‘No dinner can be a success unless the vegetables receive proper attention and consideration.’ So Mrs Agnes Marshall wisely observed in her Cookery Book of 1897, continuing with the equally perceptive statement that ‘they should be well dished and present a tempting appearance’. Such sentiments are as valid today as they were in times past, because we know for certain that stale, poorly cooked vegetables not only appear totally unappetizing but are deficient in vitamins and minerals, which are essential to keep both body and mind in tip-top condition. The prudent cook will therefore choose vegetables carefully, opt for those in season and treat them well, knowing that, as a rule, it is best to cook leaf vegetables quickly and root vegetables slowly.
Fruit, too, is best when fresh, especially soft fruits, which may be in peak condition for only a few hours. From oranges and lemons to mangoes and pineapples, the modern cook also has a huge range of more exotic fruit to choose from, which means that selecting the best demands knowledge and experience. In the kitchen, fruits are even more versatile than vegetables, since as well as being served on their own or as an accompaniment to cheese, they marry perfectly with savoury ingredients, and, of course, are the key to superb desserts of all kinds.
Particularly if they are green vegetables such as cabbage, which can turn from being deliciously crunchy to a soggy mass in a matter of seconds. For root vegetables, which need longer cooking, timing is less of an issue.
In former times vegetables were often cooked for longer than is advised today, and it was the habit to add soda to the water to help preserve their colour. Mrs Beeton, however, was precise about the need to avoid overcooking cabbage. Having trimmed and cut the cabbage into quarters, she instructed the cook to ‘… put them into plenty of fast-boiling water, to which have been added salt and soda … Stir them down once or twice in the water, keep the pan uncovered, and let them boil quickly until tender. The instant they are done, take them up into a colander, place a plate over them, let them drain thoroughly, dish and serve.’
Cooks of old also recommended starting root vegetables off in cold water but plunging green vegetables (or those like cauliflower that grow above ground) into boiling water. They would have known that fast cooking produces the best results because ‘slow boiling spoils the colour of all green vegetables’, but not that it is also the best way of preserving the vitamins and minerals they contain.
The English, it seems for good reason, acquired a reputation for producing poorly cooked, under-seasoned vegetables and for serving them as part of the main course – as in ‘meat and two veg’. This was in contrast to the French, who habitually served beautifully cooked vegetables as a separate dish at the end of a dinner.
To prevent the smell of boiling vegetables permeating the house, an old tip was to put a piece of bread wrapped in muslin into the pan. A little vinegar ‘kept boiling on the stove while onions or cabbage are being cooked’ was also recommended, although one would imagine this would make the smell worse rather than better.
COOKS’ TIPS
More tried and trusted guidelines for cooking vegetables:
Cook stem vegetables quickly, root vegetables slowly.
Plunge vegetables into boiling water for maximum retention of their vitamin content.
All kinds of root vegetables can be roasted – as can vegetable fruits such as peppers, courgettes (zucchini) and aubergines (egg plant).
Boiled vegetables always need to be well drained.
Any vegetable will make a nourishing soup.
Washed spinach needs no water added. Just shake the pan over the heat until the leaves wilt.
Keep in the goodness by steaming or grilling vegetables rather than boiling them.
Vegetables need to sweat – that is, to be browned and softened before being added to a soup or casserole.
Not originally an instruction to the cook, but still worth taking literally, since there are so many different kinds of onions, all of which add incomparable flavour to savoury dishes. The saying may refer to the famous lexicographer, C. T. Onions, or come from ‘onion rings’ – Cockney rhyming slang for ‘things’.
Large white onions are the type most used in cooking and were grown in ancient Egypt from at least 3200 bc. Best for flavour and mildness are varieties of Spanish and Egyptian onions. Milder yet are red onions, which will not overpower a dish even when eaten raw. Spring or green onions, also called scallions, are a type of onion bred to be eaten when immature. Some sorts, including oriental and bunching onions, grow, as their name suggests, in small clumps. Small silverskin onions are available for pickling, while for a mild, subtle flavour shallots are the cook’s best choice.
According to Alexandre Dumas’ Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, published in 1873, an enterprising Frenchman from Roscoff in Brittany (from where onions were regularly exported to England) persuaded Londoners to buy his onions by erecting a placard in a busy market announcing: ‘The English onion is not good.’ Underneath, he placed a little barrow full of French ones, which sold out within the day. Until the 1990s French onion sellers from Brittany regularly cycled around English towns peddling their wares.
Of all the dishes that the French make with onions, the highlights include French onion soup and Alsatian onion tart. In British cuisine, onion sauce is a classic accompaniment to roast lamb, and sage and onion stuffing is served with roast pork, duck or goose.
An onion or shallot kept in the pocket will ward off illness.
A girl would put an onion under her pillow to ensure that she would dream of the man she was going to marry.
For the simple reason that this stops them ‘bleeding’ into the cooking water, and keeps the deep red colour contained inside the root. When washing raw beetroots, remember to avoid cutting off the long tapering root.
Beetroot takes an age to boil and, as Fannie Merritt Farmer rightly commented, ‘Old beets will never be tender, however long they may be cooked.’ In English cuisine, cooked beetroots have a poor reputation as intrusive salad vegetables that colour everything they touch, or as acid pickles, but a classic beetroot soup or borscht is hard to beat. Miss Farmer gives a recipe for sugared beets, which are reheated, after cooking, with butter, sugar and salt, rather like glazed carrots. Small, young beetroots are delicious cooked whole and served with a mustard sauce as a starter. Or try grating them raw and tossing them in a dressing of lemon juice, crème fraîche and plenty of dill, salt and freshly ground black pepper.
The Greeks were probably the first to cultivate beetroot, though the roots were almost certainly yellow, not red, and were long and thin like parsnips in shape. Swollen round roots were first recorded in the 1550s, and red or Roman beets were not eaten in Britain until the 17th century. Before this, only the yellow sorts were grown, and although these subsequently went out of general cultivation for centuries, seeds of such varieties as ‘Burpees Golden’ are now available once more.
In Germany the yellow beet is known as the Mangelwurzel, literally ‘root for time of need’ (Mangel means ‘scarcity’) because it was eaten when no other food was available. The name is a punning corruption of Mangoldwurzel, which simply means ‘beet root’.
Fine advice for small, young carrots, but for old ones it may be necessary to take off the bitter, outer layer of these tasty, sweet roots. Such preparation also helps stop carrots from discolouring during cooking.
In the kitchen, carrots have a long tradition. The Babylonians, Greeks and Romans probably made use of the aromatic tops and seeds of small wild carrots with bitter-tasting roots. By the Middle Ages carrots of a deep purple-red colour were being enjoyed in Europe, often as an affordable sweetener in cakes and puddings, mimicking their traditional role in Asian cookery as ingredients for jams and preserves. Not until the 17th century were the orange carrots we know today bred for eating.
Carrots reached England as a rare delicacy in the reign of Elizabeth I. One story tells of a deputation to court presenting her with a tub of butter and a wreath of tender carrots emblazoned with diamonds. She is said to have removed the diamonds and sent the carrots and butter to the kitchen from where they returned as the classic side dish of buttered carrots.
During World War II carrots were widely used as a sweet ingredient in carrot jams, cakes and puddings. The carrot cake now served with a cream cheese topping came into vogue in the USA in the 1960s and has been a firm favourite ever since.
In the savoury range, carrots are ideal ingredients for soups and stews. The classic carrot soup potage Crécy is named for the region in France where they are reputed to have the best flavour. It was once customary for loyal Britons to eat this dish each year on 26 August to celebrate the anniversary of the English victory over the French at Crécy in 1346.
Boiled beef and carrots – a quintessentially English combination beloved of London Cockneys – is celebrated in a music hall song of 1909 written by Charles Collins and Fred Murray and made famous by Harry Champion.
It is true that carrots can make you see better in the dark. They are packed with vitamin A, which combines chemically with a protein at the back of the eye to form rhodopsin, the substance essential for night vision.
Boiled beef and carrots,
Boiled beef and carrots,
That’s the stuff for your Derby Kell,
Makes you fit and keeps you well.
Don’t live like vegetariansOn the stuff they give to parrots,
From Morn til’ night, blow out your kite
On boiled beef and carrots.
(‘Derby Kell’ is cockney rhyming slang: Derby Kelly – belly; ‘kite’ is slang for the stomach or the whole body.)
Chopping garlic – and pressing it through a metal crusher even more so – is the surest way to release the acrid chemicals it contains. A decisive bash with a wooden rolling pin or a swift crush beneath the flat of a knife blade is the best way to avoid the problem.
What happens when garlic is cut is that the enzyme allinase contained in its cells comes in contact and combines with a chemical called alliin to make allicin, one of the substances that makes garlic smell. This quickly breaks down – and more quickly still when the cells are chopped through with a knife – into the really acrid smelling diallyl disulphide, the unmistakable garlic odour.
Avoiding garlic’s acridity is especially important if it is to be used raw. For a fine dice, crush it first then chop it as quickly as you can. All garlic will, however, mellow on cooking. Roast garlic has a wonderfully mild flavour. Cut the top off whole heads, drizzle them with olive oil and add a sprinkling of sea salt crystals; bake them at 200°C/400°F/ Gas 6 for 45–60 minutes.
Garlic was once dubbed ‘poor man’s treacle’ for its health-giving properties. Modern medicine confirms that it helps to lower blood pressure and blood cholesterol, kills bacteria and viruses and acts as a nasal decongestant. It may even help to prevent cancer. However, Nicholas Culpeper advised strongly against eating too much garlic because it could create ‘strange visions in the head’.
In Mediterranean cooking, garlic is the essential ingredient of aïoli, a mayonnaise eaten with cold meat and fish. In aïoli garni it is served with a mixture of hot, boiled ingredients including, by tradition, cod, snails, squid, fennel, onions and potatoes.
There is nothing quite like the taste of fresh young green peas, eaten raw straight from the pod, and for cooking these are the best of all. By country tradition, a lucky pod containing nine peas was hung over the door by a young girl. The first man to enter beneath it was the one she would marry.
In Europe, peas have been enjoyed since at least 3000 bc and were well known to the Greeks and Romans, but in their fully mature and dried form. By the Middle Ages, dried peas were the staple food of the poor and were made into filling, protein-rich dishes such as pease pudding, which was eaten with bacon or other meat when available.
Garden peas were bred in the 16th century and by the end of the 1600s eating immature green peas was all the rage, especially in France. Madame de Maintenon, a member of the court of Louis XIV, wrote that ‘There are ladies who, even after having supped with the King, go home and there eat a dish of green peas before going to bed. It is both a fashion and a madness.’ Petits pois were originally peas eaten very young and small, but varieties are now bred to mature at a miniature size. A dish of ‘peas cooked in the French style’ describes peas stewed with butter, spring onions (scallions) and shredded lettuce and flavoured with salt and sugar.
After the pea harvest, the pods were traditionally made into peascod soup, but the custom has died out now that so much of the crop is grown for freezing.
Peas were one of the first vegetables to be frozen by Clarence Birdseye. He discovered the possibilities of deep freezing while working in Labrador from 1912–15, when during fishing expeditions his catch froze instantly at -40°C/F.
PEAS OF MANY SORTS
Peas come in a variety of forms. Although all are legumes, not all are true peas:
Mangetouts – a catch-all term for peas bred to be eaten whole. The name means literally ‘eat all’.
Pigeon peas – tropical peas mostly grown in India where, dried, they are called dal or dhal and used for the curried dish of the same name.
Marrowfat peas – large, fat peas mostly grown for canning; they are also made into mushy peas, served with fish and chips.
Asparagus peas – a type of mangetout with winged pods best eaten when only about 25mm (1in) long. They are the young fruits of a type of vetch.
Chickpeas – relations of the pea grown since ancient times and said to be named for the Roman orator Cicero, who had an ancestor with a wart on his face shaped like a dried chickpea. The essential ingredient of hummus.
A sentiment expressed by Eliza Acton and certainly true of ridge and other outdoor cucumbers, which, unlike hothouse varieties, have thick, indigestible skins. As well as dressed cucumbers for salads, the Acton repertoire included many cooked cucumber dishes.
In additional to peeling, Miss Acton recommended that cucumbers be disgorged like aubergines with ‘a little fine salt’ before being used, then coated with ‘the purest salad oil’ and ‘chili vinegar’. Her Mandrang, a recipe from the West Indies for serving ‘with any kind of roast meat’, mixed chopped cucumber and onion, lemon juice, salt, cayenne pepper and one or two glasses of Madeira or dry white wine. Cooked cucumbers, to serve as a side dish, were fried in butter and served in a stock thickened with egg yolks and flavoured with parsley, salt and pepper. Or they were peeled and sliced, dusted with flour and fried as an accompaniment to ‘common hashes and minces’.
Mrs Beeton was careful to warn her readers of the possible disadvantages of eating cucumbers. ‘Generally speaking,’ she said, ‘delicate stomachs should avoid this plant, for it is cold and indigestible.’ The 17th-century herbalist Nicholas Culpeper took a somewhat opposite view, proclaiming them ‘excellently good for a hot stomach, and hot liver …’ He also recommended the seeds for urinary and bladder health, and the juice for cleansing the skin and for treating ‘sun-burning and freckles’.
The Armenian cucumber or snake melon is, as its name suggests, not a true cucumber but a type of melon. From its size it is sometimes called the yard-long cucumber. Its flesh is sweet, not bitter, and the pale yellow skin is thin and edible.
The theory behind this age-old advice is that washing mushrooms makes them soggy, but since these vegetables are already 90 per cent water, a little more is not likely to make much difference.
Preparation method, therefore, is the cook’s prerogative, though the tenacity with which pieces of dirt cling to the cups often makes washing the only practical cleaning method. Peeling today’s cultivated mushrooms is almost always unnecessary, but may improve large field mushrooms gathered from the wild. For fine dishes the stalks of mushrooms are best removed, and the frugal cook will keep them for flavouring stocks or stews.
Most mushrooms we cook and eat today are cultivated – and have been since the 17th century, when the French discovered how to ‘sow’ the underground filaments or mycelia, from which the mushrooms grow, in beds of asses’ dung. Mushrooms were traditionally stewed with butter and served under roast poultry or, in the 19th century, presented stuffed as an entrée. As a savoury – a dish served at the end of an English dinner during the 19th and early 20th centuries – mushrooms on toast was a popular choice.
Mushrooms have not always been trusted. John Gerard, in his Herbal of 1633, said ‘Most of them do suffocate and strangle the eater,’ while Nicholas Culpeper believed that ‘Inwardly they are unwholesome, and unfit for the strongest constitutions.’
Shirley Conran introduced her 1975 bestseller Superwoman with the motto: ‘Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.’
Irish folklore maintains that if you see a button mushroom you should pluck it, as it will not grow any more once it has been looked at.
They are, on account of their unique earthy but delicate aroma and flavour – and the huge prices that even single truffles command. Just a fine shaving of truffle will transform a simple dish such as scrambled eggs: a combination said to be a marriage made in heaven.
Truffles come in two forms, white and black, and in several varieties. Best known and appreciated are white or Alba truffles (Tuber magnatum pico), which grow only in the Piedmont area of northern Italy, and the more common black truffles, including the gnarled black Périgord truffles (T. melanosporum) which, despite their name, are also found in Provence. Truffle hunters – who often go out at night – use dogs and pigs to help locate their treasure. One tell-tale sign of their location is said to be flies hovering over a spot on the ground.
Scientists analysing the aroma of black truffles have identified more than 100 different scents, described as everything from earthy, nutty and grassy to citrus, vanilla and rose petal. The fresher the truffle the greater the complexity of its aromas. White truffles, by contrast, have a more intense musky and sulphurous odour, with beefy and umami (soy-type) elements.
If you are lucky enough to acquire a truffle of either sort, make the most of it by cutting it as finely as possible with a truffle slice and shaving it over hot, rather than cold food, so that its aromas can permeate as fully as possible. A sauce so enriched will be totally transformed. And use it at once, for the perfect aroma of a fresh truffle quickly fades. Top chefs wrap their truffles in foil and keep them in the refrigerator unwashed or clean them and pack them in jars of Armagnac.
Are they worth more than diamonds? In the 19th century black truffles were so common that in France they were eaten as a vegetable like any other. Today, a measure of truffle value and scarcity is that in December 2007 a single white truffle weighing 1.5kg (3.3lb) sold for £165,000 ($330,000).
‘The truffle is not an outright aphrodisiac, but it may in certain circumstances make women more affectionate and men more amiable.’ (Brillat-Savarin)
A good way of preventing a head of celery from becoming limp and flabby, even if it is kept in the refrigerator. It is rumoured that Madame de Pompadour invented a celery soup to inflame the desires of Louis XV, so validating its aphrodisiac qualities.
Bred from a wild plant called smallage, celery was first used in the kitchen as a flavouring rather than a vegetable. In the Odyssey Homer calls it selinon and the Greeks made it into garlands for funerals. As milder forms were bred from the 17th century onwards, celery cemented its place as a salad ingredient. Writing in this period the naturalist John Ray said of it: ‘Smallage transferred to culture becomes milder and less ungrateful, whence in Italy and France the leaves and stalks are esteemed as delicacies, eaten with oil and pepper.’
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, celery dipped in egg and breadcrumbs and fried featured in many recipes, some of which recommend parboiling the celery first to remove any bitterness. Celery sauce – a sieved mixture of cooked celery and onion in a béchamel sauce was recommended as an accompaniment to poultry or game. Celery hearts braised with onions and carrots and a good stock are soft and packed with flavour.
With onions and bell peppers, celery is one of the ‘holy trinity’ of vegetables essential to the Creole and Cajun cuisines of Lousiana. In the East, it has a similar role but a different variety, namely Chinese celery, a smaller version of the western type, with thinner, crisp, hollow stems that come in dark green or white. This is a staple in the making of Asian soups, stir fries and stews.
For times when fresh celery was not available, Enquire Within recommended making essence of celery of which ‘a few drops will flavour a pint of soup or broth equal to a head of celery’. The method was to soak for a fortnight ‘half an ounce of the seeds of celery in a quarter pint of brandy’.
… after you have peeled and parboiled them. Roughening up the surface with a fork, or by shaking them hard in a colander, makes them absorb fat better. For roasting, many cooks swear that goose fat gives the most splendidly crisp results.
To accompany a Sunday roast joint or chicken, roast potatoes are a must. It is possible to roast new potatoes, but main crop or ‘old’ potatoes are the best choice by far. Varieties to look for are ‘Desirée’, ‘King Edward’, ‘Cara’, ‘Maris Piper’ and ‘Picasso’. The traditional way of cooking them is in the same pan as the meat, or in dripping, seasoned with salt and pepper, but the modern cook might choose to cook them separately. In a hot oven, which is essential for a crispy exterior, they will need to cook for about an hour.
Goose fat is brilliant for roast potatoes, making them crunchy without being greasy. Technically, the reason is that goose fat will heat to a high temperature before it reaches its ‘burn point’. Also goose fat has a deep flavour imparted by the presence of ‘umami’, the savoury taste that gives foods such as soya sauce their distinctive taste. As well as potatoes the fat is great for roasting all root vegetables (and used in place of lard it will make exceptional pastry for a savoury pie). Failing goose fat, olive oil is an excellent choice.
The potato is said to have become a staple of the English kitchen because of the poor quality of the country’s bread and of other vegetables, so giving it ‘importance beyond its merit’.
Rubbing goose fat all over the skin – and especially on the chest – was an old way of keeping out the cold.
A saying that pays tribute to the heavenly taste of fresh spears. Butter or good extra virgin olive oil – or perhaps a vinaigrette – is all it needs, or a subtle hollandaise.
For cooking asparagus, the trick is to boil the stems and steam the tips, so that both are ready at the same time. A tall pan is ideal for the purpose, and tying the asparagus in bunches will help to keep it in place as it cooks. It can also be brushed with olive oil and grilled or roasted.
Hollandaise, a sauce thought to be derived from one brought to France by the Huguenots, marries perfectly with asparagus. Writing in his cookbook Le cuisinier françois in 1651 François Pierre de la Varenne gives this recipe for ‘asparagus in fragrant sauce’: ‘Choose the largest [asparagus], scrape the bottoms and wash, then cook in water, salt well, and don’t let them cook too much. When cooked, put them to drain, make a sauce with good fresh butter, a little vinegar, salt, and nutmeg, and an egg yolk to bind the sauce; take care that it doesn’t curdle; and serve the asparagus garnished as you like.’
As for the proper way to eat asparagus, the American guru Emily Post recommends in Etiquette (1960) that although ‘by reputation this is a finger food … the ungraceful appearance of a bent stalk of asparagus falling limply into someone’s mouth and the fact that moisture is also likely to drip from the end have been the reasons that most fastidious people invariably eat it – at least in part – with the fork.’
As Kettner’s Book of the Table aptly says: ‘There is no cooked vegetable which raises expectation and lures the fancy so much as asparagus.’
Advice that is true for large, mature vegetables, but small young turnips can be treated very differently, making them much more versatile. The swede is also called the rutabaga.
Boiled turnips were a winter staple in ancient times, originally as the swollen, edible roots of wild plants, and were an important element in the Roman diet, but swedes are a more recent addition to the menu, arriving only in the 17th century. And while swedes can come in a variety of colours, the rutabaga, from the Swedish rotabagge, meaning ‘root bag’ always has a yellow flesh. (The name comes from its bulbous shape.)
Turnips have a stronger flavour than swedes, which is why they are better eaten when young. They make a perfect addition to a navarin du printemps – a lamb casserole with spring vegetables – and combine excellently with rich poultry in caneton aux navets, in which glazed turnips are added to a dish of braised duckling. Simply glazed, and with chopped fresh herbs added, they are a good side dish. Adding sugar in this way helps to neutralize the bitterness of the flesh; many old recipe books suggest adding sugar to the water in which old turnips are boiled. Mashing both turnips and swedes with butter, pepper and nutmeg also greatly improves their flavour.
When a Scots host offers you haggis with ‘neeps’ your vegetable will be mashed swede. The reason is that the word comes from Brassica napus, the scientific name for swede, which the Scots prefer.
Salad can be eaten on every day of the year and is even more enjoyable when made with in-season vegetables – lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber in summer; cabbage, chicory and celery in winter. But almost any ingredients, raw or cooked, can be used in a salad, depending on what takes your fancy.
Vegetables were certainly eaten raw, dressed with salt or oil and vinegar, long before the 14th century when the words ‘sallet’ and ‘salad’, from the Latin sal (meaning ‘salt’) came into use. A recipe of the period, advising that everything be ‘plucked small’, includes leeks, spring onions and watercress as well as fresh mint, sage, parsley, fennel, rosemary and rue. From medieval times fruit – and edible flowers – have been included in the list of salad ingredients. By the 17th century, the age of the ‘grand sallet’, an even greater range of ingredients was used. The most elaborate salads could include cold chicken combined with, among other things, capers, olives, samphire, pickled mushrooms, potatoes, oranges and currants. From this time on, salads were regularly set in aspic and served in elaborately moulded shapes.
Modern salads reflect the wide range of leafy vegetables cultivated for eating raw – including chicory, endive (frisée), beet leaves, baby spinach, rocket and mizuna.
In times when fresh green vegetables were hard to come by in winter the frugal cook would keep any cold cooked vegetables and use them in salad. Beetroot, turnips, carrots and cauliflower were all included, mixed with economical ingredients such as hard-boiled eggs, and dressed with capers and mayonnaise.
The Romans cultivated rocket (arugula), for its spicy seeds as well as for its leaves; the ‘wild’ type, whose peppery flavour has hints of horseradish, is best of all.
SALADS GALORE
Some famous salads from around the world:
Russian salad – probably invented by Lucien Olivier, French owner and chef of the Hermitage restaurant in Moscow in the 1860s. A salad of potatoes with chicken (originally game) with green peas and diced carrots bound with mayonnaise.
Salade niçoise – a salad incorporating ingredients favoured by the chefs of Nice, including tomatoes, anchovies, black olives, capers, garlic and lemon juice. French beans may also be added.
Waldorf salad – epicure Oscar Michel Tschirky, maître d’hotel at New York’s Waldorf Hotel, is usually credited with inventing this salad in 1893. The original dish comprised only apples, celery and mayonnaise. Walnuts were a 1920s addition.
Caesar salad – believed to be named for the restaurateur Caesar Cardini, who invented it for guests in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1924 from what was left over in the kitchen – romaine lettuce, garlic, croutons, Parmesan cheese, boiled eggs, olive oil and Worcestershire sauce.
Coleslaw – a salad of cabbage and carrots named in the USA in the late 19th century from the Dutch koolsla, an abbreviation of koolsalade, or cabbage salad.
Insalata tricolore – an Italian salad of mozzarella (white), tomatoes (red) and basil (green), representing the colours of the Italian flag. Avocado may also constitute the green element. When made with basil it is also called insalata caprese (salad in the style of Capri).
Chopping lettuce, believe many cooks, imparts an undesirable ‘flavour of the knife’, and quickly makes salads go limp and brown. But it is often the only way to deal satisfactorily with the ubiquitous ‘Icebergs’ eaten by the billion each year.
Tearing lettuce is said to damage it less because it divides the leaf along the natural boundaries between the cells. In fact, left only to the air, lettuce leaves will not (unlike basil leaves) brown quickly, however they are prepared, but the test comes when you add the dressing. An oily dressing will stick to the leaf and ooze into any breaks in its outer layer or cuticle, creating a browning reaction. Vinegar, by contrast (as with lemon juice on avocado) will stop or effectively delay the same chemical effect.
Lettuce (Lactuca sativa), is named for the milky sap that is exuded from its stems and leaves. In ancient times this was associated with fertility, and the Egyptian god Min possessed a sacred bull that was fed on lettuce to maximize its potency. In the Middle Ages, however, eating lettuce was widely thought to cause sterility.
The Greek physician Hippocrates extolled the healing virtues of lettuce (though he may have been referring to wild ‘loose’ lettuce, L. serriola, which makes no heads), but it was not widely cultivated in Europe until the Roman period. In the early days of the Roman Empire, lettuce salad was served at the end of a meal to help induce sleep. Later it became favoured as an appetizer, to stimulate the palate.
The sedative qualities of lettuce are well known and quoted by many authors, including Beatrix Potter in the opening to her much-loved children’s book The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies: ‘It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is “soporific”. I have never felt sleepy after eating lettuces; but then I am not a rabbit.’
In the 17th century French cooks candied lettuce hearts with sugar to make the confection known as gorge d’ange or angel’s throat.
An old Spanish saying that perfectly describes the ingredients of a good salad dressing, the fact that they need vigorous mixing to blend them, the necessity of judicious seasoning and the fact that too much dressing will make a salad greasy and unappetizing.
A great salad dressing needs a good olive oil (such as an Italian one from Lucca) as the proverb implies, although many cooks prefer to use oil and vinegar in equal quantities. For superior flavour an extra virgin olive oil is the best choice. The mixing demanded results from the fact that oil and vinegar do not physically coalesce. When they are shaken together the oil divides into tiny droplets suspended in the vinegar, but the two will separate again if the dressing is left to stand.
As with the oil, high quality red or white wine vinegar is a requisite for a good dressing. The 21st-century vogue is for balsamic vinegar, made in Modena in Italy from the long fermentation and acidification of a special variety of grapes, but it needs to be used sparingly or it will overwhelm the dish. Finally, according to Fannie Merritt Farmer, ‘Salads made of greens should always be served crisp and cold.’
A poem about potato salad by the Victorian scholar Sydney Smith contains pertinent lines on the making of salad dressing:
Of mordant mustard, add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites too soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt;
Three times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And once with vinegar, procured from town …
Or so it was called in cash-strapped families when it was eaten alone and not in a sandwich, as was the English breakfast custom. When sold in Victorian street markets such as London’s Covent Garden it was made into bunches and consumed from the hand like an ice cream cone.
Peppery watercress is a perfect ingredient for a salad or soup, and weight for weight it contains more vitamin C than an orange, more calcium than milk and more iron than spinach. Its heat comes from the mustard oils it contains, which are released when the leaves are chewed; this pungency led to its old name of ‘nose twister’. When watercress is cooked, these oils can quickly lose their flavour, which is why it is best to add the leaves to a soup or hot sauce at the last minute so they are just gently wilted.
Watercress has been credited with many healing powers. The herbalist John Gerard rightly believed that it could help prevent scurvy, while Nicholas Culpeper claimed, ‘Watercress potage is a good remedy to cleanse the blood in spring and consume the gross humours winter hath left behind.’ For the Anglo-Saxons watercress was a salad eaten to prevent baldness.
In the 16th century commercial watercress cultivation was first attempted by Nicholas Meissner at Erfurt in Germany, where it was witnessed by an officer in Napoleon’s army and subsequently introduced to France. Watercress became a must at nearly every meal, and the emperor himself was said to be a huge enthusiast.
Although watercress grows wild it is unwise to pick and eat it from country streams, as there is a danger of it being contaminated with the eggs of the liver fluke, a virulent parasite. For the same reason, a supply of pure spring water is an essential element of watercress cultivation.
A saying acknowledging the fact that pears can be reluctant to ripen and that once ripe they quickly lose their firmness and become ‘sleepy’. The best pears have flesh that is soft and juicy, without a markedly stony texture.
Smell, as well as touch, is the sense you need to test a pear for ripeness. It should have a sweet aroma with no hint of acidity. Even if it is impossible to catch a pear exactly on the right day, cooking pears that are a little underripe are excellent poached or stewed. Since medieval times, pears have been served in a wine-based syrup flavoured with cinnamon and ginger.
The pear (Pyrus spp.) originated, with the apple, in the Caucasus and was long considered the superior fruit, especially by the Greeks and Romans. Pears have subsequently been bred to produce the thousand and more varieties now known. In England, the Warden pear, bred by Cistercian monks in Berkshire in medieval times, and also known as the Shakespeare, was a staple for cooking until the plethora of breeding in the 16th and 17th centuries that resulted in sweeter, less gritty, eaters.
Pears were first grown in America after the Massachusetts Company imported seeds from England in 1629. The Williams pear, first grown in Berkshire in 1770 by John Stair, a schoolmaster, is known in America as the Bartlett after Enoch Bartlett, who took it there in the following century. The Seckel, a spicy American pear, is said to have been discovered by a trapper in 1765 on a piece of land he had purchased.
PEARS AND NAMES
Pears and pear dishes have many associations:
Poires Belle-Hélène – poached pears with vanilla ice cream, chocolate and crystallized violets, named from Offenbach’s 1864 operetta about Helen of Troy.
Pears Bristol – poached pears mixed with oranges and an orange syrup and topped with pieces of caramel. Named for the city port.
Poires Brillat-Savarin – pears poached in rum and used to fill Genoese sponge, baked and served covered with an apricot pulp. Named for the French gourmet.
Pear charlotte – made in the same way as apple charlotte, with bread, sugar and melted butter, and like it named for George III’s queen.
True, as long as you’re sure what kind of tart – or other dessert – you wish to make. Most important from the cook’s point of view is to know whether or not the apple flesh will keep its shape when cooked. In praise of apples, the epicure Edward Bunyard said: ‘Is there any other edible which is at once an insurance, a pleasure and an economy?’
Apples are one of the cook’s most versatile ingredients, and even apple tarts come in different forms. The simplest is a classic French tarte aux pommes, which consists of a pastry shell filled with eating apples cut into fine slices and arranged cartwheel fashion. After baking it is brushed with a glaze of apricot jam. More complex is a tart filled first with stewed cooking apples, then topped with eating apple slices. A Messina apple tart has raisins added to sliced eating apples and is topped with a mixture of sugar and cinnamon.
A perfect cooking apple, such as the Bramley (correctly, ‘Bramley’s Seedling’) has flesh that is firm when raw but soft and of even consistency when it ‘falls’ into a pulp. ‘Grenadier’ is another good variety for cooking. As well as needing to be sweetened with sugar, stewed apples are enormously improved by the addition of a knob of butter and, for flavour, a couple of cloves or a little cinnamon. Sour green apples used for cooking were once commonly known as codlings, possibly from the old word ‘coddle’ for stewing, simmering or gentle boiling.
The best dessert apples, by contrast, keep their shape well in a tart or flan. Good old-fashioned choices include ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’, ‘Worcester Permain’, which has a pretty red colour, a green ‘Granny Smith’ or an orange ‘Egremont Russet’.
For making baked apples and preparing apple rings an apple corer is a handy tool whose design has remained essentially unchanged since the 19th century.
MORE APPLE CLASSICS
Apple charlotte – alternate layers of cooking apples, sugar and breadcrumbs or thin slices of stale bread, flavoured with lemon zest. The whole is topped with melted butter before being baked in the oven. The dish is said to be named for Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, but the word charlotte is also probably a corruption of the Old English word charlyt, meaning a ‘dish of custard’.
Apple fritters – dessert apple rings, peeled, dipped in fritter batter and deep fried then served dusted with caster sugar.
Baked apples – cooking apples cored and filled with sugar and raisins or sultanas mixed with cinnamon, and baked in a dish with a few spoonfuls of water added. Butter can also be added and mincemeat makes an excellent alternative filling.
Apple dumplings – cooking apples cored and with sugar placed in the centre, wrapped in suet pastry and baked in the oven.
Apple turnovers – apples stewed with sugar, butter and cloves then enclosed in pastry and baked.
Apple crumble – cooking apples (and, in autumn even better with blackberries added), sweetened with sugar and topped with a crumble mixture of butter, flour and demerara sugar. Cinnamon and flaked almonds can also be added to the topping for extra flavour.
A perfect fresh fig is a treat for those partial to these sweet, fleshy delicacies. And it was probably the fig tree, not the apple tree, that bore the fruit that tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
From ancient times the fig has been grown widely throughout Asia, the Near East and the Mediterranean. One of its great advantages was that the fruit kept well when dried, so was a useful addition to the winter diet. The Egyptians considered figs so valuable that they were placed for sustenance, and for their mildly laxative health-giving properties, in the tombs of the dead for use in the afterlife. From their shape and their plethora of pips, figs are also renowned as aphrodisiacs.
In the British climate, where fig trees flourish but the fruit ripens with reluctance, it became customary to poach green figs very gently for two or three hours in a sugar syrup with lemon rind added for flavour. They were then served cold as a fig compote.
The fig roll, a pastry confection filled with fig jam, was created in 1891 by Charles M. Roser of the Kennedy Biscuit Company in Massachusetts. It was originally called the Newton after the nearby city; the name was changed to Fig Newton in 1898.
Figgy pudding, which features in the song ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’, is a seasonal dish dating from the 17th century, which developed from frumenty, the spiced porridge of the medieval festive table. The pudding, a mixture of figs, breadcrumbs, suet, sugar, eggs and nutmeg boiled in a cloth, was also made in Lent, both as a Mothering Sunday delicacy and as a dish to celebrate Palm or so-called Fig Sunday. The latter was a custom based on the Biblical account of the withering of the fig tree following the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.
The Athenian dramatist Aristophanes declared that ‘nothing is sweeter than figs’.
Snipping off both ends of gooseberries to leave a smooth fruit is a therapeutic job ideally done outside on a sunny day. The ‘tail’ is the stalk, the ‘top’ the remnants of the flower. Alternative names for the fruit are the carberry, wineberry and feaberry or feabes.
The tartness of unsweetened gooseberry sauce makes it a perfect foil for the fattiness of goose, duck or mackerel. But after topping and tailing, gooseberries are arguably best made into a fool. E. S. Dallas, writing in 1877, recommended this good old-fashioned method: ‘Scald them sufficiently with very little water till the fruit breaks. Too much water will spoil them. The water must not be thrown away, being so rich with the finest part of the fruit, that if left to stand till cold it will turn to jelly. When the gooseberries are cold, mash them all together. Passing them through a sieve or colander spoils them. The fine natural flavour which resides in the skin no art can replace … Sweeten with fine powdered sugar but add no nutmeg or other spice. Mix in at the last moment some rich cream, and it is ready.’
Gooseberries are purported to have been the first bushes ever to grow in the Orkneys and Shetland, and it is said that when the inhabitants of the Shetlands read their Bibles and tried to imagine Adam hiding in the Garden of Eden all they could conjure up was a vision of a naked man cowering under a gooseberry bush. Scottish gooseberries have long been said to be ‘the perfection of their race’.
An Oldbury tart, a west of England gooseberry speciality, is rare in being made with hot water pastry. It is said that when you bite into a good tart the juice should run out.
Sevilles are the oranges you need for the hint of bitterness that a good marmalade demands. No British breakfast is truly complete without toast and marmalade.
The first recipes for orange marmalade appeared in English cookbooks in the 1600s, not as a breakfast treat but, due to the prized medicinal qualities of oranges, as a cure for indigestion. Marmalade’s commercial success is owed to an incident in the early 18th century when James Keiller of Dundee bought a large quantity of Spanish oranges at a bargain price from the harbour. The fruit was discovered to be too bitter to eat, so his wife Janet decided to make them into a jam, but chopped the peel into shreds rather than crushing it to a pulp with a pestle and mortar. Her marmalade sold out overnight. By the mid-1700s the epicurean traveller Bishop Richard Pococke was describing a British breakfast for which, ‘They always bring toasted bread, and besides, butter, honey and jelly of preserved orange peel.’
Seville or bitter oranges (Citrus sinensis) originate from China and were first grown in Spain and Portugal in the 12th century, having been brought to Europe by Arab traders. The crop is a short one, harvested in January. The unique quality of the fruit lies in the rind, which contains an aromatic chemical quite different from that in sweet oranges. The key to successful marmalade making is to wrap the pips and pith (which contain large amounts of pectin) in muslin and to boil them in the peel and sugar mixture.
As well as marmalade, Sevilles make an ideal accompaniment to a gamey dish such as a rabbit casserole.
MARMALADE FACT AND FICTION
Many stories have been told about marmalade, not all of them true:
Mary Queen of Scots, seasick with ‘mer malade’ in 1561, did not give her name to a concoction given to her by a Spanish doctor.
The first marmalade was made from quinces; the name probably comes from marmelo, the Portuguese word for the fruit.
Oxford marmalade is named for Mrs Frank Cooper, wife of an Oxford grocer’s wife who made it to her own recipe in 1874. Students loved it and nicknamed it ‘Squish’.
Marmalade in cans has been taken on expeditions to the South Pole and to the top of Mount Everest.
In French cuisine a marmelade is a thick purée made by stewing fruit for several hours. Onions can also be cooked with sugar and balsamic vinegar to make a savoury marmelade
A good way of ensuring that you can cook fruit gently until it is just done, so it does not break up. As well as homemade syrups, natural ones such as maple syrup make versatile ingredients.
The secret of a good sugar syrup is to boil it long enough for plenty of water to evaporate so that the mixture becomes thick and heavy. The basic proportions are 250g (8oz) sugar to 500ml (1 pint) liquid, which can be water or water mixed with fruit juice and/or wine. For flavour you can add citrus rind, cinnamon sticks, cloves, allspice, cardamom – whatever takes your fancy. The mixture needs to be boiled for at least half an hour then is ideally cooled and strained before being used to poach fruit.
For poaching, fruit such as pears and oranges can be peeled and left whole for a pretty presentation. Fresh peaches and apricots are best halved and stoned and can be skinned before cooking: plunging them into boiling water for a couple of minutes makes the skins easier to remove.
Of all the natural syrups, maple syrup, traditionally eaten on breakfast pancakes in North America, is the best known. Centuries before Europeans introduced the honey bee to America, tribes such as the Iroquois, Algonquin and Ojibwa were adept at extracting sap from the sugar maple. They concentrated it by letting it freeze at night and chipping off the ice in the morning.
According to one legend, maple syrup was discovered when a lazy wife tapped the tree rather than travelling to collect water for boiling moose meat. When she saw the sticky mess in her pot she fled, but her husband went to find her in order to compliment her on her cooking.