It is impossible to undertake any serious consideration of bread without first discussing toast. Yes, bread is gorgeous, but it’s usually cold, it can be a bit floppy and insubstantial and it tends to go stale quickly. Toasting is the answer to all these issues… and then oh so much more. Toast is a world of its own; the substrate for astonishing cuisine across the globe, and in the UK a near obsession for a whole nation.
Do you and your partner like your toast the same way? If you do, you are not only creepily compatible but a statistically insignificant anomaly. Even when you take two adjacent slices from the same loaf – an effective metaphor for total similarity – there are so many variations in cuisson, serving temperature, butter application strategies and quantities… and that’s before you even take the lid off the jam/marmalade/Marmite.
If you ever needed a convenient symbol for the British oddness around toast, consider for a moment the toast rack and all that it represents. It should be self-evident that toast is best hot from the grill, fire or toaster so that the butter can melt and the full fortifying effects of the heat can be appreciated. It would be daft, surely, to plan for toast to go cold – and yet that is exactly what many toast aficionados do. Place a slice of hot toast on a plate and it will go cold. On the upper surface, steam will rise, but on the underside, it will be trapped and the moisture reabsorbed into the slice. It will become soggy.
Sadly, I have come to realise that there are people who actively like soggy, cold toast, but they are mercifully few and they usually keep their vice a secret. The toast rack is designed to let the toast go cold while staying crisp. Now, this could just be another insane variable in the wild palette of toast preferences, but there are, as so often happens in the UK, class distinctions at work here.
Anyone who makes toast in a domestic setting can arrange for it to be served hot and delicious. From a toasting fork, off the top of the Aga, from an eye-level grill or just out of a regular toaster, most of us can literally turn upon a heel and have the real deal dropped onto the plate from scorched fingers. The first electric toasters were attractive little items designed to sit in the middle of the breakfast table or, judging from gushing newspaper ads, on a tray while sitting up in bed. Hot toast is easy to acquire everywhere except the most aristocratic households, grand hotels, officers’ messes or boarding-school dining rooms, for it is here that the toast is made in bulk in the kitchen and carried by staff to the table. A taste for cold, crisp toast is an infallible indicator, apparently, of the right sort of upbringing, or of an aspiration to it. Like the cruet and the fish knife, the toast rack sits forever in the armoury of those who ‘must have things daintily served’.
Having dealt with the cooling of toast, we should pause for a moment to consider ‘doneness’, colour or, more accurately, the degree of burning. It’s the browned stuff that carries the toast flavour. Victorian cookery books are full of innovative suggestions to utilise this. There are recipes for ‘toast water’, in which the cooked, crisp surface of the toast is grated with a purpose-made ‘rasp’ into clear water for feeding to invalids.4 A more luxe variation would be any of the dozens of recipes, from all over the world, for ‘milk toast’, in which the toast is soaked in milk, lending it flavour and softening any troubling crustiness. Mrs Beeton herself recommends a ‘toast sandwich’, in which a well-toasted slice is placed between two thickly buttered slices of ‘raw’ bread.5 Actually, it’s pretty good.
For reasons nobody can quite remember, it was once considered rather refined to toast two slices of bread sandwiched together. That would provide the benefit of one crisp and browned side and one hot, steamed one. À chacun son goût. Perhaps it was something about saving fuel or speeding up production. Or perhaps it was an intentional reversal of the method for making ‘Melba toasts’, which for decades were the first thing taught to kids learning ‘domestic science’ in school. For these, a slice is toasted (both sides), allowed to cool in a rack and then carefully sliced through the middle, creating two even thinner slices that are then toasted on their raw side to produce something that’s laden with ‘toasted’ flavour and shatters in the mouth like an expensive biscuit.
It’s hard to think of anything more benign than the innocent pursuit of toasty flavour and yet, in recent decades, a new fear has grown around ‘burntness’ in food. One of the products of charring (burning something to blackness) is acrylamide, very high doses of which have been shown to increase the risk of cancer in laboratory mice. The IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) considers it ‘probably carcinogenic to humans’.6 For a decade or so, the notion has grown that ‘burnt’ toast is ‘bad’ and will kill us all. It’s certainly hampered the enjoyment of those who favour the darker tones in the palette of toast.
In 2017 the UK Food Standards Agency launched a ‘Go for Gold’ campaign to encourage the British public to cook food – particularly starches – only to the point of golden brownness, to minimise the production of acrylamide. This would have appalled my grandfather who liked his toast properly incinerated so that he ‘could taste it’. It also ran counter to the findings of a 2015 study undertaken by the European Food Safety Authority that ‘acrylamide intake was not associated with an increased risk of most common cancers, including those of the GI or respiratory tract, breast, prostate and bladder’.7 Today, Cancer Research UK states on its website that ‘for most cancer types, there is no link between acrylamide and cancer risk’.8 Once again, it seems that, as government gets its act together to demonise something officially, actual scientific thought is shifting towards the position that it’s fine in moderation… unless you’re a mouse being force-fed burnt toast.
The toaster is probably the most ubiquitous single-use device in most western domestic kitchens. You might have a deep-fat fryer for frying things or a mixer for mixing them… but a single machine just to scorch the surface of single slices of bread? That’s remarkably specific.
The glory days of toast really began with urbanisation. When large numbers of people moved into restricted accommodation, with inadequate cooking facilities, toast came into its own. In a house with no kitchen it’s difficult to get a hot meal on the table, but in a room with a fire, a loaf of bread and a tin of sardines something gorgeous begins to happen.
The principal joy in eating hot toast is the application of much butter. This is certainly what most Brits will tell you, but it conceals a more fundamental and global truth. We eat our toast with salted butter and so fail to make the connection that every other bread-eating culture does with bread and salt. Bread and salt are offered in ritual greeting across most Nordic and Slavic countries, right across Central Europe and in the Middle East. Welcome your guest by offering bread, but including salt, too, implies more – the wish that he will eat it; that he will break the bread with you. It is true that we tend to salt our bread in the baking more than others might, but really we get the salt kick we need from the butter we use.
Butter is made by churning the fat out of milk and draining the liquid portion away. In most other butter-eating nations – those that don’t rely on olive oil or pork fat as their lubricating grease of choice – the butter is then allowed to ferment for a while to aid preservation. Historically, we don’t ferment our butter much at all. Perhaps in our cooler climate it wasn’t thought necessary or perhaps we just ate it so damn fast we didn’t need to store it for months and just churned up fresh batches, but mainly we preserved our butter by salting. As it’s the fermentation that turns butter from white to yellow, we also had to add a colourant, and, in some cases, churn extra cream back into the butter to render it blander and richer. The Brits are unique in rejecting butter that’s too pronouncedly ‘buttery’ as rancid, preferring it blandly flavoured and really quite heavily salted.
Today, of course, manufacturers are reducing salt in every product wherever they possibly can and as a result we’re sold more unsalted and ‘lightly salted’ butter in supermarkets – but those of us with longer gustatory memories can never forget the commercial butter of our childhood: alarmingly yellow and astringently salty. It is perhaps unsurprising that for most of us, our recollections of the first ‘foreign’ breads we encountered were ‘unsalted’ and with pale and unsalted butter. A French baguette has little salt in it and an Italian or Spanish loaf will have none at all. In Tomás Graves’ amazing book Bread & Oil (2000) he lays out a comprehensive list of the different ways with bread on the Balearic Islands: with fruity olive oil, raw garlic or overripe and juicy tomatoes in a pa amb tomàquet, but always with the addition of salt… it’s so obvious that it’s part of the picture and yet it’s somehow so intrinsic to the consumption of bread that it doesn’t even warrant mentioning in the title.
But perhaps we Brits have pushed things a little further in our pursuit of saltiness. How else can we explain the truly odd things that only we spread on our toast?
Marmite was invented by Baron Justus von Liebig towards the end of the nineteenth century.9 To be strictly accurate, he was responsible for the discovery that yeast could be concentrated into a highly nutritious paste, which, as with many of his discoveries, he believed could be used to feed the poor and malnourished. The founders of the Marmite company, realising that yeast was available by the tonne as a waste product of the brewing industry, set up a factory in Burton-on-Trent, in the West Midlands of England. Liebig had been excited by the idea that yeast extract was a potent source of vitamins B1, 2, 3 and 9,10 but that’s not what drove customers to consume it like addicts. Marmite contains lots of free glutamic acids – basically natural monosodium glutamate (MSG) – and the yeast is extracted by autolysis, breaking down the yeast cells with huge amounts of salt. Yes, Marmite is basically yummy salt and tasty MSG in a conveniently gluey spread, capable of adhering to bread and enhancing it.11 If – and God knows I’d love to – we were to set up something like the US space programme, wherein billions of dollars and the best scientific minds of the world were employed in the search for the single, perfect material for the English to spread on toast, the result, after decades of experiment and extraordinary expenditure, would be Marmite.
They say that everyone either loves Marmite or hates it, but it isn’t half as polarising as Gentleman’s Relish, which many people will not admit into their house. Gentleman’s Relish was formulated by an Englishman called John Osborn, who launched it at one of the large ‘expositions’ in Paris in (depending on your source) either 1828, 1849 or 1855. I like to think he might have tried all three in a determined attempt to get the world’s most food-obsessed nation to understand something so utterly weird. Also known as Patum Peperium (cod Latin for ‘spiced paste’), Gentleman’s Relish is a highly spiced anchovy butter, which, like Marmite, is tongue-shrivellingly salty. One is instructed to smear this stuff on toast in an incredibly thin layer and perhaps to mitigate it with lots of emollient scrambled eggs to make the classic ‘savoury’, Scotch woodcock.
There is no doubt that all the very best things on toast or bread bring some degree of saltiness to the party, often combined with delicious, buttery fat and some element of umami. I find the modern execution of Gentleman’s Relish too muddy-flavoured and, frankly, weak for my taste, so I prefer to make my own anchovy butter.
It’s a simple process that would have delighted Liebig in its use of a fortunate by-product. I love expensive tinned or jarred anchovies in oil, but nobody else in my family cares for them. Actually, it’s worse than that; everyone else leaves the room when I open a jar. I find three anchovies, dressed in their own oil, on a slice of fresh white sourdough with a few additional crumbs of salt and perhaps a couple of drops of sherry vinegar a superlative snack, but I’m then left with the rest of the jar to deal with. I chill the remaining anchovies in their oil until it solidifies, then weigh the resulting mixture. I add twice the amount of fridge-cold butter, a little Espelette pepper and the merest scraping of lemon zest and then blitz the lot in a small spice blender. The resulting anchovy butter gets rolled in a piece of greaseproof paper and frozen – leaving no problematic, smelly leftovers in the fridge, but providing me with a sort of fragrant candle of solid butter from which I can crack a chunk in the morning and allow it to melt over my hot toast.
Perhaps I’m no gentleman but I find no need to spread this stuff thinly or to weaken it with eggs. The only special treatment it needs is extra bread for a second slice.
To start with the very first principles of this culinary medium, we should turn our attention to beans on toast. It constitutes probably the simplest proper meal you can eat with a plate and cutlery but can be prepared with next to no equipment. As long as you can stick a bit of bread in the toaster and find some way of taking the chill off the beans, you’re a bedsit Escoffier.12
Baked beans can, of course, be quite a performance. God knows I have spent many hours pursuing the perfect homemade Boston baked beans. I’ve salted my own pork, lined the base of an ancient earthenware crock with pig skin, packed it with soaked beans and poured on mustard, molasses and a dozen secret aromats. I’ve sealed it closed and buried the whole kit in a hole in the ground heated with live coals and waited twenty-four hours. They were good. After that much effort I’d have been bloody livid if they weren’t.
I’ve ‘baked’ beans in pressure cookers, in sous vide baths and crock pots and they’ve all been delicious, but the terrible truth is that none of them were tinned Heinz baked beans. I know, you’re expecting the standard disclaimer that ‘other brands of sauced bean are available’, but c’mon. We know the truth. Heinz beans are sui generis, entirely and utterly a thing on their own. They have the same relationship to any homemade beans that tinned peaches do to fresh ones. They are the same at a genetic level, but as different as you can possibly imagine in real life.
Even the greatest, most complex and highly wrought works of art must begin with sketches. Loose first principles. The blocks that may or may not form the bones of the eventual work. These foundations must be simple, fashioned from the most basic of media, with the possibilities of embellishment severely pared back. Baked beans are the starting point, the base camp for any ascent of the mountain of toast. Books could be written on the various creative enhancements, but mastery of basic beans on toast is an essential first step.
Think first of the bread. It should be uncontroversial to rule out all but white bread. Nutty flavours, complexity and pronounced textures would all run counter to the basic traits of the beans’ sweet, douce, naÏve flavours, unchallenging in the mouth. Packaged white bread would be perhaps too sweet unless balanced by salty bacon or sausages elsewhere on the plate. Yes, save the Mother’s Pride to be fried and nestled under eggs and beans in your full fry-up. Baked beans will be shown to their best advantage on a slice of toasted sourdough where the sourness can play against the sweetness of the beans like a squirt of lemon juice in a cocktail.
You could just mound your hot beans on the bread, and you’d have done a grand thing. You’d have primed a perfect canvas and, as a mere apprentice in Leonardo’s studio, that would have gained you praise and plaudits. But, as ever, even in a work of bold simplicity, it is the tiny refinements that will mark you out as a master in your own right.
We can kid ourselves – and many do – that beans on toast is a modest, restrained dish, almost the opposite of luxurious; and yet, take a discreet gander at those people’s use of butter and you’ll see through the delusion. ‘Ample’ butter is probably not quite enough. You need it hot, salty, melted and combining with the sauce of the beans in a golden slick, running over the crust and imperilling your shirt front as you raise the fork to your lips.
They say that one of the symptoms of aging is a coarsening of the palate, particularly in relation to salt, to which the old are considered to have become desensitised to a ridiculous degree. Naturally, I don’t buy this idea with anywhere near as much enthusiasm as the widespread conspiracy theory that ‘they’re cutting down the salt’. Whatever the truth, I find even Heinz are a bit bland these days, which gives us the opportunity to whip in either some Worcestershire sauce or sriracha (never both). Both are laden with glutamates, so they replace the missing salt with an even more powerful flavour enhancer.
The smell and texture of sardines has, sadly, fallen out of favour. Perhaps there are too many other easily available and less-challenging flavours; perhaps we can’t get past the taint of poverty that sardines still seem to represent, but we’re missing a trick here. Sardines tick so many boxes of modern eating – healthy, sustainable and a source of pretty much pure umami – that it’s worth our making a serious effort to relearn how good they are.13 Sardines are packed with vitamins, minerals and only the healthiest of fats, but contain no carbohydrates. While a few health enthusiasts might think that is a great thing, the rest of us, for centuries now, have realised that nothing goes better with sardines than an underlying layer of toast.
I think it’s possible to choose your genre for sardines on toast depending on which part of the dish’s cultural heritage you want to evoke. You could choose an unsalted rustic loaf in the Spanish style, toast the bread over an open flame and rub it with garlic and oil it before laying out the fish in an oleaginous phalanx. Or you could choose a baguette, toast it over a gas flame, mash the sardines and oil into the surface and top with a couple of rings of onion as a relish. Drink a barbarous Provençal rosé with it and imagine yourself on the dockside in Marseille. Personally I think sardines should tap into my own, more dour culture. I imagine them being eaten in a bedsit in a Patrick Hamilton novel… somewhere in Earl’s Court or Brighton, a greasy pea-souper fog pawing insistently at the cracked sash… a shilling in the gas meter to dry the last pair of nylons and to toast the thick-cut white bloomer from the corner shop… a little hoarded butter… I think I’d need the ferocious yellow colouring and extra salt of some old-brand supermarket stuff, and the cold sardines forked onto the seared surface of the hot toast while the butter was still sinking into it.
I find it strange and a little sad that the most fashionable restaurants in London will now bring you a slice of their house-made sourdough and an actual tin of staggeringly expensive anchovies from Spain or Portugal and consider they’ve served you the most refined of appetisers. I shall not really rest easy until they bring me a tin of sardines, a gas fire and a toasting fork. A couple of rounds of that and I could work up enough angst to write Hangover Square.
Devilled kidneys, it could be argued, are one of the most highly evolved toppings for toasted bread. Where a rarebit sits on top and pa amb tomàquet grinds tomato and garlic into the bread, devilled kidneys are made with a large quantity of good gravy that’s designed to entirely soak the toast. Once served and cool enough to eat, the tender offal is texturally barely distinguishable from the softened, moist, meaty substrate. The closest thing to it I can think of is the way that stale sponge, once soaked, is entirely integral to a trifle.
But first, let’s step back a bit here and look at the ‘sop’. It’s a word you never hear in a culinary context any more, probably because of its rather unappetising connotations, but historically, something cheap that could ‘sop up’ flavourful liquids and transform them into a nourishing, fulfilling solid was a useful ingredient to a cook.
Sops crop up in the Bible, Homer and Virgil, where bread is soaked variously in water, wine or broth. The words ‘sop’ and ‘soup’ come from the same Germanic root, so there’s something very deep in their symbiosis. In medieval England it was common to float a piece of spiced toast in hot wine to create a sort of damp tapa and it’s possible that the word ‘toast’, meaning a blessing or compliment paid over a raised glass, refers back to this practice.
Later, as small game recipes became popular at aristocratic tables, there developed a practice of serving birds on a piece of toast that would soak up any leaking juices. Once hunting with a gun became possible, small game birds worked particularly well on toast. Snipe and woodcock are miracles of natural engineering. Their muscle-to-weight ratio is finely tuned so that they can fly fast enough and with enough agility to avoid predators. To keep up this evasive action they have evolved a way to lighten themselves at takeoff by ejecting all unnecessary weight – namely, all waste matter and superfluous liquid. When taking to the air, not to put too fine a point on it, they defecate completely and explosively.
Be serious for a minute. This means that, if you can knock a bird out of the air as it takes off, it has already voided itself of anything unpleasant to eat. Get rid of the beak and feathers and you’re oven-ready. This is precisely how snipe and woodcock are cooked at their best, with the guts intact. And this is also where the toast comes in. The swiftly roasted bird, flavoured with the entrails, can be eaten easily with knife and fork, but the guts themselves are best hoicked out, mashed and spread on toast to make them more manageable.
All this is a roundabout way of explaining why the idea of rich meat on soaked toast was not immediately objectionable to the aristocratic palate and how, seamlessly, devilled kidneys on toast became a favourite country-house breakfast and gentlemen’s club savoury.
It’s now common knowledge amongst cooks that cheap cuts are the most flavourful and that offal is often the very best of the cheap stuff. In the days before refrigeration, meat could be hung and stored so that it had a high sale value, but offal would putrefy fast. It rarely left the farm and therefore had a reputation as a low-class junk meat, suitable only for the poor and desperate. In the particular case of kidneys, their reputation was further clouded by their smell. Kidneys that haven’t been scrupulously cleaned at slaughter smell of urine. The texture and flavour of their meat, though, is little short of sublime. Like liver, kidneys have no fibrous muscularity, but they lack that iron-y tang and gritty texture that the blood-packed liver suffers from. Having come from inside the body of the animal, a fresh kidney, freed from the core – which is the only part of the organ in physical contact with the urine – is clean to the point of near sterility. Good kidneys can be eaten so lightly cooked that they’re effectively raw in the centre.
For Edwardian authenticity you could devil your kidneys in a chafing dish over a spirit lamp, but you’ll do perfectly well in a regular frying pan on a normal stove. I’d reckon on three small lambs’ kidneys per person for a main course.
Core the kidneys, halve them if you wish, then toss them in flour that has been generously seasoned with English mustard powder, and cayenne pepper. Heat some clarified butter14 in a frying pan until it starts to bubble, then drop in the floured kidneys and toss them about vigorously so that the butter soaks the flour on all sides and starts to form a crisp crust. Don’t worry if bits of the crust flake off into the pan; they just add to the general gaiety of nations when we get to the wet ingredients.
Cooking time depends very much on the size of your kidneys, the heat of your pan and how much you keep everything moving, but generally speaking I find that rareness is an advantage and that you’re going to want to cook this again and again, so you’ll have a chance to refine your own timings. I would rarely take the searing stage longer than a minute, though.
Now it’s time to hit the booze. A couple of tablespoons or so of sweetish sherry would not be wrong in the circumstances, or a similar quantity of port. If you want to cut back on any sweetness and/or you require the validation and reassurance of a plume of flame, you could use brandy and set light to it at the appropriate point. Cook off most of the alcohol and you’ll have a treacly liquid in the bottom of the pan, partially thickened by the seasoned dredging flour, sizzling aggressively. Before it dries out and starts to catch, add a really substantial amount of Worcestershire sauce or Henderson’s relish and then, before that gets a chance to reduce, about half a wine glass of strong stock – beef or chicken will do.
Now for the bread. Flavour here is not the issue – the sauce will supply everything – but the texture is crucial. You’ll need white bread in a thick enough slice that a chunk cut out of it will hold on your fork and not fall apart even when sopping with juices. Two centimetres (almost an inch) is not an unreasonable thickness. Devilled kidneys come out of the pan only marginally less hot than the molten core of Mercury, so you will need to let things sit and soak for a while before you dare risk a mouthful. A strong crust will yield in this time and yet provide an interesting textural variation. What you don’t want is holes. An artisanal sourdough is a lovely thing, but if the baker’s having an off morning and there are big bubbles through the loaf, you’re going to end up with a lot of gravy on your shirt and that’s a terrible thing to have to explain to your valet. Given the choice, I’d go for a white, bloomer-shaped loaf from the bakery in a good supermarket, perhaps one that’s been allowed a day or two to stale. If your bread is very fresh you can briefly introduce it to the toaster, but not for long enough to really colour it. You don’t want to cut down the absorbency by any degree at all. However you choose to prepare it, you’ll need one slice per serving and a second for ‘contingencies’.
Going in through one side of the kidney you’ll see a tough, white tube, usually called the core. This branches out inside the organ and is the pipework through which the urine is excreted. Some chefs and a few butchers like to remove the core by grasping it firmly in the fingers, working their way down the ‘trunk’ with a knife and then carefully cutting each ‘branch’, leaving the whole kidney intact. Many recipes suggest you halve the kidneys anyway, so it’s also fine to split them and then remove the core more easily this way. I used to struggle with this until I found myself cooking one day with a friend who’s a medic. Two weeks later he’d furnished me with a haemostat, a pair of Littauer suture scissors and a brief crash course in blunt dissection and renal physiology.
To swiftly remove the kidney’s core, clamp the haemostat onto the thickest part of the core and pull upwards. Looking inside the kidney you’ll see where the first branches are pulling up, so you can slide in the tip of the scissors and snip through. The partially freed core will then pull further, revealing another set of branches. After a couple more snips and tugs you’ll have one last branch to go through before the whole thing is out and you can bask in the applause of the entire surgical team.
Lift out your kidneys onto a plate and allow them to rest for a moment. If they release any juices, pour them straight back into the pan. Continue reducing the sauce until it’s a thick gravy consistency… no, I know that’s less than useless as an instruction. The point is, how do you like your gravy? Take it to the consistency you prefer – you can always let it down a little with stock if it gets too thick – then spoon enough onto the bread to cover it convincingly (probably about half of it). Now arrange the kidneys on top of the gravy and pour the rest over the kidneys, the bread and the plate. Serve immediately.
It’s unusual to give instructions for eating – it may even be patronising – but kidneys are one of those special tastes that tend to appeal to cooks and food enthusiasts and vaguely nauseate their loved ones, so I’m confident I’m speaking to both chef and diner here; that you’ve probably done this as a treat for yourself. If all your judgements have been correct, you’ll be able to make each forkful a perfect mix of kidney and soaked bread, and if your timing is absolutely precise, you’ll end up with a gleaming clean plate, having mopped every last sumptuous atom of the gravy into the bread as you’ve eaten. If you’re less efficient, or perhaps still in a training phase, you might end up with some gravy on the plate. While we must always strive for perfection, luckily you’ve got the Contingency Slice waiting to polish off any last vestiges of glorious sauce.
Once you’ve accepted precisely how well a lightly toasted, grilled or fried slice of bread works as an elegant presentational device, a sop for juices or a replacement for the starch in a more traditional dish, a world of opportunity presents itself. Pretty much any dish you can remember where you’ve wanted to mop up the juices with a bit of bread at the end becomes a suitable topping. Think about mushrooms in a cream sauce, or some sort of Mediterranean fishy stew. The world is your oyster… or indeed any bivalve mollusc.
You know how good the juices of moules marinière are, and how fantastic the flavoursome oil coating the linguine in a vongole is… it’s just a matter of tweaking them a bit to stay on top of some bread. If you can’t get your hands on fresh mussels or clams, the freezer aisle in your local supermarket will probably reveal vacuum-packed options.
Put some finely minced shallots and a crushed clove of garlic in the bottom of a sauté pan or saucepan for which you have a lid. Pour in a sizeable glug of white wine or, better still, vermouth. Not too much – you want a fragrant steam, not a Jacuzzi. Bring it up to a light simmer, then pour in your shellfish (along with any juices in the pouch if they’re the frozen kind). Put the lid on and shake the pan energetically. After about thirty seconds take a peek inside. Some of the shells should be opening. Keep shaking and checking until most of the shells are open, then take the pan off the heat and remove the lid.
I must make it absolutely clear here that I cannot, in all conscience, even consider the idea of tweezers in my kitchen. Their use as a chef tool seems to sum up everything I abhor about pretentious cooking… and yet I find myself forced to permit them for one task and one task only. Until I am allowed to keep a very small monkey with asbestos gloves in my kitchen, there will never be a better tool for removing hot mussels from their shells. I met a French chef once who winkled the first mussel out of its shell with a fork and then used the shell as tweezers, but he was so unbelievably cool that I couldn’t dare try to emulate his insouciant deftness. Tweezers it is, then, and damn the reputational damage.
Use a slotted spoon to lift out the shellfish, shaking their juices back into the pan, tweeze out the meat and discard the shells. A combination of seawater and shellfish juice will have happily married with the wine in the bottom of the pan, the shallots and garlic will have given up their flavour and there’s sure to be some sand, grit and bits of shell in the mix, too, so quickly pass the lot through a fine sieve and return to the pan. Now you can turn up the heat and begin reducing the liquid. It’s difficult to judge how much you’ll need to do this, but there’s a clue in the smells coming off as it boils. I usually reckon things are done when the smell becomes maddeningly delicious, at which point, with the liquid still boiling hard, I add a large glug of olive oil.
When the oil hits the boiling liquid it’s immediately dispersed into an emulsion (effectively a creamy sauce), which is why this phase is essential when cooking shellfish for pasta. You can, if you prefer, add a shot of whipping cream instead of the oil. Chefs prefer whipping to double cream because it doesn’t split and it can be reduced by simmering, giving a better chance to get the consistency exactly correct.
While the sauce is getting towards perfect, sear both sides of a thick slice of sourdough in a dry pan.
You’ll need to check the seasoning of the sauce before finishing. There will be plenty of salt in the reduced juices, but cream or oil tend to work against it, so don’t ever be afraid to add more. A grind of black pepper wouldn’t go amiss, and you might even consider some minced fresh chilli. Once perfectly seasoned, pour the shellfish back into the sauce and briefly stir it through to coat and reheat. At the very last moment, stir a handful of finely chopped fresh parsley or chervil through the shellfish and sauce before ladling it over your toast.
The principle of this inversion – of putting the bread under the dish instead of using it to clean up afterwards – is simple, but the results are sublime. One could argue that a steaming bowl of pasta or a bucket of moules in the middle of the table is a more convivial form of presentation, more public and gregarious, but for a more intimate meal or when dining solo, a bit of toast supplies the better medium.
If shellfish are not for you, and I can see there may be reasons why, then mushrooms can be just as impressive. The best foods on toast are those with strong flavours and plenty of rich, oily juices to soak into the bread – even those with a gravy-like sauce. Mushrooms are excellent for this treatment. Mushroom flesh is basically a watery sponge. If you understand this, then most of the arcana about cooking them will immediately fall into place.
Cut some large mushrooms into thick slices, then throw them into a very hot dry pan and listen to them scream. No… I’m quite serious. You can ‘fry’ mushrooms in oil or butter, but that just seals the exterior. This is a better way. The noise the mushrooms emit is not protest but a near-explosive release of steam. They actually whistle as the water in them boils off. The steam forms a kind of cushion that stops the mushrooms sticking to the pan, although this is not a huge issue, because the scorched stuff that sticks just adds flavour to the eventual dish.
Shuggle the mushrooms about in the pan a bit and then, keeping the heat high, clap on a lid – a glass one is great if you have it because the next bit is instructive to watch. The mushroom pieces will continue to give off steam, some of which will condense on the lid and drop back down over them. It’s an assault from all sides on the poor little fungi. They effectively give up all their juices and moisture and are cooked in them.
Once the pieces have become small and dark, remove the lid, lower the temperature a little and continue boiling off any remaining moisture. Keep stirring and scraping so that no bits stuck to the pan – the ‘fond’ – are left behind. When the pan is dry, the mushrooms are ready for you. They’ve been parched and cooked and will now absorb absolutely anything you offer them. Pour wine into the hot pan and they’ll rehydrate themselves with wine. I love rehydrating myself with wine, too, but it does suck up a lot of unreduced booze. If you want a subtler effect, remove the mushrooms with a slotted spoon and reduce the wine first, deglazing the pan of its mushroomy fond.
So strong is the mushroom’s thirst in this condition that it can be persuaded to suck up all kinds of useful fluids. Try a shot of mushroom ketchup, or you can even double down and use water you’ve used to soak dried porcini. We’re kidding ourselves here, though; dancing around the obvious and brilliant truth: mushrooms will suck up butter. In quite surprising quantities. They become fat and astonishingly rich and this is the effect we’re going for. Throw in a generous knob of unsalted, watch it melt and disappear… then do it again.
Eventually you’ll have plump slices with a glaze of butter, at which point you can, if you wish, throw in a handful of chopped parsley, and a squeeze of lemon as an antiscorbutic and to cut the richness. You could also add a shot of cream and a really enthusiastic grinding of black pepper. Not just to mimsily ‘season’, you understand, but to the point that the pepper is actually behaving as a spice, adding fruity grace notes as well as heat. Either the herby butter or the pepper cream will soak superbly into a thick slice of white bread, toasted on both sides in a dry pan.
It is said that chefs who want to try out the skills of a new recruit will set them ‘the omelette test’, and it’s true that making a good omelette will display many of the manual skills a good chef will need: the understanding of fire, swiftness of hand with the pan, an understanding of how egg behaves in the presence of heat and a degree of earned experience. The omelette is a good test of skill, but it is nothing compared with the creation of perfect scrambled eggs. An omelette might prove you’re a worthy chef, but successful scrambling proves you are a fine human being, a noble and trustworthy character and an all-round good egg.
Scrambled eggs are, without possibility of doubt, the finest thing you can put on a piece of toast. These are not the horrid, rubbery strands in egg-water that sometimes get passed for scrambled eggs at a breakfast buffet, but something entirely more noble – a dish made in small quantities for yourself or a friend that requires so much attention that it implies at the very least deep affection and, more usually, unconditional love. You can’t really say that about a bowl of muesli.
Scrambled eggs sit well on sourdough but can be equally sumptuous on a slice of nutty, malty brown bread. There are people, I’m sure, who have the agility of mind and body to handle toasting in parallel to the scrambling, but I confess that it’s beyond me, and that’s what’s so charming about the process. You need someone else ‘on the toast’ if you’re to devote enough attention to the eggs. You’ve got to love and trust that person, and you’ve got to have enough natural physical synchronicity and ease of communication with them to arrive at the table with your two parts of the dish simultaneously.
Crack five eggs into a bowl and beat them loosely with a fork. You’ll need to add a pinch of salt and some ground white pepper. I know that since the ’80s we’ve been forbidden to use the white stuff in favour of ‘freshly ground black pepper’, but chefs have always kept the secret… white pepper is more complex, more fragrant, more interesting and doesn’t leave black bits in your teeth or besmirch the finish of a light sauce. This is refined, delicate, romantic breakfast cooking… we don’t want besmirching… and we definitely don’t want black bits in our teeth.
Take a thick slice off the end of your pat of unsalted butter, cut it into neat little cubes and arrange them on a saucer next to the stove. Keep your partner informed of your progress at all times – they will need to judge the correct point at which to drop the bread into the hot maw of the toaster.
Add a very little unsalted butter to the bottom of a small, non-stick saucepan and pour in your eggs. Begin to stir immediately with one of those silicone spatula/scraper jobs.
Purists will, by now, be shrieking in protest. ‘Non-stick pans are unprofessional, they’re hopeless at high temperatures, and silicone spatulas melt!’ Both statements are completely correct… and it doesn’t matter one jot, because you must have a non-stick saucepan and a silicone spatula just for making scrambled eggs. For no other purpose. Not for simmering milk for a late-night cardamom hot chocolate, nor for finishing a sorrel sauce for your barely poached salmon. No. Other. Purpose. Excessive heat will damage both items and, on the morning you need them most, you’ll find your eggs sticking to a saucepan that’s shedding its Teflon like an estate agent’s dandruff, with a spatula as thwart and deformed as the mind of… well, an estate agent with dandruff. Your egg equipment will never experience extreme heat and will be with you much longer than any human relationship.
Stir the eggs gently but with purpose. No element of egg should adhere to the side or bottom of the pan for more than two turns of the spatula. Watch in increasing delight as the egg begins first to set and then form curds. In your stirring, swipe occasionally across the bottom of the pan and notice the speed with which the liquid egg flows back to cover the base. This is the unmistakable portent of perfection, for the very second the egg doesn’t flow back to cover the base, you whip the pan from the heat, pour in the cubes of cold butter and beat as energetically as you can until it is melted and consumed by the eggs. The reduction in heat will immediately stop the eggs coagulating and they will combine with the fluid elements in suspension like an enriched custard and… oh, c’mon! BUTTER!
As you turn from the stove your partner will have the toast ready on two plates. Seared precisely, either naked or liberally smeared with further butter, to your preference. Share out the eggs, eat and, as long as someone remembered to put the coffee on, bask in your union.
Noble though the eggs of a chicken are, they are by no means the only ova that benefit from a bed of toast. Herring roes are… well, let’s say, ‘it’s complicated’. Go to a decent fishmonger in the spring or early summer15 and you’ll see them in tubs; flaccid, pink sacs with the texture of a dropped blancmange. The fishmonger will tell you that they are the reproductive part of a herring and will blithely assert that they contain ‘eggs’. This is only correct about half of the time. As with most aquatic creatures, sexual contact between herring is indiscriminate. The females hose their eggs all over the shop and the males follow, spending their seed like Onan. Both sexes produce similar quantities of gametes, so the number can eventually stack up and there is very little to distinguish one from the other.
Fishmongers, perhaps unfairly, have concluded that ‘delicious fish sperm’ isn’t exactly going to fly off the slab, so obfuscation and creative euphemism have been employed.16 Ask the fishmonger very directly and he may be able to tell you if his roes are indeed ‘hard roe’ (female), ‘soft roes’/‘milt’ (male) or a racy mixture of the two. Just so you know, FYI, etc.
In their raw state, roes are messy to handle, but dropped into hot water for a swift poach, they tighten up into something approximating texturally to chicken livers. Dry them off on kitchen paper, then roll them in seasoned flour. You can make this as simple or as complicated as you like: pepper and salt will allow the subtle flavour of the roe to play out in full, whereas the more traditional and robust ‘devilling’ flavours will perhaps make more of a feature out of the texture. There are as many recipes for seasoned flour as there are cooks, but you could say the devilling’s in the detail. Hot cayenne pepper and English mustard powder are traditional, but you can add smoked paprika, Old Bay Seasoning or a pinch of your favourite curry powder. The important thing, as well as the bite of the spice, is that there’s plenty of flour to crisp up when frying in butter.
The loveliest thing about roes is the contrast between the crispy crust and the creamy, almost liquid contents, combining in each mouthful. Toast is the vehicle that transfers them to the mouth and catches the drips. For maximum crispness, be generous with the flour and fry in clarified butter, or even ghee if you appreciate that extra fermented tang. With the milk solids removed, clarified butter can reach stonking temperatures without burning or becoming bitter, so you can really crank up the heat.
If your butter is hot enough it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to turn the roe’s dusty coating into a tanned, crunchy shell, fully cooked with all the flavours of butter and caramelisation balancing the spice.
Though I hymn in praise of the many advantages of toasted bread for mopping up juices and transporting toppings, few of us think of its useful abrasive qualities. I’m not suggesting for a moment that you use a bit of grilled ciabatta to get your window frames ready for a gloss coat or that you employ a seedy organic granary to exfoliate your dry patches, but toast can do something remarkable to garlic.
Consider, for a moment, the amount of effort cooks put into learning how to get garlic into a dish. We trouble ourselves about garlic presses. Are they unprofessional? Elizabeth David certainly thought so. We learn to chop garlic finely or crush it with salt with the side of our knife blade. Aficionados dote on the scene in Goodfellas where Paulie shaves a clove of garlic with a razor blade, and many of us have bought high-tech, laser-cut Microplane graters that shred garlic into a sauce almost as efficiently as they shred our fingers. But none of this is necessary with toast.
Give it a try. Take a peeled clove and rub it across the surface of even the most delicate, most anaemically toasted slice and you will be amazed at the effect. You’re expecting the tough little clove to tear up the toast, but quite the opposite happens. The bread just eats the garlic. It wears it away faster than the sharpest grater, reducing it to liquid that immediately soaks in. You have to take it carefully or within a few strokes a small slice will have absorbed an entire raw clove and you won’t feel comfortable getting into a lift with anyone for a month.
This is the fundamental principle behind bruschetta in Italy and pa amb oli in Catalonia. The very simplest peasant staple of unsalted, often stale bread can be enriched to become one of the most luxurious foods on the planet with the local ingredients of garlic, oil and salt. Most Italians will cheerfully stab you in the neck if you imply that their olive oil could be improved upon, but some, nonetheless, apply the oil with a ‘brush’ made of fresh rosemary – doing so is rather gilding the gingerbread, though. Really you just need to rub on the garlic, pinch on a little salt and then hose on the oil like a profligate Baptist. Some will soak in, some will sit on the surface and some will run down your arm, but it’s only then that you know you’ve got things right.
It is but a short and quite natural step from pa amb oli to the princely pa amb tomàquet (or pan con tomate). I’d like to think that the most authentic version of this is when a Mallorcan has toasted her bread, rubbed on the garlic, poured on the oil and then reaches to a nearby vine and plucks a just-about-to-be-overripe tomato and smooshes it into the bread. This would probably be the ideal, with the sharp juices soaking into the bread and marrying perfectly with the fruity oil.
To my eternal regret, I rarely have spectacularly fresh tomatoes to hand, so I usually have to use other common tricks to improve the ones I have. Most supermarket tomatoes in the UK seem to have thick and indigestible skins. The fastest way to deal with these is to peel them, which, before you roll your eyes and laugh at the very thought of such frippery, is actually very easy. You just cut a cross in the skin at the bottom of the tomato and pour boiling water over it. That’s it. It takes seconds. The shock of the boiling water shrinks the skin, the cross in the bottom will elongate into long fissures and you can take the skin straight off in four pieces.
Conventional wisdom says you shouldn’t keep tomatoes in the fridge, and that’s quite true for fresh ones, but once they’ve been peeled, they’re better preserved by the cold. The tendency of the fridge to dry things out works to your advantage, concentrating the flavour of the tomato. There are varying beliefs around how the tomato should be applied to the bread. Some like to crush it; some halve it, take out seeds and pulp and finely chop the flesh. For me, the way the juices soak into the bread is the whole point, so I just roughly chop the whole thing, seeds and all, salt it well and scoop it onto my oiled and garlicked slice.
A peeled tomato that’s been stored in the fridge has a texture strangely similar to that from a tin, which leads us inexorably down a dark and embarrassing side alley, to the bizarre British favourite of ‘tinned tomatoes on toast’.
Boy, this is an odd one. It’s got a definite feeling of post-war austerity about it; of a surplus in some far reach of the Empire being preserved and sent back to miserable, grey Blighty and being encouraged by government as a prophylactic treatment for scurvy. Like those sardines on toast, it’s got a touch of the Patrick Hamilton, heated-on-a-gas-ring about it. In fact, it’s such a grim urban folk recipe that it’s never, as far as I can find, been written down.
The thing is, though, that however forgotten, neglected and derided they might be, tinned tomatoes on toast are delicious – particularly if you can get a can of San Marzano tomatoes from a specialist Italian deli. San Marzanos are a DOP-certified variety, grown on the slopes of Mount Etna in volcanic soil enriched with crushed seashells. Connoisseurs say you can detect the faintest hint of the sea in them. I’d say that was probably bollocks, but they are the tomatoes that are used, with no further cooking, on the finest and most rigorously authentic pizzas in Naples. Maybe, then, it’s not such a crazy idea to pour some over a lovely bit of sourdough toast and flash them under the grill.
In the strict liturgical hierarchy of the British fry-up, fried bread is a step up from toast. Toast treats bread to the Maillard reaction and then, if served correctly, can absorb plenty of melted fat – but actually frying the bread, adding the fat before putting it onto the hotplate, jacks things up a level. And it’s not just the spatula jockey in a greasy spoon, flashing his slice in the hot bacon grease, who thinks this. A thin slice of brioche, slid into hot, clarified butter, is rich and refined enough to be a bed for foie gras in the most starry of restaurants. Bread can be fried until shatteringly crisp and dry (think good croutons) or fried blonde in duck fat and tossed onto a frisée salad – not greasy, not heavy, but somehow sublimated; rendered more airy by the process.
At the other end of the spectrum, bread can soak up colossal amounts of fat. There’s a point during the making of a bacon sandwich at which the most responsible cook will rub the bread around the inside of the frying pan so that not a drop of the precious chrism will ‘go to waste’. You can get a bacon roll in a paper bag to take away, but if the bag hasn’t gone transparent from the grease by the time you get to the door, take it back to the counter and complain.
A well-shaped slice of simple, white bread looks so enticing when lightly fried that it appeals to restaurant chefs almost as a canvas. In Italy, these appear as crostini; in Spain, it might feature as pan frito; and in restaurants anywhere else around the globe where a chef is looking for ideas and has spare bread, they’d pop up as canapés or starters. I can’t insult you by suggesting recipes for something as simple as this. Anything can be added, from anchovies to mashed raw peas and crumbled feta, caponata to peanut butter, potted shrimp to guacamole. The important thing to remember, though, is that all of these are better than ‘toppings on toast’. That creamy, fatty unctuousness that frying brings underlays everything and ennobles it, and therefore, you must choose your frying medium with as much care as you choose what will go on top.
Fried bread is a powerful thing for me, as my favourite recipes for it are rooted deep in my childhood. We were not wealthy when I was small. I imagine that my brother and sister and I were probably very fussy and I don’t remember the kitchen facilities looking much like the Sunday supplements. Mum would take a slice of white packaged bread – medium-sliced Sunblest, as I recall, was the family favourite, with red and white wax paper rather than the blue and white of the luxurious thick sliced – and fry it in bacon fat or lard. This was cut into quarters, to better fit our greedy pie-holes, and topped with a mound of leftover mashed potato. The crowning garnish to this glorious canapé was to stick your fat little thumb into the top of the potato and then fill the hole with ketchup.
Another juvenile, fried-bread delight from my childhood was one of those odd ideas that crops up pretty much wherever there’s a mum at the stove and kids to demand treats. Everyone has different names for this: you will have your own and I’m prepared to accept that your mum did them best. We called them one-eyed Egyptians, but nobody knows why and I’m sure your name is better.
Take a single slice of bread and, using a small wine glass or a biscuit cutter, cut a hole out of the centre. In butter or bacon fat, fry one side of the slice and the cut-out disc. Flip both, add a dot more fat or butter to the centre of the hole and then crack an egg in. After a few seconds, lower the heat, season the top of the egg with salt and pepper and put a lid over the pan.
Lift the lid occasionally to check how the egg is setting, and once it starts to look right, gently lift the edge of the bread to ensure it’s brown and not burned. I usually remove the lid towards the end to slow down the cooking and allow steam to escape so that the bread can stay crisp.
Lift your Egyptian onto a plate with a wide spatula, being careful not to rupture the underside of the egg. Finally, slice the crisp, fried disc in half and apply to the egg as an amusing garnish. I’ve just called Mum who’s confirmed that arranging them ‘like little ears’ is most likely to delight me.
Recently, in a very fashionable bar somewhere in New York, a young man with a beard offered me a ‘loose meat, smash burger’. There was, as there always is, a little tableside narrative about the earnest authenticity of it, how the ground beef was seared on the plancha and served, not in a bun, but on a griddled slice of their house sourdough. It was all very charming… but, god, it made me yearn for the real thing.
I’m sure that, back in the day, Mum just browned some minced meat, stirred in some Bisto gravy and poured it onto a fried slice, but this homely combination has so much potential. Over the years, it’s become the greasy peak of my home-cooking repertoire.
Start with the mince. Everyone knows by now that cheap cuts are tastier and that fat carries flavour, so, counterintuitively, the cheapest grade of supermarket beef mince is not to be scorned. It’s full of all the tastiest and toughest extremities and has a good, high fat percentage. But if you want the reassurance of control, get your butcher to help you choose some good, complex, fatty brisket, a quantity of chuck and maybe some short rib, and ask him to mince it for you. It’s the kind of combination you’d want for a very authentic burger, but fattier.
Most recipes start with firm instructions to ‘brown’ the mince. This is based on the idea that searing the surface of each individual meaty grain will seal the juices inside. It’s a principle that has long been disproved about steaks, so it’s time we questioned it for mince. Minced meat in its own gravy should, by the time it’s been properly cooked, be a near-homogenous slurry, with the meat just supplying the barest hint of granular texture.
If all the juice leaches out into the gravy, it will only be a good thing. The best way, in this case, to brown the mince is to start it in a pan, on a high heat with a small quantity of water. The water helps to break the mince up completely and gives an initial ‘steaming’ that renders out fat and some proteins.
In less than a minute, you should have found that the water has boiled off and the completely lump-free, lightly steamed mince is now frying in its own fat, the proteins helping to form the Maillard crust that gives grilled meat its best umami flavour. If you fancy adding an alcohol to your flavouring, you can use it instead of water. White wine is a modest, delicate addition; port would not be insane; Madeira sublime.
Cook the mince hard to really build the flavours up and you should end up with dry, free-flowing and granular cooked meat. Now add enough strong chicken stock to cover the mince, reduce the heat to the barest simmer and step away. Forget about it for a good half hour before briefly revisiting to top the stock back up and cover the mince again. Forget everything you’ve ever learned about keeping good meat rare. This is not a steak or a poncey burger. This is effectively a thick beef gravy with a very carefully managed textural addition.
Season to taste, initially with salt and pepper, but then pause for a moment of quiet contemplation. Where do you want to go next? A tiny shot of sriracha sauce will subtly perk things up, more sriracha will make it properly hot (though that’s not really to my particular taste). A touch of tomato purée is no bad thing… little enough that things don’t go fully Italian, but enough to boost the umami… a truly fearless cook might even try a shot of tomato ketchup – though I’m not keen on the sweetness it adds. Soy sauce is never wrong, either, but for me there’s one secret ingredient that really helps the whole thing achieve launch velocity. I religiously hoard the vinegar from jars of pickled walnuts – indeed, I’ve been known to replenish my stock by deliberately cooking beef and pickled walnut pies, just to have another season’s worth of the precious fluid. Just a few drops of this imparts a combination of traditional English spicing that’s quite similar to Worcestershire sauce but with the added acetic kick of vinegar, acting as what the French refer to as a gastrique… the shot of sour that’s unusual in British recipes but which stimulates the taste buds.
Proper mince and gravy is, to use the formal term, ‘runny’. The Italians bang on endlessly about how the texture of risotto should be ‘pourable’ and that it should pool and puddle on the plate. In exactly the same way, mince should end up as a naturally thick, gelatinised gravy, with small, soft grains of flavourful meat suspended in it. If your mince is too granular, the pieces chewy or the liquid too clear and separate, it’s not proper, because the point of the bread is to soak up all that thick, gravy amazingness.
Choose a substantial white bread, doughy and with a proper crust – bloomer or split tin would be right – and cut a slice about two centimetres (almost an inch thick). Allow it to stand for an hour or two so that the outer surface is dry and a little stale. Moist bread takes extra heat in the pan to drive off steam, so it won’t crisp as nicely when fried. Start by grilling the bread in a dry pan, flipping it until both sides have begun to crisp but not colour, then drop some dripping into the pan and fry the bread until both sides are golden brown. Transfer the fried slice to a place, mound the mince on top of the bread and serve. As you cut through the slice and allow the gravy to soak the soft heart of the bread, consider how brilliantly this has transformed the very cheapest of butcher’s meat into something nourishing, delicious and emotionally fortifying by the simple addition of time, effort… and bread.
It’s not entirely clear where sesame prawn toast originated. It’s a popular starter in British–Chinese restaurants and a feature of dim sum and yum cha spreads both here and in the US and Australia. What’s difficult is working out at what point the impressive repertoire of Chinese ingredients was supplemented by crap white bread. It first appears on menus around a hundred years ago in Guangzhou, near the international entrepôts of Hong Kong and Macau. It’s called hatosi in Cantonese, where ha means ‘shrimp’ and tosi means ‘toast’ – again, a loan word from English. It’s reasonable to assume, therefore, that the British, as colonisers, were at least partially responsible.
Though there are various breads in Cantonese cuisine, I can’t help feeling that prawn toast has always been reliant on the poor quality of manufactured western-style loaves for its unique appeal. The bread needs to be dense, a little sweet so that it takes well to deep-frying and not absorbent enough to be greasy while caramelising nicely from the heat. As a popular and democratic snack around the world, it’s logical that prawn toast shouldn’t taste too fishy and, in essence, the combination is a textural variation on neat fried bread… and I mean that in the very best way.
To make some, put prawns, an egg white, some salt, spring onions, a little fresh ginger and a shot of light soy into a blender. Blitz the whole lot to a paste as you would if making prawn or fish balls or cakes. You could, if you wish, invest in the very highest-quality prawns and chop them more coarsely to retain the integrity of your luxury ingredient, but you’d be missing the point. You could add a splash of nam pla fish sauce or maybe a squirt of sriracha for hipness, but d’you know what? Don’t.
You’ll need plain, white packaged sliced bread and you could possibly cut off the crusts to create more elegant canapés, but this would also be missing a trick, because part of the joy is the extra crunch of the fried crust. There’s a reason they’ve evolved to be triangles in Chinese restaurants.
Smear on a good thick layer of the prawn paste, smoothing the edges down to meet the bread perfectly and creating a regular domed shape. The prawns will set to an absolutely homogenous texture that’s just short of rubbery and you don’t want them to detach from the toast when frying. Once you’ve used up all your paste, sprinkle the toasts with sesame seeds. Again, you could get creative with a mixture of black and white seeds… but when did you ever see that in a Chinese restaurant?
Drop the toast into a deep-fat fryer. When cooked, drain on kitchen paper, wait a few moments for them to cool and then bite into them – they will be the best prawn toasts you have ever tasted. Not because of the quality of your seafood or your relationship with your supplier, not because you hand baked the bread, not even because you invested in a particularly high-quality oil. It’ll be the best because this simply glorious combination has evolved from the tastes of millions of diners across the world, and is unimprovable in any way, save for serving it spankingly fresh from the fryer.
4 I have tried really hard to understand how this could make anyone feel better. I’ve made it a couple of times and it made me feel measurably worse.
5Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861).
6 …as are many chemicals, red meat, shift-work and a career in hairdressing.
7https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.2903/j.efsa.2015.4104
8https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/diet-and-cancer/food-controversies#food_controversies0
9 A phenomenal chemist, Liebig was responsible for a long list of developments in the manufacturing of food for a burgeoning urban working class. He discovered the use of ammonia as a nitrogenous fertiliser, invented the first safe infant formula and, through his Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company based in Fray Bentos, Uruguay (yes, it is really a place), brought us corned beef, Bovril and, indirectly, Oxo. There should be a statue in Trafalgar Square to this German genius, who did so much for the way we eat in the UK.
10 Vitamin B12 isn’t naturally found in yeast extract and so is added.
11 Much as I’m sure a scientist of Liebig’s stature would have been fascinated by MSG and the ‘umami’ effect it produces, it wasn’t isolated as a food product until 1908.
12 Hardcore purists can even do without the toast and a pan for the beans. I recently interviewed some young soldiers about ration packs and they said they preferred beans in plastic pouches because they could heat them up by tucking them inside their body armour, for a fortifying warm snack when they returned from patrol.
13 The sardine isn’t a species of fish. It’s the name given to a variety of small fish from the Clupeidae family, usually when referred to as food. What constitutes a sardine varies depending on where you are in the world, but in the FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius the entry for ‘canned sardines’ lists twenty-one species that can be used, while the UK Sea Fish Industry Authority unhelpfully defines sardines as immature pilchards – unhelpful because the rest of the world seems to think sardines and pilchards are interchangeable terms for the same thing.
There are a few reasons why clupeids have become humanity’s most important food fish. Firstly, they are absurdly plentiful at certain times. They form enormous shoals, sometimes quite close to shore, and can be netted easily in abundance. They are easy to process. A skilled gutter can get the guts and sometimes the bones out of a sardine with the push of a well-aimed thumb, and, if they’re really good, can have the head off at the same time. As the sardine has skin rather than scales, the fish can come off the boat and be ready to cook in seconds.
Clupeidae are oily fish, giving them a high nutritive value but also a tendency to go rancid quickly. Preserving the fish in bulk, though, is easy. Like anchovies, they can be packed tightly into barrels with salt and they rapidly cure to a delicious product that will keep for years. Before the advent of refrigerated transportation, this meant that the fish could then be shipped inland in their tubs, forming one of the most popular cheap proteins for the growing urban working class and for armies, navies, travellers and prisoners.
With industrialisation, canning took over from salting and curing as an even more efficient mode of preservation. The gutted fish could be smoked, steamed or fried before packing or even sealed into the metal container with oil or a sauce and cooked inside the tin. Old cans of sardines sometimes turn up in shipwrecks or deserted arctic outposts and, if the seal is still good, they can be eaten by a courageous culinary enthusiast without ill effect. Small Clupeidae shoal all over the world, so canneries sprang up from Iceland and the Falklands, Cornwall and California, to India, Portugal, Norway and Peru.
The conventional can for sardines has always been a single-serving size that can be opened with a ring pull or an attached key. In most countries, the can is 100 per cent recyclable… which probably makes the canned sardine one of the best-ever forms of portable human food, then and now.
14 Clarified butter gets hotter without burning, while retaining its lovely butteriness. Just melt a pat in a small pan, leave it to separate, then put it in the fridge. The clarified butter will solidify, so you can prise it out of the container, pour away the milky, creamy nonsense and rinse it with cold water.
15 Or other times of the year if he’s an enthusiast for the deep freeze. Roes don’t really degrade much in freezing.
16 Most people don’t give too much thought to fish fornication, but not, apparently, American songwriter Cole Porter (1891–64) whose famous lyric ‘Let’s Do It’ is a litany of piscine hanky-panky. He manages to squeeze in mentions of oysters, clams, jellyfish, eels, shad, soles and even goldfish, all freely copulating.