My choice for April was Delia Smith’s Frugal Food. My paperback, now a tattered mess of food-stained pages, loosely contained in a cover adorned with a photo of a fresh-faced, decidedly unglamorous Delia, cost me 70p in 1974. She actually re-released this book with minor updates in 2008, not long after the publication of her much-reviled How to Cheat at Cooking (a more radical rewrite of her first published book). The new version, undoubtedly brought out to cash in on the recession, was a large-format hardback with full-colour glossy photos, the cover adorned with a cabbage instead of Delia’s face, costing £18. Not exactly a gift to poverty-stricken cooks.

I was a poverty-stricken cook in 1974, a student in London living in bedsits or crowded student flats. This book, along with Jocasta Innes’s excellent Pauper’s Cookbook, was rarely far from the stove, as its condition attests. I probably bought it because I regularly read and used the recipe column she wrote for the Evening Standard; I still have a looseleaf binder with many of Delia’s newspaper recipes pasted into it.

I don’t use the book now – the recipes are rather stodgy and earnest, a bit like Delia’s prose. Still, I thought it was worth getting out again. She had some sound ideas that stood me in good stead in those days – using cider in cooking instead of wine for example – and I still stick a skewer through baked potatoes so that they will cook more quickly. There are a few recipes here that became real favourites: fidget pie, made with scraps from a ham bone begged from the local butcher, rabbit in cider, steak and onions in Guinness, several recipes for offal, and, especially, chilladas – little rissoles made of lentils served with a tomato and chilli sauce (well, in my defence, it was the 70s!). Overall, the recipes aren’t much fun, but they are cheap, filling, and easy to cook.

For my vintage feast, I decided to cook something I couldn’t remember having tried before. As I’m in cider country at the moment, pork braised in cider with prunes seemed like a good choice. It did turn out well, if a bit dry – but I think that’s because I used a pork loin roast, since that was what I had. It would have been better with a fattier –and cheaper! – cut of meat. What little sauce there was tasted excellent, belying its humble origins. It’s a one-pot dish topped with sliced potatoes, but it needs some carrots or a green vegetable with it. To start, we had a simple carrot and leek soup, made with the stock from a pot-roasted chicken.

The choice of puddings was rather limited and uninspiring. I ended up picking spiced apple bread pudding, because I had some apples and some stale bread, but we were underwhelmed. It wasn’t a patch on my classic eggy, rum-flavoured, sultana-studded bread and butter pudding; the apples just made a soggy layer in what should have been a creamy mass of custard-soaked bread.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Delia, but having said that, there are a few of her recipes that I turn to again and again because they are so good, and she can be partly credited for teaching me (and probably millions of other people!) to cook. Her prissy, spell-out-every-detail style is a boon to unconfident cooks. Still, this book is evidently dated, in a way that her Summer Collection (the only one of hers I really like) isn’t – well, not yet anyway! It’s a reminder of how much better and more varied our food has become since then. It’s also a reminder that once upon a time most cookbooks just had recipes in them, not pages of arty photos, and were a lot cheaper!

Braised pork with prunes

750 g lean belly of pork or spare ribs, cubed
1 large apple, peeled, cored and sliced
2 onions, sliced
1 clove garlic, crushed
125 g pitted prunes
6 juniper berries, crushed
750 g potatoes, peeled and sliced
200 ml dry cider
oil (I used olive) — or dripping if you want to be traditional!
butter
a little sugar
thyme
bay leaf
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 170C. Use a heavy casserole for this (a Le Creuset is ideal). Heat the oil or dripping, and brown the cubed pork. Remove and set aside. Then fry the onion and garlic until softened. Return the pork to the pan, season with salt and pepper and add the herbs and juniper berries. Add the prunes, then scatter over the apple slices and sprinkle lightly with sugar. Finally, cover with a layer of overlapping potato slices. Add more salt and pepper, pour in the cider, and then dot with butter (or drizzle over a bit of olive oil). Cover and bake for about an hour and a half. Then remove the lid and check the potatoes are cooked — if not, raise the heat to about 200 C and cook uncovered for a bit longer. Otherwise, brown the potatoes under a hot grill. Serve with a green vegetable.

After last month’s blandfest, it seemed apposite to turn to Elizabeth David’s Spices, Salts and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, published in 1970, for this month’s cookbook challenge. She points out that England has a long history in the spice trade, reflected in cooking from the Middle Ages onwards: “we took to spiced food with an enthusiasm which seems to have been almost equal to that shown by the Romans at the height of their preoccupation with the luxuries of living. A study of English recipes of the fifteenth century leaves one with the impression that to the cook the spices were a good deal more important than the food itself.”

First a word about the book. I am a huge fan of Elizabeth David, no matter how unfashionable she has become, and practically every modern British cookery writer owes a debt to her (often uncknowledged). Her French Provincial Cooking is required reading for any English speaker who wants to learn to cook classic French food. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and she happily assumes intelligence and competence on the part of her readers. But Spices, Salt and Aromatics… is not one of her best books. It’s bitty, parts of it cobbled together from a number of previously published articles, and not very coherent as a result. It’s hard to figure out, for example, what a recipe for paella is doing in a book ostensibly about English food! But that being said, this is Elizabeth David. Of course there are good things here, and masses of interesting snippets of information. The chapter on spices and condiments is inimitable David: a combination of the academic and the personal. Using old recipe books as sources, she dragged many worthwhile recipes from oblivion and played her part in making people realise that English food was not without its own merits. Like all her books, it’s one you can read for pleasure as well as cook from.

Oh, and the cover art is gorgeous! The back cover tells us:

De Heem’s painting shows a seventeenth-century version of a Lombard crustade or pie, a survival from the fourteenth century, when such pies were common to the tables of the rich in Italy, France, England, the Low Countries, and Germany. This one, as the artist made plain by placing a dish of prawns in the foreground of his composition, was a fish day pie. The medley of dried and fresh fruit, almonds and pine kernels, probably concealed the main filling of fish, perhaps salmon and eel, or haddock and codling, ground to a paste with apples and pears, and ginger, cinnamon, cloves and mace.

When the pie was baked the top crust was lifted, a mixture of cream and egg yolks, or for fish days a cream of almonds, was poured in. The cover was then replaced and, surmounted with its decorative cluster of pears, cored, filled with sugar and sweet spices, the pie was returned to the oven until the custard or cream had thickened.

Recipes for Lombard or “lumber” pies survived in English cookery books, virtually unchanged, until well into the eighteenth century.

Everything about these paragraphs, the precision, the careful use of phrasing and detail, the casual erudition, tells me they were written by Elizabeth David herself, not some Penguin editor.

So to the meal. Unlike last month’s it soared high on the effort versus results scale, requiring only about half an hour’s “hands-on” time. The starter, coriander mushrooms, was so simple it was hardly a recipe at all. Toss your quartered mushrooms in lemon juice, heat some olive oil and sizzle some crushed coriander seeds in it. Then add the mushrooms, a couple of bay leaves,salt and pepper, saute for a minute, then cover and simmer for 3 minutes. Turn out into a dish, season with more lemon juice and olive oil, done. You could eat this hot; I let it cool and served it as a room-temperature salad. Make sure you have some bread to soak up the juices. This dish didn’t seem old-fashioned at all; a triumph of simplicity and natural flavours (it would no doubt be better with more interesting, i.e. wild, mushrooms!).

The main course was equally timeless; a slow-roast joint of pork with sliced oranges and a glug of Noilly Prat. I’m sure Elizabeth David expected a traditional British pork roast, with fat; in France pork roasts are always sold boned, every scrap of skin and fat trimmed off, rolled, and neatly tied. So the breadcrumb crust didn’t really come off (not enough fat). But the seasonings (garlic, rosemary, herbes de Provence, finely chopped and pressed into the surface of the joint) worked well with the orange, and it was really tasty. As for effort, I put it in the oven, basted it after 30 minutes or so, then went out for an aperitif, returning an hour and a half later. We had cinnamon-flavoured apple sauce with it, but only because a glut of apples meant I’d just made a big panful.

For pudding, I made a cream cheese and honey pie. I cheated here and used ready-made pastry (well, I had been out drinking). It was very like Yorkshire curd tart; she specified “double cream cheese”, so I used mascarpone, flavoured with acacia honey, lemon zest and cinnamon. Method: whizz all filling ingredients together, pour into pastry case, put into oven, done. Very delicately flavoured and best eaten lukewarm or cold.

I was glad I’d picked this book up; I’d got out of the habit of my Elizabeth David books, and this meal reminded me how her strengths are in such simple, classic combinations. No follower of fashion, she knew what she liked. Again, “things taste of what they are”, but the subtle use of complementary seasonings makes all the difference. And it was so quick and easy to put together. I’ve only ever cooked a handful of recipes from this book, but I’ll certainly do some more.

As I mentioned in my last post, Food for Pleasure was published in 1950, when Britain was still subject to rationing, albeit less drastic than during the war. It’s actually an anthology; Ruth Lowinsky chose recipes from books published from 1866 to 1942, including some of her own. So it’s even more old-fashioned than it sounds! “Pre-war cookery books,” she says, “must not be thought obsolete: their recipes, even when modified, offer incomparably better results than the frightening suggestions devised to suit the times by the misplaced ingenuity of the Ministry of Food.”

Just to encourage us, she adds, “Do not throw up your hands in histrionic despair when inferior ingredients result in a dish that falls short of your old, exacting standards”. With true British sangfroid, she urges us to make do and mend. “You must have forgotten how good things taste when cooked in butter. Continue to forget, and use instead margarine or margarine mixed with lard.” Those were the days!

Then she gives us some suggested menus, with quaint titles such as Luncheons for guests on whom a special effort is not wasted (cold mousse of eggs, duck with turnips, purée à la Jane); A dinner to please your husband who has invited business friends and wants to impress them (Batavia frappé, chicken à la king, salade andalouse, raspberry ice); Little dinners for the girl who lives alone and has a guest (Eggs à la bonne femme, boeuf Stroganoff, camembert in aspic – whaaaaat??).

As for the recipes, there was no Delia in those days. No glossy photos, and usually there are no quantities of anything, except for cake or pastry recipes – just a list of ingredients. The author assumes you already know how to cook from scratch, so most recipes are very short, with just basic instructions. Though indubitably British, they are also very foreign to modern tastes; there were quite a few I read several times and just couldn’t visualise what they would be like (on the other hand, it’s perhaps a good thing that I can’t imagine what camembert in aspic is like). A dish called panna consisting of cooked spinach, hard-boiled eggs, sardines, anchovies, and butter, all pounded together, sieved, spread out on a tray, and then cut into rounds and served on ice had me scratching my head too.

Apart from aberrations like these, it’s clear that in general British food in the 1950s was much blander than modern food. Or to put it another way, “things taste of what they are,” as Curnonsky famously said. Very few herbs and spices are used, and certainly no Asian ingredients. Naturally there are a few mild curries, and other dishes are given a bit of zing with nothing more exotic than mustard, anchovies, horseradish, or chutney.

So, something simple for pre-dinner nibbles: Parmesan fingers, courtesy of Mrs Winston Churchill, no less. Very easy to make: you just cut some stale white bread into finger-sized pieces, soak them in cream as if you were making pain perdu without the eggs, and then roll them in a mixture of finely grated Parmesan and black pepper. In the spirit of wartime substitution, you can use Gruyère or Cheddar instead. Then arrange on a greased baking sheet and bake in a hot oven for about 15 minutes, turning once, until both sides are nicely browned. I used not-very-stale sourdough baguette, whereas I think the recipe assumes factory-made white sliced, so my “fingers” came out looking rather messy. But they were very good eaten piping hot, creamy on the inside and crispy on the outside. I’d do these again.

Then cream of carrot soup. This is a prime example of 1950s blandness. It was a lovely pale apricot colour, and tasted of carrots. Which is OK I suppose, but nowadays you would have to perk it up with coriander, ginger, or orange.

Looks appetizing, doesn’t it?

The geography of the dish I chose for the main course seemed a bit amiss. Brazilian Stew (or Goulash, in Hungary) it said. Well, they are both foreign I suppose. It wasn’t much like any goulash I’ve ever had, because there was no paprika in it, at all. It’s basically a very British beef stew, with winter vegetables (potatoes, carrots, onion, a turnip), tomatoes, and beef, which for some reason is dipped in vinegar before adding it. I think this might be considered to be an adequate substitute for wine. No other liquid at all, except what comes out of the ingredients themselves.

It’s supposed to stew “at the back of the fire” for three to four hours, so I put my big cast-iron cocotte on top of the woodburner, pouring some cold water into the concave lid so that what liquid there was inside would condense and drip back down onto the meat. Result: lots of excellent gravy. Again, I think it could be enlivened with some more seasonings: a smidgin more vinegar, some Worcester sauce – heck, you could even put paprika in it and call it goulash!

Pudding: with 1950s English cuisine, it had to be jelly. Well, soufflé froid au caramel actually. This must be a pre-war recipe as it is rather extravagant with eggs. It is made in the same way as you would make zabaglione, only without the marsala – whisking eggs and sugar over hot water until thick and creamy. Then some caramel and gelatine are added and you pour it into a soufflé dish to set. Unfortunately my dish was a bit big, so I couldn’t do the paper collar thing to make it look as if it had risen above the top of the dish. Instead I just put it in the fridge and hoped for the best. It tasted good, except that it separated as it set, so I ended up with a dense caramelly bottom layer and a fluffy top layer. If I made it again, I would do it in individual moulds as it looked a total mess once it was dished out.

All in all we enjoyed this meal; nothing was startlingly good, but it was plain, wholesome stuff, made with ingredients that are all cheap and easy to obtain. I can definitely envisage making the Parmesan fingers again; really easy to do with ingredients you are likely to have on hand. My adaptations of the other two recipes follow.

Brazilian stew (or Goulash, in Hungary)

1 kg stewing beef (I used paleron, which is silverside in English I think; any cut suitable for slow cooking will do)
3 tbs red wine vinegar
1 tbs flour
1medium onion
2 turnips
4 carrots
4 large potatoes plus a few small ones
3 tomatoes
A stick of celery plus the leaves
Dripping or oil (the recipe specified beef dripping, but that’s not something I have to hand; I used duck fat instead)
Salt and pepper
Paprika or Worcester sauce to taste

I’m sure this recipe would work really well in a slow cooker.

Put the vinegar in a bowl. Cut the meat into fairly large chunks, at least an inch square, and toss them in the vinegar. Slice the vegetables, except the potatoes, and cut up the tomatoes. Peel the large potatoes. Melt the dripping in a large, heavy casserole and add all the sliced vegetables, and the tomatoes. Saute for a few minutes, till they start to soften and release some juice, then sprinkle on the flour and cook for a few minutes more, stirring, till they are slightly coloured. Add the meat, the peeled large potatoes, and the celery leaves, and season generously. Cover tightly and cook over a very low heat for 3-4 hours. An hour before it’s done, add the small potatoes, peeled but left whole, and put the lid back on. When the meat is really tender and the potatoes are cooked, taste and season further if necessary. It really doesn’t need anything else with it, although a green vegetable would be a good idea.

Soufflé froid au caramel

Caramel:
150 g sugar (cubes are best)
3 tbs cold water

Soufflé:
100 g caster sugar
3 eggs and 2 yolks
2 ¼ leaves gelatine
juice of ½ a lemon
2 tbs very hot water
3 tbs whipped cream

Note: the original recipe instructs you to stir the soufflé over ice till almost set, before pouring it into the mould. I didn’t do this because I didn’t have any ice; I just put it in a sink of cold water. But I think if I’d used ice it probably wouldn’t have separated, because it would have cooled much faster and I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time stirring. So have some ice handy. Also, this all sounds more trouble than it is; it’s really quite quick to make (especially if you cheat and use bought caramel!).

Use the sugar to make caramel in a dry pan. When it’s done, protect your hand from any splashes and pour in the 3 tbs water. Return to the heat and stir till smooth if it seizes. Set aside.

Prepare 4 individual ramekins by tying strips of oiled greaseproof paper round them so that they protrude above the rim. Put the sheets of gelatine to soak in some cold water.

For the soufflé base, put the eggs and yolks in a bowl with the sugar over a pan of barely simmering water. Using an electric whisk, beat constantly for about 10 minutes until the mixture is thick and frothy, and the whisk leaves a trail on the top. It won’t be hot, but should be warm. Remove from the heat and start adding the caramel, still whisking. Taste as you go, till it seems caramelly enough. Whisk in 1 tablespoon of whipped cream.

Squeeze out the gelatine and add it to the hot water and lemon juice in a small bowl, stirring to dissolve (the egg mixture isn’t hot enough for this, which is why you have to do it separately). Then whisk it into the eggs. Put the bowl inside another bowl filled with ice, and stir until it is almost set. Then pour it into the moulds, using the paper to fill a bit above the edges, and put them in the fridge to finish setting.

Carefully remove the oiled paper, and decorate the soufflés with the remaining whipped cream. You can use other flavourings instead of caramel – praline or coffee for example, or even pureed fruit. Be careful not to increase the amount of liquid added though, or it won’t set.

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Use a non-stick roasting tin (I have a ceramic one that works well), or line an ordinary one with foil. Combine the marinade ingredients in a bowl and whisk till smooth. Put the chicken in the roasting tin and pour all but about 2 tbsps of the marinade over it. Roast for 10 minutes, then remove, baste, surround the chicken with the turnip wedges, and return to the oven, turning the tin 180 degrees as you do so. Continue to cook for a further 50 minutes, basting 2 or 3 times with the reserved marinade. If the chicken is browning too quickly, turn oven down a bit, and if it starts to dry up and you have run out of marinade, use some more orange juice or water to baste it.

Once the chicken is cooked, remove from the oven and leave to stand in a warm place for 5 minutes before serving.

Cut the monkfish into large chunks and remove the skin if the fishmonger hasn’t done it for you. Plunge the tomatoes into boiling water, peel them, squeeze out the seeds, and cut into dice. Chop the shallots.

Heat the olive oil and half the butter in a saute pan and quickly fry the fish over high heat till lightly coloured. Remove with a slotted spoon. Add the rest of the butter and gently cook the shallots and garlic till soft. Add the white wine and cognac and cook for a few minutes to deglaze and reduce slightly. Add everything else except the cream and cook for about 5 minutes. Put the fish back in the pan and simmer just long enough to cook the fish, about 10 minutes. Remove the fish and keep it warm while you reduce the sauce by about half. Stir in the cream and adjust the seasoning. You need a bit of a kick from the cayenne or chilli, but it shouldn’t be really hot — we are in France after all.

A la forestière in French cuisine invariably means the dish contains mushrooms, because in autumn every self-respecting peasant is out there scouring the woods for fungi while hoping to avoid trigger-happy hunters. All we’ve scored so far are a few piboules from the poplar tree in our garden, but luckily dried ceps are always on hand to add a secret kick to savoury dishes.

This Jane Grigson recipe (from her Vegetable Book) worked wonders with the woody organic carrots in our veggie box. She serves them in hollowed-out bread rolls brushed with butter and crisped in the oven; I just served them on toasted muffins. They make a good vegetarian starter or light lunch/supper, but would also be an excellent accompanying vegetable for a roast, with or without the bread.

You could just use common-or-garden cultivated mushrooms, but fresh or dried ceps (porcini) will take it into another league.

750 g carrots, sliced fairly thickly
light, not too highly seasoned stock (beef, chicken, vegetable…)
1/2 tsp sugar
a knob of butter
nutmeg
250 g fresh mushrooms, preferably including some ceps, or dried mushrooms soaked in hot water, or a mixture of both
150 ml cream
chopped parsley and/or chives
juice of half a lemon
salt, pepper

Put the carrots in a pan and just cover with stock. Add sliced dried mushrooms if using (I added some of the soaking liquid too, because it’s full of flavour). Add sugar and nutmeg and simmer uncovered for 20 minutes or so, until the carrots are tender and the liquid is reduced to a syrupy consistency. If you are using fresh mushrooms, slice them and fry in a little butter till lightly browned, while the carrots are cooking. Add them to the cooked carrots, then add the cream and herbs and stir over low heat for a couple of minutes to thicken and amalgamate the sauce. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice to taste and serve immediately.

You simply boil your pasta and dress it with the zest and juice of a lime, some chilli flakes (I used my standby chilli sherry instead), plenty of black pepper and olive oil, and a splash of the cooking water to loosen it all up. Salad dressing, basically. Swill it around so all the strands are glossy with oil and sprinkled with specks of lime zest and pepper, add plenty of Parmesan, eat. Excellent stuff!

It looked promising, so I tried it and was pleased with the results — it’s one of those simple sauces that can be prepared in the time it takes the pasta to cook. So StuffyerBake is now in my feedreader and my blog roll.

I often cook courgettes like this as a side vegetable (though I hadn’t thought of adding chilli before, or indeed stirring them into pasta) — they are very nice with roast chicken or duck, or even a grilled steak. Usually I salt them after grating and leave in a colander with a weighted plate on top for half an hour before squeezing out the excess moisture, but this probably isn’t necessary unless the courgettes are really large. I didn’t salt them this time, but did raise the heat to boil off the water.

For 2:
pasta of your choice
1 tbsp olive oil
1 red chilli, finely chopped (I didn’t have any, and used dried flakes, but fresh would have been better)
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 medium courgettes, grated
2 tbsp creme fraiche
zest of 1 lemon, finely grated
black pepper
parmesan, grated

Start the pasta cooking. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan over a low heat, add the chilli and garlic, and stir but don’t allow to brown. Turn up the heat, add the grated courgettes and stir for a few minutes to allow any excess water to evaporate. Stir in the creme fraiche and lemon zest and season well with pepper. Drain the pasta and toss with the sauce, adding some grated parmesan and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil to finish.

“Must-stop-baking-cakes,” I muttered to myself as I browsed the blog of this month’s partner for Taste & Create, Happy Cook of My Kitchen Treasures. I seem to have baked a lot of cakes recently, many of them from my T&C partners or other bloggers, and the effects on my waistline are noticeable.

It wasn’t easy though; there were quite a few sweet dishes I fancied trying, such as Apricot-Marzipan Bundles, or coffee-craisin-mascarpone loaf. Or moelleux au chocolat. Or raspberry financiers. Well, you get the picture. HC likes making panna cotta too, and I love panna cotta.

But still, I tore myself away and decided that since HC obviously knows what she’s talking about when it comes to Indian food, I would make Kadai Murgh. Excellent choice — we both really liked it, and scraped our plates clean. I served it with a Basmati rice pilau and some yoghurt — sadly no Geeta’s mango chutney, because our local Carrefour doesn’t stock it any more — most upsetting.

This dish is dead easy to make; you can do it in little more time than it takes to cook the rice. Mine doesn’t look quite like HC’s, because I couldn’t get any tandoori powder, so I had to make do with a spoonful of paprika and some ras-el-hanout. When I tasted it at the end of the cooking time, it was a bit too spicy for me, so I just added an extra spoonful of crème fraîche to tone it down. Definitely a keeper, so thanks HC!

Visit My Kitchen Treasures for the real recipe. Here I give my own way of making pilau rice; I’ve been doing it this way for years and it always produces rice that is not soggy or stuck together. Of course you can vary seasonings to suit yourself.

For two not very greedy people, take a glass or cup of about 220 ml capacity and fill it about 3/4 full with Basmati rice. Finely chop a small onion or a shallot or two, and crush a clove of garlic. Heat some vegetable oil in a pan with a tight-fitting lid. Soften the onion and garlic in it for a few minutes, then add the rice and stir to coat it with oil. Fill the glass to the top with cold water, pour into the pan, and stir once just to loosen anything that might have stuck. If you like your rice a bit more cooked than I do, you can add a little more water — a tablespoon or two. Season to taste: I use salt, pepper, two or three crushed cardamom pods, and a bay leaf. Sometimes I add crushed coriander seeds or cumin too. Put on the lid, turn down the heat to very low, and leave to cook completely undisturbed for 15 minutes. Do not take off the lid or stir!

At the end of this time you can take a peek; all the water should have been absorbed, and you can test the rice by eating a bit. If it’s done, turn off the heat and stir it up a bit in case it’s stuck to the bottom of the pan. It will keep warm with the lid on for another 10 minutes or so.

Well, I will never catch up with Maggie, because she has already done more recipes than there are in my whole book. But here I am with two recipes in two days.

Thank goodness for my Global knife, the best tool I’ve ever had for chopping vegetables. This recipe requires you to dice courgettes and aubergines to the size of grains of rice. I’m not the best chopper in the world, but with this knife I did it tolerably well in about 10 minutes.

The veg are sauteed and then added to a classic plain risotto, which is served with lamb cubes threaded onto rosemary twigs and pan-fried. Actually I grilled mine using my cast-iron grill pan, because it’s the best way of quickly cooking meat so that it’s caramelised on the outside and still pink on the inside.

It was nice; I liked the way the flavour of the tiny dice permeated the risotto. For a vegetarian version, it would be good with grilled halloumi cheese, which could also be threaded on skewers.