Normally, I cook frittata slowly in a frying pan and finish it off with a couple of minutes under the grill to set the top. This time, I had some left-over roasted vegetables to use up, and was inspired to do it differently. It’s a very quick and easy dish if you have left-over roasted veg, but of course you can cook them from scratch. I always do plenty when I roast vegetables, because they are one of the best kinds of left-overs you can have. Toss them into a salad with rice, pasta, or Ebly and some toasted nuts, blend with some home-made stock and spices and make a delicious soup, use them to fill quiches or omelettes …

For 3-4 people
About 400 g mixed veg — I used half a butternut squash and 1 large leek, but choose what you like
2 cloves garlic, chopped
olive oil
1 medium onion
5-6 eggs
salt and pepper
50 g cheese (I used feta, but cheddar or Gruyère will work fine)
Parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to 200 C. If the vegetables aren’t already roasted, peel and cut the squash into chunks of about 2cm, and clean and thickly slice the leek. Spread on a roasting tray, sprinkle with salt and plenty of olive oil, and then use your hands to turn everything over in the oil. Roast for about 15 minutes, then add the chopped garlic, give everything a stir, and return to the oven for another 15-20 minutes, till the vegetables are soft and beginning to caramelise. Reduce the heat to 180 C.

Meanwhile, heat some olive oil in a frying pan, slice the onion and fry gently, stirring occasionally until it is lightly browned, about 15 minutes.

Tip all the roasted vegetables into a gratin dish — I used a round one of about 22 cm diameter, but an oblong one is fine too. It’s important that the vegetables and egg combined should be at least 2 cm deep; thin, leathery frittata is not good. Pop the dish in the oven for 5-10 minutes to heat through. Sprinkle over the caramelised onion. Dice the cheese, sprinkle that over, and season with pepper.

Beat the eggs and pour over the hot vegetables. Sprinkle with grated parmesan. Immediately return the dish to the oven and cook for 10-15 minutes, until the egg is just set and lightly browned on top. Serve warm or at room temperature, with chilli jam.

Oh, and vegetarian, if that floats your boat. Although if you are a confirmed carnivore you could add some ham if you wanted.

Like any good default dinner, this is very tolerant of substitutions and enhancements — I’ve suggested a couple below. This will make enough for two not-too-greedy people.

2 tbs olive oil
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 shallot or half a small onion, finely chopped
a small jar of artichoke hearts — either the marinated antipasti sort, or plain ones in brine
herbs of your choice: fresh basil or dried oregano are both good
1 tsp pesto (optional — handy if you don’t have any suitable herbs)
about 50 ml ricotta or curd cheese. Or cream cheese, if that’s what you’ve got.
about 50 ml crème fraîche or sour cream
pasta of your choice
salt and black pepper
grated parmesan

Put the pasta on to boil for the required time. Heat the olive oil over moderate heat in a saute pan big enough to hold the cooked pasta, and cook the garlic and onion for a few minutes until soft. Cut the artichoke hearts into quarters and add to the pan. If they are the marinated sort, add some of the oil from the jar too. Otherwise, add a slosh of the pasta water to stop the sauce sticking. Add the herbs of your choice, and/or the pesto, stirring until heated through. Lower the heat to a whisper and stir in the soft cheese and cream until the sauce is smooth. If the sauce seems too thick, add a little more pasta water. Drain the pasta and add to the saute pan. Toss with the sauce, adjust the seasoning with salt and black pepper, and serve sprinkled with Parmesan.

There’s an art to making a good tortilla, and I’m not sure I’ve cracked it yet (although I’ve cracked plenty of eggs trying). It’s the sort of thing where even the most detailed recipe is no substitute for being able to sense when you’ve got it right. Even if they aren’t up to the standards of the average Spanish tapas bar (can I do those rounded edges? Can I hell!), I have been pretty satisfied with my last couple of attempts.

The key points are a) the correct ratio of eggs to potatoes, and b) the right sized, heavy frying pan. I reckon you need about one medium potato per egg, but really you need to look at the mixture and know whether to add another egg. It should be neither too eggy (it won’t hold together) nor too packed with potato (too stodgy). The mixture should fill the pan to a depth of between 1 and 1 1/2 inches — thin tortillas are hopeless, and if it’s too thick it will scorch before it’s set in the middle.

Some people slice the potatoes, others cube them. I’m in the “slice them” camp at the moment, but I may change my mind. The onion is essential — it will be too bland without. The end result should be firm enough when cold to cut into wedges or squares and eat with your hands. At the same time it’s not nice if it’s so overcooked it’s gone leathery (another reason not to do a thin tortilla).

6 eggs
5-6 medium waxy potatoes
1 medium onion
olive oil
salt and pepper

Slice the potatoes thinly and finely chop the onion. Heat a generous amount of olive oil in a heavy frying pan of an appropriate size — the oil should cover the bottom to a depth of about 2-3 mm. Place over a medium-low heat and add the potatoes; cook gently for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, before stirring in the chopped onion (if you add it earlier, it may burn). The potatoes and onions must be completely cooked before you add the eggs, but they mustn’t brown. This process should take about 20 minutes; keep checking and stirring.

When the potatoes are cooked, season with salt and tip them into a sieve over a bowl, letting the oil drip through. Beat the eggs in a large bowl with some salt and pepper. Add the drained potatoes and onions; this is the point where you need to stir it and decide whether the ratio is right, adding another egg or a bit more potato if necessary.

Pour some but not all of the oil back into the pan; you only need a thin layer to stop the tortilla sticking. Over a medium heat, pour in the egg mixture and let it cook for about 10 minutes, till it’s lightly browned on the bottom and no longer runny on top.

At this point you have a choice. Are you brave? If so, take either a plate a little larger than the pan, or a flat pan lid (i.e. no lip) of similar dimension, and place it over the pan. With oven-gloved hands, flip the whole lot over so that the uncooked side of the tortilla ends up on the plate. Then slide it back into the pan. Cowardly? Preheat the grill and slide the pan under it to finish cooking the top. Either way, it should only take another 3-5 minutes.

When cooked, slide onto a plate and leave to cool. I genuinely do think it’s nicest left in the fridge overnight; the flavour always seems much better the next day. It will easily keep a few days in the fridge. Eat in squares as a tapa, or with salad and bread as a main course.

This is a recipe I received from Jim Fisher of Cook in France. We didn’t actually make it when I was there, but he mentioned it and I was intrigued, as I knew that by the time I got home our friend Magali would have delivered half of one of her lambs, raised on the mountainside only a few hundred metres away from where we live.

Normally, we’d have gone out for a wild asparagus omelette on Easter Monday, to which all the village is invited, but due to circumstances beyond our control, it had to be cancelled. So it seemed like a good opportunity: we invited eight friends and got cooking.

The reason I say it’s “sort of” 30 minutes is because it only spends half an hour in the oven, but you need to put it in 2 hours before the meal. Our guests ended up being late and then we spent a long time drinking aperos, as you do in the Midi, so it ended up getting to the table about an hour later than our calculations had allowed for. Not a problem — it was delicious! This is an excellent way of roasting a leg of lamb, and I think I’ll always do it this way from now on. Apart from the flavour and the energy savings, the other big advantage of this method is that the lamb comes out of the oven very early, liberating it for other things (a gratin dauphinois and some roasted vegetables in our case). And as our experience demonstrated, it is very tolerant about timing.

1 leg of lamb (ours weighed about 2.5 kg)
olive oil
1 orange (optional)
1 lemon (optional)
aromatics of your choice: garlic, orange zest, rosemary, anchovies …
salt and pepper

Make sure you take the lamb out of the fridge several hours beforehand: it needs to be at room temperature when you put it in. If you want you can marinade it in a glug of olive oil, a spoonful of red wine vinegar, and whatever herbs you fancy. I find this is a good flavour boost for indifferent lamb, but I didn’t bother this time. Preheat the oven to as hot as it will go (250C in my case) and place a shelf fairly low down.

Stab the leg all over with a small, sharp knife and insert slivers of your chosen flavouring into the slits. We used Jim’s suggestion of slivers of garlic and orange zest, but garlic and lemon zest, garlic and rosemary, garlic and thyme, or garlic and anchovies would be good too (you can see a garlic theme emerging here — I find it hard to imagine lamb without garlic). If you’ve gone for the citrus theme, cut your orange and lemon in half and rub them vigorously all over the lamb.

Liberally coat the lamb with olive oil, smearing it on with your hands. Sprinkle with plenty of salt and coarsely ground black pepper. Place on a roasting tray, fatty side up, and cook in the oven for 20 minutes. Turn over and cook for another 10 minutes.

In the meantime get together some clean towels. If you have a coolbox, this is an excellent choice: otherwise you’ll need more towels or blankets. Put a folded towel in the bottom of the coolbox. At the end of the cooking time, wrap the lamb and its tray in several layers of foil, making sure there are no gaps. Put it in the coolbox, and fold towels over the top to enclose it completely. Put the lid on and go away. It will take an hour and a half to finish cooking, and will be perfectly pink and tender all the way through. Leaving it longer won’t do any harm.

When it’s done you can make gravy by pouring off the accumulated juices and skimming off the fat. Reduce the remaining juice in a pan with some red wine to make a sauce. We completely forgot to do this, but the juices made a very fine sauce for the leftovers later in the week.

It was Eliza who inspired me to try the vintage feast idea in the first place, so I don’t know why I’ve waited so long. The official “challenge” is over, but I like these old cookbooks so much that I have decided to continue an occasional series.

The book I have is an old Penguin, The Best of Eliza Acton, published in 1968, edited by Elizabeth Ray and with a foreword by … who else? Elizabeth David. You can’t read much Elizabeth David without discovering that she and Eliza are kindred spirits. Jane Grigson drew on Acton heavily for her English Food, and both she and David clearly thought more highly of Eliza than of the better-known Mrs Beeton.

Modern Cookery for Private Families was published in 1845, when Eliza was 46, and stayed in print for over 50 years. This 350-page paperback holds only a fraction of the hundreds of brief, precise recipes the original book must have contained. Her crisp prose, sharp asides, and succinct instructions that assume the reader is already a competent cook cannot fail to recall Elizabeth David, so it’s hardly surprising the latter admired her so much : “Over and over again,” she writes, “I have marvelled at the illuminating and decisive qualities of Miss Acton’s recipes.” Discussing the fact that Acton was eclipsed by later inferior writers, David suggests that it was because she was “a child of the eighteenth century …. living in the manner and writing of a style of English domestic life already doomed.” And she concludes, “Temporary eclipse has often been the fate of great innovators. In a way it is posterity’s compliment to genius.” And similarly, when the Jamies and Nigellas of this world have been and gone, Elizabeth David will still be with us.

So after all that, what about the food? I was spoilt for choice here. All sorts of things tempted me: fried potato ribbons, which sound very much like rather fantastical potato crisps, cut in long spirals; jumbles; cheesecake with no cheese in it; the famous cabinet pudding. In the end I went for a very simple menu.

To start: carrot soup. Eliza has two basic recipes for this, but follows them with a recipe for a variation: “Buchanan carrot soup (Excellent)”. With that recommendation, how could I not try it? It was delicious, deep orange with a zing from the curry powder, making it much more successful than Ruth Lowinsky’s bland 20th-century version. My only criticism was that I don’t particularly like the texture of cooked rice in my soup; when I reheated the leftovers for lunch, I liquidised it. Next up: Chicken Burdwan, which with a few adjustments could well become a regular standby for using up leftover roast chicken, and is an “Indian” dish that would certainly appeal to French people. It’s a feast of 18th-century flavours.

For dessert, I found the potato pudding irresistible. Years ago we were served a dessert of tiny dishes of impossibly smooth potato puree flavoured with vanilla at my then-favourite restaurant, Les Feuillants in Céret (sadly now gone). It was fantastic, and potatoes are my favourite vegetable, so I was certainly prepared to try another potato dessert. Of course it was nothing like that creamy dish at les Feuillants, but it did seem strangely familiar. After a couple of spoonfuls I realised it was very like the bottom part of a Queen of Puddings. So next time I want to make Q of P and don’t have any stale bread, I might use potatoes instead.

All of these were dishes I’d happily make again, so this is the best vintage feast so far. My adapted recipes for all three follow.

Buchanan carrot soup
600 g carrots
30 g butter
1 litre chicken or beef stock
1 heaped tsp curry powder (or 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper)
60 g cooked rice

Scrape the carrots and cut into thick slices. Melt the butter in a large pan and add the carrots; then cover and cook really slowly for an hour, shaking the pan from time to time. The carrots should not brown or stick. In true 19th-century fashion I did this on top of the woodburner.

Add the stock and simmer for another half hour. Liquidise till smooth. Then add the curry powder and cooked rice, and simmer for another 10 minutes. Liquidise again if, like me, you don’t like the texture of the rice. Taste, adjust seasoning, and serve.

Chicken Burdwan
Lefotver roast chicken (I used about half a small chicken)
1 small onion or a large shallot, finely chopped
25 g butter
1 tsp flour
pinch cayenne (I used pimentón picante as that’s what I have these days)
1 tbsp anchovy essence, or a couple of tinned anchovies, very finely chopped
1 wineglass of Madeira (I used some sweet Pedro Ximenez sherry, another magic Spanish ingredient)
1 tsp chilli sherry (Eliza says a tablespoon, but my Scotch Bonnet chilli sherry is so strong I didn’t dare)
black pepper
Juice of 1 lime or 1/2 lemon (optional)

Cut up the chicken into bite-sized pieces, removing skin. Melt the butter and gently soften the onion or shallot. Then add the flour and stir for a minute to blend before adding the anchovies and a wineglass of water. Bring to the boil, stirring, then simmer for 10-15 minutes. Stir in the Madeira/PX and chilli sherry, then add the chicken and heat gently just long enough to warm it through. Taste it and add black pepper and/or lemon juice to taste. Serve with rice pilaff and chutney.

Potato pudding

This is served hot with whatever jam or preserve you have; I used some home-made apricot jam. Eliza says you can serve it on its own cold as a cake, but I’m not sure I’d like that; it’s a bit stodgy and would be rather dull without the jam, which complements it really well.

500 g floury potatoes
75 g butter
120 g sugar
5 small eggs
pinch salt
grated zest of 1 lemon
good-quality not-too-sweet jam, e.g. redcurrant, apricot, greengage

Preheat the oven to 170 C. Boil the potatoes till soft and drain them very well. They need to be mashed very thoroughly but lightly while hot; I put them through the potato ricer, which is perfect for this. Beat in all the other ingredients except the jam. Pour into a well-buttered soufflé dish or cake tin. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, till the cake is set in the centre. Turn out of the tin or dish, cut into wedges, and serve with the jam. Or use it as the basis of a Queen of Puddings (in which case you’d use only the yolks of the eggs, saving the whites for the meringue, and reduce the other quantities by about half).

The ingredients list looks long and daunting. But almost all of them are storecupboard ingredients or basics you are likely to have on hand anyway. And it’s an excellent idea to make it in advance. I cooked it completely several hours beforehand, then left it to sit and mature before liquidising part of it and reheating. The rouille, a spicy form of mayonnaise, takes minutes if you have a stick blender.

This recipe is from Nadine Abensur’s excellent Cranks Bible. If you remember the ghastly wholemeal stodge Crank’s used to serve in the 1970s, it’s nothing like that. As this recipe demonstrates, the recipes are imaginative and heavily influenced by Abensur’s French and North African background. If you like Ottolenghi’s Plenty, you’ll like this, and I highly recommend it if you are vegetarian, cook for vegetarians, or just fancy meatless meals every now and then. You’ll probably have to search for a second-hand copy, but it’s worth seeking out.

Dried orange peel from half an orange (see below)
3 tbs olive oil
1 small leek or a small onion, sliced
1 small carrot, diced
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 small red pepper, diced
1/2 tbsp fennel seeds
a few threads of saffron
1 tsp tomato puree, or a couple of sun-dried tomatoes, chopped
1 tsp soft brown sugar
1 medium celeriac, peeled and chopped into pieces about 1 cm square
1 litre vegetable stock (or chicken, if you are not vegetarian)
125 ml white wine or dry vermouth
3tbs chopped parsley

To serve: thin slices of baguette, lightly toasted
2 oz gruyere cheese, finely grated

Rouille:
2-3 garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 tsp tomato puree
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp paprika or pimentón dulce
1 small roasted pepper (from a jar), chopped
1/2 tbs lemon juice
pinch cayenne pepper or pimentón picante
1 egg yolk
pinch sea salt
225 ml olive oil (not too strong-tasting)

To dry orange peel, peel strips of it as thinly as possible (I use a vegetable peeler) )and leave it in a low oven for about 40 minutes; store in an airtight tin.

Heat half the olive oil in a large, heavy-based pan over a moderate heat, and gently cook the leeks for a few minutes. Then add the garlic, carrot, and red pepper and continue to cook gently for 10 minutes or so till the vegetables soften. Add the spices, orange peel, brown sugar, tomato puree, and celeriac and saute for 5 minutes, turning the celeriac to coat it nicely in the aromatics.

Add the hot stock and another spoonful of olive oil, season with black pepper, and cook at a lively simmer for about half an hour. Add the wine and the chopped parsley and cook for another 10 minutes. The celeriac should be nice and soft by now — if it isn’t, cook it some more. At this point you can set it aside.

Make the rouille: this is absurdly easy if you have a stick blender. Just put all the ingredients except the oil in the beaker and whiz to blend. Then pour in the oil bit by bit, whizzing constantly and pulling the blender up through the mixture to pull the oil in gradually. It will thicken as it emulsifies. Taste and adjust the seasoning (adding more salt or lemon juice, for example, or cayenne if you think it isn’t sharp enough. It should have a good kick without being chilli-hot, remember we are in France). Note: this is the minimum quantity you can make, but leftovers will keep for a week covered in the fridge.

When you want to serve, remove about a quarter to a third of the soup (depending on how chunky you want it to be) and liquidise it thoroughly before returning it to the pan. The original recipe says to liquidise almost all of it, but I decided I wanted it to look more like bouillabaisse than plain fish soup, with actual chunks in it, and flecks of red pepper. Reheat, check seasoning and correct as necessary. Toast the slices of baguette.

Serve in wide bowls with toast, a pot of rouille, and the grated cheese; each person tops the toasts with rouille and cheese, floating them in the soup.

No apologies for the gratuitous cat picture; he’s more photogenic than cabbage gratin

My version: I had no butter, at all, so I substituted olive oil, which was probably a good thing for my arteries anyway. I’m sure it would be good with butter, but it was just fine with olive oil. There was no St Marcellin in the cheese shop, so I bought a nice ripe St Félicien instead. St Félicien is bigger than St Marcellin. What the heck, I chopped up the whole cheese (except the bits I ate while I was doing it) and scattered it over. So if using St Marcellin I’d be tempted to use most of two cheeses. Other nice tangy creamy cheeses can be used — I think Reblochon might be nice, and Molly used Délice de Bourgogne (I think she’s right that Brie wouldn’t work).

Of course, if you use vegetable stock this dish is vegetarian.

3 tbs olive oil or unsalted butter
1 smallish savoy cabbage quartered, cored, and sliced into narrow shreds
1 bunch spring onions, white and green parts, thinly sliced
salt
400 ml mild chicken or vegetable stock
1 ripe Saint-Félicien cheese or 2 St Marcellins

Preheat the oven to 180C. Heat the oil or butter in a large frying pan, big enough to take all of the cabbage. Saute the cabbage and spring onions with a generous seasoning of salt on a medium to high heat for about 10 minutes; the cabbage should start to wilt, and can go brown in places. Add the stock, bring to a simmer, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 2 minutes.

Transfer everything to a large gratin dish, cover tightly with foil, and bake for 45 minutes. Remove the foil, and continue to bake for 20 minutes or so until much of the liquid has evaporated (it’s a good-tempered dish, no harm will be done if you leave it a bit longer). Remove the dish from the oven, cut the cheese into small pieces, and scatter over the cabbage. Turn up the oven to 200C and cook for another 10 minutes or so until the cheese is melted. We just ate this with mashed potatoes, but it would go really well with roast or braised meat, especially pork.

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.