Ramekins look like dolls’ tea party soufflé dishes. They are identical to their big brothers, just scaled down, a miniature version of a white porcelain, straight-sided soufflé dish. While they can be used for individual soufflés and gratins, they are great for any portion-control baked or chilled dish – pies, baked custards, sweet and savoury mousses, jellies and sponge cakes. They are perfect for potted shrimps, for crème brûlée and crème caramel, and any little creamy pudding. They’re handy too for nuts and olives, dips and sauces, cheese and egg dishes like coddled eggs, oeufs en gelée and oeufs en cocotte. Dishes that need high temperatures, or to go under the grill, or be fired by a blowtorch, or to go in the fridge or freezer, these cute little dishes can cope with everything. They are made in various sizes: I have diddy ones that hold 50ml, but most are 150–250ml capacity. Look out for them in charity shops and jumble sales. You will notice that they vary very slightly but quite noticeably from manufacturer to manfacturer – the thickness, size and depth of the rim, weight, etc. – my favourites are French Pullivuyt.
Lemon posset is the cooked equivalent of syllabub and similarly quick and simple to prepare. Both are made by souring and thickening cream with lemon juice and sweetening it with sugar. For posset, the sugar is dissolved in the cream and boiled briefly in a large pan so it can rise and expand before the lemon juice is added. As the cream cools in individual little pots it sets firm, like home-made lemon curd, but melts on the tongue in exquisite mouthfuls of creamy, lemony angel food. It is the perfect make-ahead dessert and was on the menu for the twenty-first birthday celebrations at the Blueprint Café overlooking Tower Bridge. It was also Jeremy Lee’s swansong before he left for Quo Vadis. He served the creamy little puds topped with similarly soft, impossibly slender slices of pale rhubarb. Such a clever idea; here’s how to do it.
600ml double cream
150g caster sugar
2 large lemons
200g rhubarb
Heat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4. Pour the cream into a medium-large pan. Add 125g of sugar and the zest from 1 lemon. Squeeze the lemons into a measuring jug – you want 100ml of juice. Bring the cream slowly to the boil, stirring with a wooden spoon as the sugar melts. Increase the heat and boil for 2 minutes.
Take off the heat and whisk in the lemon juice. Cover the pan with a stretch of clingfilm to avoid a skin forming and leave for 15 minutes to infuse. Strain into a jug and pour into 6 or 8 ramekins, stumpy glasses or similar, leaving room for the rhubarb. Drape a sheet of clingfilm over the top, cool, then chill for at least 60 minutes and preferably several hours.
Trim, rinse and cut the rhubarb into slices approximately 5mm thick. Arrange, snuggled up closely, on a shallow roasting tin. Lightly dredge with the remaining 25g of sugar. Cover tightly with foil. Roast for 8 minutes.
Remove from the oven and leave, still covered, to cool. Keep thus in the fridge until you are ready to scoop with a metal spatula on top of the little puddings.
A roasting rack is designed to fit inside a roasting pan and hold the joint above the fat and juices released as it cooks. Some are simple trays that sit inside the base of the pan, others are adjustable in a V-shape to hold different sized joints or birds.
Many, like mine, which also has handles in the middle to enable easy lifting, are sold with the roasting pan. In my case, I made the mistake of assuming the professional quality roasting pan with big easy-to-grip welded handles would fit into my oven. It didn’t. So I kept the rack and gave the pan to one of my sons. There is a moral there.
A Gressingham duck is a cross-breed of wild mallard and Pekin. One duck tends to weigh two kilos, providing plenty of meat for four hungry people, with sufficient leftovers to fill Peking pancakes for two with spring onions and plum sauce, a noodle soup supper with rice noodles, peas and coriander or duck Parmentier with gratinéed mash. It is meaty and gamey and has a high proportion of breast meat. I like it roasted so the skin is very crisp and dark and the meat cooked brown rather than rosy.
For this delicious roast, some of the fat is used to roast diced, blanched potatoes, and peas with scraps of bacon and shallots are cooked in stock made from the giblets. I like to carve the duck and pile the meat over the peas on one big platter but you may prefer to carve it at the table. Full details of how to carve a duck can be found on the Gressingham Foods website (see here), but basically, remove the legs, then the breasts in whole fillets, then get slicing.
Usefully, duck preparation, stock, the first stage of potato cooking and preparing and cooking the onions with the bacon, can all be done 24 hours in advance. Remove the duck from the fridge an hour before you start cooking it.
2 onions
1 carrot
1 bay leaf
a bunch of thyme
20 shallots
5 rashers of rindless streaky bacon
15g butter
900g potatoes
500g frozen petits pois
1 tsp flour
2 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley
redcurrant jelly, to serve
Boil the kettle. Remove the giblets from the duck. Set aside the liver for another meal. Place the rest in a pan with 600ml of water, 1 chopped but unpeeled onion, the carrot, bay leaf and half the thyme. Simmer for about 45 minutes. Strain; you want 400ml, so simmer to reduce if necessary.
Heat the oven to 220°C/gas mark 7. Pierce the duck all over with a fork. Rinse with boiling water from the kettle to make the holes open. Drain and pat dry. Trim, peel and quarter the second onion. Rinse out the cavity, season with salt and pepper and fill with the onion and the remaining thyme. Place on a roasting rack inside a roasting pan. Roast for 20 minutes, then reduce the heat to 180°C/gas mark 5 and cook for a further 1 hour 40 minutes, or until the skin is crisp and dark golden, and the juices run clear when it is pierced with a skewer. During the cooking, drain (and save) the fat a couple of times.
Re-boil the kettle. Place the unpeeled shallots in a bowl and cover with boiling water. Leave to soak for 10 minutes. Make a bacon pile and slice across the rashers into lardons. Separate the pieces. Melt the butter in a medium-small, heavy-based, lidded pan, add the bacon and cook for a few minutes until the fat begins to melt. Drain the shallots, trim the ends, remove the skin and separate any ‘double’ shallots. Stir into the bacon, cover and cook gently, stirring every so often, for at least 30 minutes, until the shallots are cooked through and the bacon is crisp.
Boil or steam the potatoes until tender. Drain, leave until cool enough to handle, then peel and cut into dice about the size of a large sugar lump. Twenty minutes before the duck is ready to come out of the oven, pour 4 tablespoons of duck fat into a shallow roasting pan. Add the potatoes, turning them through the fat. Place on the top shelf of the oven.
When the duck’s time is up, transfer it to a warmed platter and cover loosely with foil. Rest for at least 15 minutes before carving. Keep an eye on the potatoes, turning if necessary; you want them golden and crusty. Cook the peas in salted boiling water. Drain.
Drain the fat from the roasting pan, leaving behind about 1 tablespoon of fat and any meaty juices. Stir the flour into the pan, then add the stock and stir briskly to make a thin, smooth gravy. Stir in the hot shallots, bacon and drained peas. Simmer together for a few minutes to consolidate and reduce the liquid slightly. Stir in the parsley and any duck juices. Transfer to a hot serving dish. Place the potatoes in a second dish. Carve the duck at the table or before you plate up the peas and potatoes, and serve with redcurrant jelly.
I keep my roasting tins lined up on their sides in a deep, wide cupboard under my oven, which was built at eye level into the old kitchen chimneybreast. They are arranged by size next to the baking sheets, pizza pans and pans that came with the oven. My favourites look bright and new but aren’t. They are made of heavy-duty, hard-anodized aluminium by Alan Silverwood (see here). They won’t warp in very hot ovens, or over direct heat (when making gravy) and are magic to clean, only needing a soak and scrub with a mild scourer to bring them back to rights. Vim and Viakal are my solutions for burnt-on food.
The pans divide into two types: the shallow tins, in two sizes (21 × 30cm and 37 × 27cm) and two depths (1.5 and 2.5cm), and large deep ones. Two of the smaller size fit side by side on my oven shelves and are the perfect size for roast potatoes for two. These pans are deceptively Tardis-like, and will hold up to a dozen round or pointed red peppers, four mackerel, a brace of game birds or a spatchcocked chicken. I have two favourite large pans, both 24 × 36cm and 7cm deep. The oldest cost a fortune and is made of heavy stainless steel with a reinforced base and a slightly raised central panel that means the joint is raised above the fat or juices that swim around it. It has slightly curved sides and a deep lip at each end for lifting the pan in and out of the oven. It’s been in constant use for twenty-odd years but still scrubs up like new. The other, newer pan, from Lakeland (see here), is made of heavy steel with a rolled rim and all-over non-stick surface. It has no lip or handles, so is a bit tricky to manoeuvre with a big joint of meat, but I love it for party-size dishes like moussaka, pastitsio and stuffed peppers. It is useful too for marinating kebabs and large pieces of meat for the barbecue, for baked apples for a blowout and stuffed marrow from the allotment.
My advice would be to buy the sturdiest pans you can afford. Treat them well and they will last a lifetime.
The supermarkets have caught up with our predilection for belly pork, selling large pieces as joints and packs of neatly trimmed slices. Either is perfect for this approximation of char siu, the dark, glossy roast pork that hangs glistening in many Chinatown restaurant windows. With boiled rice and a few sprigs of coriander it makes a delicious prepare-ahead, greedy hands-on supper.
500g pork belly slices
150g basmati rice
about 8 sprigs of coriander
For the marinade:
2 tbsp runny honey
1 tsp rice wine
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp tomato ketchup
1 tsp water
3 tbsp hoisin sauce
Make 2 or 3 diagonal cuts in the belly slices in opposite directions, cutting halfway through the width; when cooked the meat will fan in traditional char siu style. Mix together 1 tablespoon of honey with all the other marinade ingredients. Return the pork to its container or place in a shallow dish and pour over the marinade. Cover with clingfilm and chill for at least an hour and up to 24 hours.
Heat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6. Place a cake rack over an oven tray half-filled with water (to catch drips) and line up the belly slices. Roast for 30 minutes. Turn, smear with marinade and roast for a further 30 minutes.
To cook the rice, rinse until the water runs clean, place in a pan and cover with boiling water. Stand for 5 minutes, swirl to remove the starch, then drain and place in a pan with 225ml of water. Bring to the boil, turn the heat very low, cover the pan and cook for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat, do not remove the lid and leave for 10 minutes. Fork up the rice before serving. Glaze the pork with honey and serve over the rice with a few sprigs of coriander.
Cooking a large fish to share with family and friends is always a bit daunting, with the fear of over- or undercooking the beast. For a special fish like a large turbot or sea bass, encasing the fish in gravelly sea salt is a stunning solution. The salt sets hard and the fish steams evenly and very quickly, ending up perfectly seasoned. The pearly white flesh with its dense yet delicate texture slides off the bone in pleasingly silky flakes and is delicious with mild aioli, just garlicky enough to be noticeable but not enough to swamp the delicate fish. All you need with this is new potatoes. Steam or boil them before you toss them with butter and chopped chives or a little parsley. A good alternative, though, if you are off carbs, is lightly cooked green beans topped with a generous mound of finely diced tomato, the merest hint of red wine vinegar and a splash of your best olive oil.
approx 2kg turbot or sea bass, gutted but not scaled
fennel stalks (optional)
1kg rock salt (unrefined coarse Atlantic sea salt)
2 large lemons
For the aioli:
2 new season garlic cloves
2 fresh egg yolks
2 tsp Grey Poupon or Maille Dijon mustard
200ml olive oil
½ lemon
Heat the oven to 220°C/gas mark 7. For the turbot, spread half the salt in a parchment-lined roasting tin that can hold the fish snugly. Top with the fish, black skin uppermost, and cover with the remaining salt, not worrying if head and tail aren’t submerged. To cook a sea bass, rinse inside and out and pat dry with kitchen paper. Stuff the cavity with fennel stalks, if you have them. Spread half the salt in a foil-lined roasting tin that can hold the fish comfortably. Lay the fish in the middle. Pull up the sides of the foil so the salt rests against the fish, crushing the foil so it makes a salt-lined boat-cum-coffin for the fish. Cover with the remaining salt, not worrying if head and tail aren’t submerged. In both instances, sprinkle with about 6 tablespoons of cold water to moisten the salt and encourage it to harden. Slacken the foil around the sea bass so it isn’t tight.
Bake the fish on a middle shelf for 20 minutes. Take it out of the oven and leave for 5 minutes. Carefully lift the fish on to a serving platter. Crack the salt shell and use a metal spatula to carefully lift it off in pieces. Slice down the backbone to halve the skin and peel it away to reveal the pearly flesh. Slide the spatula under the flesh from centre to side and remove the fillets. Remove the backbone before tackling the rest of the fish. Serve with a lemon wedge for each person.
I usually make aioli in my large, granite mortar. Chop the garlic and crush to a paste with a pinch of salt. Mix the egg yolks and mustard into the garlic with the pestle or a wooden spoon. Add the olive oil in a dribble whilst beating constantly with a wooden spoon, adding a squeeze of lemon juice every so often. Continue until thick and wobbly.
One of my regular Sunday morning ‘pocket money’ jobs from quite a young age was to make the pastry and then the custard – Bird’s – for lunch. The flour was measured out in tablespoons into a big china mixing bowl with a pinch of salt added. I was given a chunk of lard, sometimes margarine or butter too, which had to be cut into small pieces into the flour. The trick, I was told, was to work quickly, rubbing the sticky lard into the flour with my fingertips. I couldn’t bear the feeling of the soft, slippery fat stuck under my fingernails, and hurried to finish so I could rush upstairs to the bathroom and scrub my nails back to normal.
I was never allowed to roll the pastry. That was a job for Mum. She had a slim, long wooden rolling pin, probably made of beechwood, with fixed handles, that she floured deftly, sliding the pin up and down her floury hands until dusty white. She cut the pastry into two pieces, rolling one to cover the pie plate, then the other for the lid. Her rolling technique was very particular: always away from her body, quickly moving the pastry with her hands so it could be rolled evenly, gauging with her eye the size she wanted. When she was done, she loosely rolled the pastry round the pin, then lifted and gently unrolled it under or over the filling, pinching and tucking, smoothing and positioning. I loved watching her work so quickly and neatly, trimming the edges and using the trimmings to cut out leaf shapes to decorate the top. Afterwards, clearing the floury surface and scraping up the little bits of pastry that stuck to the surface was my job.
I felt a similar awe years later when I watched Valeria and Margherita Simili, better known as the Simili sisters, thinly roll pasta dough for tortellini at their house in Bologna. They used long wooden rolling pins that tapered very gradually to the ends, giving greater control for very thin pastry or paste, and small shapes. A much smaller version of a matarello is used for chapattis. It comes with a special round chapatti board with three little feet that make it easier to turn the board to achieve a perfect circle. One day I am going to treat myself to one.
When I first moved to London the only pies my flatmates and I ate were Fray Bentos. When I went home for a visit, I would beg my mother to make a real steak and kidney pie or a gooseberry or rhubarb pie with thick Bird’s custard and me having all the skin. I didn’t attempt pastry-making myself for years and years. When I did, all those memories came flooding back. The flat where I lived wasn’t strong on kitchen equipment, so instead of a rolling pin I used a milk bottle. Any smooth bottle will do the job perfectly but given the choice I’d choose a hock bottle because it’s longer and thinner than most other bottles. Professional chefs use rolling pins without handles and I own one myself, made (though sadly no longer) by Eddingtons. It’s long and slim and made of red silicone-wrapped metal, so it’s always cool, but if I remember, I pop it into the fridge just before baking. I use Mum’s old beech rolling pin for the many other jobs a rolling pin can help with. Crushing nuts (in a sealed plastic bag), rolling dried bread into toasted crumbs, bashing digestive biscuits for cheesecake base, and curling tuiles (thin almond biscuits) around. It is perfect, too, for pounding meat for escalopes.
There is a boggling choice of rolling pins available in various materials apart from wood. I’ve seen bamboo and basketweave pins, although stainless steel, marble and glass are thought to be particularly good because they are so cold. When I bought my house it coincided with Richard Shepherd clearing out the huge basement below Langan’s Brasserie. My builder and I went along for a recce and came away with enough marble for all my kitchen work surfaces. So, when I slap my pastry around, I sometimes think of the chefs who toiled at this incredibly thick, icy cold marble, way back when Langan’s was Le Coq d’Or.
Fresh tomato sauce, particularly one made with butter and very little else, is always a revelation. For an intense tomato taste, it’s vital, of course, to use so-called vine tomatoes, preferably grown in soil and natural conditions. I used a huge, ridged tomato weighing half a kilo that had been sitting on my windowsill for a week, too beautiful to cook immediately. It’s a coeur de boeuf (bull’s heart), grown in the south of France and many areas of Italy, available from discerning greengrocers such as Andreas (see here), who supply the River Café. With a hint of garlic and a few leaves of basil, the sauce has a clean flavour worthy of the extra effort involved in skinning and seeding the fruit. Here it’s spooned over linguine, making the perfect accompaniment to crunchy little chicken escalopes, the whole lot served with a generous grating of Parmesan. A lovely plate of food.
500g large vine tomatoes
1 garlic clove
40g butter, plus an extra knob
3 chicken thigh fillets
2 tbsp flour
1 egg, beaten
50g fresh breadcrumbs
150g linguine
1 tbsp groundnut oil
15 fresh basil leaves
freshly grated Parmesan
Pour boiling water over the tomatoes. Count to 30, then drain, core, peel and quarter. Place a sieve over a bowl. Scrape the seeds into the sieve (the surrounding jelly is richly flavoured). Dice the flesh. Crack the garlic, skin, chop and crush to a paste with a pinch of salt. Melt 25g of butter in a frying pan over a medium-low heat. Stir in the garlic and cook, stirring constantly, for a couple of minutes before adding the tomatoes. Stir. Press the seed juices through the sieve with the back of a wooden spoon and add that too. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, until thick and smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper, then beat in scraps of the remaining butter to thicken further.
Slice each chicken fillet on the diagonal into four similar-sized pieces. Arrange on a sheet of clingfilm, cover with a second sheet and bash a few times with a rolling pin. Place the flour in one shallow bowl, the egg in a second and the crumbs in a third. Dip the chicken into the flour, shaking off excess, then into the egg, then press into the crumbs, transferring to a plate as you go. Cook the linguine according to packet instructions. Toss with a splash of cooking water and the knob of butter. Heat the oil in the wiped-clean frying pan and fry the escalopes in two batches for a couple of minutes a side, until golden and cooked through. Shred the basil, stir it through the sauce and serve the pasta topped with sauce and with the escalopes on the side. Hand round the Parmesan.
My sister has an annoying habit of saying she can’t cook. What she actually means is that she prefers someone else to take on the day-to-day cooking. Despite this feigned disinterest, she is always on the lookout for recipes with wow factor to impress her friends, so when it comes to entertaining, which she does often, she always has something special up her sleeve. Most of the time, though, she relies on a tried and tested repertoire she’s been cooking for years. One such favourite is apple strudel with almond ice cream. She likes the fact that both recipes can be made up to 48 hours in advance. The strudel, she reckons, actually improves after a day or so in the fridge. At the cookery course she attended before she got married – see what I mean? – everything was made from scratch, including rolling a large sheet of tissue-thin strudel pastry. Cheating with filo, which is what a lot of cooks do, is not an option. The pastry is undeniably the tricky bit of making this roly-poly apple pie but it’s a revelation how a small lump of pastry can be cajoled beyond the size of a tea towel. The occasional tear doesn’t matter a jot because it’s likely to be hidden in the roll.
Any apple, eater or cooker, is suitable for apple strudel but green-skinned, crisp and dry, slightly tart eaters like Granny Smith or Golden Delicious are particularly well suited. The peeled and sliced apples are strewn over the sheet of pastry with buttery, fried breadcrumbs and golden sultanas to soak up the apple juices. Lemon zest and finely chopped toasted almonds, cinnamon and demerara sugar add extra interest and depth of flavour and they all sing out with the apples and pastry as the strudel bakes in the oven. The pastry will have been carefully rolled into a plump, ungainly sausage, the ends sealed and the surface glazed with butter. It is usually curled into a horseshoe shape to fit neatly on to a baking sheet and will be baked until crisp and golden. The strudel can be served immediately or left, as my sister advises, for up to 48 hours before it’s brought up to room temperature and then given a 15-minute blast in a hot oven to warm it through and re-crisp the outer pastry. While it cooks, the apple and pastry merge against each other and end up deliciously light and gooey with an almondy apple flavour, but it’s the sultanas and background hint of cinnamon that make the dish. Some recipes advise soaking the sultanas first in alcohol – rum or Calvados – but it really isn’t necessary.
Like all apple pies, apple strudel goes with cream, ice cream and custard. The cream could be whipped with icing sugar to make crème Chantilly, or with a little rum or Calvados. Decent shop-bought vanilla ice cream is a good easy option, but why not have a go at almond ice cream? Based on meringue rather than custard, with home-made praline stirred into the mixture, it’s not the simplest of ice cream recipes but at least you won’t need an ice cream maker.
For the pastry:
250g strong white flour, plus a little extra
½ tsp salt
1 egg, beaten
1 tbsp vegetable oil
75ml tepid water
For the filling:
75g butter
50g blanched almonds, preferably Marcona
75g white breadcrumbs
1 lemon
1kg green eating apples
100g sultanas
2 tsp ground cinnamon
75g demerara sugar
1 egg, beaten
25g icing sugar
Sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl. Whisk the egg in a small bowl, add the oil and water and mix thoroughly. Make a well in the middle of the flour and pour the liquid into the middle gradually, beating flour and liquid together with a wooden spoon, continuing until it clumps together and is neither wet nor dry. This is a dodgy moment because adding the liquid too quickly makes it lumpy. Work the dough, kneading and slapping it on to a work surface for about 10 minutes until smooth and shiny and obviously elastic. Cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave in a warm spot for at least 30 minutes to relax the pastry.
Now prepare the filling. Melt 15g of butter in a spacious frying pan and when bubbling, stir in the almonds. Stir-fry until golden, then tip on to a fold of kitchen paper to drain and cool. Wipe out the pan and add 35g of butter. When melted, add the breadcrumbs and stir constantly until crusty and golden. Tip on to a fold of kitchen paper to cool and crisp. Place the cooled almonds in a plastic bag and crush with something heavy until chopped into crumbs. Remove the zest from the lemon and chop finely. Squeeze the lemon juice into a mixing bowl. Quarter, core and peel the apples, then slice thinly down the quarters directly into the lemon juice. Toss occasionally to prevent excessive browning.
Give the pastry another quick kneading. Choose a clean tea towel with a strong pattern – I chose one covered with strawberries – and spread it out on a work surface. Dust the tea towel lavishly with flour and rub it into the fabric. Plonk the pastry in the middle. To begin with, as you roll and pull the pastry, your task, to roll it so thin you can clearly see the tea towel pattern and big enough to overhang the edges, will seem impossible. The pastry will resist and want to spring back on itself, but just keep on rolling, stretching it gently with your hands. As it gets larger, slip your hands under the pastry, carefully easing it off the tea towel, to gently stretch and pull the dough, using your forearms and later the backs of your hands to support it. It helps if you can roll the pastry on a work surface or table that enables you to get at the pastry from different angles, although you could just move the tea towel. Keep on keeping on until the pastry is tissue-thin and large enough to just overhang the tea towel. Don’t worry about the odd tear but choose the end with the least damage to finish on. Trim the edges. If you haven’t already, ease your hand under the pastry to ensure that none of it is stuck to the tea towel. Have ready a buttered baking sheet lined with buttered baking parchment.
Melt the remaining 25g of butter and paint it over the pastry. Leaving a 2cm border, scatter the pastry with the chopped almonds, sultanas and breadcrumbs. Drain the apples and mix with the cinnamon, sugar and lemon zest. Spread evenly over the crumbs. Bearing in mind which end you wish to end on, roll the pastry with the aid of the tea towel. Use beaten egg to glue and seal the end of the roll and the side ends, tucking the seal under the roll. Carefully manoeuvre the roll on to the prepared baking sheet and ease it into a horseshoe shape. If you wish, you could keep the strudel on hold at this point. To cook, heat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4 and bake it for 20 minutes. Increase the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6 and cook for a further 30 minutes, until the surface is crisp and golden and your kitchen smells like Christmas. Dust with icing sugar and ease on to a serving platter. Serve warm rather than piping hot, cut in slices.
