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FOURTH ESTATE • London
To Mrs H, whose real name is Alison
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
A Culinary Courtship
1 Cracking the egg
Seeking Glory
2 Rhubarbing
The First Eruption
3 Rhubarbing on
A Chilly Moment
4 Crêpe souls
Taste For Travel
5 Burger king
The Sound Of Falling Scales
6 Infernal rind
The Lure Of The Cookbook
7 The joy of blancmange
Tools For The Job
8 Slower pasta
Walking Down The Aisles
9 A bite on the wild side
Whining And Dining
10 Pizza excess
Dinner Party Dust-Up
11 A selfish feast
Suet And Steel
12 A cake is not just for Christmas
Judicial Matters
13 Telling porkies
Cash Into Nosh
14 Getting the raspberry
Recipe For Disaster
15 Death by chocolate
The Food Of Love
16 Shucking revelations
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the publisher
A CULINARY COURTSHIP
GIVEN OUR COMMON INTEREST, it was appropriate that Mrs H (as she then wasn’t) and I met in a kitchen. It was at a party in south London, Darling Road to be precise, in 1982. When one thing happily led to another, food emerged as a joint passion. The first meal I ever made for Mrs H was a giant pile of smoked salmon sandwiches. I noticed that they went down well. This was promising. I doubt if a longstanding relationship would have resulted if she had turned out to be one of those females whose main nutritional intake is a breath of air.
The first meal she ever made for me was a Mongolian hot pot. This takes the form of a great plate of raw titbits – slivers of chicken breast, pork and steak, along with prawns, sliced scallops, broccoli florets, mangetouts – that you cook piecemeal in a large pot of stock over a methylated spirit burner. When you’ve simmered a piece, you eat it. Mongolian hot pot is an ideal dish for a couple in the exploratory stages of courtship. Because you use chopsticks to fish out the various items, there is plenty of scope for intimacy. You might steer your companion towards a succulent piece of steak, while she hands over a juicy prawn. There might be a certain amount of light-hearted competition for a scallop. The culinary foreplay is prolonged but not so heavy on the stomach as to preclude subsequent activity.
The meal was a revelation. My passion for food began when I became passionate about Mrs H. After living in an all-male flat, where food was fuel rather than feast, I was astonished by the flair and generosity of her cooking and also the remarkable amount she spent on ingredients. Not that I was entirely indifferent to food when we met. I don’t suppose many men would have proposed the Royal Smithfield Show as a destination for a first date. Somewhat to my surprise, Mrs H expressed keenness to attend this agricultural jamboree. The first thing we saw inside Earls Court was several lamb carcasses suspended over an enclosure containing their living siblings. Mrs H did not seem too alarmed by this vivid depiction of before and after. We bought a pair of pork chops at the show, which she grilled for supper. They were excellent.
Nibble by nibble, our relationship blossomed. We did a certain amount of the restaurant work that courting couples are supposed to go in for. Not that we had many candlelit dinners for two. Economy was a greater priority than romantic surroundings. Restaurants don’t come much cheaper or less romantic than Jimmy’s, the Greek joint staffed by famously cheerless waiters in Frith Street, Soho, while Poon’s on Lisle Street came a close second. Though far from ideal for a tête-à-tête – you ate at shared tables covered by greasy oilcloths – Mrs H was impressed by the robust generosity (she says ‘greediness’) of my ordering: roast duck, sweet and sour crispy won-tons, oyster and belly pork casserole…
Mostly, we dined at home. Since I spent almost all of my twenties in the pub, I missed out on the prawn cocktail era. Mrs H introduced me to a few delights of that distant time – snails in garlic butter (I was impressed that she owned snail tongs), kidneys in mustard sauce, chocolate mousse and cheese fondue. I’m still fond of her fondue, made in a large Le Creuset pan, though we restrict our intake of this dish, which is of doubtful value for the arteries unless you have spent the day climbing an alp or two, to once or twice a year. In her turn, Mrs H had missed out on certain areas of gastronomy that I regard as essential. I brought pork pie, rhubarb tart and shellfish to her attention. This did not, however, prevent her from refining my technique for moules marinière. ‘You don’t need great big chunks of onion. Could you chop it finer?’
Through Mrs H, I discovered the difference between proper paella and the Vesta variety. I also enjoyed the revelation that curry could be a pleasure, where you tasted the ingredients, rather than a form of trial by ordeal. She acquainted me with homemade pâté and salads that did not involve floppy lettuce. She even maintains that I didn’t like broccoli before we met. I find this hard to believe. I’ve always been a big fan. ‘You haven’t! YOU HAVE NOT! And, it’s only in the last couple of years that you’ve eaten curly kale and spring greens.’ Well, she may be right on the last point, though I can now see the point of such vegetation. Mrs H also recalls my eruption when she tried serving flowers in a salad, which was fashionable some years ago. ‘You objected very strongly and described it as “poncing it up”.’
I gained an additional impetus towards culinary matters when I began writing a weekly column called ‘The Weasel’ in the Independent. Though its contents could be anything of a vaguely humorous nature, food and drink began to make a regular appearance. As with any habit, it started innocuously enough. You happen to write a piece about eating muskrat (dark, tough, springy meat not unlike Brillo pad) at a restaurant called Virus in Ghent. Soon after, you find yourself eating betel nut near Euston station, aphrodisiac jam in Paris, illicit ormers in Guernsey…
This new direction for the column bemused some executives on the paper. Objections to the high gustatory content were passed from above (‘Can’t he write about anything else?’), but I found it difficult to comprehend such griping. After all, what could be more interesting or amusing than food? Indeed, what else is there? Maybe I did ease up on the nosh from time to time, but this only produced an even greater flow of food pieces when I turned the tap back on: setting fire to the kitchen when trying to crisp Ryvita under the grill (they curled and touched the electric element); blowing up the fusebox when I tried to put a fuse on the fridge; making frumenty, the alcoholic porridge that prompted Michael Henchard to sell his wife and child in The Mayor of Casterbridge (‘Well, I’m not sold on it,’ said Mrs H).
Perhaps the real theme, which steadily emerged in column after column, was the difference between men and women in the kitchen. Or, at any rate, the difference between Mrs H and me in the kitchen. Though I came to spend much time cooking in the kitchen – more, possibly than Mrs H – it remains her bailiwick. Never having been taught the essential rules of the kitchen, such as tidying up and putting the right thing in the right place, I came in for a certain amount of brusque character analysis. Recently, when I foolishly asked Mrs H to refresh my mind concerning my shortcomings in this milieu, it prompted a Niagara-like flow that proved hard to turn off.
Woman on men (i.e. her on me)
Men want a huge amount of praise for anything they do.
Whatever they do, men always create a vast amount of washing-up, but they never think of washing up as they go along.
Men are reluctant to follow recipes in the same way that they are reluctant to ask for directions when they are lost.
Men plunge into cooking without sorting out the ingredients and utensils they will need. Then they can’t find what they want. When things are found for them, they never put them away.
Men tend to over-season. They think that if a little is good then a lot will be even better. This particularly applies to salt and Tabasco.
Men give up easily – e.g., if they get a pain in their arm when whisking cakes.
Men disappear if they have to do some work, but they are quite handy for reaching things from high shelves.
Men are not keen on washing burnt pans. (This is simply not true. I’m always washing up pans that Mrs H has managed to fuse food on to.)
Men always want to pinch a bit of a dish that is in the process of being made. They are very keen on eating between meals.
Men fill the dishwasher any old how so it seems packed even though there aren’t many items in there.
Following these lacerating comments, it struck me that Mrs H might appreciate a few words of mild correction. Hence:
Man on women (i.e. me on her)
Women are very, very, very bossy.
Women tend to be excessively pedantic about recipes and timings.
Women are very keen on vegetables, even when old and fibrous. They have an inexplicable fondness for purple-sprouting broccoli that is too woody to eat.
Women take a lot of luring into eating oysters. When you finally manage to do this, they can often be sick and look at you reproachfully.
Women are very difficult to get out of kitchen shops. Their favourite reading tends to be the Lakeland catalogue. They spend money like water in such places. I’d never spend £18.99 on a jelly strainer set, though Mrs H says, ‘It’s worth its weight in gold.’
Women always remember to put on a pinny when cooking. Despite the consequent stains and splotches on my clothes, I would never wear such an emasculating garment.
Women are obsessed with cleanliness to the extent that it imperils our natural resistance to bugs and germs.
When clearing cupboards, women have a tendency to chuck out perfectly good foodstuffs that are only a year or two past their sell-by date.
Women are very willing to eat lobsters and most forms of fish, but show a marked reluctance to kill, gut or scale these creatures.
Women constantly complain that they have not received an equal share of food. They are particularly assiduous in checking the level in their wine glass. ‘It’s not fair!’
So why did we decide to test our relationship further by cooking the stuff in this book? Lots of food books will give you the recipes, but this one tells you what it was like to make these dishes, and where irritations and cock-ups occurred. We tried a variety of methods and recipes for items ranging from pasta to raspberry jam, pizza to pancakes. While avoiding outré ingredients (OK – we did a hamburger with wagyu beef) and complicated techniques, we aimed to produce versions that were, if not exactly perfect, pretty damn good and capable of being reproduced on the domestic range. From Lady Shaftesbury’s hot cheese dip (page 56) to Fergus Henderson’s seed cake (page 247), I’d recommend that anyone even vaguely interested in cooking should have a bash. There are, however, some exceptions. Heston Blumenthal’s Black Forest gateau is definitely not easy to do. Rocket science is a doddle by comparison. I would never have dreamed of making the damn thing if the features editor of a newspaper had not com missioned me to do so. For sanity’s sake, I earnestly entreat you not to try it. Mrs H would say the same about geoduck clams and similar maritime oddities I treated her to in Chapter 11.
Most chapters involve the tutorage of Mrs H. I suppose I could have gone to other authorities for instruction but this would have caused problems. Having experienced several cookery schools over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not very good at being taught things in the kitchen. I claim this is because I’m too much of an anarchist to take orders. ‘Actually,’ says Mrs H, ‘you don’t listen when people tell you things.’ Well, yes, I do seem to have some kind of mental block when people try to teach me practical skills. (After four years of learning woodwork at school, my sole production was a test-tube rack with three wonky holes.) Having lived with me for twenty-odd years, Mrs H was able to put up with this minor foible. Even so, several dishes were seasoned with salty language and peppery outbursts. But our flare-ups, both verbal and actual, were quickly extinguished. Mostly, it was a rewarding, or at least filling, adventure. Some couples climb Kilimanjaro: we made a pork pie.
1 Cracking the egg
Battle of the boil
HAVING MOVED MY TOOTHBRUSH into Mrs H’s house, I found myself eating very well, though a surprising deficiency in her abilities emerged early in the day. After I’d cooked the breakfast egg for perhaps a dozen times on the trot, it occurred to me that Mrs H didn’t do boiled eggs.
‘Of course I can boil an egg,’ she insisted.
‘But have you ever done a soft-boiled egg?’
Her resistance crumpled like a toast soldier encountering a ten-minute egg.
‘Well, rarely.’
‘When did you last do one?’
‘Can’t remember. My father was always in charge of egg boiling. I followed my mother’s example.’
‘You mean you both just sat there and waited for them to arrive?’
‘Yes. Like chicks in a nest with our beaks open.’
‘Just like you do with me?’
‘Yes.’
Of course, it was no great hardship to plug this unexpected gap in Mrs H’s culinary repertoire. It gave me a raison d’être of sorts. But her lack of enthusiasm for this little dish was mystifying. In my view, the breakfast egg is 0-shaped bliss. I formed this opinion at an early age. While other boys invested their spending money on footballs or Ian Allan train-spotting books, I bought a humorous egg-cup etched with the injunction, ‘Get cracking!’
Mrs H’s take-it-or-leave-it approach to the soft-boiled egg did not prevent her pointing out my occasional failures with some vigour. I concede that it is not a good start to the day when you crack open your egg and find a yolk surrounded by a mainly liquid white. Still, I generally press on and eat the sad swirl. Not so Mrs H. ‘I think that’s the worst egg you’ve ever done for me,’ she said once, pushing away her untouched breakfast. She was so disturbed that it was several days before she could contemplate another boiled egg.
In order to improve my technique, I began to explore the unexpectedly vexed business of boiling eggs. Though the war between the Big Endians and the Little Endians about the best way to tackle an egg was a Swiftian satire, this stalwart of the breakfast table sparked a vigorous conflict in 1998. The cause of combustion was Delia Smith’s advice in her BBC programme How to Cook. Her method involves making a pinprick in the big end to prevent cracking, then simmering for ‘exactly one minute’. You then remove the pan from the heat and leave the egg in the water, resetting the timer for five or six minutes, depending on whether you want a white that is ‘wobbly’ or ‘completely set’. This advice was described as ‘insulting’ by fellow telly chef Gary Rhodes. ‘I really don’t believe the majority of people cannot boil an egg,’ he huffed. Obviously, he hadn’t met Mrs H.
In 2005, there was a further kerfuffle when Loyd Grossman tested the boiled egg techniques of five chefs for Waitrose Food Illustrated. Giorgio Locatelli’s method involved constantly stirring the egg in boiling water for six minutes. The resulting centrifuge, he claimed, should keep the yolk exactly in the middle of the boiled egg. Antonio Carluccio insisted that the egg should be boiled for three minutes and then left to stand in the water for thirty seconds. But it was the procedure advocated by Michel Roux of the Waterside Inn at Bray that caused feathers to fly. In his book Eggs, he recommends that an egg should be placed in a small pan, covered generously with cold water and set over a medium heat. ‘As soon as the water comes to the boil, count up to sixty seconds for a medium egg,’ Roux explained to me. ‘It requires neither a watch nor an egg timer and it is infallible.’ Grossman reported disaster when he attempted this method: ‘It was so close to raw that I didn’t want to eat it.’ I met Roux a few months after this criticism and he was still incandescent about Grossman’s comments.
In order to achieve an impartial view, I tried the Roux method using an egg at room temperature. The result was a lightly boiled egg. To achieve a medium set, I had to count for another thirty seconds. Obviously, the time varies depending on the temperature of the egg before it goes into the water and the size of the egg. My main objection to the method is that counting up to sixty or, worse still, ninety is excessively demanding for some of us at breakfast time.
I attempted several methods that claimed to produce the perfect boiled egg, though I drew the line at St Delia’s suggestion of simmering for the time it takes to sing three verses of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Eventually, I evolved a technique that eschews any form of timer, whether human or mechanical. It involves putting two eggs into simmering water, looking at the digital clock on the oven and adding another four minutes to whatever time is displayed. When this period clicks up, I add a few more seconds for luck, making (I hope) four and a half minutes in all. I then whip out the egg. It works, more or less. The result is usually a nicely set white and liquid but slightly thickened yolk. Mrs H’s customary response is ‘Very nice’. This is satisfactory, though on her scale of responses it is not as ecstatic as her top accolade, ‘Yum’.
Occasionally, for inexplicable reasons, this method produces an underdone egg and accompanying complaints from Mrs H, but I still prefer human approximation to mechanical certainty. ‘An egg is always an adventure,’ said Oscar Wilde. ‘The next one may be different.’ In that spirit, I stick to guesswork even if it means a variable outcome at the breakfast table. That’s me, living for kicks.
If Mrs H wanted a certain outcome in her boiled egg, she could, of course, break the habit of a lifetime and start doing them herself. Instead, she continues sitting there with beak open. Had she ever considered attempting the breakfast simmer in our two decades together?
‘Nope. See what you can get away with if you keep quiet.’
The scramble for success
The boot was on the other foot when it came to scrambled eggs. My inadequacy was brought home when I made some for Mrs H. ‘This is fine,’ she said, ‘as long as you like scrambled eggs that are pale, hard and rubbery.’ I scrutinised my effort, which leaked a watery residue that made the under-lying toast go soggy.
‘It’s not all that bad,’ I protested, risking a nibble.
‘Hmm,’ considered Mrs H. ‘Perhaps I’ve had worse scrambled eggs in hotels.’ Recalling my encounters with terrible hotel scrambles – friable, evil-smelling, desiccated – I realised that this was not saying very much.
‘Chuck it in the bin and buy some more eggs,’ said Mrs H.
Swallowing my pride, which was easier than my eggs, I reassessed my scrambling technique. At some point in the past, I’d conceived the idea that speed was of the essence with scrambled eggs. Plenty of heat and plenty of spoon-whirling guaranteed success. Occasionally, I would examine the chewy results of my speed-scramble and ponder, ‘This can’t be right.’
Mrs H put me right: ‘You need four eggs, plenty of butter and plenty of patience.’ Of all the culinary lessons imparted by Mrs H in this book, the one that has taken root most effectively, at least in her opinion, is how to do scrambled eggs. ‘You’ve learned to do them very well,’ she said, rather like an old master dispatching a talented apprentice into the wide world. ‘I like your scrambled eggs as much as mine.’ Since then, scrambled eggs have become my default snack. Nothing as simple to cook tastes quite so good.
For two people, five lightly beaten and seasoned eggs are added to a pan that is just warm enough to melt a walnut-sized lump of butter. Cooking at low heat is of the essence. Unlike boiled eggs, poached eggs and soufflés, scrambled eggs demand the near-constant involvement of the cook. They should also be consumed immediately. (That’s why the hotel breakfast scramble is usually hopeless.) Nothing seems to happen for ages while you keep stirring. Then, just when you have given up all hope, curds begin to form on the bottom of the pan. These have to be gently broken by the rotating spoon. When the eggs are heading towards setting but still liquid, you add another teaspoon of butter (a splat of cream also works well) and stir again, remove from the heat and serve. The final result should be a slurry, not a set.
If you’re trying to do anything else at the same time, especially the manifold demands of the full English breakfast, disaster is likely. But with unceasing attention and quite a lot of butter, you can produce a dish that is luxurious in both taste and texture. It is one of the few items where the amateur can achieve three-star finesse – or nearly. I must admit that Michel Roux’s formulation incorporating crab and asparagus tips, which I sampled once at his reataurant in Bray, has the edge on my version. ‘There are two schools of scrambled egg,’ explained Roux. ‘My brother Albert does his for hours in a bain-marie. I do mine over very low gas using a diffuser. His are still half-cooked when mine are finished. Less than three eggs in scrambled egg and you get nothing. Five or six are best.’
My decision not to use a diffuser was assisted by my inability to find the damn thing in our kitchen cupboard. Not that the lowest possible heat is always regarded as a sine qua non. In a heretical deviation, Roux’s nephew Michel Roux Jr, who is chef at Le Gavroche in Mayfair, dispenses with both diffuser and tiny flame. He recommends ‘a medium to high heat’ in his recipe for ‘the perfect creamy scrambled eggs’. It goes to show that there is no golden rule for a great scramble.
My in-depth research into scrambled eggs was curbed by Mrs H’s concern for my arteries. I would have tried Ian Fleming’s recipe – his obsession with scrambled eggs is indicated by their repeated appearance as James Bond’s breakfast – but requiring six ounces of butter and twelve eggs, it is as potentially lethal as Bond’s Walther PPK. Along similar lines, the scrambled egg recipe from the surrealist Francis Picabia in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook calls for eight eggs and half a pound of butter. ‘Not a speck less,’ insists Toklas, ‘rather more if you can bring yourself to it.’ Since the result is described as having ‘a suave consistency that perhaps only gourmets will appreciate’, Mrs H’s prohibition was not too painful.
I had better luck with ‘Portuguese-style scrambled eggs’, one of the variations proposed by Michel Roux. Currently the Sunday breakfast de choix at Hirst HQ, it is a good dish to make if you happen to have some meat stock in reserve. (Years ago, I saw a tip in a newspaper about storing concentrated stock in plastic ice-cube bags in the freezer. Aside from being a bit fiddly to achieve – you tend to end up with a lot of stock on the floor – and the tendency of the frozen cubes to get lost in the freezer, it’s a fine idea.) The scrambled eggs are served in a soup plate topped with a sprig of grilled cherry tomatoes and fringed by a narrow moat of warm stock. Serve with buttered toast. Mrs H’s response is most satisfactory. ‘Simply fantastic. It’s the very best sort of brasserie food. Just the thing to revive an ailing spirit. Perfect for a late breakfast on a Sunday.’