At Elizabeth David's Table: Her very best everyday recipes

Oooh, what we all wouldn't give to be at Elizabeth David's table. Sort of. Because I imagine she'd be really quite terrifying. 

What if she got you to do a taste test of some tomatoes, and you plumped for the ones from Tesco instead of the glowing fresh ones she'd picked herself under the blush of a Tuscan sun?

That would be so shameful. You'd never be able to eat a tomato again.

Here's my book review of At Elizabeth David's Table for Lovefood.com.

There will be a regular (probably monthly) review, so I'll post them as I go. 

I should find a way of archiving all my food writing on here, so it doesn't interrupt with the blog, but is still there. Any ideas how?

I'm on t'box right now, on Market Kitchen but I can't watch it because I don't have the Good Food Channel. A little annoying, but probably a blessing. I am on tomorrow too.

Lindsey Bareham's A Wolf In The Kitchen: Easy Food For Hungry People

Lindsey Bareham's A Wolf In The Kitchen was my second cookbook, and if I wasn't so obsessed with food it could well have been the last, because any cook in possession of it could feed him/herself and others quite happily, with plenty of variety and not an absurd cost, for years, a lifetime perhaps. 

My mother bought it me when I was at university. It wasn't just any university. Oh no. It was a university that hated its students so much it thought they should survive on the worst food in the country. A combination of hideous, inedible, overboiled shite pretentiously served en masse in a big fancy hall by

Hispanics (an event pretentiously known as "hall") and whatever you could cook on the one (sometimes two) electric plug in hob things provided to share between about twenty students.

They obviously thought we were far too interested in studying to worry about little things like EATING. Fools. That place was Cambridge. Boy it was crap.

Instead we fashioned our own diet.

There was no breakfast. We got up too late. Obv.

Lunch was an over-sized tuna and sweetcorn baguette from Peppercorns on Rose Crescent. Apart from the happy term I spent helping a medic out with his dissertation (I sat in a box pressing buttons next to different coloured lights for a fiver an hour). After which Rishi took me to Pizza Hut so he could eat the all you can eat buffet and I could have refills of Diet Coke.

Dinner, if we went to hall, was a big bowl of tortilla chips and two bottles of wine from Ha Ha's. Whenever we got to hall there was a queue, so we talked obnoxiously loudly for a while about how shite the place was, and how we wouldn't pay 10p for such crap (even though we already had, because you had to pay for all these awful meals up front), and then if the glares were too bad when we tried to push in, we went down the road to the bar where you got a bottle of vino and a plate of tortilla chips for a fiver before 7pm).

Or cartons of Covent Garden soup, if we were in a healthy stage. Preceded by a Mr Motivator video. Yes, a video. And yes: it was Mr Motivator.

Or we ate out at the Dome or Pizza Express. Massive spendthrifts of students we were. It was years later I learnt that everyone else was spending either the money their parents gave them or a student loan. I was the only dummy binning both and ending up in agonising debt. But then again, I did get to go on clubbing weekends around the country and drink the wine and eat the cake in Cambridge. Rather than either/or. Never really been an either/or person.

A midday fry up. Made with crazed control-freakery by AC to everyone's perfect specifications. She could get orders for nine different fry ups exactly right, for everyone, at the same time and all warm.

Sundays were white bread, ham and crisp sandwiches. Dairylea Dunkers. Washed down with white wine.

When we were stoned in Guy's room, we ate Sunbreak biscuits, or whatever his grandparents had packed in the latest food package.

When we were stoned in Jon's room, we ate whatever his mum had packed in the latest food package.

And then there was A Wolf In The Kitchen, from which, as far as I can remember, I cooked three things.

Sweetcorn fritters - still a favourite of mine. Though I usually make courgette fritters now.

Pea dhal with white fish. As you can imagine, a winner.

A lamb and apricot stew. Also great.

But I always looked at the book, and always planned to cook epic feasts. Did this book set the pattern for how I would treat each of the many, many cookbooks I would buy in the decade to come? Is there something deeper to be read into this, about making plans you never execute?

Or is it just about my greed being so intense that even I can't service it?

Who even cares. What I do know is that this is the best introduction to cooking anyone could hope for. It runs through quick dishes from Italy, North Africa, China, India and south-east Asia, with brief explanations (nothing too taxing for student brains). It isn't intimidating, but is authorative. Unlike Delia, who I do respect for her contribution to teaching us how to cook, and who this book recommends you read, there is nothing "teachy" about it. It's just: here's the food, cook it if you fancy.

The first thing it does is explain how to make yourself a proper tomato sauce, while most students were dicking about with those gross one-pot Dolmio things in little plastic saucers. And while most student cookbooks were suggesting a good way to feed yourself was to take three slices of plastic white bread, paste together with some of that putty supermarkets call "sandwich filling", and deep-fry the lot in a freshly-mixed Pot Noodle seasoned with mixed herbs.

I salute Lindsey Bareham. But at the same time it was nice to wake up knowing you could eat a fry-up, three Irish coffees, two Nadia's white and dark chocolate slices, a pizza, seven alcopops, a pizza/tortilla chips for dinner then chips at 3am, and not put on any weight.

Eat, Memory

Eat, Memory. It is such an obvious title, and such a good one at the same time. Everyone has memories they associate with food, and so often it is the food which helps them remember the rest.

This is what New York Times food editor Amanda Hessler was counting on when she launched her Eat, Memory column in 2004. She knew the context food brings with it: history, place and understanding. 

More importantly, how a person approaches, eats and remembers food can tell a reader more about that character than a hundred other pages, written in Hardy-esque cinematic description, might.

Ok, that's overdoing it. but it really fucks me off when people say they don't like Hardy because his sentences are too long and he goes into too much detail. It's a huge, epic, cinematic novel, people, not a fucking tweet about who's winning X-Factor.

Eat, Memory is a collection of these columns. The Memory is italicised because Hessler wanted her writers to concentrate on the memory the food evoked, not to go all schmaltzy over why cherry pies make them cry whenever they see one now, because granma used to make granpa cherry pies before he has his tracheotomy, and nothing has ever tasted quite the same for him since, etc. Zzzzzz.

You have Kiran Desai remembering the amazing cook from her childhood, so protective of his kitchen she never learnt to cook herself. Yiyun Li tells how a rancid-sounding orange drink was the height of sophistication during her teens in China, as one of the first western products to gain popularity there. 

A magazine editor called Heidi Julavits describes how she went to Japan to work out what to do with her life after college, and ending up losing herself in adzuki bean cakes, and the rest. 'I remind myself of the Zen-like quotation: "Emotional freedom comes with being aware of the certainty of uncertainty." I will go to Japan, I will be certainly uncertain and I will reach a higher plane of existence while eating amazing food,' she writes.

So, you see, Julavits, and most of the other columnists, have failed in this attempt to not get all nostalgic over the food. Hessler says in the introduction, "The food doesn't matter, really. What it evokes does."

Bollocks. What complete bollocks! Of course the food matters. I mean yes: without the food there wouldn't be the memory. So it facilitates the memory. In much the same way as if I broke my leg falling over on the way to the bus stop, I would remember that walk to the bus stop better than the other several zillion times I've walked to a bus stop.

But the food really, really does matter, in and of itself. Not necessarily because it was good food or special food, or because the writer knows a lot about food, or whatever. But because it was that particular food or meal which enabled the feeling described in each story.

One guy never eats dessert because he worked in an ice cream parlour one summer, shovelled the stuff down his greedy neck, and hasn't been able to face another sweet dish since. Which means that at least several times a week, if not more often, the guy is reminded that once upon a time he adored ice cream, and of the joy that eating it brought him. And now that joy is lost forever - and he deals with this all the time. He says he's content - like he's simply had enough ice cream. If that's the case, why does he now have to avoid all desserts? And anyway, who has ever had enough ice cream?

Food brings things up and it swats them down. It is and has to be part of everyone's lives. I know people who aren't interested in food very much at all, but they can't just pretend it doesn't exist. Even the odd inclusion of the guy who doesn't eat at all, which is a nice conceit an'all but doesn't entirely work, is about how the author finds himself so angry at the general greed of others that he stops eating altogether. The food here, again, is so important by what he chooses not to eat: steak, lobster, eggs and cream - dream foods, which he feeds himself on by dreaming about them.

Even the story I like best is my favourite for a nostalgic reason: it is a story by the travel writer Pico Iyer, Our Lady of Lawson, about how he lived in Japan without eating Japanese food - preferring to buy packaged shit from the local convenience store, Lawson. 

I like it because I went to Japan recently (you are saved a Japanese cookbook post because I'm of the opinion that sushi is one of those foods you go out and buy, not buy some nancy kit and waste time and good fish trying to make yourself. And no, I'm not trying to sum up a whole cuisine with the word "sushi". I hope you know what I mean). 

Anyway, Dave, the friend in Japan, is obsessed with the vending machines you find all over the city. These vending machines are on every corner and serve milky, sugary tea in screwcap bottles and bright pink pop in glasses with crushed ice. Unlike Pico, Dave eats Japanese food. He loves it. But there is something about the vending machines - possibly the sheer number of them and the fact you don't have to converse with them to get what you want - that works as some sort of comfort blanket for him in Tokyo. For Pico, the same was true of the Lawson convenience store, and it also taught him, through what it sold and the family who ran it, lots of stuff about Japanese culture. He says it is precisely because he is not interested in food that he is able to eat twice a day from Lawson, but if he wasn't, why would he always go there and not elsewhere? For him, food is ritualistic, as it is for many. 

And now I'm going to have my ritualistic glass of wine in front of the telly on a Sunday night. I don't even feel like it tonight, so I've tried to argue myself out of having it. But I cant.

PS. This is a nice book, but don't buy it. All the columns are up there online

Kitchenella, Rose Prince

I have been meaning to write about Rose Prince's Kitchenella for a while. I bought it soon after it came out in September, and have used it a fair bit, but seeing as my 'productive' days are in reality about as productive as Homer Simpson's Sunday mornings, it never happened.

You may suspect I have made a pathetic New Year's resolution (do we need to cap 'New Year' up as a rule? It does seem better that way) to blog more. Or rather to blog at all. You are right!! We'll see how long it lasts. It's thirsty work reading and cooking and eating, y'know. And I've forsworn the booze for all of January.

Kitchenella's subtitle is "The Secrets of Women: Heroic, Simple, Nurturing Cookery - for Everyone". Which is a bit of a mouthful. Like every other cookbook at the moment, it has a message. Because it has to. Cookbooks can't just be collections of recipes any longer. Or grouped simply around a season or a cuisine. No sirree - they have to be political, with a shouty, right on message, to differentiate themselves from all the thousands of other books, which contain recipes to make food with.

Except they don't, do they? Because all cookbooks have a bleeding message these days. Every single one of them. I'm a girl who likes a message, but let's face it, most people can't be bolloxed with one.

That's not to say I don't like Kitchenella. I really, really do. Although Prince's conceit of bringing cookery back to the home, the hearth and the kitchen sink, away from all those nasty boy bullies in big name professional kitchens, is not new in itself, she sidesteps associating women only with baking, over-frosted cupcakes and overeating.

Instead, she gives us a pleasing home cooking manual, split into 'Cheap', 'Kids', 'Fast', 'Slow', 'Bake', 'Special', 'Rehash' and 'Ahead'. The food is never complicated, but it is often quite special. And it is astutely contemporary - while Prince eulogizes her idyllic childhood and food experiences, and litters her recipes with many classic French skills, Mediterranean influences and a la mode cheap cuts, they're woven into modern recipes which most people will want to eat.

Prince has also written a proper book here, which looks at women's relationship with food and her own discovery of food and cookery through, in large part, her mother. Some of it does sound a little twee, but it also sounds honest. She references the cooks who have helped her learn her trade, and explains the whys and wherefores of getting the meat temperatures just right.

The most surprising thing about the book is that THERE ARE VERY FEW PICTURES but I STILL LIKE IT.

I mean, it's a bloody bold move to put a few images at the front of the book and then type and type alone over the following three hundred-odd pages. I suspect with more pictures I might have cooked more things from here, but I got over the initial disappointment after a few minutes of reading.

I learnt a lot from this book. Prince says to search out unexpectedly interesting finds in your local corner shop, which I already do in my great Turkish supermarket, but she points out these finds can be the centrepiece of a meal, not only a hurried snack.

The chapter on stews explains why meat has to be old enough to be stewed and why this can be hard to find these days, and so brings in the ethics of fast farming, which is good. Too many books, I think, focus solely on do-goodery type eating, which just makes people head straight for the nearest KFC.

She also gives a few lessons in stocks, braising, risottos, scrambled eggs and other everyday meal staples which we won't all have learnt at mother's knee.

What did I make? Chickpea and tomato ten-minute soup, Spiced butter and yellow split peas, Warm tomatoes with oregano and feta and Coconut spiced soup with chicken. I'm aware these all sound quite like variations on a comfort eating theme a theme, but they're exactly the sort of easy lunch or dinner I want when I'm eating alone.

They also sound quite perfect healthy-but-not-miserable January eating, so I might make them again. No pics from me I'm afraid, as the camera was at the (bloody expensive) menders.

Perhaps the nicest thing about the book is that it is entirely multicultural, but seemingly without thinking about it. Prince jumps from Stifado to a Pot-cooked spring chicken, Moules frites, Gnocchi and a Pheasant curry. Lentils, spices, polenta....Eastern, American and English country garden influences mingle throughout the book, with a linguine here, a remoulade there, and lemongrass and chili all over the place. This is its real triumph.

I am making another resolution now, to try three new recipes from here this month. They might be:

Oxtail stew

Braised chicken rice with allspice

Mother's aubergines.

Nothing fancy pants.

Merry Christmas Delia!

I know it's absurd to be doing a Christmas blog in January, on everyone's first day back at work, when I haven't blogged in months.

But think of this as a preamble to Christmas 2011. Hell, we need something to look forward to!

And anyway, it's my blog so I can do what the fuck I like.

I just wanted to mention Delia's Christmas for a few reasons:

- I've had an excellent Christmas of eating, thank you very much.

- This was one of the first books on my cookery radar, and I remember very clearly watching the series with my mum. It was first published in 1994 so it must have been around about then.

- This was also one of the first books which I remember causing a massive social stir in cooking, at least among desperate, Delia-loving, dinner party-giving classes, who raided cookshops for the tins to bake her Little Sticky Toffee Puddings with Pecan Sauce in. My mum was too late.

- But mainly because, while doing Christmas foodage for 13 this year, it was the book my mum still referred to most, and it all worked - the cake, the mince pies, the pudding, the turkey. All moist and fat-laden and moreish.

- I even found a cheese straw recipe in there, to add to a selection of retro canapes I made for Christmas Eve dinner.

It just made me think that Delia, although she is Waitrose's new pin-up, has got a bit of a bad rap since that awful book a few years back about piling together pre-prepared shit and calling it cooking, when really she did sterling work in teaching a nation to cook.

I've never looked at her One is Fun! book, because it seems a bit tragic, but at the end of the day one is what I is cooking for, so I'm going to get hold of it.

Then, maybe, I'll check out her How to Cook series and teach myself to make some decent sauces and stop things burning without blaming it on my shitty oven.

That's all.

Turkey: food heaven

So I went on holiday to Turkey and was so consumed with stuffing my face with the amazing food I didn't stop for one moment to take you any pictures of it.

Instead I'll treat you to a few holiday snaps (let's face it, no one else is going to sit through them politely).

In short, Turkish food rocks. If there's one contemporary food trend we all know about it's taking fresh simple ingredients and not dicking about with them too much, and that's what they do in Turkey.

Istanbul turned out to be an Aladdin's Cave for greedy people, and for greedy people with a sweet tooth at that. Straight off the airport bus in Taksim Square I got myself a fresh pomegranate and orange juice and some warm roasted chestnuts. I had a discussion with a Turk about why I'd bastardised the pomegranate juice with orange, and claimed it needed some sweetness. I do believe that, but I also think that because pomegranate is so damn expensive in the UK, because of its "wonderfood" properties, I thought it would be too much just to go crazy and have a straight pomegranate juice.

Our first meal was something I'd choose for my last supper. A salad of chilis, coriander and tomatoes. A plate of super sharp and salty crumbled cheese, dotted with knobs of butter, came with one of those hot thin bread things that blows up like a balloon. It's called lavas, but you'll probably get by if you ask for balloon bread. Then came a gut-droppingly hot lamb kebab, layered with slices of hot oily bread to wrap it in and a charred aubergine, sliced in half so cheese and chili could be melted into its soft flesh. Joy.

Oops - missed out the bit about our first stop at a Turkish delight store. Hated the stuff (do you remember Fry's Turkish Delight? Jesus.) until tasted the real thing a few years' back. We had rose flavour, stuff with pistachio and hazelnuts in the middle, rolled in coconut...amazing. My sweet tooth even came out in one piece of it, which was gross, but didn't stop me eating.

Anyway, presumably you're after the book and the recipes. The book is The Huzur Vadisi Cookbook. I was on a yoga holiday [insert irony here] and the food was amazing and there was a bar too, which meant that despite five hours of yoga a day I came back fatter and as alcoholic as I was when I left.

As usual, can't really be bothered to cook any of this stuff, but the fact I ate it all while out there means I know it's good.

The first good things are a few salads which can be construed as wintry:

Carrot Yoghurt salad with Tahini and Walnuts

5 medium carrots

2 tbsps olive oil

3 tbsps yoghurt

3 tbsps tahini

3 tbsps chopped walnuts

2-4 cloves garlic

salt

1 tsp red pepper flakes or paprika

Grate carrots. saute in oil with some salt. Crush garlic and add to yoghurt. Mix the yoghurt with tahini, walnuts, half the red pepper and salt with the carrots. Melt rest of pepper in a bit of butter in a pan and drizzle over as a sauce.

Beetroot and Tahini Salad

6 beets

4 cloves garlic

4 dessert spoons tahini

4 dessert spoons lemon juice

4 dessertspoons olive oil

Roast the beetroot unpeeled in the oven in a bit of oil, at 200C for 45 mins or until soft. When cool, peel and grate. Add tahini, crushed garlic, lemon juice, oil and salt to taste.

Works as a salad or dip. Should make you feel healthy as the weather turns and everyone says they got one of those " the weather's turning" colds.

There's a tasty looking recipe for meatballs in a herby lemon sauce. Can't be bothered to write it all out here, but let me know if you want it. According to this week's papers, meatballs are just the thing right now.

I did make a couple of things from here. A grilled aubergine salad with yoghurt and cigar-shaped borek. Courgette, feta and dill fritters may be next.

Aubergine salad (more of a dip) - grill 4 large aubergines until skin crisped and insides soft. They're easy to peel if you hold them under a running cold tap, grip the stem and crack th skin off. Though you will probably burn your fingers at the same time. Mix together 4 tbsps each of olive oil and lemon juice, and mash the aubs in one by one until smooth(ish). Add in 4 tbsps yoghurt mixed with 4 cloves crushed garlic and a little salt.

The borek recipe calls for round sheets of filo pastry you can cut into triangles. I was sold rectangular sheets and couldn't quite work out how to make the right shape of triangle - you really need an isoceles shaped one or, as mine did, there will be too much pastry and it will suck up too much oil.

So: mash one packet feta in a bowl. Add 1/2 bunch each finely chopped dill and parsley and one beaten egg. The idea is to place one teaspoon of the cheese mix in the middle of the bottom of the triangle then roll it up so the tip ends up on the outside. Seal with a bit of water and fry in oil for a minute or so. Even if they turn out crap (mine were too oily, but still yum), they keep kids occupied for aaaaaages.

There is lots of great stuff to buy in the Spice Market, but I went overboard on the teas, which looked delicious (rose, green with ginger, green with jasmine, a gingery wintry mix) and they are all FOUL. Bitter, disgusting and undrinkable. The sun dried darker than usual apricots are amazing though.

Oh, I forgot to mention what I didn't pick up in Turkey: a man. Actually i didn't forget, but my newsagents were most disappointed that I hadn't come back with one. I'm not sure why it's any of their business either, or where they got the idea I was on holiday shopping for a husband, but they reliably inform me they know of two women who went to Turkey and came back with a husband. Did they read about these women in Take a Break? For the past few months they have asked me every week or so whether I have found a man yet. My accountant informs me I spent £1000 in their shop last year. I suggest they watch their step.

Teaching Dad To Cook Flapjack Green Tart Update

So the Green Tart has been cooked and eaten. I can report back that it was quite amazing. The pastry was buttery and flaky and the filling really quite clever - you're basically stuffing your face with all these healthy green herbs and therefore are allowed to feel virtuous, despite the fact they're sitting in a greedy eggy creamy mix.

I'm baking the Caramel Salties later for consumption tomorrow, so will report back, again...

...The Caramel Salties for the seal of approval from Nephlet Numero Uno, who pronounced them "yummy and chewy and lovely and chewy. And the dentist says I shouldn't eat chewy things which makes me like them even more."

His mother wasn't so keen on the salty aspect.

He also gave a Bacon and Egg Tart (made with bought pastry) a 10 out of 10, a grade he doesn't give out lightly, which his mother says she hasn't been awarded for a very long time.

Then I slaved over the Lemon Polenta Cake twice, because the first one fell apart and I knew AC wouldn't be accepting no crappy fall aparty sub standard birthday cake. My tips:

Grease the top and bottom, and perhaps the sides too, of your baking parchment WELL.

I could only find a revolting-looking block of cooked polenta in the supermarket, so I grated this into the mix.

Cook long and slow. Don't worry if the top of the cake is looking burnt, as - obviously - this will turn out to be the bottom of the cake. Put some foil or a baking sheet over it if you're gettin worried it is turning to a cindery crisp.

Going to cook some of these things with my cute old daddio tomorrow and write about it, so will post that then.

Which will add up to far too many posts about this one book. Whatevs.