La Recette du Jour

It must be over a decade since I last made an apple pie. Since I became French, my default option for apples and pastry is sinfully easy Tarte Tatin. Or occasionally, if I have time, a classic tarte aux pommes. But today I suddenly felt the urge to make an old-fashioned apple pie. I had to dredge long-unvisited corners of my memory for the little tweaks I developed in the years when I made it regularly. Painting the pastry with egg white to stop it going soggy. Mixing a little cornflour in with the sugar to thicken the juices, making it easier to serve cold. Adding a few sultanas. And above all, hiding bits of quince among the apples to perfume the pie and turn the filling a rosy pink. In fact it must have been the quince in the fruit bowl that gave me the idea in the first place.
Recipe for English apple pie »

I find mince pies can easily be too heavy on the pastry. So I was pleased to find a recipe for mince pies with an almond paste topping. Except … there were no almonds in it! I still liked the result when I made them last year. They are much lighter than the traditional version, and the almond flavour complements the mincemeat really well. This year I made my own version of the frangipane, with almonds. So here’s the recipe. Use whatever your favourite mincemeat recipe is (or buy some) and make a sweet shortcrust for the base.
Recipe for Mince pies with frangipane topping »

This is a truly classic Catalan sauce. Pounded nuts, usually almonds, are a strong feature of Catalan cooking, used to thicken sauces, whether savoury or sweet. Romesco sauce is very versatile: you can serve it with plainly grilled or baked fish, for example. Or steak. Or even escalivade. A very traditional combination is with calçots, young green onions that are grilled over an open fire in winter and early spring. They’re served on a roof tile to keep them warm, and eating them (with your fingers) is a messy business; when I ate them in a restaurant, I was provided with a bib!

It’s an uncooked sauce which is ridiculously easy to make — it will take you five minutes if you use a jar of peppers and a food processor or blender. I used the method in this video, substituting salt for the anchovies. Anchovies are not traditional, and they make the sauce unsuitable for vegetarians.
Recipe for Romesco sauce »

The web is awash with recipes claiming to be “the best brownies ever”. I make no such claim for this recipe; they are extremely good, but tastes differ, and anyway the success of brownies depends above all on not overcooking them, whatever recipe you use.

No, what struck me about this recipe above all was that there is no chocolate in them! Don’t get me wrong: they are chocolate brownies, but they are made with cocoa, not slabs of dark chocolate. This is great for me, because whenever I buy chocolate to cook with, I put it in the cupboard, and when I come to use it a few days later, it has mysteriously disappeared, leaving only a crinkle of silver foil to mark its passing. Whereas the box of Dutch-process cocoa stays in place for months on end.

I found the recipe on Apple and Spice; the original is by Alice Medrich. If you can keep your hands off them long enough, these keep really well in a tin, and I’ve even sent some unharmed via international post!
Recipe for Fudgy chocolate brownies »

Poor neglected blog! Summer is a busy season; I just have time to post a recipe for this lovely salad from Savoie. It makes an excellent fuss-free starter when you are having a substantial main course; or you could eat it as a light lunch. Non-vegetarians can add strips of prosciutto or serrano ham, or crisply fried bacon bits. You can prepare all the ingredients in advance, adding the dressing and croutons at the last minute. This amount will serve about four people.
Recipe for Salade Savoyarde »

I’m a sucker for anything with lemon in it — it’s my favourite flavour. Lemon posset is utterly simple: just lemon, sugar, cream. It’s rather indulgent, so make small quantities and pair it with something more virtuous; I added hot cherry compote to the chilled possets, so that made them part of our five a day. Choose plain glasses to show off the pale, creamy possets, and serve with crisp biscuits, such as tuiles, langues de chat, or Maggie’s shortbread thins.

Ideally, make it 24 hours ahead, but I’ve chilled it for only four hours, and it’s still set, if less firmly.
Recipe for Lemon posset »

Our broad bean crop was decimated by frost, but I bought some lovely small, fresh broad beans from the market. To me, broad beans and bacon or ham are one of those marriages made in heaven. I had some stock from a roast chicken so risotto seemed an obvious choice to make the most of them.

The basic method of making risotto is a doddle; I don’t know why people make so much fuss about it. The hardest work in this recipe is preparing the beans, but it’s one of the few recipes where it really is worth blanching and peeling them; pilaff with broad beans and serrano ham is another.

Rice is one of the few things I always measure by volume. An ordinary mustard glass holds just the right amount for two people, and for risotto you can count on roughly three times the volume of stock to rice. Don’t bother making risotto with any rice other than Italian; the result won’t be worth the effort. Make pilaff instead. If you like stringy cheese in your risotto, use Gruyère or Comté; otherwise Parmesan, or even aged cheddar.
Recipe for Broad bean and bacon risotto »

Elizabeth David was a fan of Pomiane; in fact she wrote the introduction to this edition, beginning “I love Docteur de Pomiane’s work. In fact I owe him a great debt.” She likes him because he doesn’t just give us instructions, but explains why: “He has made us understand our actions. We know what we have done right — it is just as important — as well as where we may have gone wrong.”

This is a neglected cookbook, but Pomiane is an entertaining writer, and his recipes are often accompanied by anecdotes. When I read the introduction to Poulet Tamara, I was immediately captivated.

According to a story denied by some Georgians, the country was ruled in the twelfth century by Tamara, a queen of rare beauty who, having cast out her drunken husband, the Muscovite prince Bogolubski, decided to drive her lover, the poet Rousthaveli, author of the marvellous poem The Leopard Skin, mad with jealousy. To inflame the passions of the wretched man she took lovers at random, welcoming them in her castle on a crag above the Georgian highway over the Caucasus, and preparing with her own hands the principal dish of the banquet she offered them. The chance lover was overwhelmed with wine and caresses. Next morning he was hurled to his death over a precipice which one can see to this day.

This dish is the one Tamara served to her doomed guests, and Pomiane promises “a completely novel gastronomic sensation”. Having already experienced one of these in the form of his wonderful tomates à la crème, I quickly scanned the recipe to check that I had all the ingredients. It looked like an excellent way to use up the leeks, turnips, onions and carrots in the veggie box, and I had some walnuts that needed using too, so the decision was made.

But oh Docteur Pomiane, how you deceived me! Put the chicken in a heavy casserole with the onions, carrots and leeks, the herbs and spices, and some water, he tells us. So I duly did. Then looking at the next step, I find he’s now telling me to finely chop the onions and garlic that are currently happily simmering with the chicken, and soften them in butter as the first step in making the sauce. Oh well, I’ll chop another onion. But wait … now I read the recipe more closely and discover that the turnips in the ingredients list are never mentioned again. Hmm, maybe they were supposed to go in with the chicken, instead of the onions? But won’t they make the sauce taste of turnip? Too late now anyway — I’ll just have to eliminate them from the recipe.

So I can’t really claim that what I ended up with is exactly what Tamara served to her lovers. Basically you poach the chicken with vegetables (possibly including turnips) for half an hour, then remove the chicken and roast it for another half hour. The strained stock from the poaching is reduced and used to thin a sauce made of fried onions and garlic, pounded walnuts, vinegar, and egg yolks. Theoretically you pour the sauce over the cut-up chicken, leave it to stand overnight, and eat it cold, but after a day’s mountain walking Steve didn’t seem keen on waiting till breakfast time to eat his dinner. So we ate it hot.

The sauce was … interesting, but really not an attractive colour — a greyish pink. Still, roast chicken is roast chicken, so it wasn’t a total failure. And the vegetables and stock will make a nice soup — maybe I’ll even add the turnips.

This hasn’t put me off Pomiane anyway — it’s probably just a result of poor copy-editing. The book includes a lot of simple, homely French classics, including a reliable recipe for gratin dauphinois which illustrates his talent for explaining the “why”. He mentions three different ways of cooking it, and then explains why his method, which involves adding a tiny amount of flour to the cream, is the best: it prevents the cream from separating.

Finally, like Elizabeth David’s, his prose is a pleasure to read for itself, even if you aren’t planning on cooking anything.

French Country Kitchen is very similar in approach to Jenny Baker’s Simple French Cuisine. I was given Jenny Baker’s book around the time we bought our holiday house in the Languedoc, so I kept it here to provide inspiration. We had a very rudimentary kitchen then, so it was useful having a book of delicious recipes using local ingredients and requiring no fancy equipment. I tend not to pick it up much now; it may soon make an appearance in this neglected cookbook series!

Like Jenny Baker, Geraldene Holt is a British woman who came to southern France, fell in love with it, and being a keen cook, collected traditional recipes from friends and neighbours. I picked up a second-hand copy of French Country Kitchen recently; it’s out of print, so it can be bought for pennies on Amazon. I love the fact that the Internet has made it so easy to find out-of-print books.

This book is organised by ingredients — there’s a chapter on mushrooms for example, one on olives, one on chestnuts, almonds, and walnuts, more conventional ones on poultry and beef, and a whole chapter on the pig, covering every part of it of course., including making brawn and your own sausages.

I’m not a great meat-eater, so I decided to try the recipe for endive belge étuvée aux champignons, or braised chicory with mushrooms. Chicory is something I only discovered when I came to France, and I love its bitter flavour. The result was delicious and makes a change from our usual ways of cooking chicory (wrapped in ham and covered in cheese sauce, or braised with chicken). If you’re vegetarian you could leave the bacon out, although it does add an essential saltiness and a touch of fat to cut the bitterness of the chicory. I might add a splash of soy sauce if I left out the bacon.

The recipe specifies cultivated mushrooms, and that’s what I used. But I reckon it would be even better with wild ones — cèpes or chanterelles. If you’re making a vegetarian version I would recommend the tastiest mushrooms you can find. As fresh tomatoes are banned in our house from October to May, I used a spoonful of sun-dried tomato paste instead of the tomato, which turned out to be an excellent idea.

I like the homely approach of this book, and like the Jenny Baker book it is an excellent choice to take on holiday to France with you, if you like cooking and buying produce at French markets.
Recipe for French Country Kitchen, by Geraldene Holt: braised chicory with mushrooms »

I’m continuing my trawl through the reserve collection.This claims to be a “vegetarian” cookbook, although a few of the recipes include fish or shellfish. It is definitely not the 70s/early 80s style of vegetarian cooking with lots of wholewheat stodge and mushy lentils. Like Nadine Abensur’s, Annie Bell’s dishes are creative and elegant, letting the flavours of fresh vegetables shine. This book is clearly geared towards entertaining, as it’s organised as a series of seasonal menus, most involving five or six dishes.

Not that this is a criticism. Her philosophy of vegetarian cooking is that rather than having a “main” ingredient (a chunk of protein) and some side dishes, a meal can be composed of a harmonious selection of smaller dishes. It’s a philosophy I like, even though it’s more work, so is likely to happen only on special occasions.

I haven’t cooked any complete menu from this book, but I have bookmarked a number of recipes. Actually, in true neglected cookbook style I hadn’t cooked anything at all from it till today, when I decided to try the cardamom rice with prunes.

Rice pudding and stewed prunes … hmm, sounds like British canteen fare. Happily, it is not. I’ve always liked rice pudding, although I do normally prefer to eat it hot, with jam or maple syrup. The cardamom makes this version decidedly un-English. The prunes are not an unappetising brown mush, but whole pruneaux d’Agen simmered in an Armagnac-laced syrup with cinnamon and vanilla. If I’d done the whole menu, I would also have served spaghetti marrow and vermicelli with watercress cream, cannelloni omelettes filled with spinach and gruyère, with a tomato sauce aux fines herbes, and a green salad with avocado and toasted walnuts. You can tell she used to run a restaurant.

Anyway, here’s my version of the rice. It turned out a bit runny, and over-sweet to my taste, so I’ve adjusted the quantities slightly to reflect this. It was very nice cold, with the prunes making an attractive colour contrast. And of course it can all be prepared hours in advance — fortunately, since the rest of the menu seems to involve an awful lot of last-minute frying, pasta cooking, and salad dressing. The recipe seems long, but really it’s very simple and not time-consuming. I’ll definitely keep this book because even if the complete menus are too much work there are a lot of small, stylish dishes. It’s out of print — so if you want to give it a try you can buy it for a penny on Amazon!
Recipe for A Feast of Flavours by Annie Bell: cookbook review and recipe »