Tag: food and drink

All these food posts are of course displacement activity to stop me getting on with any actual poetry.

I’ve made a cheesecake (haven’t tried it yet) from Jane Grigson’s English Food. The recipe originally comes from The London Art of Cookery, and Housekeeper’s Complete Assistant, by John Farley (1783). It’s flavoured with, amongst other things, crushed macaroons. I used Italian ratafia biscuits. What I was thinking was: it’s curious that almost everyone you ask thinks that Amaretto (the liqueur or the biscuits) is made from almonds, whereas, like my ratafias, it’s actually made from apricot kernels. Now, if Georgette Heyer is to be believed, ratafia (a drink – I’m not sure whether alcoholic or not) was a popular choice for genteel young ladies in the Regency period. So when did the taste of apricot kernels drop from Britain’s collective memory?

A bit of improvisation I was quite pleased with.

I was doing roast pork, and I’m not a big of classic apple sauce, so I thought I’d make a sauce by cooking onions with a bit of sage (cos its traditional) and rather more rosemary, and putting some cider in it for the appliness. And I had a third of a cabbage in the fridge.

Fry 4 smallish red onions with a few leaves of sage and a handful of chopped fresh rosemary.

When the onions are soft and just browning slightly, slosh in some cider (i.e. alcoholic cider, for any Americans reading). I used quite expensive cider, because the cheap stuff is revolting. Simmer.

When the cider has mainly evaporated, mix in a shredded third of a cabbage. Stir until the cabbage is a bright green colour.

I thought this was a bit of a success, although no-one who ate it commented on it.

I made kedgeree today. I’m intrigued by Anglo-Indian food like kedgeree and mulligatawny soup. Even more so, those things like Worcester sauce and brown sauce which are so deeply imbedded into the British consciousness that no-one even thinks of them as Indian any more.

Rub a chicken with 2 tbsp of olive oil, 1 tsp of cinnamon, 1/2 tsp of ground allspice, salt and pepper. Roast it.

Recipe from the excellent Tamarind and Saffron, a Middle Eastern cookery book by Claudia Roden. I thought it might be too overpoweringly spicy, or a bit puddingy (because those spices are traditionally used in sweet food in this country), but it was nice.

recipe du jour: cassoulet made from left-over duck and sausages.

I had most of a roast duck left over, so I’m making a cassoulet of duck with a couple of sausages and a bit of bacon. No haricot blanc at the Italian deli, so it’s borlotti beans.

Soak the beans overnight.
Simmer with a bouquet garni, a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, and an onion studded with cloves for 1 hour 45. Save the cooking liquid.

Layer up the beans, meat, some chunks of tomato and chopped thyme and parsley (mostly parsley in my case), finishing with a layer of beans. Pour over the bean liquid mixed with a little tomato paste (I also added some duck stock, since I’d just made some from the carcasse) then a layer of breadcrumbs.

Stick in an oven at 170C for an hour and a half.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Cooking can be a great humaniser of another culture.

My grandfather refused to eat garlic because that was food for Frenchmen and Arabs. But I mean something broader than that.

Our impressions of other countries are news driven. Not the countries we’ve visited, or whose films we watch, or whose clothes we wear, perhaps; but that still leaves whole continents we only know about in terms of wars, revolutions, famine, disease and abject poverty.

If you asked people what they thought if you said “Iran”, the list of topics would be short: oil and fundamentalist Islam. I’d be tempted by that answer myself. But I also own various cookbooks which tell me that Iranians eat dishes like a pilaf cooked so that the rice at the bottom forms a golden crusty base; or tea made from dried limes; or dishes flavoured with lots of mixed fresh herbs – dill, flat-leaved parley, mint, coriander. And they make meat dishes flavoured with fruit – duck with cherries, chicken with apricots.

I guess if you don’t cook a lot, especially food which is foreign to you, that might make Iran seem even more distant. For me, though, it transcends religion or language or culture and makes us all just human. I read these recipes, and my mouth waters. A dried lime pilaf doesn’t compensate for a lack of human rights – but it does bring out the shared experience of being human. The food of other cultures can seem forbidding – try cartilage on a stick or soy-fried grasshopper, if you’re in Japan – but the more you know how to do it, the more it just all becomes food.

I should stop before I become any more like “I’d like to teach the world to sing…”