11. THE FRUIT BOWL
‘The banana plant is large and fine, it rises about ten or twelve foot out of the ground, and has very large leaves of an oval figure. It bears a fruit as long as one’s hand, and of the bigness of the fist of a child of four years old. It is outwardly yellow when it is ripe, and white within, a little clammy like the inside of apricot and of a delicate and excellent flavour.’
—François Leguat,
A New Voyage to the East Indies (1708)
By way of introduction, Marcus Wareing is chef-patron of his eponymously named restaurant at the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge. One day I sat entranced as he talked to me about the banana. Over to Marcus…
When I was growing up, Dad had a fruit and veg business, so you might think that means I was raised on the finest quality produce. Not a bit of it. Dad supplied to school kitchens in the North West, and those pupils ate well because they got the best stuff.
But what Dad brought home was the fruit and veg he couldn’t sell. There was always something wrong with it – it would be old or over-ripe or falling apart. The bananas were no exception: often manky and covered in black spots.
A popular dessert in our house was sliced bananas with a piping hot, home-made custard, and if it was a warm summer’s day, we’d have the same thing but with the custard cold.
Years later, I realised that the best bananas you can buy are the ones that Dad couldn’t sell, where the skin is covered with small, black spots and speckles. Quite simply, the banana that might seem over-ripe to many people is, in fact, the most flavoursome. When the fruit is getting older, its taste intensifies and improves with maturity. So you can judge a banana by its skin.
Unfortunately, supermarkets and many shoppers have got it all wrong. They think that a good banana is one with a bright yellow skin and very firm fruit. Utter rubbish. It might look ‘beautiful’, but I’m sorry, the fruit will have no flavour whatsoever.
If you are in the supermarket and want bananas, head straight for the reduced section, and then rummage around for old bananas at a knock-down price and put them in your trolley. I tend to buy from Waitrose, but I’m not fussed about the bananas’ country of origin – a banana is a banana, no matter where it comes from.
If you are one of those people who likes to buy green bananas, then fine, but only if you know how to store them correctly. People often keep them in the fridge, which is wrong. My Dad would always wrap bananas in newspaper and then stash them in a dark place that was not too warm and not too cold. Lack of light and ambient temperature are essential factors in storage.
Then you come across people who chuck away bananas just as they are reaching their most magnificent taste. It is absolute stupidity (and a waste of money) to bin a banana when it starts to go brown. Simply peel it, put the fruit into a freezer bag and keep it in the freezer for a smoothie at a later date.
Then there are the varying degrees of ripeness, and remember the banana is unusual in that it is a fruit that is picked green and continues to ripen as it makes it way across the world towards Britain.
If you want a peeling banana (to eat ‘raw’) or to slice it, the skin should be just yellow. For a smoothie, the skin needs to have those black spots which tell you that the fruit will have a bit of texture to it.
We talk about cooking bananas, but that’s probably the wrong word to use. This fruit is not like an apple, which you might put on to the heat to transform it from a hard texture to soft. With the banana, it is already soft enough to eat so what we are actually doing is warming it through.
A delicious dish is pan-fried banana, where the fruit should have some body to it but not be absolutely knackered. In the frying pan heat a large knob of butter and some demerara sugar until it turns into a caramel; throw in your bananas and, as soon as they start to colour, chuck in some dark rum. Rum and banana are the perfect combination – it’s a spirit that amplifies the banana flavour. Let the alcohol burn off, remove from the pan, and serve with toasted flaked almonds on top and with ice cream. The trick about sautéing bananas is not to keep them in the pan for too long: they have a high water content and if too much water comes out, they’ll turn to mush. I’ve never made banoffee pie (layers of biscuit, toffee, banana and cream) but if I were to, I think I’d purée the bananas rather than incorporate them in slices.
But my favourite of all is banana bread, which I used to make when I worked in America. There, we’d serve it for breakfast. Here in Britain, we serve it at tea. Again, the key to success of this cake is the ripeness of the banana – they need to be over-ripe!
Marcus Wareing’s Banana Bread
Ingredients:
2 large eggs, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 1 tsp almond extract, 300g (10oz) strong white bread flour, 1 tsp baking powder, ¼ tsp fine salt, 115g (4oz) softened unsalted butter, 100g (3½oz) caster sugar, 4 over-ripe bananas (with a total raw weight of about 550g/1¼lbs) peeled and mashed, 75g (2½oz) chopped walnuts.
Method:
Pre-heat the oven to 180°C (350°F/Gas 4).
In a bowl, whisk the eggs with the vanilla and almond extracts.
Sift the flour into a bowl and mix with the baking powder and salt.
Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Pour in the egg–extract mixture and, very slowly, beat until completely incorporated.
Fold the mashed bananas into the mixture. Fold in the sifted dry ingredients and the walnuts (one-third at a time).
Pour the sloppy mixture into a greased loaf tin and cook for 55 minutes.
When it comes out of oven, check it is cooked through by inserting a skewer, which, when removed, should be clean.
Leave it to sit in the tin for 15 minutes before removing. Serve cold.
The tangerine is in season from October to March; the satsuma from October to February; the clementine from November to February; blood oranges are in season in February and March; Seville oranges are ready to eat in January and February.
The apple is a magnificent thing, ranging in taste from sweet to sour, and is possibly Britain’s favourite fruit. In the wrong hands it can become ghastly and is often spoiled when cooked. The trick is to keep your apples simple.
Ensure that you have an apple with a good deal of flavour. If you are shopping for apples in a supermarket, smell the fruit before you put it in your trolley. If an apple (or any other fruit or veg, for that matter) has no smell then it certainly won’t have any flavour. That’s a given. Discard the British notion that apples must be divided into ‘cookers’ and ‘eaters’: that sour apples should be cooked and sweet apples eaten raw. If you cook with sour apples then lots of sugar needs to be added to reduce the acidity. Cook with an apple that is delicious in its raw form. Cox’s have a wonderful flavour but they also have a low water content so that when they cook they don’t turn to mush.
Apple sauce is the perfect accompaniment to roast pork, and is also lovely with roasted goose and pheasant. It has to be one of the easiest accompaniments in the world to make but frequently it is overcooked, thereby losing flavour and changing the texture. In fact the secret of the sauce is to cook it rapidly.
Top and tail your apples, peel them, split them in half, core them, and then slice them wafer thin. Remember, the smaller the pieces, the faster they’ll cook.
In a saucepan pour a little water – half a cup or so, just enough to stop the fruit scorching. Add a knob of butter and a squeeze of lemon juice and put the heat on high.
Place the sliced apples in the pan and cook rapidly. As they start to cook they’ll release their own water. Cook for about 3 minutes.
Liquidise the mixture, and there you have it: not soggy, not lumpy, but very fresh and extremely tasty.
A sauce boat, gravy boat or saucière is a boat-shaped pitcher in which sauce or gravy is served. It often sits on a matching plate, sometimes attached to the pitcher, to catch dripping sauce. Often sauce boats are really annoying. They never clean well in a dishwasher as the water can’t get round the lips.
Sauce is a section within the traditional ranks of a professional kitchen, as in ‘I’m on Sauce’, usually meaning that the chef is cooking meat dishes and hot sauces. It’s very different to ‘I’m on the sauce.’ If a chef is on the sauce you don’t want him cooking your food.
Sauce boats became all the rage in the French Court of the 1690s. Silver sauce boats with two handles and two spouts were reported as early as 1690 and appear to have developed in response to the new and original nouvelle cuisine. French fashion was highly influential in 18th-century England, where such sauce boats were copied in English silver, and, from the 1740s, in English porcelain.
These boats do not float.
If someone is being boring about fruit, stop him swiftly by saying. ‘According to Macedonia folklore, the first fruit of the tree must not be eaten by a barren woman, but by one who has many children. Peasants of Austria and Bavaria believed that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year.’
If that doesn’t work, point out that, while we all know that tomatoes are a fruit, some other ‘vegetables’ that are really fruits include peppers, chillies, cucumbers, aubergines and most squashes. They are fruits because you have to break the skin to get to the seeds or pips.
Five ‘different’ fruits to grow at home according to botanist James Wong
Cocktail Kiwi (Actinidia arguta): Plant in spring, harvest in September. These rampant but hardy vines, which hail from North-East Asia and Siberia, will survive –35°C… so they’re ideal for the British climate! Mature plants produce up to 400 mini kiwis that are the size of grapes; the skins are edible and the flesh is sweet.
Chilean Guava (Ugni molinae): Plant in spring, harvest late summer. Said to have been Queen Victoria’s favourite fruit, they are also known (or have been rebranded by Australian growers) as Tazziberries. A tiny punnet costs about a tenner.
Cape Gooseberry (Physalis peruviana): Seed March or April, harvest October to December. Despite their unusual appearance – each berry wrapped in a paper lantern – cape gooseberries are drought- and disease-resistant and need no pruning, training or fertilising.
Cucamelon (Zehneria scabra syn. Melothria scabra): Sow April, harvest August. These look like tiny watermelons, and taste of cucumber with a tinge of lime. They are perfect for patio pots or hanging baskets.
Pineapple guava (Acca sellowiana): Plant in spring, harvest late summer–autumn. These evergreen plants produce pink pompon flowers that have fleshy, edible, sweet-tasting petals. Plant in full sun, between two feijoas – this will ensure cross-pollination, which equals lots of fruit.
Why do the best raspberries come from Scotland?
Scotland can be cold, cloudy and windswept but it produces the finest raspberries Britain has to offer. In fact, it is precisely because of the weather that the raspberries are superior. Raspberries ripen too quickly in extreme heat. They need time for their flavour to become superb. In raspberry-growing areas like Blairgowrie, temperatures rarely go above 22°C, which is perfect for the raspberry.
Tennis fans at Wimbledon munch their way through 110,000 punnets of strawberries, topped by 7,000 litres of cream. But what is the story of this fruit and dairy combination?
Let’s go back to the 16th century, when Thomas (later to become Cardinal) Wolsey lived in Hampton Court Palace on the banks of the River Thames. Wolsey had yet to lose his home to King Henry VIII, and he entertained on a grand and extravagant scale. Life below stairs was not so cheerful. According to a Spanish visitor at the time – when the word ‘veritable’ was common – the palace kitchens were ‘veritable hells, such is the stir and bustle in them… there is plenty of beer here, and they drink more than would fill the Valladolid river.’
From this veritable hell, gastronomic heaven was born. It was here that the strawberry is said to have first been paired with cream. Cardinal Wolsey himself takes the credit for the dish’s creation, though I’m not so sure about that. Perhaps it was his chef‘s homage to both the red and white of the Tudor flag as well as ecclesiastical colours: the red a symbol of Jesus Christ’s blood, the white representing purity and joy.
‘When you are in love you don’t really care about food. But I can see myself sitting beneath a peach tree with the woman I love, catching a ripe peach as it falls, and then sharing it, of course. One big bite into the peach, and the juices run everywhere. That is the food of love.’
—Pierre Koffmann, Koffmann’s,
The Berkeley Hotel, London