bake as for pizza. Shake a little extra virgin olive oil over the bread as it comes out of the oven.

To make goat’s cheese pasties, roll out the dough thinly and cut it into rounds with a tumbler. In the centre of each one, put a spoonful of mild, fresh goat’s cheese and a little finely chopped dill or lightly cooked greens (such as chard or spinach, with all the water squeezed out). Brush the edges with water, fold over and pinch together to make little pasties. Bake until crisp and golden in an oven preheated to 230°C/450°F/Gas Mark 8.

making the most of stale bread

It is easy to glance around the kitchen and say, ‘I have nothing in the house’, but that is not strictly true if the end of a loaf is lurking in the bread bin. This section of the bread chapter is intended to change ‘I have nothing …’ to ‘hmmm, well perhaps …’, or even to, ‘I have eggs, I have some herbs and I can make toast …’ Then there are breadcrumbs, so quick to defrost after storage in the freezer, then fry in olive oil with a little garlic and parsley to serve with pasta, or use as a coating for meat that has been hammered thin (see here).

The art of making bread go further has become almost extinct – partly because of the preservatives in commercially baked bread, but also because it is the kind of hand-me-down information that disappeared when mothers stopped cooking and broke the chain of food lore. It is not that recipes using stale bread are old-fashioned – Tuscan bread soups are now championed by contemporary chefs as one of the most delicious things in the world. Their recipes invariably suggest using the ubiquitous ciabatta but it is fine to make use of that old loaf of everyday bread.

Good bread deteriorates faster than sliced and wrapped factory-baked loaves containing preservatives such as citric acid. They will not, however, develop a mould quickly, but gradually dry out during the week. My experience with factory-made breads is that they deteriorate suddenly approximately six days after they are bought, when an outbreak of mouldy spots appear and the whole lot must go in the bin.

Sourdough bread, on the other hand, has an extraordinary life. The crust will dry but no spots appear for up to two weeks. Because it costs more, I tend to scrape or cut any mould away and continue popping the bread under the grill, where it obediently becomes springy inside and crisp on the outside – edible again.

This is what a home-made loaf can give, assuming it yields 10 slices of bread. Half the loaf is eaten fresh over a day for breakfast, or in packed lunches; 4 slices of the drying remains are toasted and put in the bottom of four soup bowls, then a vegetable broth spooned over; the remainder is made into breadcrumbs. Half the breadcrumbs are used to coat some hammered chicken thigh meat and the other half fried with herbs and nuts beside a separate dish of roast pheasant or partridge. Fifty pence goes a long way with food.

toast

There’s nothing new. The French have croûtons, Italians crostini – we have toast. Crostini sounds so neo-Italian, so latter-day peasant that it is easy to forget that it is simply toast. Putting things on toast is genius – ordinary, everyday items of food are greatly elevated by their toasted mattress of bread. Toast belongs to the British Isles, and it is one of those things that we do better than anyone else. Thick slices of toast with butter and marmalade, what better breakfast? Apart from perhaps boiled eggs and toast. Or scrambled eggs on toast.

My father was very fond of savouries. These were small dishes, often on toast, served after the main course. They are out of fashion now, outside the gentleman’s club. His favourite was sardines on toast – and yes, they were from a can. We quaked with horror at the table, but out came the macho Worcestershire sauce: ‘They must have Worcestershire sauce!’ And he was right. They were very good after a liberal shaking.

sardines on toast

I tried them again the other day, with very little modification, and liked them all over again. It is the same story of good and bad food in England. They do need good bread, good butter and good sardines. You can buy line-caught canned sardines from Spanish shops and delis. Ramon Bue is an excellent brand that has been around for ever – as long as Worcestershire sauce, in fact.

Serves 4

8 canned sardines

4 medium-thick slices of day-old bread

butter

Worcestershire sauce

chopped parsley

Pick over the sardines without damaging their silver skins. Where possible, remove the gritty spines or obvious bones. Toast the bread and spread it with butter while it is still hot. Lay fillets from 2 fish on top of each slice, skin-side up, and put under a hot grill for 2 minutes. Dress with Worcestershire sauce and sprinkle with parsley.

dripping toast

When well-hung beef is roasted, it produces a full-tasting dripping with a jelly beneath that can only be described as nectar. Hot toast or Melba Toast (see here), cut nicely into triangles, with a fifty-fifty mixture of dripping and jelly spread on top, finished by black pepper and maybe a watercress leaf, is a completely respectable thing to serve with drinks. It fed the poor for centuries, but was killed off by tasteless, poorly hung meat. It is not an everyday dish; a little dripping is good for you but too much is not. But on those occasions when you splash out on the best beef joints, make sure you collect the dripping to make Roast Potatoes (see here), pilaffs (see here) – and for toast.

more good things on toast

Melted cheese – Try some of the new British and Irish cheeses as well as traditional farmhouse Cheddar and Double Gloucester. Lord of the Hundreds is used often in this book – a hard ewe’s milk cheese that melts to a tart, white cream. Other good melting cheeses include Saval, Malvern and Coolea, plus the obvious European mountain cheeses, Gruyère, Cantal, Emmental and Tilsiter.

Fresh, young goat’s cheeses – Soft white goat’s cheese can be crumbled on to toast, with herbs, salad leaves and olives, and dressed with a few drops of those piquant oils you can buy, infused with chilli or aromatic herbs.

Cooled scrambled eggs (see here) – With added cream, scrambled duck or hen’s eggs on toast make a truly elegant starter or supper dish. If you like, you can add very thin, crisp bacon, fresh herbs or smoked fish, such as eel or trout.

Chicken livers and other offal (see here and here) – Chopped and fried with butter, chopped capers, anchovy and a little white wine.

Smoked fish – Organic smoked salmon or trout, mackerel or kippers, or perhaps the more unusual fish now being smoked by specialists, such as pollack and ling.

Herring – Filleted and fried in butter, then placed on hot toast that has been spread with a mixture of butter and mustard. Finish with lots of fresh dill.

North Atlantic or other cold-water prawns or Morecambe Bay grey shrimps (see here) – Dress with a few herbs and scatter a little cayenne pepper and ground mace over the top.

Fried tomatoes – Go a step further and fry the day-old bread, then cover it with sweet fried tomatoes. Add a blob of crème fraîche or soured cream and a few basil leaves for something richer.

melba toast

Melba toast is made by splitting a piece of toast apart and baking it in the oven. It has a lovely old-fashioned feel to it and is wonderful with those smooth duck liver pâtés from delis, finished with a slice of pickled cucumber. Use it also as a base for semi-dried tomatoes (sold as sunblush) and dress with virgin olive oil, or break it up and throw it into leafy salads with herbs, spring onions, lemon juice and olive oil.

The renowned chef, Auguste Escoffier, named Melba toast after the prima donna, Dame Nellie Melba, in 1897. But in her book, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (Allen Lane, 1977), Elizabeth David found an earlier recipe written by the Scottish home cook, F. Marian McNeill, proving that Melba toast belongs as much in our own kitchens as it does in the grand dining rooms of old hotels.

Serves 4

4 thin slices of white or brown bread

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4. Toast the bread on both sides, then cut off the crusts. Using a serrated knife, split the toasted bread apart into 2 sides; you will find it comes away easily. Cut each side into 2 triangles, place them on a baking sheet and bake in the oven until dry. They tend to curl up, looking lovely as you bring them to the table in a basket.

kitchen note

To make a rich toast that will not go soggy, brush each side of the Melba toast with melted butter before you put it in the oven. This will keep for a week in an airtight container.

breadcrumbs

Like chicken bones, prawn shells and vegetable peelings, breadcrumbs are a gift to the cook. They are essentially ‘free’. The crusted end of a dry loaf or the cut-away crusts from Melba toast, once headed for the duck pond in the park, still form the basis of another meal. They can perform a variety of jobs, from making a filling winter pasta dish to becoming a summer salad, spiked with chilli and soaked with olive oil.

There are two ways to make breadcrumbs:

Simply put stale but soft bread into the food processor and whiz. These crumbs can be used for stuffings, bread sauce and meatballs, but if you want to dry them, put them on a baking sheet and place in a moderate oven until golden.

Or – dry out old bread slices and rolls in a moderate oven, then either whiz them in a food processor or put them in a strong, thick plastic bag and crush with a rolling pin.

kitchen note

Dried breadcrumbs can be stored in an airtight container, where they will keep for at least three weeks. Fresh ones must be stored in the freezer.

bread sauces for poultry and game

These absorb and flavour the juices of poultry beautifully. I prefer them to bread-based stuffings which can take ages to cook, drying out the birds as they do so.

fried breadcrumbs with lemon

The pine nuts can be left out altogether, or replaced with pecans (for turkey), walnuts (for duck) or shelled unsalted pistachios (for partridge or pheasant).

Serves 4

4 tablespoons olive oil

4 heaped tablespoons fresh or dried breadcrumbs

zest of 1 lemon

4 sprigs of parsley, chopped

2 tablespoons pine nuts

¹/₂ teaspoon crushed pink peppercorns

Heat the oil in a small pan, add all the remaining ingredients and fry gently until golden. Serve with roast turkey, wild duck, partridge or pheasant.

kitchen note

Middle Eastern shops are the best places to buy dried nuts of every variety (and dried fruit, for that matter). Large bags of pistachios and walnuts are always fresh and cost about half the price of those found in conventional groceries and supermarkets.

almond, sherry and clove sauce

An aromatic sauce with a crumb base.

Serves 4

4 tablespoons olive oil

4 garlic cloves, chopped

4 tablespoons fresh or dried breadcrumbs

4 tablespoons ground almonds

8 sprigs of parsley, finely chopped

¹/₂ teaspoon ground cloves

a pinch of ground cinnamon

1 glass of sherry

175ml/6fl oz chicken stock

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a pan, add the garlic and cook until golden. Stir in the breadcrumbs, almonds, parsley, spices and some black pepper. Add the sherry, bring to the boil and simmer for a minute. Then pour in the stock and simmer for a further minute. Season to taste with salt. Serve with rice, beside roasted poultry or game.

traditional bread sauce

Serves 6

600ml/1 pint whole milk

1 onion, peeled and halved, studded with 5 cloves

a pinch of grated nutmeg

about 10 tablespoons fresh breadcrumbs

1 tablespoon butter

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Put the milk in a pan and add the onion halves and nutmeg. Heat to boiling point, then turn off the heat and leave to stand for at least half an hour. Reheat, adding enough fresh breadcrumbs to form a thick sauce, then stir in the butter and season to taste. If the sauce becomes too thick, let it down with more milk.

breadcrumb coatings – suspicious minds

In Italy, difficult food is made appetising for children by coating it in breadcrumbs: veal, chicken or lamb is hammered until thin, then concealed in a crust (see here). It is a proven means of getting children used to the flavour of real meat and away from fast-food nugget culture. You can also use the technique for plaice, prawns, green vegetables such as courgettes – in fact anything that you may not normally get past their suspicious minds on the basis that it is not chips. Crumbed food can be fried in a shallow layer of olive or sunflower oil. Keep an eye on the temperature; the food should emerge from the pan golden, not mahogany.

You need three bowls:

Bowl 1 – contains about 3 tablespoons of plain flour with a tiny pinch of salt. Dip the raw food in this first; it allows the egg to stick to the breadcrumbs and puff away from the meat.

Bowl 2 – contains 1 beaten egg. This is the glue, which firms up when cooking and prevents the breadcrumbs falling off. Dip the floured food in the egg, coating it fully. Use your fingers, tongs or 2 forks.

Bowl 3 – contains the breadcrumbs. For 4 pieces of chicken, fill to 2cm/3/4 inch deep. Use fresh or dried breadcrumbs; you will discover your own preference. Dip the egg-coated meat into the breadcrumbs and roll it around until evenly coated.

kitchen note

Any food that has been crumbed will keep safely in the fridge for the usual time without spoiling. You can also freeze the crumb-coated food before you cook it.

breadcrumbs and garlic with pasta

If possible, use orecchiette pasta for this dish, because the little, saucer-like shapes catch the breadcrumbs so neatly.

Serves 4

400g/14oz broccoli, broken into florets

400g/14oz short durum wheat pasta

2 garlic cloves, crushed

4 tablespoons fresh or dried breadcrumbs

4 tablespoons olive oil

salt and freshly ground black pepper

freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to serve

Bring 2 pans of water to the boil and add salt. Cook the broccoli for 5 minutes and the pasta for whatever time is recommended on the packet (reputable Italian brands give very accurate cooking instructions). The idea is for both to be ready at the same time, so you can drain them in the same colander.

Just before you serve, fry the garlic and breadcrumbs in the oil until golden. Drain the pasta and broccoli and return them to the pasta pan. Stir in the breadcrumbs, season with salt and pepper and serve with grated Parmesan cheese.

kitchen note

Use steamed courgettes, shredded Savoy cabbage, spring greens, calabrese or string beans instead of the broccoli.

breadcrumb, garlic and parsley butter stuffing for shellfish

A treat for large mussels or clams on the half shell. The butter and crumbs make expensive shellfish go further because you can mop up the juices with crusty white bread. You can also serve scallops in the same way.

Serves 4

120g/4oz unsalted butter, left at room temperature overnight

6 sprigs of parsley, finely chopped

6 heaped tablespoons fresh breadcrumbs

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

24 large mussels or 40 clams, cleaned (see here)

sea salt

Pound together the butter, parsley, breadcrumbs and garlic and work in a pinch of salt.

Put the mussels or clams in a large pan, then cover and place over a fairly high heat for 2–3 minutes, until they open. Allow to cool. Remove the top half of each shell, leaving the mussel or clam in the other half. Spread a little stuffing into each (1/2–1 teaspoonful, depending on the size of the shell). Arrange on ovenproof plates – individual ones are best – and place under a hot grill. If you do not have a grill, preheat the oven to 240°C/475°F/Gas Mark 9. Cook until the breadcrumbs are singed and the butter bubbling.

kitchen note

If you have any leftover steamed mussels, cockles or clams, you can fill them with the breadcrumb stuffing and store them in the freezer if there is no immediate use for them. Even a few make an unusually good snack to have with drinks. Grill or bake as above.

soaked bread

I love recipes with soaked bread. It’s funny but I could never stomach puddings or any dish made with soaked grains but sopping wet bread is in a realm of its own. Why else would just about everyone love bread and butter pudding? Bread dishes usually look a total mess but no one minds. The following recipes are for both fresh and stale bread.

breadcrumb salad

Another bread salad, this time one that uses breadcrumbs from sourdough or ciabatta bread. It is lovely and soggy, with oil, peppers, tomatoes and herbs. You can tailor-make it to your taste. Some prefer to leave out the garlic so you can really taste the quality of the olive oil. Serve it for dinner and most will think they are being given a plate of cold porridge but will come round after the first mouthful.

Italians call this dish panzanella, and the restaurant of the same name in Northcote Road (a wonderful market street in Battersea) gave me its approximate method, which I reproduce here. The restaurant uses Puglian bread but any rustic-style sourdough bread will work.

Serves 4

¹/₂ day-old ciabatta or sourdough loaf

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1 garlic clove, finely chopped (optional)

1 carrot, finely grated

6 sprigs of parsley, chopped

salt and freshly ground black pepper

To serve:

¹/₂ fresh red chilli, chopped, or a strip of sweet red pepper,

chopped

halved cherry tomatoes

small black olives

Tear up the bread, put it in a food processor and whiz to rough crumbs. Put them in a bowl, cover with cold water and leave for 5 minutes. Pour the breadcrumbs into a sieve and, using a ladle, press down to squeeze out all the water. Return the breadcrumbs to the bowl. They won’t look too appetising but once you add the oil and vinegar, have a taste. Add the other ingredients, stirring them in well. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Scatter the chopped chilli, halved cherry tomatoes and olives on top.

sourdough bread, wine and onion soup

This is much, much nicer than French onion soup. Instead of one large croûton with cheese in each bowl, the bread is layered, club-sandwich style, with the cheese and baked separately. The hot soup is then ladled over the top.

Serves 4

5 tablespoons olive oil

1.4kg/3lb pink or white onions, sliced

a large pinch of dried thyme

175 ml/6 fl oz red wine

1.2 litres/2 pints well-flavoured beef stock

4 large slices of sourdough bread

1 garlic clove, lightly crushed but left whole

4 heaped tablespoons grated hard cheese (see Kitchen

Note overleaf)

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat 3 tablespoons of the oil in a large pan and add the onions, thyme and some salt. Cook over a very, very low heat for about 45 minutes, until pale gold, soft and sweet tasting. Add the wine, deglazing or scraping any cooking bits from the base of the pan with a wooden spatula. Add the beef stock and bring to simmering point. Taste for seasoning and add salt if necessary. Grind over a little black pepper.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas Mark 5. Rub each slice of bread with the garlic, brush with the remaining oil and cut into quarters. Place 4 pieces of bread in a baking dish. Spoon a dessertspoonful of the cooked onions on to each, followed by a teaspoon of grated cheese, then place another piece of bread on top and repeat, continuing until you have used up all the bread and have 4 multi-layered croûtons. Bake them in the oven for about 15 minutes, until the tops are golden and bubbling.

Put a croûton in each serving bowl. Bring the soup back to boiling point if you have set it to one side. Ladle the onion broth over the croûtons and serve immediately.

kitchen note

I recommend using a hard sheep’s milk, Pecorino-style cheese, such as Lord of the Hundreds or Somerset Rambler, for the croûtons. You could also use a traditional farmhouse Cheddar or other cow’s milk cheese, hard or crumbly. See here for information on cooking with British and Irish cheeses.

summer pudding

This moulded pudding made from dry white bread and a mixture of lightly stewed berries doesn’t require an exact recipe. You will need enough fruit to fill the pudding basin you wish to use, plus a little over. You could use a traditional pudding basin, a soufflé dish or any shallow dish. I sometimes make summer pudding in large plastic containers for children’s meals, serving helpings from them as and when needed. Raspberries, blackberries, tayberries, red and blackcurrants are all suitable for the filling – it’s best to use a mixture, but the pectin-rich raspberries are pretty much essential. You can use strawberries, but they tend to disintegrate wastefully when cooked.

Simply stew the fruit gently until the juices run and add enough sugar to remove any sourness. Line the pudding basin with slices of day-old white bread, pour in the compote and cover with a ‘lid’ of sliced bread, then a saucer small enough to fit inside the basin. Put a weight on top – a can of tomatoes will do – and leave in the fridge overnight.

Push any leftover compote through a sieve to make a sauce. To turn the pudding out, run a blunt knife between the bread casing and the bowl. Invert a plate on top and turn the basin and plate over. If you have ever got water in your gumboots, you will know the noise a summer pudding makes when it unmoulds. Pour over the sauce to cover any white patches. Serve with crème fraîche.

kitchen note

Frozen English berries, organic or conventionally farmed, are a wonderful source of winter fruit and, unlike exotic fruits, they are free of air freight and fossil fuel issues. I use them to make summer puddings in winter for school packed lunches or simply to cheer everyone up. I find them in supermarkets but also in farm shops in big chest freezers.

toffee pudding

Constance Spry again, with a pudding whose flavour has only to be tasted to be loved. I have fed this to everyone and, despite its obvious fudgy stickiness and collapsed appearance, they all say how light it is. Recipe trickery at its best.

Serves 4

120g/4oz butter

120g/4oz demerara sugar

240g/8oz golden syrup

300ml/¹/₂ pint milk

4 thick slices of bread, crusts removed, cut into fingers

whipped cream, to serve

Heat the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a small pan and boil for 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and keep warm. In a separate pan, heat the milk to boiling point. Put the fingers of bread in a dish and pour over the milk. Lift them out, put them into 4 serving bowls and pour over the sauce – you can dip them in the sauce instead but you will have to work fast. Serve immediately, with whipped cream.

winter charlotte with rhubarb and raspberries

For charlottes, buttered day-old bread is placed on top of the fruit and the pudding is baked. Apples and berries make good charlottes, and it is even possible to make a savoury charlotte with chicory, apple and spices that have been slowly cooked until sweet.

Here is a baked winter version of summer pudding, filled with forced rhubarb and frozen raspberries.

Serves 6

about 8 slices of day-old white bread, crusts removed (reserve

them for breadcrumbs, if you like – see here)

softened unsalted butter

ground cinnamon

700g/1¹/₂lb forced rhubarb, cut into 2cm/³/₄ inch lengths

(see here)

400g/14oz frozen raspberries

golden caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6. Butter the bread slices and sprinkle with a little cinnamon. Cut each slice into quarters, then into 8 small triangles.

Put the rhubarb and raspberries into a pan, cover and cook over a low heat until the rhubarb is just soft. Add enough sugar to sweeten to your taste, then pour into a shallow ovenproof dish. Arrange the triangles of bread on top, buttered-side up, working in a fish-scale pattern. Bake the charlotte for about half an hour, until the surface of the bread is golden brown. Remove from the oven and sprinkle caster sugar on top. Serve with fresh custard (see here) or thick double cream.

brioche and fig pudding

For the last 15 years it has been easy to buy French-style breads in almost every town. Purists will quibble at their quality, but they have the slight sourness, crust and tearable dough that make French breads so wonderful. Next to arrive has been brioche – and no, it’s not as good as the artisan-style buttery bread whose fragrance pours out of pâtisseries across the Channel, but it’s not bad either. Our local late-night shop always sells brioche loaves wrapped in plastic, which keep for a suspiciously long time. They are too claggy to eat fresh but make terrific emergency puddings.

Serves 4

10 slices of brioche

5 ready-to-eat dried figs, sliced

4 egg yolks

300ml/¹/₂ pint whole milk

125ml/4fl oz double cream

1 tablespoon golden caster sugar

¹/₂ teaspoon vanilla extract

a pinch of grated nutmeg

caster sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas Mark 5. Toast the brioche slices in a dry frying pan over a medium heat; they burn very easily, so be careful. Cut the slices into triangles and arrange them in overlapping layers in an ovenproof dish, points/corners up. Slot a slice of fig between each one.

Whisk the egg yolks into the milk and add the cream, sugar and vanilla. Put in a saucepan and heat gently, stirring, but do not let it boil. As soon as it thickens slightly, pour it over the brioche and figs and scatter a pinch of nutmeg on to the surface. Bake the pudding for 20–30 minutes, until golden on top and just set. Dust with caster sugar and serve with cream.

alternative flours

Flour made from wheat is clearly the most versatile, and the keeping qualities gluten gives to bread are a real advantage, as the previous recipes show. But there are alternative flours made from vegetables and nuts that are well worth discovering. Finding a bag of gram flour in an Asian shop in Tooting Bec was the beginning of a new friendship with flour in savoury cooking for me, and my favourite recipe for orange cake would be no good without potato flour.

gram flour

Gram flour is milled from dried chick peas and is a light, gentle-flavoured flour with a smooth texture. It is used extensively in Indian cooking, in fritters or to coat vegetables for frying.

gram coating for poultry, game and fish

A practical way to season poultry and game or whole fish like sole and trout before you fry it. Quicker than breadcrumbing, it also absorbs the sometimes unpleasant fat on poultry skin that spits as it cooks.

gram flour

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons dried oregano

freshly ground black pepper

Scatter gram flour on to a dinner plate in a layer 5 mm/¹/₄ inch deep. Mix in the salt and oregano and grind over some black pepper. Roll the meat or fish in the mixture and cook.

gram and cheddar shortbreads

Makes 12–16 (enough to serve 4 people with drinks)

90g/3oz gram flour, sifted

75g/2¹/₂oz very mature farmhouse Cheddar cheese, roughly grated

75g/2¹/₂oz chilled unsalted butter, cut into cubes

a large pinch of cayenne pepper

¹/₂ teaspoon sea salt

a pinch of freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon very cold water

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas Mark 5. Put the flour, cheese, butter, cayenne and seasoning into a food processor and whiz until the mixture has a breadcrumb consistency. Add the water and whiz again. As soon as the crumbs begin to form a dough, tip them on to a board and knead together until smooth. Work quickly; the mixture should not become greasy.

Shape the dough into a cylinder and cut it into 1cm thick slices. Put them 2cm/³/₄ inch apart on a baking sheet lined with baking parchment or greaseproof paper. Place in the fridge for 20 minutes, then bake for 15 minutes, until the shortbreads are slightly puffed, their edges lightly brown.

kitchen note

To decorate and add flavour, roll the cylinder of dough in chopped pistachio nuts, or scatter toasted black cumin seeds or flaked almonds on to the sliced biscuits before baking.

potato flour

In Italy, potato flour is added to sweet cakes with ground nuts, giving them an almost impossible lightness and delicious dry crumb. It is also used to coat pork before frying. Also known as fécule, potato flour is available from Italian stores and wholefood shops. It is very white, and squeaks when rubbed between your fingers.

almond and orange cake

Based on Anna del Conte’s recipe in her book, Secrets of an Italian Kitchen (Bantam Press, 1989), this is a subtle cake to eat after a meal with a little crème fraîche.

150g/5oz blanched almonds, whole or flaked

3 eggs, separated

150g/5oz golden caster sugar

60g/2oz potato flour

1¹/₂ oranges

a pinch of salt

30g/1oz butter, softened

icing sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 160°C/325°F/Gas Mark 3. Chop the almonds in a food processor, or finely by hand, until they have a crumb-like texture. Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until pale and creamy. Add the almonds and the potato flour. Grate the zest of the whole orange into the mixture, then add the juice of 1¹/₂ oranges.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites with the salt until they form stiff peaks. Fold them into the orange and egg mixture. Butter a 20cm/8 inch round cake tin – use up all the butter; when it cooks it will be absorbed into the cake and form a delicious crust. Pour in the mixture and bake for 50 minutes, until the cake has shrunk from the side of the tin and feels springy when you press the surface with a finger. Unmould the cake and cool on a wire rack. Dust with icing sugar.

2 store

A good cook knows how to squirrel food away, storing it to save not just time but money, too. Squirrelling reduces the number of occasions when you hear yourself say, ‘I haven’t the time to cook.’ It is also a comfort when you don’t want to shop. It’s not that taking an evening off cooking is a bad thing, but with the pressure upon everyone to work longer hours and spend more time on other pursuits, a night off cooking can turn into six nights. And unless you really hate cooking, it’s not just the cost that is irksome but the sensation that you are 100 per cent reliant on others to choose the food you eat.

A good store of food not only means more home cooking and therefore more pleasure, it makes good economic sense, rewarding you with more money to spend on other things.

A few organisational skills are needed. Briefly imagine living on a boat. The bulk of what you eat must come from packets, cans, or sacks kept in the dark to prevent the contents rotting. Before the days of fridge freezers, the ship’s cook must have been a man of talent, able not only to improvise with the few fresh ingredients available but – who knows? – perhaps also to prevent a crew going stir-crazy from meal tedium. Knowing how to use your stores is a good discipline. Even with the advantages of refrigerated storage, store food has changed little from centuries ago.

The miles of aisles devoted to bottled, canned, frozen and packet food are endless. Spoilt for choice, that’s us – yet look again and there are very few things that anyone really needs. Cooking sauce? Try a little oil, spice and lemon. Flavoured rice? Add dried wild mushrooms to ordinary rice. Ready-made vegetable curry? Heat canned tomatoes, coconut milk and spices with canned chick peas.

Food manufacturers are always keen to show journalists their latest innovations. Warrens of laboratories are devoted to the imaginings of their development teams. In the name of convenience, they bottle and preserve our favourite foods and create some weird new ones. My heart sinks when I see all this effort in pursuit of the impossible. Fresh pesto tickles every sense; bottled is, well, all right. Home-made tomato sauce is sweet, light and delicate; commercially bottled tomato sauce is salty and acidic, bulked out with thickeners to make money for the manufacturer. None of these is essential. Lazy cooks could save themselves the bother of carrying it all home if only they would shake a little good olive oil on to cooked pasta, chop a bit of chilli and mash a little garlic. This is olio d’aglio – the sauce to make when you come in at midnight, desperate not just for food but for real cooking.

The contents of my store cupboard are minimal. Actually, that’s not entirely true. The contents of my store cupboard are vast, but most of it is food bought that is never finished. No matter how clever the manufacturer, I don’t want their poppy seed, tarragon and lemon salad dressing – I want my bottle of olive oil and a lemon, and a little soft crystal sea salt. The contents of my store cupboard that I use are minimal. That is the truth.

This is about the sum of it. I could potentially survive on the following but the children would complain:

dried foods

Grains – Rice, couscous, bulgar, hulled durum wheat.

Dried pulses – Green lentils, including Puy, and red lentils.

Cans – Tomatoes, coconut milk, artichokes in brine; beans (cannellini, flageolet, butter beans) and chick peas; plus there’s always a tin of dried Colman’s mustard powder, ready to mix with water to eat beside Saturday breakfast chipolata sausages.

Bottles – French mustard, capers and gherkins.

Packets – Flours – strong white and wholemeal, plain and self raising plus some alternative flours like gram and potato flour; pasta – both long and short durum wheat pasta, and nests of noodles made with egg; sugar – unrefined caster and soft brown; spices, seeds (sesame and pumpkin), dried fruit (figs, prunes, sultanas), pine nuts and pistachios.

Fruit and vegetables – Oranges and lemons, potatoes, garlic, shallots and onions.

Finally, by the hob, there are two bottles of olive oil – standard and good – plus sesame oil, avocado oil (both good wok oils), soy sauce, red wine vinegar and rice vinegar.

the fridge

Fats – Butter, dripping, coconut cream and duck fat.

Dry-cured meat – bacon, ham, salami and chorizo.

Fresh herbs and salad leaves – wrapped in damp newspaper these keep a long time.

the freezer

Meat – A variety of cuts, plus sausages and chicken (see the chapters on meat and poultry).

Stock – frozen in plastic bottles.

Seafood – Atlantic prawns and squid.

Bought pastry, breadcrumbs.

Fruit and vegetables – red berries, plus oddities like stewed quince and rhubarb, peas and broad beans, and invaluable cooked tomato sauce.

The dried foods listed above are items that have, more or less, been in store cupboards for ever. The important thing is to put them into a modern context, making them fit the life you lead now. It isn’t necessary to buy 50 different foods a week. Just a few will do, each put to more than one use. Look at what is fresh in the house, or what can be bought at the shop you pass on the way home. Can it be used with one of your store foods? The shop has spring onions, you have some eggs, frozen peas, and cooked rice left over from last night. A bowl of fried rice is yours, and very good it can be.

cooked store foods

There is a group of storable foods that, since they are already cooked, can be swiftly added to something else for an almost-instant meal. Leftover rice; tomatoes simmered until sweet with oil; mashed potato; braised lentils; meat sauce, and stock – these are the things that really do save time shopping and cooking, while simultaneously helping to provide the home cooking that everyone craves deep down.

food-safety rules

Modern food-safety advice can be the enemy of good home economics. It encourages wastefulness and, worse, it promotes the idea of microwaving chilled or frozen food in sealed containers. Talk of reheating food is viewed by the food-safety authorities as subversive stuff – dangerous talk perverting the nanny state’s plan to make all food safe. But there’s no hope of making all food safe. Not when 60 million humans are on the loose – eating dirt as babies, sharing dinners with family pets as toddlers. Who hasn’t occasionally sampled the glory of a dropped 99 ice cream with its topping of earth and grass, or gallantly rescued a dusty boiled sweet from under the sofa? And in adulthood there are all sorts of opportunities to eat living food, as you begin to enjoy handmade cheeses, air-dried meat and reheated leftovers.

The thing to bear in mind is that the most dangerous thing about food is the person handling it. If you store and reheat food, use your common sense, and your senses. Keep cooked food in clean, sealed containers in the fridge and check it for signs of deterioration in terms of appearance and smell. Always make sure you reheat food thoroughly before use, and the risk to anyone who’s had that dirt-eating, droppedlolly childhood should be low.

rice

I recommend deliberately cooking more long grain or basmati rice than you need. Kept in a sealed container in the fridge, it yields almost-instant meals throughout the week: reheated into a pilaff with meat or vegetables; stir-fried with peas; or stirred into lemongrass-infused coconut milk. Short grain or risotto rice can be partly cooked, then stored to make into quick risottos; any leftover risotto can be rolled into balls, crumbed, fried and eaten with green salad.

rice economics

The value of rice – and all grains, beans and pulses, for that matter – lies in its ability to provide a cheap, meatless meal. Once you accept the principle that more must be paid for better meat, inexpensive foods such as rice become essential. A kilo of good-quality basmati rice should cost around £2.75, while Arborio rice will be about £4. They will yield 20 servings of 50g, each serving costing 14 pence and 20 pence respectively. The cost of added fat, vegetables, herbs and spices is minimal, so this is great food, economically and gastronomically.

buying rice

To make it easy, I buy just two types of rice: genuine long grain basmati from India or Pakistan, and Italian short grain rice, usually Arborio but I have also made short grain rice dishes with Carnaroli, Spanish paella rice and even ‘pudding rice’, which works magnificently in emergencies.

Basmati rice is grown in the foothills of the Himalayas, in both India and Pakistan. It is the rice I eat plain with curries and sometimes with fish, or make into pilaffs and re-fry in a pan. Good basmati lengthens to almost twice its size when cooked, so it is worth paying for the best. Choose genuine brands, labelled ‘pure’ basmati, rather than the cheaper, inferior hybrids, which do not lengthen in the same way.

Asian stores and some supermarket delivery services sell 5-kilo bags of pure basmati rice. They have nylon zips so they can be properly sealed to keep out bugs and mites, which is very important. A bag of this size costs approximately £10, bringing the price of one helping of best basmati rice down to 10 pence.

American long grain rice is the other choice. But, while it is cheaper and meatier, it does not have the elegant scent of basmati or its enjoyable texture in the mouth.

Short grain rice is used for risotto and rice puddings. It can absorb twice or more of its weight in liquid, and should retain a tiny opaque pearl of hardness in the centre when perfectly cooked. There are many brands, most of which perform their task well, but makers of specialist varieties from Italy or Spain will wax on about their superiority – which is, in my view, less obvious than it is with genuine basmati.

to cook basmati or long grain white rice

The following method should solve your rice troubles, but given time you will instinctively know when to turn off the heat, how long to leave the lid on, and so on. I like to wash and soak the rice first, as it shortens the cooking time by a few minutes and also helps to produce perfectly cooked, unbroken grains. However, you can omit this procedure if you prefer.

Serves 4–8, depending on appetite

480g/1 lb long grain white rice

600ml/1 pint water

To wash the rice, place it in a saucepan, fill the pan with water, then swirl the rice around a bit to release the starch. Carefully pour most of the water away, leaving the rice in the pan. Repeat twice, then cover the rice with water again and leave to soak for a minimum of 15 minutes.

Drain the rice in a sieve, then return it to the pan and add the 600ml/l pint of water. Bring to the boil, stirring once. Let the rice simmer, uncovered, for about 10 minutes, until all the water has been absorbed, then cover the pan with a well-fitting lid – put foil between the lid and the pan if it is loose. You do not want the vapour to escape. Turn the heat down very low and continue to cook for 5–7 minutes. Turn off the heat and leave the rice for a further 5 minutes, without removing the lid. Fork the rice to loosen the grains and it is ready to eat.

kitchen note

Regular rice cooks rely on their rice steamers, which not only cook perfect rice but keep it warm safely. The best are available from Asian shops.

how to store cooked rice

Cool the rice quickly in the pan with the lid slightly off, immersing the base of the pan in a bowl of very cold or iced water. When the rice is cold, transfer it immediately to a clean plastic container with a tight-fitting lid. It will keep in the fridge for about five days. Smell it and inspect for deterioration before use.

The following three recipes serve two and can be made in minutes – they make perfect TV dinners.

fried rice

An enormous bowl of this, on the knee – a big cup of jasmine tea beside – makes an immaculate dinner on its own.

Serves 2

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

a few drops of sesame oil

2 helpings of cooked basmati rice (see here)

4 spring onions, chopped

1 egg, beaten

4 tablespoons frozen peas

Heat the oils in a non-stick frying pan or a well-seasoned wok, add the rice and stir-fry quickly over a high heat. Mix the spring onions with the beaten egg, push the rice to the edge of the pan and pour in the egg mixture. Turn the heat down to medium and cook, stirring, for a minute. Bring the rice back over the egg and stir thoroughly but with a light touch, flicking the egg through the rice. Once the egg has turned from transparent to pale yellow, stir in the peas, heat for a minute until they defrost and warm through, and eat.

cooked rice with coconut, lemongrass and galangal

Southeast Asian shops can be few and far between but passing one should mean popping in for tubs of real green, red and yellow curry paste, coconut cream and milk, huge bags of rice, galangal, fresh lime leaves and lemongrass. This rice meal takes the edge off the craving for a sour-hot curry, but without the need for a fresh supply of meat.

Serves 2

1 tablespoon oil

1 tablespoon green curry paste

1 red pepper, cut into 1cm/¹/₂ inch squares (optional)

2cm/³/₄ inch piece of lemongrass, outer layers removed, then

very thinly sliced

2cm/³/₄ inch piece of fresh galangal, crushed, or fresh ginger

2 fresh or dried lime leaves

250ml/8fl oz canned coconut milk, or 4cm/1¹/₂ inches cut from

a block of coconut cream and broken into 250ml/8fl oz water

2 helpings of cooked basmati rice (see here)

leaves from 4 sprigs of mint or basil

salt

Put the oil in a saucepan with the curry paste and heat through. Add the red pepper, if using, plus the lemongrass, galangal and lime leaves, followed by the coconut milk. Bring to the boil and simmer for 3 minutes. Add the rice and bring back to the boil, then stir in the herbs and season with salt to taste. Tip into bowls and eat with a spoon.

aubergine and pumpkin seed rice

When I want a warm and filling lunch that will not see me slump fast asleep over my desk mid afternoon, I heat a little cooked rice in a pan with some cooked vegetables, cumin and a few nuts or seeds. I eat it with plain yoghurt – there is usually some in the fridge – and a teaspoon of bought harissa, the hot pepper sauce of North Africa. The fresh ingredients in the following recipe could be replaced by tomatoes, shallots, spring greens, squash or pumpkin.

Serves 2

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 aubergine, diced

1 onion, chopped

2 celery sticks, chopped

1 tablespoon green pumpkin seeds

1 teaspoon ground cumin

2 tablespoons stock or water

2 helpings of cooked basmati rice (see here)

leaves from 2 sprigs of mint

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a pan and add the aubergine, onion and celery. Cook, stirring, until the aubergine is soft, then add the pumpkin seeds, cumin and stock or water. Mix in the rice and reheat thoroughly. Add the mint and season to taste.

kitchen notes

For a richer, sweeter dish, substitute sherry for the stock or water.

A recipe for pilaff using cold cooked rice and leftover roast lamb can be found on here 202.

kedgeree

We made this for a big Christening party recently and agreed that kedgeree is hard-to-beat party food. The bare bones can be made in advance and assembled just before everyone arrives. It’s also incredibly rich. A little fish goes a long way in kedgeree, which is an advantage with the high price of sustainable fish. For information on how to choose fish, see here.

Serves 8–12

480g/1 lb smoked fish fillet – haddock, pollack or hot-smoked

organic salmon (see the Shopping Guide)

1 onion, cut in half

6 cardamom pods, crushed

250ml/8fl oz creamy milk

90ml/3fl oz single cream

1 quantity of cooked basmati rice (see here)

180g/6oz cooked peeled North Atlantic prawns (optional)

1cm/¹/₂ inch piece of fresh ginger, grated

1 teaspoon cumin seeds, toasted and ground in a pestle and mortar

6 fennel seeds, toasted and ground as above

¹/₂ teaspoon ground turmeric

30g/1oz butter, melted

4 semi-soft boiled eggs (see here), peeled and quartered

8 sprigs of coriander, chopped

Put the fish in a pan with the onion and cardamom pods and pour over the milk and cream. Place over a medium heat and bring up to boiling point. Turn down to a simmer and cook for 5 minutes, or until the fish begins to firm up and flake apart (if you are using hot-smoked salmon, you will not need to cook it – just bring to the boil). Strain off the creamy milk and reserve.

Break the fish into large flakes, discarding any skin or bones, and mix lightly with the rice and prawns. Add the remaining spices, pour over the reserved creamy milk and the melted butter and mix quite thoroughly. Strew the eggs on top and scatter over the coriander.

rice, cucumber and dill salad

The herbs lend their aromas, the onion seed gives a sharp little kick and the cucumber cools down this salad. It will not spoil if you take it to work in a carton. It’s also very good eaten outdoors, with barbecued sardines or lamb.

Serves 2

2 helpings of cooked basmati rice (see here)

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

juice of ¹/₂ lemon

a pinch of sea salt

¹/₂ cucumber, cut in half lengthways, then peeled, deseeded

and sliced

4 sprigs of dill, chopped

4 sprigs of chervil, if available, or flat-leaf parsley, torn into

smaller sprigs

¹/₂ teaspoon black onion seeds (nigella)

freshly ground black pepper

Put the rice in a deep bowl, add the oil, lemon juice and salt and mix well. Add a little more oil if you want a wetter salad. Add the cucumber and dill and mix again. Strew the chervil leaves on top. Throw over the onion seeds and finish with a grind or two of black pepper.

short grain rice

There are various traditional risotto recipes in the Stock chapter (see here) but here is the store-method recipe.

store-method risotto

This technique is used in very busy Italian restaurants that want to be able to make a genuine risotto in 15, not 30, minutes. Although it is frowned upon by purists, it is very useful for anyone who works long hours.

1 tablespoon butter

1 onion, finely chopped

300 g/10 oz short grain Italian rice, such as Arborio

1 glass of white wine (optional)

1–1.5 litres/1³/₄–2¹/₂ pints chicken, vegetable or beef stock

Melt the butter in a large pan, add the onion and cook until soft. Add the rice and cook, stirring (preferably with a wooden fork), for 1 minute. Stir in the glass of wine, if using. When it has been absorbed, begin to add the stock a ladleful at a time, stirring constantly over a medium heat. After 10–15 minutes, taste the rice – it should be half cooked, with a white, opaque centre. Strain it, reserving any cooking liquor. Cool the cooking liquor, add it to the remaining stock and store in the fridge, clearly marked. Spread the rice out on a plastic tray, no more than 2cm/³/₄ inch deep. Allow to cool, cover with cling film and store in the fridge. It will keep for 2–3 days.

To finish the risotto, cut a piece of the rice from the tray – as much as you need – and put it in a pan. Cover with just enough of the cooking liquor to make it sloppy when stirred. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and cook gently for a few minutes, until the rice is tender but firm to the bite – al dente. Do not stir. The risotto should be cooked perfectly and ready for Parmesan or a grated hard ewe’s milk cheese, plus any other ingredients (see the recipes here for risotto inspiration).

fried risotto cakes

Leftover risotto can be shaped into little cakes – a cube of mozzarella hidden inside – then dipped first in flour, then beaten egg, then dried breadcrumbs. Shallow-fry them in a little olive oil and eat as a lunch dish, with a lush green salad.

couscous, bulgar and other grains

This is my sister Sam’s domain. She runs Moro, the Moorish-influenced London restaurant, with her husband, Sam, and they know more about grains and allied North African dishes than I can shake a stick at. But in the New English Kitchen, where your pricy piece of meat is reserved for special occasions, grains provide diversity – a lively change from rice. Use whole durum wheat (sometimes sold as pasta wheat or Ebly) in broths (see here) and salads, and use grains such as bulgar wheat (cracked whole wheat) and couscous (grains of semolina paste made from durum wheat) in salads with herbs. If you have the chance, buy your grains – along with wonderfully fresh nuts, juicy dried fruits and big bunches of herbs – from Middle Eastern shops. They usually do good bulk deals and take great pride in the quality of these essential goodies. Middle Eastern shops also sell a finer version of bulgar, the true grain to use in a tabbouleh salad with parsley, oil and lemon juice. Couscous is usually sold pre-cooked in the UK, and needs only moistening with water.

to make a store of couscous

To create a store of 6 helpings, put a 240g/8oz teacupful of couscous in a plastic container that will take twice that amount and pour over 200ml/7fl oz cold water and 3 tablespoons of olive oil, stirring. Stir in a large pinch of salt and leave the couscous to swell. After 15 minutes, test the grains to see if they are tender – add a little more water if they are still dry. Use a fork to loosen the grains, then cover the container and put it in the fridge, where it will keep for about 5 days.

Couscous can be eaten very simply with boiled purple sprouting broccoli (see here) or with the baked chick pea recipe (see here). For a decorative, mighty feast, see the recipe below. Its flavour benefits from being made well in advance.

reheating couscous

There are two ways to do this. Put the couscous in an ovenproof dish with a large knob of butter, cover with foil and place in an oven preheated to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 for 20 minutes. Alternatively, melt some butter in a pan, add the couscous and stir over a low heat until warmed through.

a couscous feast

It must be 20 years since I first saw a bowl of hot couscous next to a grand platter of simmered meats and vegetables. It was in France, close to the Mediterranean coast, where merguez sausages, tabbouleh and harissa – a paste made with hot red peppers – could be bought in almost every grocery. Then it seemed so alien. Now couscous, like risotto and dal, has become neo-English; it has a second home and a new following. I like to cook it in a festive way, covering the table with all the component dishes: a large platter of braised lamb and poultry, plus steamed courgettes, carrots, runner beans and golden beetroot (when I can find it – the colour of red beetroot invades in an unpleasant way). There’s a bowl filled with fresh parsley and mint leaves, another with toasted nuts and golden sultanas, a dish of harissa, and finally a large pan filled with the cooking juices from the meat, ready to ladle over everything. It’s probably inauthentic, but it works.

Serves 8 generously (I am always happy to have leftovers from this for reheating later)

2 small, corn-fed chickens, jointed and skinned (ask the butcher to

prepare them for you, with the lamb)

8 lamb shanks, trimmed of fat

10 sprigs of flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped

4 onions, finely chopped

about 2 litres/3¹/₂ pints water or chicken stock

120g/4oz butter

2 teaspoons ground coriander

8 spring carrots, trimmed of leaves, then halved lengthways

4 courgettes, cut lengthways into quarters

about 10 runner beans, cut on the diagonal into 2cm/³/₄ inch lengths

240g/8oz string beans

4 golden beetroot, scrubbed, cut into quarters, and boiled for

30 minutes

salt and freshly ground black pepper

To serve:

leaves from 8 sprigs of parsley

leaves from 8 sprigs of mint

4 tablespoons flaked almonds, toasted in a dry frying pan until golden

4 tablespoons sultanas or 4 dried figs, sliced

harissa sauce (available from Middle Eastern shops and

specialist shops)

480g/1lb couscous, cooked (see here)

Put the chickens in one saucepan and the lamb in your largest pan. Throw half the parsley and half the onion into each pan. Grind about half a teaspoon of black pepper into each, then cover with the water or stock. Bring to the boil, skimming away any foam that rises to the surface. Turn down to a simmer and cook for about 20 minutes, then put half the butter and ground coriander into each pan. Let the chicken simmer for another 20 minutes, then turn off the heat. Continue to cook the lamb for 1¹/₂ hours; it should become very tender.

Put all the vegetables in a steamer, or simply put them on top of the lamb, and cook, covered, for 10–12 minutes, until they are just tender. Bring the chicken back to the boil (if there is no room for all the vegetables in the lamb pan, you could put the rest in with the chicken and cook as for the lamb).

To serve, put the herbs, almonds and sultanas or figs into separate bowls. Lift out the meat and arrange it on a large dish with the vegetables all around. Pour all the stock into a pan, then taste and season with salt and pepper if necessary. Bring back to the boil. Spoon the heated couscous on to each serving plate, followed by the meat and vegetables, then some of the herbs, nuts and sultanas or figs. Ladle over the stock to moisten, then offer the harissa to those who like a bit of heat in their food.

to make a store of bulgar wheat

Put 240g/8oz bulgar in a pan, cover with water and add a good pinch of salt. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 8 minutes, until tender. Drain and either use immediately or cool quickly and put into a sealed container. Store in the fridge for up to 5 days.

bulgar and parsley salad for barbecued meat

The salad to make during a parsley glut – you will need a lot of tender leaves.

Serves 2

2 tablespoons pine nuts

2 helpings of cooked bulgar wheat (see here)

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

juice of ¹/₂ lemon

a pinch of sea salt

8 sprigs of parsley, very finely chopped

2 spring onions, finely chopped

freshly ground black pepper

Toast the pine nuts in a dry frying pan over a medium heat until golden. Add them to the bulgar wheat with all the other ingredients and stir well. Eat with flat breads (see here) or grilled meat.

lentils

With lentils you enter the realms of pulses, and the many braised dishes that can be made with them. These are foods that can form a meal in their own right, without meat, fish or eggs, because they contain proteins and fats, but you can also feast on them with those foods. Lentils that have been hulled and split, such as red lentils, are best for soft, sloppy dal-like dishes to eat with hot flat breads (see here), while whole lentils belong in stews and salads.

You can make a store of lentils – green ones are good because they will stay firm in a sealed container – eating them once with a big meal, then dipping into them for little dishes of curry, or in salads with semi-soft boiled eggs and herbs.

Puy lentils are the finest. They have blue-grey marbled skins and cost more than standard green lentils, which are over twice the size. Cooked, they have a shiny, almost caviar-like quality and pop pleasingly in your mouth. Both types are easy to overcook, becoming a dry, powdery hash, so keep an eye on them when they are on the go.

to cook puy lentils

Serves about 10

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 garlic clove, chopped

1 white onion, finely chopped

480g/1lb Puy lentils

¹/₂ teaspoon dried thyme

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a saucepan and add the garlic, onion, lentils and thyme. Swish them around in the warm oil for a minute or two, then cover with water (or stock). Bring to the boil and simmer for about 30 minutes; when cooked, the lentils should be tender inside, with firm skins. Add more liquid during cooking if you need to.

Remove the pan from the heat and tip the lentils into a large, cold bowl – it is important to stop the cooking process and – if you are storing them – to cool them quickly before putting them in the fridge. Season with salt and pepper. When the lentils are completely cold, cover and place in the fridge, where they will keep for about 5 days.

kitchen note

Use a combination of red wine and water for a rich lentil stew to eat with beef or game.

lentils and eggs

Undeniably pretty to look at, this recipe has become a picnic lunch regular.

Serves 2

8 heaped tablespoons of cooked lentils (see here)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 teaspoon red wine vinegar

3 sprigs of coriander, chopped

4 semi-soft-boiled eggs (see here), peeled and halved lengthways

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Put the lentils in a bowl and add the oil, vinegar and three-quarters of the coriander. Season with salt and a few grinds of black pepper. Spoon on to a flat dish and arrange the eggs on top. Scatter the remaining coriander leaves over them.

kitchen note

You can use a few pinches of a good curry powder to devil up the eggs a bit.

spiced green lentils with buttered spinach

Scoop this rich, green stew up with strips of hot flat bread – either bought naans or bread made using the recipe on here 22.

Serves 4

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 white onion, chopped

1 tablespoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon turmeric

¹/₂ teaspoon cayenne pepper

12 heaped tablespoons of cooked lentils (see here)

150ml/¹/₄ pint water or stock

150g/5oz unsalted butter, melted

480g/1lb frozen spinach leaves, defrosted, the water squeezed out

salt

Heat the oil in a saucepan, add the onion and fry over a low heat until it turns the colour of fudge. Add the spices and heat through, then add the lentils and cook for 1 minute, stirring slowly. Add the water or stock and bring to the boil. Simmer for 5 minutes, then remove from the heat and season with salt.

Melt the butter in a large frying pan. When it foams, add the spinach and cook for 1 minute, until it wilts. Pour the spinach on top of the lentils, with the butter, and take it to the table without stirring.

braised red lentils with lime juice and fresh ewe’s milk cheese

A meal in itself – soft hulled red lentils, citrus, lots of spice as for dal and lumps of fresh, lemony ewe’s milk cheese – feta is best – added at the end. Serve in big bowls and abandon forks, giving everyone a big spoon instead. It can also be stored in the fridge for a few days and successfully reheated.

Serves 4–6

240g/8oz red lentils

1 onion, chopped

a pinch of ground turmeric

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 garlic cloves, chopped

2 hot green chillies, chopped

2cm/³/₄ inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped

juice of 1 lime

2 kaffir lime leaves, slightly torn

240g/8oz feta cheese, broken into lumps

Put the lentils in a pan with the onion and turmeric, cover with water (or stock) and bring to the boil. Simmer for 45 minutes, then strain.

Heat the oil in a large frying pan, add the garlic, chillies and ginger and cook over a medium heat until singed light brown, but not burnt. Stir in the lentils, lime juice and lime leaves, then bring to the boil and add the cheese. Take to the table when very hot – the cheese will soften as it heats through.

beans

Beans are the pasta of Spain and the Latin American countries where they come from, but they do not share pasta’s convenience-food factor – unless bought in cans. Dried beans bought in the UK take a seeming age to cook and there is a reason for this. In countries where beans are really valued, they tend to be fresher even when dried, since they are taken from the new-season crops. Ageing beans, dry as can be and probably years old, are sent to those who care less about them – to, er, places like Britain, where everyone happily consumes chicken breasts and tiger prawns for their protein fix. So we get the old beans – the ones that take ages to cook. No wonder everyone prefers pasta. Chick peas are the worst – I once waited seven hours for a pan to produce a batch soft enough to eat. The energy cost must have run to the price of a rib of beef. You can buy better beans (there are specialist varieties in Spanish groceries), and patience – or a pressure cooker – will deliver nice tender beans eventually. It’s not that you have to do anything while they go through their eternal simmer, just that you have to be around – and most people would prefer to be doing something else.

It’s because of this that I am a fan of canned beans. I buy my haricots, cannellini, flageolet and black-eyed beans in cans. They still go a long way – averaging 30 pence per helping – and are perfectly cooked and ready to use. They keep for ever and, apart from being damned heavy to carry back from the shop, are a practically perfect food.

windowsill bean sprouts

Not the oriental sprouts but mung bean sprouts, left on damp paper. This is a lovely, crunchy little sprout that gives its liveliness to open sandwiches made with cold meat and mustard. Children can be put in charge of production – the biology lesson alone is healthy stuff.

Use an old wooden or plastic seed tray with drainage holes and put it on something leak proof. Cover with four layers of kitchen roll and dampen with water. Scatter mung beans on top and leave to germinate, moistening the paper again if necessary. When the sprouts are about 2cm/³/₄ inch high, after about four days, they are ready to eat.

You can do the same with herb seeds, and slavishly follow the current fashion for pointless but fun infantile plantlings. Frankly, bigger leaves have far more oomph. But there’s no harm in them, and buying big packs of coriander seeds will produce coriander babies in a matter of days, to chuck on to green salads, open sandwiches and shut ones.

butter beans marinated with shallots and watercress

To eat with cold meat, such as ham, pork, chicken or beef.

Serves 4

6 shallots, sliced

6 tablespoons olive oil

2 cans of butter beans, drained

the leaves from 2 bunches of watercress (the stalks can be

reserved for soup)

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

In a saucepan, stew the shallots in the oil for about 2 minutes to remove their raw aroma. Add the beans, remove from the heat and leave to steep in the shallot-flavoured oil until cold. Season to taste and add the watercress, stirring the salad well.

This salad will keep in the fridge for a week – the watercress will wilt but it will still taste lovely. Again, this goes against standard food-safety advice but I check it, smell it, and look for any bubbles or bad signs.

kitchen note

Add canned tuna to this recipe (see here).

baked chick peas, peppers and potatoes with yoghurt sauce

Another one-pot standard to keep in the fridge for busy weeks when you don’t want to cook. The yoghurt sauce will brighten it, and it’s good alone or as a side-of-the-plate number.

Serves 6–8

3 teaspoons ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

¹/₂ teaspoon salt

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 onions, sliced

2 red peppers, cut into strips

2 cans of chick peas, drained

20 cherry tomatoes, or 6 small tomatoes, halved

2 sprigs of thyme

600ml/1 pint chicken, vegetable or beef stock

1 tablespoon butter

For the yoghurt sauce:

8 tablespoons plain yoghurt

1 tablespoon olive oil

a pinch of salt

1 teaspoon black onion seeds (nigella)

Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6. Mix the spices, pepper and salt together in a small bowl – you will need them as you layer the dish.

Heat the oil in a large casserole and add the onions and red peppers. Cook them over a medium heat until they soften, then add a layer of sliced potatoes and season with the spice mixture. Add a layer of chick peas with half the tomatoes and a sprig of thyme, then season again. Repeat the layering process, finishing with a layer of potatoes and using all the spice mixture. Pour over the stock, dot the surface with the butter and bake for 1 hour, or until the potatoes are tender. Leave for half an hour before you eat, to let the flavours merge.

For the sauce, combine the yoghurt with the olive oil and salt in a bowl. Scatter the black onion seeds on top and serve with the baked chick peas.

potatoes

Buying sacks of British potatoes at the roadside, even in cities, is a great economy. They should be sold in paper sacks to keep the light away from them and prevent them turning green. I now keep a metal dustbin outdoors for potatoes but as long as you store them in a cool, dark place they should be fine.

Looking at the supermarket shelves, you would think that only two or three potato varieties grow in the UK. It’s not that Maris Piper, King Edwards or Desiree are dull, simply that there are dozens of other varieties in danger of vanishing unless there is a demand for them – and we, the cooks, are missing out. Many of them are lovely, with colours ranging from white to yellow, and purple to a strange blue-black. Some are waxy, some are earthy and fibrous, some even taste of lemons or chestnuts. Seek out Kerrs Pink, Shetland Black, Wilja and Golden Wonder, as well as some interesting varieties of new potato (see the Shopping Guide). The types of potato grown in domestic gardens are more exciting still – these are the places where you will find old-fashioned varieties such as British Queen, Arran Pilot, Majestic, Suttons Foremost and the various Pentlands.

I would always choose British potatoes over imported but there is a window, between March and May, when supplies are low and the quality is frankly poor. I compromise by buying imports from Cyprus and Spain. I look out for organic when I can, as I do with British potatoes, for clear reasons:

organic potatoes

The season for organic potatoes in Britain is shorter than that for conventionally grown potatoes. The first organic new potatoes are dug in late April/early May and the first large, storable potatoes arrive in shops in September. The late arrival is due simply to the slower growth rate – conventional potatoes grow fast with the help of fertiliser and a lot of water. Using less water and allowing the potato to grow at a natural rate not only strengthens it, protecting it from disease, but it gives the potato more flavour. Here is an instance where there is no doubt at all that an organic food has more flavour than its conventional counterpart. Ordinary potatoes are routinely treated with anti-blight spray – their fast growth means weaker plants that need frequent treatment. They are also treated with sprout suppressants and insecticides after harvest. Organic farmers find that growing several types of potato throughout the season in soil that has been well nourished with manure will also help control disease, but they are allowed to spray with copper to prevent blight. Copper treatments are controversial, as residues remain in the soil, but still greatly preferable to the numerous chemical treatments used on conventional potato farms.

the price of potatoes

Potatoes are caught up in the supermarkets’ price wars – sold at less than their value in order to attract customers. Some poorly flavoured varieties are sold for just a few pence per kilo. The real price of the best conventionally farmed potatoes should in fact be up there with the price of organic potatoes, odd as it may seem. This is around £1.40 per kilo. With a kilo of potatoes yielding about five helpings, that’s 28 pence per helping – still a bargain for a high-quality food.

roast potatoes

Dripping or duck fat is ideal for making really crisp roast potatoes but you can get a good result with vegetable oil using the following method. I routinely sprinkle flour on to the potatoes after the par-boiling stage because it guarantees crispness, especially in summer when potatoes can be watery, but you can leave it out if you wish.

1 large, floury potato per person, plus a couple more for good measure

a little flour for sprinkling

dripping, duck fat or vegetable oil

About 1¹/₄ hours before you are due to eat, peel the potatoes and cut them into a shape you like. I cut them lengthways into quarters for a sleek look. Put them in a large pan, cover with water and bring to the boil. Simmer for 5 minutes, then drain in a colander and leave them there to steam for a minute. Sprinkle with a light coating of flour and shake the potatoes around in the colander.

Heat some fat in a separate roasting tin or, if there is room, in the tin you are roasting your meat in. The fat should be about 5mm/¹/₄ inch deep. When it is hot, lift out each potato from the colander and place at even intervals in the tin. Place in the oven and roast until tender and browned – you will probably have to take them out of the oven and turn them over once.

more roast winter vegetables

About half an hour before you serve the roast, slice 1 sweet potato, cut 3 medium parsnips into quarters lengthways and peel a small squash – any sort – and cut it into slices 1cm/¹/₂ inch thick. Add them to the tin with the roast, or the roast potatoes, if there is room. Or heat some fat in a separate tin and roast for 25 minutes.

leftover roast potatoes

The season for large potatoes that will keep through the winter begins in August. Cooking too many potatoes is a habit of mine, probably brought about by greed. Before I had children, we always had lots of roast potatoes left over, and I used to fry them until crisp and eat with peppery or bitter greens such as rocket, watercress or curly endive. They become yet more colourful with the addition of diced red chilli and dabs of black olive tapenade.

unused potato skins

Leftover potato peelings that are clean and unblemished can be shallow-fried, preferably in dripping or groundnut oil, until crisp. Serve with soured cream and a chilli sauce.

roast potato soup

You need only a few leftover roast potatoes – or parsnips if you routinely add them to your roasts – to make a heartening soup for very cold weather.

Serves 4

6 roast potatoes or parsnips, cut into cubes

1 large onion, chopped

600ml/1 pint milk

600ml/1 pint chicken or beef stock

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Put the potatoes or parsnips, onion, milk and stock in a pan and bring to the boil. Simmer for about 20 minutes, then cool slightly and liquidise until very smooth. Reheat gently, season to taste, and serve in large bowls, with maybe some chopped fried bacon to make more of a meal of it.

mashed potato

This is easily the most useful of all types of cooked potato and, like rice, it keeps well in the fridge in a sealed container. If it begins to discolour, I throw it away immediately. Milk adds lightness to mash – and scalding it accentuates the potato flavour.

Makes about 10 helpings

2kg/4¹/₂lb old potatoes, peeled

300ml/¹/₂ pint milk

60g/2oz butter

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Boil the potatoes in a large pan of salted water until soft (test by spearing a potato with a sharp knife and holding it just above the pan; if the potato falls off the knife after a second, it is ready – if it sticks, it is not). Drain in a colander and leave in the colander for 10 minutes to steam. The more liquid that leaves the potato, the better the mash. Some people put their (metal) colander of potatoes in a preheated oven for a few minutes, to be sure.

You can either mash the potatoes in the traditional way with a potato masher or purée them through a food mill (mouli-légumes). Then heat the milk to boiling point in a separate pan and beat it into the potato with the butter. Season to taste.

kitchen note

Peeling the potatoes before cooking is an old habit, and I know that boiling potatoes with the skin on works beautifully, too. Doing this means slipping off the potato skins when they are still hot. It’s up to you.

potato cakes with watercress sauce

Makes 8

¹/₂ quantity of mashed potato

2 eggs, beaten

flour for coating

sunflower or groundnut oil for shallow-frying

For the sauce:

1 bunch of watercress, finely chopped

150ml/¹/₄ pint crème fraîche

1 egg yolk

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Mix the mashed potato thoroughly with the eggs and return to the fridge to firm up. Form the mixture into little cakes, about 5cm/2 inches in diameter and 1cm/¹/₂ inch thick, and coat them in flour. Heat a thin layer of oil in a frying pan, add the potato cakes and shallow-fry over a medium heat for about 5 minutes on each side, until lightly browned.

Meanwhile, heat the watercress, crème-fraîche and egg yolk together in a small pan, whisking gently. Remove from the heat before it boils and season to taste. Serve the potato cakes with the sauce poured around the edge.

smoked trout potato cakes

Follow the above recipe, mixing 2 flaked fillets of hot-smoked trout into the mashed potato, together with 2 chopped hard-boiled eggs, if you like. These fishcakes are very good with the watercress sauce.

bubble and squeak

What more can be said about a classic leftovers hash? Except that I add egg yolks for richness, which is not authentic but very good. You can leave them out, if you prefer.

240g/8oz leftover cooked cabbage

¹/₂ quantity of mashed potato (see here)

2–4 leftover egg yolks

3 tablespoons dripping

Mix the cabbage, potato and egg yolks together. Heat the dripping in a large frying pan, add the potato mixture and fry over a medium-low heat on both sides, until it forms a crisp cake that is hot all the way through.

kitchen note

You can use the same method with all the brassica family, whether the much-maligned Brussels sprout or the ultra-chic Italian cavolo nero. You can also use cooked leeks, anything from the squash family, or sweetcorn – a hash is a hash.

salad potatoes

Salad potatoes are small with firm skins. They are available all year round, and while it is always the right move to buy British during our own new-potato season – from April to July – imported types can be fine when there are no home-grown to be had. Varieties omnipresent in supermarkets are Charlotte and Nicola but do seek out the rarer breeds, too. These include La Ratte, Pink Fir Apple, Belle de Fontenay, Duke of York and Kestrel (see the Shopping Guide). Organic salad potatoes are grown slowly, a factor that no doubt accounts for their deeper flavour. Cook more than you need and use them to help other meals happen. Don’t confuse year-round salad potatoes with specialist seasonal types like the papery-skinned Jersey Royals, which begin to arrive in Britain as early as February, or their Cornish early equivalent.

potato salad

This is the best salad to eat with cold ham or beef. The sweeter the onions, the better it will taste. If you can find Breton or Roscoff onions – they are still sold in strings – so much the better. So-called banana shallots, which are in fact onions, make a good substitute.

Serves 4

1kg/2¹/₄lb salad potatoes

1 teaspoon salt

6 shallots, or pink Roscoff onions if you can find them, sliced

Mayonnaise (see here)

Put the potatoes in a pan, cover with water and add the salt. Bring to the boil and cook until just tender – they should still be waxy in the centre when you cut them open. Drain and leave to cool, then slice thickly. Put them in a bowl and add the shallots and enough mayonnaise to coat. Mix well.

the freezer

Before you run screaming from the room, I am not about to make you cook for the freezer. I do freeze extra food, but not great bags of every type of vegetable and fruit, which only become soggy and tasteless when defrosted. I make a few shepherd’s and fish pies, and braised meat stews and sauces to store in the freezer. Otherwise I prefer to cook from stored ingredients. However, there are foods that are ideal for freezing: peas, broad beans and spinach come to mind. Sweetcorn freezes well – so much better for the children than canned – as do all red berries apart from strawberries.

broad beans

Frozen broad beans have to be used in a certain way because one of their weakest points serves them very well in the freezer. The pale skin that surrounds the inner, podded bean toughens unpleasantly but in doing so protects the flesh of the bean from the ice crystals that make most frozen vegetables go soggy. Broad beans are inexpensive, so the method that follows is not as wasteful as it seems.

Defrost the beans in a colander and put them in a pan. Pour over boiling water and reheat to boiling point. Drain, splash with plenty of cold water and then pinch off the pale skin of each bean. It doesn’t take long and you are left with beautiful bright green kernels, perfect to dress with oil and lemon juice and eat with dry-cured meat, hard-boiled eggs, soft goat’s cheese, or even quite alone.

frozen peas

A terrific vegetable, and ingredient. It is true that frozen peas often taste better than fresh, unless you can be sure that your fresh supply has been picked within two or three days. This is because fresh peas deteriorate quickly, becoming hard and starchy. It is now possible to buy organic frozen peas and petits pois. I recommend them. not least because it is an inexpensive way to eat naturally produced food (see the Shopping Guide).

Blend frozen peas with stock for an almost-instant pea soup, stir them into rice dishes, or combine them with skinned broad beans (see above), spinach, olive oil and fresh mint for a simple salad that will put the colour green into your winter food.

pea soup with potatoes and bacon

Serves 4

1 litre/1³/₄ pints chicken, beef or vegetable stock

2 spring onions, chopped

480g/1lb frozen peas, defrosted

150ml/¹/₄ pint single cream or whole milk

4 rashers of unsmoked back bacon, cut into thin slivers

8 salad potatoes, boiled in their skins until just tender then

thickly sliced

leaves from 4 sprigs of dill

sea salt and white pepper

Heat the stock to boiling point and add the spring onions and peas. Bring back to the boil and simmer for 1 minute. Allow to cool for a few minutes, then liquidise with the cream or milk. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Fry the bacon over a low heat until crisp, then add the potatoes and stir to warm them through. Serve the soup in deep bowls with a large spoonful of bacon and potatoes in each. Scatter the dill on top.

frozen spinach

Defrosted slowly, frozen spinach can be as good as fresh. All the water must be squeezed out, and the spinach cooked either with plenty of butter, or heated with good olive oil to make this quick vegetable dish.

spinach with pine nuts

Serves 2

2 tablespoons pine nuts

480g/1lb frozen whole-leaf spinach, defrosted and the water

squeezed out

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Dry-toast the pine nuts in a frying pan until lightly browned, then set them aside in a bowl. Warm the spinach through in a pan and add the oil. Transfer to a dish, season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and scatter the pine nuts on top. Finish with the lemon juice.

canned food

Canning is ideal for certain foods, a good and pure way to store them without preservatives. It can even improve them in some cases – skipjack tuna being an example.

skipjack tuna

I could never understand why anyone would want to eat a lot of seared fresh tuna. Half the time it is dry and tasteless and, when buying it, it can be hard to tell how long it has been out of the water. What’s more, at the current rate of consumption, blue and yellow fin tuna will soon go the way of the dodo. Blue fin – the type favoured by the Japanese for top-quality sushi – is at an all-time low, while yellow fin is in serious decline. The only tuna not listed as endangered is skipjack. The standard of canned skipjack tuna varies from dubious and disgusting small flakes that look like factory-floor sweepings in unidentifiable oil, to tender fillets that, when packed in the tin, look like the cross section of an old tree trunk. This tuna is far superior and has a light texture, because it does not absorb too much oil. The unique double-cooking technique – before canning and then again when the sealed cans are heated to preserve the contents – seems to improve and tenderise the flesh. It can then simply be softly flaked into a salad or sandwich, or made into a delicately flavoured fish cake.

choosing tuna

Trawling for any fish using nets puts other wild species at risk of getting caught up in the gear, but the risk is greater to these lovely mammals when netting tuna. Check labelling on cans to be sure it contains ‘dolphin friendly’ tuna, looking for mention of monitoring by the EII (Earth Island Institute). The ‘dolphin safe’ motto you may find on cans from North and South American tuna fisheries is not, according to marine conservationists, so closely monitored. In coming years, the EII hope to develop a logo to make it easier for shoppers.

Catching tuna by pole and line is the only truly sustainable means. Not all ‘line-caught’ tuna is sustainable. Ask for hand-lined, troll-caught tuna; or tuna caught on long lines that are ‘seabird friendly’. It is currently very difficult to tell what fishing method was used for catching skipjack tuna. This is because it is a commodity – like coffee or tea – traded on a world exchange. It’s a system of trading that undermines efforts to conserve the tuna numbers. If well-managed fisheries are not rewarded, why bother? In the coming years the Marine Stewardship Council hope to certify the pole and line tuna fisheries as sustainable – watch out for their logo on tins and jars.

You can also find handline-caught albacore – a pale, delicate-fleshed relative often dubbed ‘white tuna’, and found mostly around the coast of Spain, Portugal and France (see the Shopping Guide).

Always buy tuna packed in either olive or sunflower oil, draining it away before you use the fish.

tuna cakes

Lovely, delicate cakes to eat for supper – tuna-loving children will adore them. Serve with a green sauce (see here).

Serves 4

3 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons plain flour

300ml/¹/₂ pint milk

180g/6oz canned tuna, drained

2 shallots, finely chopped

juice of ¹/₂ lemon

2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese

dried breadcrumbs (see here)

sunflower oil for shallow-frying

salt and white pepper

Melt the butter in a small pan and add the flour. Cook gently for a minute, then remove from the heat. Gradually stir in the milk, then cook, stirring, until the sauce thickens and finally boils. Remove from the heat, add the tuna, stirring to break up the flakes, then add the shallots, lemon juice and Parmesan. Season with a little white pepper and the barest pinch of salt. Refrigerate the mixture until very cold, then roll it into a cylinder shape, about 4cm/1¹/₂ inches in diameter. Cut it into pastilles 2.5cm/1 inch thick and roll each one in dried breadcrumbs. Shallow-fry the tuna cakes in sunflower oil for 3–4 minutes on each side, then drain on kitchen paper.

tuna salad with skinless tomatoes

I mix preserved tuna with lots of herbs, lemon juice, and virgin olive oil if necessary, then add black pepper and a few capers and eat it with tomatoes. The secret, by the way, of great tomato salads is skinning them. Note to the ‘time sceptics’: it takes 3 minutes to skin 4 tomatoes. This is how to do it: nick the skin of ripe tomatoes with a knife, submerge the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute, then drain and push the skins off. They have a wonderful way of homogenising the dish, absorbing the olive oil and the flavour of the herbs and allowing the tuna to stick to them.

kitchen note

Add drained, canned cannellini or haricot beans to make a more substantial plateful.

other uses for tuna

Flake tuna over a pea and broad bean salad dressed with olive oil.

Tuna can be added to semi-soft-boiled eggs and lettuce hearts (see here).

Tuna is always good with Mayonnaise (see here). For an interesting sauce to eat with cold veal or chicken, blend 150g/5oz tuna with 2 anchovy fillets and 150ml/¹/₄ pint mayonnaise, then stir in 1 tablespoon chopped capers. This is a take on the dish Italians love – vitello tonnato.

canned anchovies

The best-quality anchovies have a sleek, carefully handled appearance, and come from artisan fisheries. Spanish groceries are a good source of the best, which come packed in olive oil (see the Shopping Guide).

anchovy butter

Melt this butter over green beans, haricots or even a dish of hot new potatoes. If you like anchovies, make a pot and keep it, covered, in the fridge.

Serves 6

150g/5oz unsalted butter

60g/2oz canned anchovies

4 sprigs of parsley, chopped

freshly ground black pepper

Soften the butter in a bowl with a wooden spoon. Drain the oil from the anchovies and pat them with a paper towel to remove any extra. Chop finely, add to the butter with the parsley and mix thoroughly. Season with black pepper and mix again; it will temper any saltiness.

canned tomatoes

Buy canned tomatoes from Italian specialist food shops, choosing authentic brands from the south of Italy. They will be genuinely sun ripened, and canned at source. The tomatoes should have a rich dark red appearance and a thick juice. It does not matter whether you buy whole, quartered or chopped tomatoes, but if you use whole ones for the following sauce, chop them roughly using a pair of kitchen scissors while they are still in the opened can.

canned tomato sauce

Since beginning to make my own Tomato Sauce (see here), I have used canned tomatoes less, but was once shown a clever technique for an instant sweet sauce that has rescued a meal or two.

This sauce has been very useful in emergencies for pizza or pasta. It is rather thick because the hot oil instantly caramelises the tomatoes, but it has a character of its own. The technique was shown to me by Carla Tomasi, a wonderful cook from Rome.

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 can of chopped tomatoes

8 basil leaves

salt and freshly ground black pepper

You need a heavy frying pan with a lid to make this sauce safely and successfully. Have the canned tomatoes open and ready.

Put the oil in the frying pan and heat to smoking point. Working quickly, pour in the tomatoes and slam on the lid, otherwise the sauce will spit. When the sound of sizzling has died down, remove the lid and add the basil. Season with salt and pepper.

kitchen note

Substitute passata for tinned tomatoes for a very smooth sauce.

tomato juice

The strained juice from canned tomatoes makes a wonderful Bloody Mary. For every 90ml/3fl oz juice, add a dash of Lea & Perrins, a pinch of celery salt, a shot of vodka, half a shot of sherry and as much Tabasco as you like – start with 2 drops. Shake in a cocktail shaker with ice.

canned artichokes

A secret store-cupboard weapon. Canned artichokes come in brine, cost very little and taste bland – until you get to work with your olive oil, herbs, garlic and lemon juice. Eat them on toast, with chopped hard-boiled eggs or soft, fresh cheese.

bottled and canned sweet peppers

Much less fuss than roasting peppers yourself, bottled peppers in oil should be an ideal store-cupboard food but the majority of them are sour from undercooking and, worse, still have leathery skins attached. Go in search of Navarrico, a Spanish brand (see the Shopping Guide). The outlay for a can seems high until you realise that it contains over 20 genuine Spanish, sun-ripened, wood-roasted peppers in olive oil. They have so much flavour you need add only a few to a paella, or use a few at a time in Roasted Pepper Mimosa (see here).

cured meats

Bacon is the most obvious example of British cured meat, with hams following closely behind. There’s a lot of dry-cured bacon about, but virtually no culture of dry-cured ham such as prosciutto at all. Every other European country has its dry-cured saucissons and salami; its charcuteries and salumerie – where are ours? The answer, as explained to me by a successful English butcher, is very interesting: ‘We are happy to make sausages and bacon; they’re quick to make and we sell them fast. But why would we want to put money on a shelf for six months?’ Because you would reap more from it if you waited – there’s a real passion for this stuff and we are importing tonnes of it.

The analogy brings Tabasco to mind. Its Louisiana originator, Henry McIlhenny, made the first batch, then forgot about it for a year. When he came back to it, the sauce had fermented slightly and developed a mellow, mature flavour, though it still had the heat of red chilli. It has been made in the same way ever since. Long maturation gives Tabasco its subtle taste. Pity the poor Caribbean sauce makers. They make superb hot sauces but, try as they might, they cannot make a similar sauce or a similar sum of money because they cannot afford the time for maturation. It’s an attitude to aged food shared by most British meat curers. We are slowly but surely reviving genuine mature Cheddar and making better wine. But, with few exceptions, British butchers will never see the point of the great starter plate of thinly sliced, dry-cured meats and sausages, with a little pile of vinegary cornichons beside.

Cured meats such as chorizo, bacon and ham hocks are very useful in the New English Kitchen. They can be served as instant meals or used to flavour stews. Take advantage of British-based charcuterie makers (see the Shopping Guide) – your spending power will see others jump on to the bandwagon.

herbs

Herbs give so much to cooking. They lift and freshen dishes and, when matched to the right foods, they turn the flavour volume up – by this I mean they sing, not shout. Herb oil half stirred into a potato soup invades it with its flavours; the same beside grilled or roast meat, or spooned over boiled meats and offal, will make the grey-brown of the dish evaporate and give it a new vitality.

herbs and english cookery

Herbs have always belonged in English cooking. There is a general idea that the English are a nation of rehabilitated mistresses of the bland, rescued by Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food in 1952. Wrong – David herself was perfectly aware of that, as her later books testified. If you believe some of what is said about English cooking, we are masters of roasting joints but otherwise stole everything from the French and Italians. Many people believe the first statement and are subsequently shamed into accepting the second. But this is not an argument about cookery – who made custard first, the English or the French – it is about the real tools: ingredients.

Visit a house that still has its eighteenth-century gardens and you will see a herb or knot garden. Fresh herbs once had a vital place not only in the kitchen but also in the medicine chest. They were used in early recipes for salads along with edible flowers, and in sauces, soups and stuffings. Cooking with them was considered an art. I blame the puritanism that invaded the kitchens of this country in the nineteenth century for the disappearance of fragrant green leaves from our cookery – the twisted concept that exotically flavoured food is vulgar, suspect and bad for the gut. In the southern Mediterranean, aromatics are used to bridge the gap between humble, locally grown ingredients and elegant cuisine, creating an egalitarian cookery available to people on every income level. The prime example is the addition of basil leaves to a plate of sliced tomatoes, refining and cultivating the salad.

Now to those silly plastic packs of herbs that hang on hooks in supermarkets. Hopelessly, guiltily smitten is how I feel about them. They make wonderful food possible, yet I know they should be in big, generous bunches or, better still, in pots on my windowsill. I do grow a few herbs in pots but what I really want is a knot garden because I use a lot of them.

If you can, buy herbs in bulk from Middle Eastern shops. Many of them are grown in the Middle East and arrive here impeccably fresh. Wrap them in damp newspaper and then in a plastic carrier bag – they will keep for at least a week. They are ten times cheaper than the triangular, plastic containers sold in supermarkets and it is well worth lobbying the supermarket you use for larger bunches of a wide variety of herbs. Insist!

kitchen note

My sister Laura, unlike me, has only to glance at a plant and it seems to do whatever she wants. She takes home from the supermarket a potted herb such as basil or coriander. These are usually immature and soft, being 30 or so plants crammed very close together, which is why they do not grow, and drink like camels at a watering hole. She pulls them apart at the root, replants them in compost, three to a pot, and keeps them on a windowsill that gets the sun. Two weeks later, she has ten healthy pots of basil, all from one pot. If you have the time, this is well worth it; the supermarket has done the tricky part for you, you reap the reward.

green sauce

This is a standard to eat with poached, roast or grilled meat, poultry and fish. You can also stir it into mayonnaise or salad dressing. Make a small jar to store in the fridge; it will keep for 2 weeks.

Serves 4–6

5 sprigs each of tarragon, basil, chervil and parsley

about 10 chives

olive oil

salt

Chop all the herbs and the capers very finely and put them in a jar. Barely cover with olive oil and stir. Taste and add salt to bring out the flavours of the sauce.

herb oils

Herb oils can be used, a few drops at a time, to flavour salads, cooked vegetables and pasta. A pestle and mortar is the best tool to get the right effect. Parsley, basil, dill, oregano and chives are all suitable.

Roughly chop 4 sprigs of either herb, or the equivalent of chives, and put them in a pestle and mortar. Add a few drops of olive oil and begin to work it into the herbs, grinding with the pestle and mortar. Add more until you have a smooth, green oil. Season with a little salt to taste.

kitchen note

Oil blended with fresh or dried smoked chillies makes a good addition to a noodle soup.

herb, oil and breadcrumb ‘stuffing’

This can be spooned on to halved tomatoes, cylinders of courgette or thick aubergine slices before baking them in the oven. You can also fry it and serve it beside game or poultry with the gravy.

4 tablespoons breadcrumbs, fresh or dried (see here)

2 sprigs of basil or oregano, chopped

1 garlic clove, crushed with a little salt

3 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat the oven to 220°C/425°F/Gas Mark 7. Mix together all the ingredients until they are well blended and have the texture of wet sand. Spoon on to the vegetables and transfer them to an oiled baking dish. Cook for half an hour or until the vegetables are soft. Eat them on their own, or beside meat or fish.

year-round salad vegetables
lettuce

While I am grateful for those herbs in their little plastic packs, bags of washed infant lettuce leaves are expensive and taste suspiciously of chlorine. Washing salad in a strong solution of chlorine and water to kill the bugs that cause food poisoning seems to wash away the flavour, too. It can also make the leaves smell downright manky once they have sat on the shelf for a time. This is not to say that all small leaf salad is bad. You can buy fresh leaves, loosely packed, all year round – some from British farmers. Rocket, mizuna, ruby chard, sorrel, purslane, dandelion and pak choi have a beautiful fresh taste and can be bought from specialist grocers and farmers’ markets. At £10 per kilo, however, it hurts. The popularity of fresh wild rocket makes it easier to obtain, and slightly cheaper.

Whole Cos or romaine lettuces, on the other hand, are inexpensive, keep for ages and have a good mineral flavour. A salad made with torn romaine lettuce and herbs will be as good as any so-called gourmet leaf mixture. Use the inner leaves for salads and the outer leaves for stock or for creamy lettuce soups (see here).

Store whole lettuces and salad leaves as you would herbs. They will keep for a week wrapped in slightly damp newspaper in a plastic bag. Limp lettuce can be revived by separating the leaves and putting them in a ceramic bowl. Cover with a dampened tea towel and leave in or out of the fridge.

cucumber

The standard supermarket cucumber is a watery creature but you can boost its flavour with a simple method. Peel the cucumber, halve it lengthways and scoop out the seeds. Slice thinly, then place in a colander in the sink and throw a little salt over it. Leave for an hour, during which time the water will seep out of the cucumber flesh. Pat dry with a towel, which will absorb the water and excess salt.

Cucumbers store well in the lower drawers of the fridge.

cucumber sandwiches

Butter very fresh white bread and sandwich a few layers of cucumber, prepared as above and seasoned with freshly ground black pepper, between 2 slices.

cucumber salad with mustard

Serves 4

1 cucumber, prepared as on here 93

6 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

2 teaspoons golden caster sugar

¹/₂ teaspoon soft crystal sea salt

2 tablespoons water

4 sprigs of dill, chopped

10 chives, chopped

freshly ground black pepper

Combine the cucumber with all the remaining ingredients, scattering the herbs on top. Serve with Fried Sole (see here).

spiced braised cucumber

An easy, instant curry to eat with flat bread (see here).

Serves 2

1 tablespoon butter or ghee

1 onion, chopped

1 green chilli, chopped

1 tablespoon mild curry paste

¹/₂ can of coconut milk

4 tablespoons water

1 cucumber, peeled, halved, deseeded and cut into slices

1cm/¹/₂ inch thick

1 teaspoon black onion seeds (nigella)

4 sprigs of coriander, chopped

Melt the fat in a pan, add the onion and cook until soft. Stir in the chilli and curry paste and cook for 1 minute, then add the coconut milk and water. Finally add the cucumber slices, bring to a simmer and cook for 5 minutes. Finish with the black onion seeds and coriander.

pickled cucumber

¹/₂ cucumber, peeled, prepared as on here 93

1 teaspoon golden caster sugar

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar a pinch of salt

2.5cm/1 inch piece of fresh ginger, grated

3 small green chillies, chopped

Combine the cucumber with all the remaining ingredients. It’s good served with curries or boiled ham.

avocado

When an avocado is perfectly ripe, its oil-rich flesh is almost a sauce, a kind of green mayonnaise that goes so well with crustaceans – yes, it’s a refugee from the avocado-and-prawn generation talking – but also matches red chilli, lime and fresh coriander. Avocados are imported into the UK from South Africa, the Caribbean and Mexico. The dark, knobbly-skinned variety, the Hass avocado, has more flavour but some prefer the gentle taste of the smooth, soft-skinned type. Both are available all year round and are as welcome to me as bananas and oranges – fruit that I cannot do without.

avocado mash with coriander and curry oil

Treat this as a starter. It looks dazzling with the yellow oil, particularly if decorated with a few sprouting beans or pea shoots. Smooth-skinned avocados are ripe if the skin gives a little when pressed at the round end; knobbly avocados are ripe when the skin turns from green to a dark greeny-black.

Serves 4

2 teaspoons Madras curry powder

6 tablespoons avocado oil (see the Shopping Guide)

2 ripe avocados

2 tablespoons yoghurt

juice of 1 lime

4 sprigs of coriander, including their roots, well washed

2 shallots, finely chopped

salt

Stir the curry powder into the oil and leave to infuse for 30 minutes. Strain through a fine sieve and reserve.

Peel and stone the avocados, then mash the flesh until almost smooth. Beat in the yoghurt and lime juice. Tear the leaves from the coriander stalks and roots and set to one side. Chop the stalks and roots finely and stir them into the avocado mixture. Season with salt.

To serve, spoon the avocado mash into a neat mound on each starter plate, then scatter over the shallots and coriander leaves. Zigzag the curry oil over the top and eat with toasted flat bread.

kitchen note

If the curry powder does not contain turmeric, add 1 teaspoon to colour the oil a zingy yellow.

watercress

Watercress now grows all year round, and stores well in the fridge. It relies on a supply of clean water to grow and only several days of hard frost will dry up the supply. Most British watercress comes from an admirable co-operative of farms in the south of England, particularly Hampshire and Dorset. Choose this type in preference to French imported – there is no excuse for shops to sell this. Watercress is very underrated, and so English.

The nutritional qualities of watercress were once valued so highly that it was known as poor man’s meat. I use watercress frequently in this book as a replacement for the ubiquitously trendy rocket. Its peppery leaf goes with dozens of dishes, and finds a place in sauces and salads, too. Grumble if you are sold sealed bags of watercress that smell of rank water when opened; it means it has been hanging around a bit.

Watercress has the winning attribute of being slow to change colour from bright green to dull olive when cooked, unlike spinach or herb leaves. For that reason, as well as its powerful, clean flavours, I use it in dumplings and soups and in the simple sauce below.

watercress oil

1 bunch of watercress

6 tablespoons olive oil

a pinch of sea salt

Cut off and discard the lower 5cm/2 inches of the watercress stalks. Either whiz the watercress with the oil and salt in a food processor or pound using a pestle and mortar until you have a smooth sauce.

Use in the same way as Herb Oils (see here). Good with roast beef, or zigzagged over toast spread with fresh cheeses or smoked fish.

watercress sandwiches

Children once took watercress sandwiches to school, in place of real meat. They are, in fact, very good and, cut small, are nice to eat with drinks before dinner.

Spread slices of good brown or white bread with farmhouse butter, then sandwich with watercress, the lower stalks cut away.

year-round fruit

Oranges and bananas, mangoes and papayas – I cannot do without them, and rely on a supply to cheer up fruit bowls when the English apples and pears have all been eaten, the berry season is over and soft orchard fruits are a memory in a pickle jar to eat with cold Monday leftover meat. I have travelled to Tobago twice and eaten so-called exotic fruits in their home – ripened in the sun and not in the hold of a ship – and was cheered to find that although they tasted better, it was only marginally so.

These fruits are made for travel. They ripen without sunlight in the dark, in our cold shops and quickly on our radiators. The gentle fingers that pack them in boxes in the Caribbean and Africa do so knowing how easily bananas bruise. I once asked a banana trader in London’s Nine Elms wholesale market why Caribbean bananas are small and curled and South American bananas long and straight. It was a conversation that has always stayed with me. ‘Ah, that is because there is less investment in the banana plantations of the Caribbean,’ he said, ‘and the bananas are picked before they grow to their full size.’ It was 1999 and we were talking about the World Trade Organisation’s decision to apply levies on certain European ‘luxury’ goods to the US, in retaliation for European loyalty to the Caribbean banana market over the largely American-owned plantations in South America/Costa Rica. ‘The Caribbean bananas,’ the trader continued, ‘are picked early because the farmers cannot afford to leave them on the trees even for another week. To me,’ he added, ‘they always look like small, hungry hands.’

This is an analogy of a worldwide problem for food producers. Lack of investment is the enemy of small food production. Along with coffee, tea, chocolate and dried fruits, Fairtrade bananas are now in most supermarkets. They are still small and curled but I am watching with hope.

fresh mango chutney

This chutney can be made in half an hour or less. Eat with sausages or hot ham.

150ml/¹/₄ pint white wine vinegar

3 cardamom pods

120g/4oz golden granulated sugar

1 red chilli, deseeded and chopped

3 mangoes, peeled, stoned and cut into 1cm/¹/₂ inch cubes

1 tablespoon black onion seeds (nigella)

Put the vinegar and cardamoms in a small saucepan and add the sugar. Heat slowly, allowing the sugar to dissolve before the mixture boils. Simmer until the mixture has reduced in volume by about one-third and then remove from the heat. Add the chilli and stir. Pour the mixture over the mangoes and throw the onion seeds on top. You can eat it immediately or store it in the fridge for up to a week.

plantains

If you have never visited an Afro-Caribbean market, you are in for an experience. At Brixton Market in London, you will see some of the most demanding shoppers in action. African and West Indian women, and men, shout at market traders to push prices down and go for bulk deals. They pick up everything, squeeze it and smell it; they are terrific buyers of fresh vegetables and understand their true value.

Plantains are large, banana-like fruits that are eaten cooked. On my trip to Tobago, I ate them sautéed in butter or ghee for breakfast and they were wonderful. Their skins must be completely black before you cook them or they will have no flavour. Eat them with baked chicken legs and Corn Fritters (see here).

fried plantain

Serves 2

1 plantain, peeled and cut slightly on the diagonal into slices

1cm/¹/₂ inch thick

ghee or butter mixed with vegetable oil

1 lime

Shallow-fry the plantain slices in the fat until golden on both sides and tender when prodded with a fork. Squeeze a little lime juice over them and serve.

pomegranates

Pomegranates are in Middle Eastern shops all year round, although they are particularly plump and fresh in late summer to autumn. They do keep a long time, though – I bought some for Christmas once and they were still there in April, albeit a little shrivelled, but the pips inside were red and juicy. Pomegranates appear frequently in Iranian cooking. I tend to buy them because I like the look of them, and then use only a few in a pilaff or a salad with oranges and spinach. What to do with the rest? What the Iranians do, of course. Make a pomegranate syrup to eat with roast poultry or game.

pomegranate syrup

I am ever grateful to the exhaustive research of Claudia Roden for this recipe. This is an adaptation of her version.

4 pomegranates

juice of 2 lemons

1 tablespoon golden caster sugar

150ml/¹/₄ pint water

a pinch each of salt and pepper

Cut the pomegranates in half and dig out the seeds. Put them in a food processor and blend for a few seconds – enough to break the skin that surrounds the seeds. Transfer the pulp to a sieve placed over a bowl and squeeze out the remaining juice by rubbing it through with a wooden spoon. Four pomegranates should yield about 300ml/¹/₂ pint.

Put the pomegranate juice in a pan with the lemon juice, sugar, water, salt and pepper. Heat slowly and bring to the boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook until the mixture has reduced by about a third. Add more lemon juice if it is too sweet. Pour into a jar and store in the fridge.

kitchen notes

To eat pomegranate syrup with poultry or game, pour it over browned chicken, mallard or pheasant, then cover and simmer for 1–1¹/₂ hours, until the meat is tender. Thin the sauce with water if you wish.

Throw fresh pomegranate seeds over the pilaff on here 202 – substituting pheasant or other game for lamb will be even nicer.

dried fruit

Dried fruit has gone though a renaissance and you can now buy wonderful, freshly dried soft pineapple, plums, figs, cherries and cranberries. I cook them with ordinary dried figs, adding them sliced to stock when braising partridge or pheasant. I make trifle with them too, having discovered by accident when short of fresh berries that they make a much more interesting pudding that is nice for Christmas meals.

winter trifle

Serves 8

480g/1lb dried fruit, such as figs, cherries, pineapples, plums and peaches, roughly chopped

2 glasses of marsala

2 glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice

6 sponge fingers, spread with any jam or Quince Cheese (see here)

1 quantity of Lemon Syllabub (see here)

dried rose petals and unsalted slivers of pistachio (optional – both

available from Middle Eastern shops) or flaked almonds

double cream, to serve

Soak the fruit in the marsala and orange juice for about 1 hour. Put the sponge fingers in the nicest glass bowl you own and pour over the fruit and liquid. Spread the syllabub on top and chill for at least 1 hour. Scatter the petals and nuts on top, then put the trifle on the table with a small jug of cream.

dried fruit meringues

Based on an Australian recipe, this is basically a meringue with chopped fruit and nuts folded in. You can make it into a pavlova-style cake with a layer of cream and fresh figs, which go well with the dried fruit inside, or make small, macaroon-style cakes to put on the table with cheese and coffee after a big dinner.

Serves 6–8

4 egg whites

270g/9oz golden icing sugar, sifted

90g/3oz dried apricots

90g/3oz dates

90g/3oz pecan nuts or green pistachios

Preheat the oven to 150°C/300°F/Gas Mark 2 and line 2 baking sheets with baking parchment.

Put the egg whites and icing sugar in a large bowl and beat with an electric whisk until stiff peaks of white foam are formed. This will take about 9 minutes, so a tabletop food mixer is best, although you can use a handheld mixer.

Chop the dried fruit and nuts finely in a food processor, but do not allow them to become a paste. Fold them into the meringue. Drop dessert-spoonfuls of the mixture on to the baking parchment, 5cm/2 inches apart. You should fit approximately 9 on each sheet. Bake for 30 minutes, until very pale brown and slightly cracked. Allow the meringues to cool on the trays, then lift them off the baking parchment.

lemon and orange zest

Lemons and oranges should be washed or scrubbed before you use the zest, as they are sprayed with a protective covering, unless they are labelled unwaxed. In honesty, I do not always do this, and hope not to suffer as a result of my laziness.

A strip of orange zest in a beef stew, or a few parings of lemon in the cavity of a chicken, is all that is needed to brighten the flavour. You can also dry citrus peel by hanging strips of it on a mini ‘washing line’ in a warm cupboard – 48 hours should do it. It can be stored indefinitely and added to stews and sauces.

pasta with lemon

Keep the Parmesan away from this. It is delightful alone, clean flavoured and comforting, too. You could serve it as a side dish with grilled sardines.

Serves 4

zest and juice of 2 lemons

175ml/6fl oz best quality, extra virgin olive oil

400g/14oz dried egg linguine

15g/1/2oz butter

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