Bread is a perishable product and we refer to the process of its degradation as ‘staling’. Because fresh bread is usually moist and soft, we assume that stale bread has simply dried out – that its moisture has evaporated – but this is only a very small part of the story. How bread stales and how we control that process is a contributing factor to most of our bread traditions, beliefs and recipes.
The texture of the ‘crumb’ – the body of the bread as distinct from the outer crust – is a result of the starch in flour gelatinising. This is a structural change, whereby the bonds between molecules are broken down by water and heat in such a way that the starch can engage more water, forming a gel.42
Bread will stale when, over time, the gel breaks down, releasing water and allowing the starch to recrystallise. It’s a fine distinction to make, given that the result seems very much like dried-out bread – the important thing to realise is that staling will still occur in non-drying conditions. The breaking down of the gelatinised starch occurs faster at just above freezing point, so bread will stale faster if kept in the fridge.
If bread has gone stale, it can be partially brought back to life by applying heat again, causing some of the starch and water to re-gel, but it will stale doubly quickly as it cools down, so reheating is usually just a rescue trick for tired baguettes at dinner parties.
Wrapping bread tightly in an airtight material does prevent evaporation, but the moisture retained is absorbed by the much drier crust of the loaf. When unwrapped, the crumb might seem to have been ‘preserved’, but the crust will have lost its crispness and achieved an unpleasant leathery texture.
Dampness is an enemy to good bread, as it encourages mould. Fresh bread, without preservatives, left exposed to the air at room temperature will stale before mould ever gets a chance to grow. Tightly wrapped bread may grow mould before it seems ‘dried out’ – but machine-produced bread, specially treated to avoid degelatinisation of the starch, and wrapped in an airtight bag, will grow a luxurious pelt of multicoloured moulds while, at least technically, not staling.
The best way to keep bread fresh is to keep it at room temperature in something that protects it but isn’t entirely airtight – something through which it can ‘breathe’. The paper bag in which you brought it home from the baker is a good start, or the traditional wrapping for commercial loaves, a sort of loose wax paper wrapping, does the trick, too. A traditional ‘bread bin’ will keep it in good nick for as long as it decently can, and several companies now sell a reusable food-wrap material made of light cotton fabric coated in beeswax that seems to do the job wonderfully. Personally I favour a canvas bag. This keeps the crumb in good condition for as long as possible, maintains crispness in the crust and means that any leftover pieces are untroubled by moulds once they actually do go stale – at which point they can be used in any one of hundreds of recipes calling for stale bread.
The best way to have great, fresh bread on hand at all times is to use your freezer. Fresh bread, with its moisture locked up in starch gel, freezes brilliantly. Slice the loaf as soon as you get it home, have your first meal out of it, then bag it and freeze it as soon as possible. For weeks to come you’ll be able to take the loaf from the freezer and crack off a slice or two (use a palette knife please, not a sharp one, if the slices need to be coaxed apart), which will defrost in minutes and taste as good as the day they were baked. This also makes it possible to have half a dozen different types of bread available at all times.
Making things with leftover bread is kind of a private ritual. It’s done in family kitchens, often during difficult times. Recipes become loaded with complicated emotions and deeply loved. If ‘recipes’ are ever passed on, it would be orally or in a handwritten note – so it’s sometimes surprising when one comes into the public domain.
I have on my shelf a strange old book called As We Like It: Cookery Recipes by Famous People. It was published in 1950 and proceeds from its sale went to a charity for returning prisoners of war. The list of contributors is vast and ranges from The Dowager Marchioness of Reading, GBE, CStJ to George Bernard Shaw. Some of the recipes are short and homely like the one supplied by Cicely Courtneidge for ‘Prawns Spécialité’ (with tomato, cucumber and salad dressing), or complex and ostentatious like the Provençal fish preparation by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, which is clearly designed to announce not just their fabulous home on the Riviera but also the presence of a world-class private chef.
It’s an entertaining snapshot of the era – of a nation just coming out of rationing and becoming what we’d now see as ‘aspirational’, impressed by new stars yet still displaying immense deference to a traditional aristocracy. My favourite of all the recipes, though, is this…
White bread
Cream
Grated cheese
Pepper
Cut stale white bread into fingers. Soak in cream. Then roll in Parmesan cheese and pepper and pat with a knife so the cheese sticks well. Butter baking-sheet and bake in a very hot oven and turn when one side is brown, so that the other side browns.
Serve very hot.
You can do this with grated Cheddar or Gruyère if you have no Parmesan. The fingers should be crisp on the outside, and soft and creamy inside.
These still taste completely delicious and work as an excellent savoury, particularly when you solemnly introduce them as ‘Winston Churchill’s Cheesy Fingers’.
After we’ve learned to make toast, the first thing most kids tackle in the kitchen is some form of ‘eggy bread’. It would be wrong to dignify it, at this stage, with the term French toast because it’s too simple. The bread’s job is to hold the egg in position while it cooks, like an omelette, but with less chasing it around the pan… less to go wrong. I vividly remember cooking my first slice and the thrill of turning something out of a pan and onto a plate, a feeling that stays with me to this day. Eggy bread was the first thing my daughter cooked, too. It isn’t just taking a piece of bread out of a packet and sticking it in a toaster – this, however simple, is the first step in Proper Cooking.
Just as simple is the Jewish breakfast favourite, matzo brei… a dish that frankly involves even less preparation. Matzo is an unleavened bread, something like a cracker, that comes in big square sheets. It’s crumbled into milk or water and allowed to soak for a couple of minutes until it’s soft, then scrambled into eggs – one egg per sheet of matzo. The ideal frying/scrambling medium is schmaltz (chicken fat), and it works well with a little salt, maybe ketchup or, if you’re feeling really crazy, some chopped chives or spring onion. Alternatively, the whole thing can be subverted with sugar or honey and a sprinkling of cinnamon, under which circumstances butter is the appropriate fat.
I’ve still got a soft spot for the very simplest iteration of eggy bread: a slice quickly flipped in beaten egg and fried in a pan. The egg forms a thin, omelettey layer on the soft, warm bread. If you cut it into thin fingers or cubes before dipping, you can up the egg/bread ratio. It’s probably best with ketchup. But it’s also just a starting point.
Pain perdu is what the French call French toast. It’s more elegant, richer and takes a little more work. You can start with brioche, a bread already fortified with eggs and butter, but the important thing is not the eggy skin but the custard texture of the interior. The eggs should be beaten with a little cream, to effectively slow down the setting process, sweetened with sugar and flavoured with Grand Marnier and vanilla – and the bread should be allowed to soak thoroughly. No matter how thick you cut your slices, you need the egg mixture to soak right through to the centre.
Fry the first side in clarified butter and pour a little more of the egg mixture onto the top – just to make sure it’s completely soaked – then flip it. It doesn’t need to be more than lightly tanned on the outside, but the idea is that the interior should just set. Thick pieces can be kept in a warm oven for a while, but the best way to be sure of perfection is to use a probe thermometer and cook to a core temperature of 70°C (158°F).
Served carefully, dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon, it’s a dessert worthy of the poshest French restaurant… but it’s not quite the best version it can be.
Speculaas butter might just be one of the most dangerous ingredients on the planet. Speculaas are small, spiced biscuits, common all over Scandinavia and northern Europe and traditionally baked around Christmas time. Their flavouring varies, but they usually include a fair amount of ginger, some cardamom and that particular cinnamon they favour in Scandinavian baking that’s softer and a little less honkingly fragrant than the ‘pumpkin spice’ preferred in other countries. Weirdly, they have become popular worldwide since airline caterers started serving them with coffee. We taste things differently on planes, but the particular flavour of the ‘European cookie’ somehow fixed in the minds of travellers. It’s thought that Lotus Foods, one of the largest manufacturers of the biscuits, was the first to blend them into a buttery spread, which soon achieved a kind of cult status all over the world.43
If you can’t get your hands on speculaas biscuits, a few standard ginger biscuits will do. Crumble them into a blender with a similar quantity of chilled, unsalted butter and season with a pinch of salt, a shake of ground cardamom and some ground cassia. Blitz everything to a smooth consistency and pack into a jar. Take a single, thick slice of white bread and, using a sharp knife, split it in half laterally, leaving one edge uncut. You could also use the point of the knife to cut a pocket instead, but either way it’s important to leave the slices connected. Thickly smear the flavoured butter between the slices, then gently press them back together. At this point you can freeze the prepared slices or store them, wrapped, overnight in the fridge.
When you’re ready to eat, dip the slice in an egg wash, well beaten with just a little cream or milk (you don’t want to weaken it too far, but it’s important that it’s runny enough to soak in). You can season the egg a little if you wish, but the flavoured butter should do most of the work. Fry both sides in clarified butter and serve dusted with icing sugar. The speculaas butter will have melted into the bread from the inside and will be held in place by the egg coating. The biscuit crumbs might hold a pleasant crunch, or, if you’re lucky, they’ll have homogenised into an entirely smooth paste. Either way, you should eat this on a hotel balcony, overlooking Copenhagen harbour on a crisp autumn morning.
Sogginess in bread is something we all fear. Damp toast is depressing, a wet sandwich is deeply polarising and there’s something approaching nauseating about the texture of a slice of bread that has somehow got wet. It may have been placed on an improperly dried plate or too close to a glass dripping with condensation, but when bread soaks up water it feels wrong in the mouth. Yet intentionally using wet bread, particularly when it’s staled and extra absorbent, is the first step in using it as an ingredient.
Once we’ve overcome our fear of wet bread, a world of wonder is open to us. There’s a whole string of recipes from all round the world in which stale bread is included in salads, partly as a filling element but more usually as an absorbent vehicle for dressing. Paximadia are Greek barley rusks that are double cooked so that they last pretty much forever. In a seafaring nation, they probably originated as a hardtack-style biscuit – indeed, they can be served just soaked in water to reconstitute them, but are best broken up and sprinkled into a horiatiki-style salad. If there’s plenty of oil and lemon juice in the dressing, it will soften the bread by itself and the dark, nutty nature of the barley adds a whole new level of depth to the salad.
Moving further around the Mediterranean, we encounter panzanella, the Italian salad that uses great chunks of stale bread. Italian bread, particularly the ideal Tuscan pan sciocco, stales quickly and is usually undersalted to our taste, so it is absolutely ideal for the job of soaking up dressing… and more. The secret to a great panzanella is to disobey the near-unbreakable rule of salad making and to start dressing it way ahead of serving. The edict from St Elizabeth David about dressing only at the very last minute with ‘lashings of good olive oil’ and scant vinegar is very sensible if you don’t want lettuce leaves to wilt in seconds to an unappetising mulch, but panzanella should begin hours beforehand with raw onions and salt.
Raw onions can be a bit fierce in a salad, but the oxalic acid in them – the stuff that makes us weep and gag – is trapped in plump cells on the surface and is released when the cells are disrupted. It’s why you cry more when grating onions or chopping them with a blunt knife – more cells are crushed, and more acid is sprayed out. You can tame onions by blanching them in boiling water, but there’s a much cleverer trick that Turkish cooks favour when making their amazing ezme salad.44
Place some sliced onions into a salad bowl and pour over the same amount of coarse-grained salt you might eventually expect to use in the dressing. Now, using your hands (in latex gloves if you ever want to be accepted in polite company again), scrunch up the onions and salt with vicious enthusiasm. The sharp salt crystals will cut into the surface of the onions, releasing loads of oxalic acid into the air and a sweetly flavoured onion juice into the bowl. Sure, you, the cook, will weep like you’ve been tear-gassed, but this will pass, and your dining companions will experience only the best part of the onion.
The onion juice is, of course, laden with salt, so it’s now time to toss in your chopped, ripe tomatoes. These need to be juicy, even a little overripe isn’t a problem, and most emphatically not deseeded. The minute they hit that salt they’re going to start weeping juice – a dreadful solecism in a polite side salad but vital to a gutsy panzanella. Add a little more salt – trust me, it will work – and now, if you’re brave, you can put the bowl in the fridge overnight and let it really collapse.
When it’s time to assemble your salad, things go quite back to normal. You can chop some red and yellow sweet peppers if you need them, some cucumber if you are so inclined, rip up some basil leaves in preparation and have ready some capers and an anchovy or two. When you take your salad out of the fridge, you’ll have some onions and tomatoes effectively swimming in a highly flavoured liquid, which is, of course, the base of the dressing. Grate or crush some garlic according to your taste and smush up an anchovy. Add these to the juice with a couple of glugs of white wine vinegar and taste. Now start adding olive oil until the dressing comes into balance. You can add a little sugar and black pepper if needed.
Look at the bowl. If there’s a really absurd amount of liquid in there, just chuck in great hunks of stale bread. If you fear there isn’t enough juice, you could soak the bread in water for two minutes, then wring it out before adding it to the salad. Either way, it now needs to stand for a good fifteen minutes before it gets served, which will give you ample time to add some capers, or some shards of black olive if you’re feeling feisty and iconoclastic, and finally to adjust the seasoning and give everything the occasional stir.
By the time it hits the table, each chunk of bread should be soaked through properly with all the flavours we associate with Tuscany, the vegetable ingredients should be modestly dressed in flavoured oil and the bottom of the bowl should contain little, if any, juice.
You would think that the Spanish, with their fine appreciation of all things tomato and bread, would have an equivalent bread salad to the panzanella, but no – with fiendish cunning, they’ve evolved something arguably better and, if anything, even more cooling on a boiling-hot day.
Take each of the ingredients of the panzanella above and, in the same order, add them to a blender. You might want to up the garlic, you may want to omit the olives, maybe swap in some sherry vinegar for the white wine stuff and you will definitely feel inclined to add more olive oil, but you will have created an absolutely authentic gazpacho.
Some argue that bread isn’t part of a ‘true’ gazpacho, but it has the quality of keeping more oil in suspension in the liquid and, in the rural corners of Andalucia where gazpacho originates – where there are few written recipes but a love of oil – I feel that its inclusion is probably appreciated.
If there is one culinary culture that’s done more work on stale bread than any other, it must be the Spanish. The remarkable combination of creativity, thrift and a deep appreciation of the delicious means there are thousands of ways with bread in the Spanish repertoire, many of them without recipe or name. At the root of this is the conceptual leap that small pieces of bread are an ingredient in themselves, not just a waste product to be ‘used up’. These pieces of bread, called migas, can be used as a thickening agent, to replace the starch in most dishes or can be sprinkled over others. Migas absorb olive oil in staggering quantities and hoover up the flavour of garlic or herbs while retaining a crunchy texture. In that form, they can be used in the same way as an Italian gremolata, to garnish and enhance, or, made in larger pieces, they can form the backbone of a simple dish, topped with a fried egg or shot through with chopped tomatoes and onions. In a place where rice, pasta or potatoes might be expensive or unobtainable, migas, in some form or another, can replace any of them.
Upma is a thick porridge, and is a popular breakfast in southern India. It’s traditionally made by toasting semolina or ground rice in a dry pan and then using it to soak up a rich, spiced sauce… you’re ahead of me here, aren’t you? Yes, as packaged bread has gained popularity across India, a bread-based upma has evolved. It’s amazing stuff, particularly on a ferocious hangover, as it gives those of us truly unimpressed by yoghurt, fruit or cereal the opportunity to enjoy what is effectively curried toast.
Slip a couple of slices of white bread into a dry pan and toast both sides very lightly – this stiffens up the bread and makes the next stage easier. Now, either slice the bread into neat little cubes or, if you’re feeling very hungover, just tear it into small pieces and then toss it back into the pan. Keep the pan moving over the heat until the bread pieces are toasted to a rusk-like consistency, then tip them out onto a plate. Keep the pieces distributed, uncovered and in a single layer so that they can steam off any remaining moisture and not go soggy.
Now brown a few peanuts or cashews in the dry pan. Keep your eyes on the nuts, as they go from perfectly brown to utterly torched in a microsecond.
Next put some mustard oil into the hot pan (or plain vegetable oil if you don’t have a fantastic Indian shop nearby – in which case you should move house) and start things off with some mustard seeds, cumin seeds and curry leaves. Don’t let things burn, but let them have a proper seeing to, until the seeds begin to spit, before adding some grated ginger, garlic and a good handful of chopped onions. Lower the heat and let everything sweat while you chop up a couple of tomatoes and a fresh green chilli. Add these, plus a splash of water, and let everything cook down until it’s soft.
Once the masala looks good – well-combined and still quite fluid – and you’ve adjusted the seasoning with sugar and salt, you can throw in the toasted bread and stir until it’s taken up any loose liquid. Serve with chopped coriander (for health) and a freshly blended mango lassi – or possibly a Bloody Mary. It might just benefit from a fried egg, and once – I believe mezcal was involved – I made an emergency bread upma and sprinkled Bombay mix over the top of it.
Nobody died.
Aficionados rave about ribollita, the bread soup of Tuscany, but to me it seems almost fraudulent in its effortlessness. In spite of long and involved recipes from food writers star-struck by the poetry of the Italian countryside and the romance of tradition, it is basically last night’s minestrone with chunks of stale bread in it. Admittedly, most British households might not have leftover minestrone unless someone left their Cup a Soup to go cold in front of the telly the previous night, but seriously Italy, sort yourselves out. Ribollita just means ‘boiled up again’, so claiming it’s ‘all that’ is like the Brits making a big song and dance out of constructing a sarnie out of Sunday lunch leftovers.45
Perhaps more considered are the açordas of Portugal, which vary hugely in flavour depending on the region and available ingredients, but seem to agree on a) the addition of coriander b) being enriched with egg c) having a truly slurry-like texture in which the bread loses all structural integrity.
A simple açorda start with some toucinho (smoked bacon) or chouriço sausage for flavour, sweated in olive oil. Once there’s enough fat in the pan to be worthwhile, add garlic, chopped chilli and the stems of your coriander and lower the heat so that everything breaks down slowly, softening rather than browning. Once you feel you’ve liberated the flavours, add a lot of good-quality chicken stock to the pan and allow to simmer for a while, then add stale bread, roughly torn and with the crusts. Keep the heat low and stir regularly until the bread has completely broken down into the consistency of a sloppy porridge or a really, frighteningly authentic risotto – this will take about half an hour and you might need to top up the stock to maintain the right consistency.
Finally, take the soup off the heat and allow it to stand for a few minutes before quickly stirring in a couple of beaten eggs. If you do it fast, they won’t scramble, but if they do, no one’s going to come round and tell you off. Tear up the remaining coriander to top off the serving bowl and, perhaps, to distract from the fact that this is a far less photogenic dish than its deliciousness deserves.
Açordas are so varied that it’s unwise to specify any single one. In truth, it’s a method more than a recipe. Coastal regions, for example, favour fish açordas, using a stock made from trimmings and topped with grilled fish, or served with prawns and made with the water in which they were boiled. Some recipes add plenty of tomato early on so that the bread is effectively soaking in a runny tomato sauce. It’s fair to say that anything you might consider doing to a risotto would work well in an açorda, and then a whole bunch of other stuff, too.
Of all the wet bread soups, French onion is probably the most famous. Like many classics of French provincial cooking, it’s probably an urbanised refinement of a much older peasant dish – a dish that almost certainly resembled açorda.
Also, like many dishes in the repertoire, it takes advantage of ingredients that would be made in bulk in a professional kitchen and which would feature as sub-ingredients in many other dishes. The best French onion soup would need long-sweated and reduced onions, topped up with a good stock and a shot of booze and then topped with a piece of stale bread and a handful of grated cheese before flashing under a salamander and serving. What’s most noticeable here is that this ‘classic’ of French cuisine could be thrown together by a chef in less time than a hamburger, though replicating the effect at home – where we don’t have the pre-made ingredients in large buckets – is a long and involved process.
You won’t have a small brigade in your kitchen, so, unfortunately, getting the basic stock right is going to take a while. Days before you plan to make your soup, you’re going to need to start with a good chicken stock. You can, if you wish, use the carcass, trim, pan juices and leftovers of a roast chicken, and you could buy a bag of wing tips and bones from your butcher, or, if you’re really committed and very organised, you could save the cooking water from a poached chicken.
I know that sounds extravagant, but it’s one of the unspoken secrets of the French kitchen. If you poach a chicken – a classic poule au pot – you’re left with the beginnings of an amazing stock. And what’s going to really bake your noodle is how that stock makes the perfect base for a pot-au-feu… and then how the liquid from the pot-au-feu makes the perfect starting point for FOS.
OK. I completely understand that no modern family that doesn’t own half of Yorkshire is going to eat like that in an average week, but it does give you an insight into how a thrifty brasserie owner might be managing his ingredient costs. The canonical brasserie menu is such for a reason. There’s a complex web of interactions behind the scenes that gives the best selection of dishes, with the minimum of ingredients shared between them. Nothing goes to waste and the FOS is the ultimate in ‘using up’.
Chicken stock is useful because it has richness, but the flavours are subtle and can easily be altered. However, you’ll probably want your eventual soup to have a good level of beefiness, so next you’ll need to poach some short ribs or other good, strong-flavoured beef cuts in the stock.46 Roast the meat first in order to darken the colour of your stock and, if you need more gelatine to improve the texture, consider using some oxtail, too.
Now your stock is strong and beefy, it will set when you put it in the fridge, and you’ll be able to lift off the fat as a solid cap.47 It’s been hard work, but you’re now at the stage you would have been if you were from a wealthy French provincial family in around 1890 with a private cook.
Next turn to the onions. It’s now a well-documented fact that caramelising onions takes longer than anyone is prepared to admit in print, but, unfortunately, FOS cannot happen without it. You’ll need far more onions than you think – probably two large ones per serving won’t be too much. You might think your knife skills are up to thinly slicing that many, but honestly, for consistency and speed, it’s worth getting out the mandoline or the slicing attachment on a food processor.
Prescribed methods for onion caramelisation are as disparate as the imaginations of cooks and, once you’ve managed a method that works once, you are likely to cleave to it with the terrifying enthusiasm of a zealot and to scorn all alternatives. I reckon the way I do it is a lot less fuss than most and has never failed me yet, but for the sake of all our sanities in these trying times, I offer it in a spirit of kindness and you can take it or, in a very real way, leave it. Don’t @ me.
Most methods suggest an initial stage of sweating the onions to ‘drive out the moisture’ and break down the cell structure, after which the onions are covered (so that they don’t dry out) and stewed in their own juice. Some add salt to speed up the moisture loss, some add sugar to speed the caramelisation. Here’s what I do: slice the onions as finely as possible and add to a bowl with coarse salt, then, using latex gloves if necessary, thoroughly scrunch everything together in your hands. You may weep. This is all to the good.
Now melt some butter in a big pan and drop in the onions on a medium heat. They will quickly wilt, dropping into a mush on the base of the pan. You don’t want this layer to be too thick – hence the largest pan you have. Ride the heat so that the onions are cooking gently, but do not allow them to take colour. Now, this is where we get blasphemous. Add just enough water to cover the layer of onions and raise the heat enough to boil it off. Then repeat. Then repeat again. In a sense, this stands to reason. The onions are stewing in an onion-flavoured juice, just a lot faster than they might have, and the addition of the water makes it easier to prevent burning.
The clever thing about adding water during a frying process is that the oil or fat you started with floats on the surface and remains when the water boils off. Each time you boil the water completely away, the onions will be softer, and each time they’ll get another touch of frying from the butter. It seems more aggressive and interventionist than long, slow stewing under a cartouche, but it works faster and better.
When you’ve achieved a really soft consistency, you can sprinkle on a little sugar if you wish and then start allowing the onions to ‘catch’ just a little in the drying pan. You don’t want the onions themselves to burn, but you do want the sugary sludge to stick to the bottom of the pan and heat just enough to caramelise. What’s really important to understand is that the onions are not going brown because they are burning. They are actually changing colour because you are constantly scraping caramelised sugars from where they have stuck to the bottom of the pan and dissolving them back into the onion mulch.48 You are now as prepared as a brasserie chef with a brigade of underpaid scullions to do his onions.
To make your soup, take a ladleful of the onions and a couple of ladles of the broth per person and heat them in a saucepan. Adjust the seasoning, including, if so inclined, a glug of Worcestershire sauce and some sherry. Transfer the soup to individual ovenproof soup bowls and top with a thick disc of bread, cut as closely as possible to the size of the bowl as to form a lid. Drop this onto the top of the soup and allow it to absorb as much as it wishes. You can speed up the process by dressing the top with a drizzle more broth. Now sprinkle over a thick cap of grated Gruyère, not being too fussy about it overhanging the sides. Put the bowls onto a baking sheet and transfer to a hot oven, which, if you have suitable control over it, should have plenty of heat coming from overhead.49
Everybody knows that FOS is such a health and safety disaster that it should probably be banned in all responsible jurisdictions, but we shall persist. Remind your guests that the soup is only marginally cooler than molten titanium and that the melted cheese will adhere to human flesh, then sit around as food lovers have done for centuries, and make polite conversation about philosophy, poetry, art or love until it’s cooled down enough to stick in your spoon.
French onion soup is all very well in a Parisian brasserie, where all you need fortifying for is another day of strolling the boulevards, knocking out a quick painting or writing a couple of thousand words about a madeleine… again… but these don’t make particularly strenuous demands upon the body. If you want a soup that’s really going to set you up for the day, you need to travel to the Alpine regions of north-west Italy, where ‘men are men’ and soup is valpellinentze.
You’ll need a whole savoy cabbage – because nothing much else can survive up there – from which you have removed the tough stem. You could, I suppose, go for cavolo nero or kale, but it wouldn’t really be in the spirit of the thing. Render down a handful of chopped pancetta in some olive oil until you have enough fat running to ensure your survival through a bleak winter and then gently sauté the leaves in it.
Take ten or so slices of Italian bread and toast them gently in the oven until they’re very crisp, then lay a couple of slices in the bottom of a broad bowl that will fit in the oven (a cazuela would be great).
Now, at this point you’re supposed to start moistening the bread with the roasting juices of meat but, unless you’ve just slaughtered a superannuated milker and roasted it over a spit for the whole village, the chances are you’re going to need something more akin to the beefy broth in a French onion soup. Pour a little of this broth over the toasted bread, season very sparingly with a pinch of ground cinnamon and the merest scraping of nutmeg, then add a layer of the cabbage leaves and another of shredded pancetta.
Repeat this process, like a surrealist lasagne, until you run out of ingredients. Try to finish with a layer of cabbage and then pour in more of the broth until everything is just covered. Let everything soak for a few minutes and then top up again with the broth. It’s important to make sure that everything is completely saturated. If you underestimate the amount of broth needed, you’ll have to redefine your soup as a stew, and if you’re really tight with it, you’ll end up with a cake.
Finally, top with a thick layer of fontina cheese and place in a low oven for half an hour or so. Everything in the bowl is already cooked and, hopefully, sealed with that layer of cheese, so nothing much should evaporate while all the ingredients get to know each other by sharing a bath.
The final dish should be of such a texture that you can eat it with a spoon. You should be able to take a large helping as the first snowdrifts build up against the front door and then fall asleep in front of the fire until spring.
One particularly elegant use of fried bread comes from a mash-up of a street food from Tainan called ‘coffin bread’ and the largely forgotten vol-au-vent, usually attributed to Marie-Antoine Carême.
Take a loaf of white bread – something with a close and regular texture – cut off the crusts and then slice the crumb into large, regular cuboids. You can make a normal-sized loaf into two main-course-sized coffins, four starter-sized or a whole undertaker’s worth of canapé-sized ones.50
Slice a good thick ‘top’ off each cuboid and then use a small, sharp knife to make four cuts down into the bottom piece. Create a thick wall, at least a centimetre (just under half an inch thick) and then carefully pluck out the interior, leaving a thick bottom. Paint the box you have created, and the lid, with clarified butter on all sides and then bake, flipping the pieces around every now and again until crisp and golden, inside and out.
If you’re well organised you can add your filling to the case while it’s still hot, but actually, they take well to being allowed to cool on a wire rack and then quickly reheated for serving.
Fillings can be anything you fancy. Fried bread is too absorbent for anything liquid, so don’t try coffins full of soup or stew, but, like volsau-vent, they are best with thickened sauces or gravies. A full-on prawn cocktail looks great (with or without avocado), and anything bound in a cheesy béchamel works superbly, particularly if you put a little grated cheese on top and gently torch it. A coffin will hold together small ingredients, like grilled chicken livers or hearts, and if you want to go full Carême, you could even knock up a thick ragout of diced kidneys in Madeira gravy.
The idea of serving soup or stew in a loaf could ordinarily be ignored as an appalling gimmick. In my home town, I remember a local entrepreneur trying to launch the ‘concept’ that would inevitably make him rich – hard-baked crusty rolls, hollowed out and served with a choice of fillings. There was ‘chillie-con-carne’ [sic], an unattributable ‘stew’ and some sort of chicken thing in white sauce with sweetcorn that looked like it had already been eaten once. It might have been less abominable if he’d thought to serve them at a table, but he felt that, as his target competition – McDonalds, Burger King and Wimpy – served food to be consumed on the move, this was how he was going to crack into the big markets and make his billions.
You will have noticed the main technical issue here – that of walking along the promenade of an evening with a bowl of boiling slop and then, basically, biting the side out of the bowl. I think he lasted about six weeks before the last customer finally disappeared, disheartened by a scalded chin or a huge dry-cleaning bill.
There are, however, a couple of foods for which the loaf makes sense as a container. Bunny chow originated in Durban, but has since become a de facto national dish of South Africa, perhaps because the many myths surrounding it are all rooted in the country’s apartheid history, and bunny chow is one of the vanishingly tiny number of good things that came out of that period. Bunny chow consists of a white loaf, cut in half, hollowed out and filled with curry. The name is probably derived from ‘bania’, the caste of Indian restaurant owners who served it out of the back of the kitchen to black workers who were barred from the main restaurant. The bread itself is the standard ‘tin loaf ’ that spread wherever the British colonised and meant that nobody need be troubled with crockery or cutlery.
A ‘bunny’ can be eaten on the move using fingers and the lid of the loaf as a spoon. The last remains of the sauce soak into the bread container, which is then torn apart and consumed. I’m trying hard to think of anything in the English repertoire with that many cultural resonances, and if South Africans proudly enjoy their curry out of a loaf, I’m not going to be the one to belittle it as a gimmick.
In fact, let’s not have a recipe for bunny chow. Let’s get an extra helping of something good next time we’re having a takeaway, let’s serve it straight into a hollowed-out loaf and eat it with our fingers, and let’s think about what thoroughly delicious things come out of human ingenuity in the face of adversity.
In the States, the hollowed-out loaf is a popular tourist food that, for some reason, has become associated with seaports. In San Francisco, cioppino – an Italian fish stew – is served in a hollowed boule of sourdough, and along the north-eastern coast it’s creamy clam or fish chowder. I worked in restaurants in both places and, even as a careless youth, it troubled me that the bread was never eaten. Loaf after loaf came back to the wash-up, to be scraped straight into the bin.
It was a time and a culture less troubled by kitchen waste than we are today, but that wasn’t what got me. My greed told me that these bloody idiots were just chucking out the best bit and it completely infuriated me. Today, whenever I travel to either coast, I’ll still order the cioppino or the chowder, if only out of gastronomic nostalgia, as it’s just too easy to ask for the whole thing to be brought to you in a bowl.
After the first bits are eaten with spoon and fork, you can start ripping the bread apart, and yes, particularly in posher places, they’ll look at you like you’re dismembering a live poodle, but you know the truth. They’re the fools, and you’re eating the best bits.
There are plenty of recipes for chowders on the Internet and you can find good clams and mussels in the freezer section of the supermarket now, in sealed pouches with all the vital juices that make for good broth. Next to them, though, you’ll also find frozen lobsters that are remarkably cheap and often marked down in price as their sell-by dates approach. I usually buy them up when they hit ‘two for a fiver’.
Frozen lobsters seem to come in gluts. I understand they’re boiled and frozen on big boats, and I’m sure they’re not the right thing for a lobster salad or something elegant. They are great, though, for pasta sauces, soups, lobster rolls and, in this particular case, kind of ‘chowdery’ stews.
Defrost the lobsters and pick out their meat, being careful to catch any juices, odd bits or weirdly unrecognisable pasty materials. Put the meat to one side and put the shells and everything else in an oven tray, breaking up the big pieces. Roast everything in the tray until you start to get a little bit of scorching on the edges.
In a big pot, sweat some onions and a chopped stick of celery until they’re translucent. Now add a tablespoon of tomato purée and cook until it loses its acidic edge. Pour in the contents of the baking tray and, while it’s still hot, rinse out the bottom of it with vermouth, taking care to scrape vigorously to dissolve any stuck-on and browned material. Pour some white wine into the big pot and cook off the alcohol, then add a couple of pints of milk and bring to just below a simmer.
Slice the top off a boule loaf – the supermarket ones are excellent for this – and tear out the inner crumb. Paint the inside of the loaf and the lid with melted butter. Cut the crumb into regular cubes and fry in clarified butter to make golden-brown croutons. Set to one side.
Peel a few potatoes, cut them into cubes, then fry them a little in the buttery frying pan along with some chopped whites of leeks. Strain the milky lobster stock through a sieve into the frying pan, pushing down hard on the detritus to extract every last bit of flavour. Put the loaf into the hot oven to just faintly brown on the inside.
Once the potato cubes have cooked through to softness, stir through some cream and the lobster meat.
Adjust the seasoning with salt, black pepper and a small squirt of sriracha, then pour into the loaf, topping with the croutons and a couple of teaspoonfuls of cheap lumpfish or Japanese salmon roe – which you will casually refer to as ‘caviar’ when serving.
It’s not a bisque, and it’s not really a chowder either, but it’s as luxurious as all hell. It looks absurdly impressive served in a loaf and the best thing is that nobody will dare to leave the bread uneaten.
There are meals that stick in your memory forever, and I’ve been lucky enough to have had many. The really good ones change the way you think about an ingredient or dish for all time, and for me the most memorable of these was a simple roast chicken at Zuni Café in San Francisco.
Ask most food lovers about the Zuni chicken and they’ll talk about the brining. Chef Judy Rodgers was one of the first to publicise the idea of salting the bird a day or two ahead of cooking to enhance the flavour – and it was, indeed, a boon to humanity worthy of a Nobel Prize for Roasting – but what had me near to tears at the table was the bread salad that accompanied the roast bird.
It was rough-torn chunks of rustic white bread, a few crusts left for texture, grilled, dressed in roasting juices, olive oil and carefully curated vinegars, and all served over bitter frisée shot through with soaked raisins and roasted pine nuts. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, stellar – and, quite apart from the whole stunning experience of the meal, it cemented in my mind forever the relationship between roast chicken and simple white bread.
Top in the category of ‘things that shouldn’t be so damn good but really are’ is a supermarket rotisserie chicken, shredded into a supermarket baked baguette, with just a thick smear of butter and a few crystals of sea salt. With the bread warm and the chicken almost too hot to rip into, the butter sinks into the loaf in a manner that’s almost troublingly erotic. So completely seducing is it that I’ve been known to construct one of these in the car park.
The combination works in many iterations. Sliced chicken breast on sliced white is a lovely thing. Simple, pure and with the only question to trouble the mind being whether a smear of mayonnaise is better than thick butter, salt and black pepper – there’s something about the combination that gets you into these Jesuitical refinements. Skin on/skin off? Darker meat, torn from thighs? The oysters dug from just above the hipbones, confited in their own fat and pan juice… perhaps a denser, slightly sweeter white bread? Definitely lots of salty butter this time… mayo would be too much… the salt cuts the fat.
It never gets old, either. I’ll come back to the chicken sandwich as I sit on the edge of my bunk waiting for the prison chaplain to lead me out, and I refine and improve the chicken and bread salad combo every time I cook it – at time of writing, about once a month. The first way I strayed from Rodgers’ true path was to combine the raisins, pine nuts and torn bread, soak them in a little water and stuff them into the chicken. The water steams the chicken from within, and the bread, in exchange, soaks up even more of the chicken’s fat and juices. I roast the bird, initially, in the usual way – slowly and lying in two positions, first on its breast, then, as the core temperature begins to rise close to finished, flipped breast-up and the stuffing pulled out into a separate roasting pan. It still has the power to absorb a good sprinkling of oil or maybe some dots of butter, but then it goes back in alongside the chicken so that they can both crisp and tan.
The roasted bread-stuffing salad is rich, so bitter leaves and lemon juice or vinegar are still the ideal foil, but this is not yet the ultimate iteration. The chicken and bread salad is supreme for a glorious summer lunch, but for a winter evening we need something more… using the bread to unite the ideas of roast chicken and French onion soup.
We are still in awed homage to Judy Rodgers, so the night before you plan to cook, salt your chicken vigorously, inside and out, and tear a white loaf into big chunks. Leave the bread out to stale, and cover the chicken loosely and put it in the fridge.
Clarify and caramelise half a dozen big white onions51. When you’re ready to roast, pack a layer of stale bread chunks into a baking tray, top with a thin layer of the caramelised onions and then a generous grating of Gruyère. Construct a second layer of bread on top, then pour over chicken stock until you can see it pooling between the chunks.
Wait a little to ensure that the bread is soaking up the stock, then top up with a little more and now…. well, now we should pause for dramatic effect…
…because the next step is to place the chicken on top of everything. Yep, just perch it there like the Rokeby Venus, recumbent on a damp duvet.
Season the top of the bird as you usually would and then gently slide the entire teetering edifice into the oven. Cooking time will depend on the size of your chicken, but 75°C (167°F) internal temperature at the thigh joint is safe.
Once cooked, remove the chicken and pour any juices from the cavity into the bread, which by now will have puffed up like something halfway between The Blob (1958) and some sort of swamp soufflé. Crank the oven to full, and while the chicken rests on the table, slide the bread base back in. Ferociously brown the top of the bastard.
I like to serve the chicken on top of the bread. It makes an absurd visual impact placed in the centre of the table, and any juices released as you dismember the bird will just enrich the bread. You can serve the bread with a big spoon, making sure you include some crispy bits, some soft and spongy stuff, a good portion of the sweetened onions and great twangy strings of the melted Gruyère with each helping.
You’ll still need the bitter leaves and you’ll almost certainly want any dressing to be tart – hell, you’re probably going to want a medic on standby with a defibrillator – but, like that very first chicken I ate at Zuni Café, I can guarantee you’ll never forget it.
There is a name for the kind of hot/wet bread we saw in the wintery Zuni chicken with bread strata – in classical French cookery, it’s called a panade. It’s rarely associated with refined dishes and it’s not seen that often in British savoury cooking – perhaps we can’t quite handle any more dampness – but it does appear in some characteristically British desserts. Bread pudding is, effectively, a sweetened panade. It works well made with brown bread, where the malty, nutty notes combine with the caramelising sugars to make something that just cries out for custard.
Some people like bread and butter pudding to be made thin, in a wide pan, so that it can be cut into delicate slivers and served politely. It’s made with a lot of eggs and they proudly speak of its resemblance to a poncey French pain perdu. They lay out the slices of bread in neat and pleasing patterns or, and I apologise for this, they make it from panettone.
For me, this is not in the spirit of a ‘pudding’ – which, in its earliest and most beloved forms, was effectively a lump of boiled suet dough. A bread pudding should be made deep, even in a loaf tin, and carved into big, rude lumps or spooned out like Stilton from a truckle.
Lavishly butter slices of malty brown bread, tear them into large pieces and stick them around the bottom and sides of a regular loaf tin. You could butter the tin first, but if you’re being generous enough in smearing your bread, this won’t be necessary. Be aware that this is one of the most important parts of the process, for it is these slices that will fry in this butter when the pan hits the hot oven. This is the key element – the chief characteristic of a good bread and butter pudding. It’s why we tear the slices before we stick them in… because torn edges catch and brown.
Tear up the rest of the bread and soak it in lots of milk. After ten minutes or so you’ll be able to beat it like a thick batter, into which you’ll be able to stir demerara sugar, a couple of eggs, some melted butter and loads of raisins or sultanas that you’ve soaked for half an hour in hot tea. Season unreasonably with cinnamon and nutmeg.
Your finished mix should look, as my grandfather averred, like M10 grade concrete,52 but only barely pourable. Scrape it into your bread-and-butter-lined tin, bang it on the work surface to make sure there are no air pockets that might compromise its set strength and then top with a thick crust of more demerara sugar. Bake for ninety minutes before cranking up the oven to crisp the top and make everything golden.
Serve warm with clotted cream, ice cream, custard or any combination thereof, but, as a sufficiently fruity bread pudding is consanguineous with dark fruit cakes, you’ll find it’s even better cut into a large slice, wrapped in greaseproof paper and hiked with to somewhere miles from prying eyes, where it can be properly enjoyed.
If you’d prefer to make something a little more appropriate to a dinner party than the noble bread pudding – and, who knows, there may be people reading this who would – then it’s possible to mash up the bread pudding with the infinitely more middle-class Sussex pond pudding, veteran of a thousand ’70s restaurants and countless Abigail’s Parties.
The impossibly racy premise of the Sussex pond pudding that so enchanted post-war Britain was a whole, exotic lemon, packed in sugar and butter into a capsule of suet pastry and steamed until it collapsed into what would doubtless have been described as an ‘indulgent’ treat. It’s not that difficult to knock up and, yes, it does make an impressive display when cut into at table – but it can be punishingly sweet or face-shrivellingly tart if you don’t get the balance right, and, if you’ve failed to cook it for long enough, chewing the skin is less than pleasurable.
Instead, line a small metal pudding basin with a layer of dense white bread, cut into slices, crusts removed and very generously buttered on both sides. Make sure all gaps are filled. Now add another bread layer, also well buttered, trying to ensure that the joins in the first layer are covered by the slices in the second.
Use a clean tea towel or J Cloth soaked in vodka to wash the outside of a small orange. A navel would be good when in season, a blood orange will cause your guests to swoon at your brilliance and a Seville will win you extra points for ‘a sophisticated balance of sour and bitter in the flavour profile’. This might also work nicely with a satsuma or clementine, but since the supermarkets renamed them ‘easy peelers’, I recommend we should boycott them altogether.
Over a baking tray, vigorously exfoliate the skin of your fruit with a handful of demerara sugar. Make sure not to lose a single crystal of it because it will have absorbed a great deal of fragrant oil as well as rendering the skin more porous. Drop the whole orange into your bread-lined pudding bowl, pack cubes of salted butter (yes, salted) into any crevices, then pour over the exfoliating rub and some extra sugar for luck.53
Try to ensure that your packing brings the filling of the pudding right up to the rim of the basin, then apply a thick bread lid, also buttered on both sides, and wrap the whole arrangement tightly with cling film.54
Take a large pan with a well-fitting lid and screw up a tea towel in the bottom of it. Place the wrapped pudding on the cloth, then pour in water until it comes nearly to the top of the pudding basin. Put the pot over a low heat and allow to just simmer, with the lid on, for three to four hours, topping up with water from a boiled kettle if necessary.
Take the pudding out. Depending on your timings, you can now leave it to stand until you’re nearly ready to serve or you can plough straight on. Turn up the oven to its highest heat. Unwrap the pudding and cover the top with a piece of foil, buttered on the inside and cinched tight over the top of the bowl. Put the whole pudding on a baking sheet to catch any overspill and put into the oven for ten minutes.
The buttered bread layers will have kept the ingredients together as well as suet pastry, though with less of the texture of an armoured tyre. The fruit will have collapsed, and the liquid elements of the filling will have combined. The cling film will have held everything in place and the quick final burst of heat will fry the buttered bread exterior and caramelise any leaks.
If you’re planning to turn the pudding out at the table, loosen it first in the privacy of the kitchen. It will save massive embarrassment. As it’s hotter than lava when it comes out of the oven, you could even transfer it to a cold pudding basin of similar size, discreetly lubricated with a little more butter. It should pop out at the table like a greased frog, to admiring gasps from your guests.
The purest panade is probably the very British phenomenon of bread sauce, which is served with game birds and Christmas dinner, but really should be available with every meal in a special silver pot at the centre of the table. At its simplest, it’s hot milk into which fresh white breadcrumbs are stirred, breaking down to create a pure, smooth paste. There’s an argument that this should be enough to provide a foil to properly high-hung game with a rich, dark gravy but, thank goodness, most cooks can’t leave well alone.
Bread sauce usually begins with ingredients infused into the milk. It’s traditional to start with a bay leaf and large, peeled onion stuck with a couple of cloves. Personally, I can take or leave bay, and I think cloves taste like one of Starbucks’ ‘seasonal’ slurries. The onion is a great thing, so I will keep that, but if I’m going to add a spice it might just be a pod or two of cardamom.
Once the milk has taken on the flavours you want, strain it to remove any solids. Toss the spices, but you might want to consider keeping the onion.
Add the bread a little at a time or the sauce will take on a life of its own and, like some invasive alien life form, grow to a terrifying size. Keeping the milk at less than a simmer, add a small handful of breadcrumbs and observe their behaviour. First they sit, soaking, then they sink, and any larger pieces quietly get bigger as they absorb and then break up… and then absorb more. If you add too much, you’ll end up topping up with liquid…then adding more crumbs, then more liquid…
Heat everything really slowly, stirring constantly and carefully. There is a short window between achieving the perfect consistency and scorching the bottom of the pan.55
As soon as you feel you have it right, take the sauce off the heat and consider your options. You should obviously season – plenty of salt and ground white pepper56 – but, aside from a couple of hundred years of sclerotic tradition, there’s nothing stopping you taking things further. Cream is an obvious improver. You could add cheese. Yes, cheese. A scrape of Parmesan or a big old handful of Gruyère will transform the sauce completely. Yes, it’s closer to a mornay sauce, but who’s going to sue us? But what’s going to blow the minds of traditionalists is when you take that poached onion you saved, chop it into the sauce and then clobber it smooth with an immersion blender. ‘It’s a soubise!’ they will whinge. ‘Bollocks,’ you will reply. ‘It’s much better.’
There are recipes in every food culture that are about using up leftovers and elevating thrift to an art form, but it took the Italians to codify it into cucina povera, or ‘poverty cooking’ – folk recipes, mostly from rural Central Italy, which combine the validation of thrift with the pleasure of great flavours. Passatelli is a ‘pasta’ that perfectly expresses the idea. It begins with stale white bread, grated finely and regularly, which is combined with grated Parmesan and bound with egg. Toothless little old grannies in rural Emilia-Romagna will recall making it after the war with kilos of iron-hard bread, the tiniest scrapings from a carefully hoarded Parmesan rind and an egg that had been bartered for two days’ labour on a road-making gang. Water would have made up for any lack of moisture. Recipes today suggest a relatively abstemious 1:1 ratio of bread to cheese, bound with one egg to each 150g (5oz) of dry ingredients, but slyly mention that wealthier families ‘might have used more cheese’.
The dough is rested and then pushed through a purpose-built press, which extrudes it into thick little rods. You can use a potato ricer or spätzle maker to get the same effect. Perhaps the most satisfying way, though, is to feed the dough into a mincer fitted with a coarse plate and the star-shaped ‘cutter’ removed. The resulting fat noodles/long gnocchi/dumpling sticks can be dropped straight into a well-flavoured chicken broth, where they’ll poach and quickly cook through – they float when they’re done.
You can eat them just like that, in brodo, or you can lift them out and serve them with grated cheese. Because there’s less free gluten in passatelli than there would be in pasta, long strands will not survive cooking in one piece, so it’s best to cut both your losses and the pasta into short lengths.
Pure crabmeat can be finely ground until almost puréed, shaped into a patty and fried, but doing this produces a solid lump of homogenous protein – the kind of fishcake or ball that you might find in Chinese or Thai cookery. The American crab cake, however, is more lightly textured and crucially ‘stretches’ the strong flavour of the meat into something much more filling.
It might seem odd to think of a crab cake as a bread recipe but, ultimately, bread is the main bulk of the dish. You can strip your own fresh crab if you’re keen, but in truth this works extremely well with tinned or frozen crab, or the stuff that supermarkets now sell sealed in plastic pods. Separate the brown from the white meat and try to keep as many large chunks intact as you can.
Stir the brown meat into a similar quantity of mayonnaise – I favour the Japanese Kewpie mayo because it has much more of an umami element – and then add the same amount of breadcrumbs as the combined brown meat and mayo.
Finally, add the flaky white meat and delicately fork it through. No need to combine too thoroughly, as the idea is to keep things light. For the same reason, don’t over-handle the mixture to make neat patties or, God forbid, force it into a cheffy quenelle or a ring – just dollop a spoonful into a hot pan with some clarified butter and then when it’s time to flip, squish it lightly and bring up the sides into a rough patty shape.
It’s no wonder that the crab cake is a restaurateur’s favourite. The expensive ingredients add all sorts of punchy flavours, but it’s the stale bread panade that’s carrying the dish, soaking up all the goodness and crisping in the hot butter, yet steaming and soft within.
Stretching ingredients with breadcrumbs isn’t just a matter of adding filler, like gravel in concrete. The important thing about bread, particularly the stale stuff, is its ability to suck up moisture and hold it. It’s particularly good at holding in fat, which adds huge amounts of flavour but would otherwise separate.
If you’ve ever been subjected to a well-meaning cook’s first attempts at home sausage making, you’ll have had first-hand experience of this. The first thing most sausage makers want to do is ‘get rid of all those awful commercial fillers’ that you find in butcher’s sausages. They buy premium meat, season it well, grind it smooth and pipe it into skins… which then make the most appalling sausages. Heavy, dull, with a rubbery texture and none of the life-affirming joy of a proper banger.
Butcher’s sausages are made with a quantity of ‘rusk’. This is a simple white bread that’s been baked twice57 before being ground to a carefully measured granularity. You can make your own by chucking some dry toast in the blender. But here’s the key point: a good sausage is, indeed, made from meat that might otherwise not be used, or has a challenging texture, but the butcher knows that that is where all the flavour lies – there, and in the fat.
The meat is ground to make it more palatable, the fat supplies more flavour, unctuousness, lubrication and juiciness, and the rusk – the vital rusk – holds the fat inside the mixture. It soaks up the fats and juices and holds them. The sausage is a triumph of the butcher’s skill in selecting and re-texturising some of their best products, and it’s rusk that makes it all possible.
I could tell you that you can do the same thing with hamburger meat, and create an absolutely astonishingly good burger by using ‘fillers’ to ensure that all that delicious beefy fat and juice doesn’t leak straight out of the burger, to evaporate in a heartbreakingly pointless puff of steam on the carefully sourced hickory logs below. I could tell you that, but you’d laugh and say, ‘Nobody’s put breadcrumbs in a hamburger since Fanny Cradock’, and then a gang of tattooed blokes with huge beards, wearing leather aprons would drag me into the street to ‘re-educate’ me for my breach of doctrine.
I discovered one of my favourite pieces of unintentional food writing when I was still too skinny to know what a decent meal was. Tucked in my backpack, like every other callow oaf with literary ambitions, was a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. Before spending sixty-three days alone in a fire-watcher’s lookout post on Desolation Peak, The Traveller stocks up on burgers from a roadside joint. Dozens of them, wrapped tightly in greaseproof paper and jammed into the bottom of his backpack.
I loved that piece of writing. I grew out of Kerouac pretty quickly, as we all did – his self-obsessed adolescent proto-hippy Zen ‘philosophy’ was never going to survive contact with the adult world and could be safely ignored – but he knew even then, as I know now, that food from roadside shacks is good, in spite of itself, and that a good burger is good cold – and I’m damned sure his had more than a handful of filler in them.
Maybe the world isn’t ready to welcome back panade in a burger, but there’s another dish in the American canon, rare in the UK, that uses the principle to brilliant effect: meatloaf.
There are as many recipes for meatloaf as there are hassled ‘moms’ stretching their budgets in the US, but when you know the principles, it’s fairly easy to make up your own. You’ll need beef mince and pork mince as your base – beef by itself is boring and not fatty enough – along with a beaten egg to hold things together and some fresh breadcrumbs. Most written recipes you’ll find for meatloaf try to make it more luxurious, indulgent and, frankly, modern, by reducing the quantity of breadcrumbs and going for better cuts of meat. This is equivalent to whatever the philosophical opposite of a false economy is; it’s more expensive and it doesn’t taste as good.
You can now go to town on the seasoning – but not just in the ordinary way, sprinkling in dry stuff like herbs and mustard powder or little touches of damp stuff like Worcestershire or Tabasco sauce. You have Secret Knowledge. You know the awesome absorbative power of your breadcrumbs, so you can glug in Marsala, blob in a load of ketchup or mayo, or smooth things out with cream cheese, double cream or yoghurt. If you like, you can add more breadcrumbs to soak up more amazingness.
Drop the combined mixture into a greased loaf tin, cover with foil and cook until a probe thermometer reads 75°C (167°F) at the centre.58 Allow to rest in the tin to reabsorb any absconding juices, then serve in thick, juicy slices as you consider this thought: meatloaf, that much derided proletarian treat, without its bread and the delights that bread is able to retain, would be merely a posh terrine… and where’s the fun in that?
When soaked for a while, breadcrumbs lose their form and become a relatively smooth starch paste.59 With the judicious application of an immersion blender, this can be entirely smooth. This is, in every respect, identical to a béchamel or white roux, only a lot less fuss to knock up.
We’ll use this miraculous quality elsewhere in the book, too, but for now, it’s enough to know that you can use it to make absolutely stunning Spanish croquetas – and with about half the faff of the usual method, thereby removing the only reason that might stop you eating them at every single meal until you die.
Bring some milk to just below a simmer and pour in a handful of white or panko breadcrumbs.60 Allow them to soak for a while and then, if things remain liquid, add another handful. Keep going until you reach the consistency of a really thick custard. Now ply the immersion blender. This will thicken the sauce further, meaning that you’ll be granted the tremendous opportunity to loosen it with butter and cream. Add salt and taste regularly while you adjust the flavour and texture.
Next beat in your flavouring element. Chopped jamón or grated Spanish cheese would be traditional, some tinned or fresh crabmeat would be a luxury, lobster meat beyond wild dreams and probably illegal in several administrations.
Allow the flavoured mixture to cool, then take a spoonful at a time and shape into spheres or cylinders before returning to the fridge to set.
You can roll the croquetas in egg wash and breadcrumbs before frying or just in a coat of seasoned flour. Either way, they’ll crisp beautifully as they enter the deep-fat fryer, while the filling will warm through and return to a positively indecent consistency that actually spurts when bitten.
Using panade to absorb liquids and flavours gives us one of the most subtle recipes, in bread sauce, and one of the most ferocious – and they are closely related.
Skordalia is a Greek dip or sauce that often comes as a meze, or can be offered as a sort of relish alongside roast meats. It’s not unrelated to aioli or the other garlic-based suspensions, but it’s thickened and stabilised with bread. You’re supposed to do all this in a pestle and mortar for peasant authenticity, but honestly, who has the time – and though I don’t know any Greek peasants personally, I’d be prepared to make a substantial cash bet that if you offered them a blender, they’d embrace it with enthusiasm and gladness.
Crush a few garlic cloves first. It’s possible to use garlic by itself as an emulsifying agent, as anyone who has made allioli with just a clove of garlic, olive oil, a knife and plate will readily attest.61
Tear white bread into small pieces, throwing away the crusts, and beat them into the smashed garlic to form a paste. Season with salt, pepper and a little lemon juice, then start adding the olive oil drop by drop. The sauce should begin to ‘mount’ like a mayonnaise, though with a slightly less opaque, creamy colour. Balance the flavours with a little vinegar and lemon juice, and that’s it. Some recipes pound in walnuts or almonds, somewhat in the manner of a pesto, but the main point of the skordalia is usually the garlic, raw and fiery.
It is possible, though, to rebalance the ingredients in a traditional skordalia to make an incredibly smooth and luxurious dip that’s a subtle and elegant alternative to hummus. Begin by poaching a clove or two of garlic in a small amount of milk. Remove the garlic, then add crushed almonds and white breadcrumbs to the pan and stir on a low heat. It’s important for the finished result that you can actually distinguish the taste of the bread, so it’s worth using a fresh Italian loaf or a baguette. Sourdough is a little too strident. Use a blender to ensure the paste is completely free of lumps, then add a well-flavoured olive oil in a thin stream until you have the texture of a smooth parfait. A little salt and lemon juice will finish it off, but it’s important to taste as you season. You must be able to clearly distinguish the fragrance of the oil, plus the almonds and, most importantly, the bread.
Just when you think you’ve entirely exhausted the shape-shifting possibilities of soaked bread, there’s one last thing to consider. When left to go cold, panade will go solid. It’s a similar effect to chilling polenta. This means it can be sliced into pieces that can be toasted or fried. There is something pleasingly circular about taking slices of bread, staling, drying and crumbling them, turning them into a smooth white sauce, and then chilling, setting and slicing it and treating it exactly like a slice of bread again.
A slice of chilled, highly flavoured bread sauce, dredged in seasoned flour, then fried in clarified butter, is the perfect thing to slip under something dark and gamey. Or you can do it with a very plain version to support a more delicate topping, such as a slice of smoked eel or mackerel with chrain or perhaps some devilled crab.
There’s a whole class of bread use that we can usefully categorise as ‘dipping’ – or ‘dunking’, if you prefer. The absorbent quality of bread makes it an ideal eating utensil, the way it can be torn into convenient-sized chunks meaning it can completely replace a fork or spoon altogether. With a bowl of soup or stew and a small loaf (and without a disapproving audience) you can make short work of dinner, and it’s entirely debatable whether you need to do any washing-up afterwards.
Dipping isn’t always necessarily barbarian. Let’s consider what, at least to British children, is often the first excursion into self-feeding beyond just cramming bits in: the boiled egg and soldiers. It’s a combination that has occupied kids’ messy attentions for centuries and which still secretly pleases most of us as adults. It’s difficult to pin down exactly why it feels so good to dip bread in things. If I’d spent more money on therapy, I’d probably be able to posit that it was something to do with oral fixation, but there certainly is something about harking back to innocence. We got dippy bits of bread when we were still too young to be trusted with eating utensils. We were encouraged by loving, warm, all-providing parents to messily shovel our food into our mouths and, when we’d finished, they tenderly washed our greasy little faces. There’s got to be something about that, buried in the lizard brain, that delights even the most uptight of adults.
At the bleakest times, it is often difficult to retain faith in humanity, but then we remember that every food culture that has discovered cheese has found a way to melt it and use it for dipping bread into. It has not once been elevated to anything like haute cuisine, and yet everywhere it turns up, the Melty Cheese Product™ delights, survives and persists.
The most famous incarnation of the dippy cheese is probably Swiss fondue, which may have one or two authentic roots in Alpine villages but was mainly reinvented and introduced worldwide by the Schweizerische Käseunion, a shadowy cartel that controlled all cheese production in Switzerland. In the years following the First World War, they campaigned to have fondue declared their national dish. They created competing ‘regional’ recipes for the various cantons and, in the 1930s, began an aggressive campaign of promotion and advertisement. This was partly what they described as a ‘spiritual defence’ of Swiss nationality... but mainly because fondue used such a colossal amount of cheese.
In 1964 fondue was a popular novelty at the New York World’s Fair, and it quickly became a global success story. Quite how a vast vat of boiling, indigestible cheese managed to be seen as ‘sexy’ is still a bit of a mystery. It may have been something to do with ads involving athletic-looking young people feeding each other with long forks or the whole ‘dipping and sharing’ concept somehow tapping into ideas of European sexual liberalism. Whatever it was, it was certainly nothing to do with stomach cramps, cheese sweats and catastrophic intestinal wind.
The Schweizerische Käseunion stayed firmly in control of their global expansion plans. When the US market was challenged by a widespread cultural aversion to ‘double dipping’, they ‘discovered’, as if by magic, a long-forgotten tradition that the fork was only to be used to transfer dipped food to your plate and never to be eaten from.
It is unfortunate, though perhaps not entirely surprising, that the Käseunion folded in 1999 in a corruption scandal – but their work was done. Fondue had gone global, Swiss cultural dominance was assured forever and the brilliant minds behind it have faded into obscurity… that is unless, in a hardened concrete bunker, deep in the Alps, a criminal mastermind still lurks… Dr von Due, wearing an eyepatch, stroking a cat… and waving a long fork as he lowers inconvenient spies into a vat of boiling cheese.
Much of the mythology around preparing fondue comprises quite sensible efforts to stop the cheese splitting into oil and solids or coagulating into a terrifying lump. In Mexico, queso fundido is the dipper’s choice. Like fondue, it gets round the problems of splitting and texture by combining various types of cheese. Asadero, Manchego and Chihuahua (or menonita) cheeses cover all the bases of strong flavour, stringiness, meltability and stability. Asadero is close in structure and behaviour to mozzarella and Chihuahua shares some of the characteristics of Cheddar. Mexican Manchego is made from cow’s milk, rather than the sheep’s milk of its Spanish cousin, but a properly aged one is perhaps halfway between a mature Cheddar and a mild Parmesan. These are usually grated together and either heated in a small pan or dumped straight onto a hot griddle and then scraped up to be served. It’s best spooned onto fresh, warm tortillas.
Fonduta is an Italian version of fondue, originating just over the peaks from Switzerland, but it gets round the problems of splitting and clumping in a different way. It starts with fontina, a semi-soft cheese, but combines it with egg yolks, flour, milk and butter. It has elements of béchamel, a touch of custardiness and, crucially, the sauce-like recipe makes the cheese stable. It also somehow manages to be more refined than fondue, more digestible and all-round more elegant.62
Some cheeses, though, are great at melting all by themselves. Camembert is already pretty soft and is contained in a physically strong rind. It requires only a little heat to become a perfect dipping medium all of its own.
Most of the French washed-rind soft cheeses have a long and distinguished pedigree as high-status delicacies. For centuries, Camembert was carefully ripened and then brought to the table to be ceremonially opened and consumed. It was only with the arrival of smaller cheeses, made for the mass market and packaged in wooden boxes for ease of delivery, that recipes began to appear for the sacrilegious act of ‘baking’ a Camembert.
It’s a recipe that writes itself. You don’t need an expensive cheese to do it – a supermarket one, reduced in price due to those who get squeamish about sell-by dates, is absolutely the best. Just open the box, pull off the wax paper, replace it with aluminium foil and put the cheese back in. Pierce the top and poke in shards of garlic, a herb or two and a shot of booze, close everything up and heat it in the oven. Too simple for words and, pleasingly, evolved from the democratisation of a product and a development of modern packaging.
If you want to get classy, they now make ceramic pots that fit standard-sized cheeses. You can go even more premium with a Tunworth, a Vacherin or even an Époisses, but most important of all is that you’re going to need a lot of bread. It is entirely coincidental that baguette is the best bread for this. It’s not what it was designed for and there’s no tradition attached to what is, effectively, a modern dish. Melted cheese, though, has a particularly gluey consistency, so unless you want to go the fondue route of staled bread cubes on long forks, you need something that has a supporting crust attached to every small piece. Rip a bit off the end of a baguette, then tear that apart and you are automatically left with the ideal dipping tool, crumb and crust in perfect ratio, with the structural integrity and the shape to scoop gloop.
Lots of things got devilled in the past: kidneys, eggs, sprats, fish roes, haddock… in fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Edwardians were so idiotically squeamish that they’d devil anything that had the faintest chance of smelling ‘off’. It’s no coincidence, then, that they devilled crab with abandon. Though it’s delicious by itself, crab is also a terrific ingredient to use with pronounced seasoning, because if you use plenty of the brown meat, its flavour is strong enough to stand up to anything. If you don’t like the brown meat in a crab, then a) don’t bother devilling the white meat alone (it’s a waste) and b) try devilled crab because it balances out the brown meat in a way you will probably find delightful.
This particular way of eating crab evolved after a trip to Lisbon. I remember little of it due to some fairly heroic drinking, save for a visit to a beautiful restaurant overlooking water somewhere that seemed to have John Malkovich in it. I recognised crab on the menu, through the haze, and persisted in ordering it, in spite of the wise and incredibly handsome young waiter who tried to warn me that it may not be the best choice for me. What arrived was a vast spider crab, on its back, its undercarriage removed and filled with a quantity of boiling reddish-brown magma.
I was given bread and some sort of earnest warning, which I blithely ignored, dipping in and scarfing greedily, bubbling all the skin off the roof of my mouth. It was complete agony… but it was also so good that I couldn’t stop, shovelling in more and more, blistering the blisters, until every last scrap was gone.
Serving hot, spiced crab in its shell is a lovely bit of table theatre. Devilling it also allows you to use frozen crab quite happily if you’re not lucky enough to be able to grab one off a day boat in Lisbon harbour. Some supermarkets now sell ‘dressed’ crabs in the shell from their fish counters, which are perfect for this job.
Chop a shallot very finely and clarify it in butter in a hot pan. Add a shot of sherry and allow it to bubble off, then slip in a couple of large lumps of sobrasada. Throw in a large handful of breadcrumbs, the contents of your dressed crab and a large spoonful of crème fraîche. Take the mixture off the heat, stir quickly to combine everything, then taste and season. Now spoon the mixture back into the crab shell and top it with a mixture of breadcrumbs, lemon zest and a little grated mild sheep’s cheese, perhaps a Manchego or similar – not enough to taste distinctly cheesy, but just enough to bind the crust and boost the umami. Dot the top with butter and then put the shell onto a tray and into a very hot oven, favouring heat from above, if your oven gives you that option.
When the shell comes out it should be handled with extreme care. The top will be browned and bubbling in a threatening manner. You can serve it just as it is, with chunks of sourdough to dip in, or you could spoon it carefully onto toast or make a plain bread sauce slice and serve the crab ladled over it in a concupiscent manner.
The simplest dip I know is also the most glorious. It works best with Spanish or Italian bread – bland, unsalted and just screaming out for something salty/spicy/fermented/sweet. Take a big lump of ’nduja or sobrasada (they are remarkably similar, being cured pork with garlic and hot pepper, stingingly hot and funky with ferment) and place it in a small ovenproof dish. A cazuela would be appropriate. Heat it in the oven until the meat becomes soft, the fats become liquid and maybe there’s a slight hint of crisping and browning on the surface.
Drizzle honey over the top. Strong stuff, not that weak nonsense that comes in a squeezy bottle shaped like a bear, but something heady and fragrant that tastes like it was made by angry bees. Rip lumps off your bread and dip it in. You will almost certainly burn your lips. Indeed, you’ll probably go into shock from the chilli hit and endorphins will well up in your tear ducts… but years later you will still be trying to find my phone number to call and thank me.
42 A gel is a colloidal substance: a semi-solid created when a solid is dispersed in a liquid.
43 Lotus sell the biscuits and spread under the name Biscoff in some countries.
44 Made most impressively at L’As du Fallafel, 34 rue des Rosiers, Paris – which isn’t even Turkish.
45 Although, now I think about it, that’s not a bad national dish to be proud of.
46 Although a departure from the canon, a FOS made with a strong chicken broth is no bad thing.
47 For the love of God don’t throw it away. You can toast the bread crouton if you wish, but – and I only dare say this in a footnote where the obsessives will find it – it’s even better if you fry it in the beef fat.
48 Caramel is an amazingly effective food colouring. If, for example, you want your beef broth to be a deep, mahogany brown, put a teaspoonful of sugar into a dry pan and heat it until it turns liquid and then just blackens. Now let it cool, then ‘deglaze’ the pan with a very little boiling water and a small wire whisk. The resultant liquid will dye a litre or so of stock the very deepest brown.
49 Brown the cheese with a torch if you lack the equipment or are feeling particularly cheffy.
50 The brilliant Jacques Pépin has, in his encyclopaedic books on classical technique, a recipe for a ‘Pullman’ loaf, where a long pain de mie is turned into a crust coffin and the neatly excised inside is transformed into forty or so canapé-sized sandwiches… which are then packed back into the loaf! Truly, for some great men, life is not too short.
51 You can also do this overnight in a slow cooker if you have one.
52 1:3:6 ratio of cement/sand/aggregate. Compressive strength of 10 MPa.
53 Estimate the size of both the orange and the bowl so that there is only the smallest amount of wriggle room between orange and bread. You’ll fill any space with sugar and butter, but too much of that stuff will clog your arteries.
54 Top Chef Tip. As long as it doesn’t touch the hot surface of the oven or an open flame, cling film is effectively ovenproof. Many commercial chefs will wrap a roast in cling film and then foil before a long, slow roasting, only removing them after the meat has rested for a final ferocious browning… much like this pudding.
55 About the same amount of time it takes light to travel one Planck length.
56 White pepper was classified as a fully Mortal Sin at some point around 1980. Chefs are trained to use white pepper in white sauces so that there are no ugly black flecks, but everybody is missing the point here. White pepper tastes different from black. It has a complicated fragrance with elements of mace and nutmeg… both of which you’d probably want to add separately if you used black pepper.
57Bis cuit if you want to go all haute cuisine about it.
58 I do not presume to suggest the size or shape of your tin. This works beautifully as a ‘loaf ’ but is no bad thing as a shallower ‘cake’… though obviously ‘meat cake’ has less immediate appeal on a menu.
59 Technically a starch gel.
60 Panko can be substituted for white breadcrumbs in any recipe – they are similarly without pronounced flavour – but just remember they’ll absorb almost twice as much liquid.
61 Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who can do this. It’s supposed to be possible – in fact, it’s often issued as a challenge to non-Spaniards – but I’ve yet to witness it.
62 It is also an absolutely superb substitute for the béchamel in a lasagne, elevating it – almost – to the status of a vincisgrassi. This fact should be kept secret from everyone except you and me. Honestly, it’s so rich that if they find out, they’ll take it away from us.