I’m continuing my trawl through the reserve collection.This claims to be a “vegetarian” cookbook, although a few of the recipes include fish or shellfish. It is definitely not the 70s/early 80s style of vegetarian cooking with lots of wholewheat stodge and mushy lentils. Like Nadine Abensur’s, Annie Bell’s dishes are creative and elegant, letting the flavours of fresh vegetables shine. This book is clearly geared towards entertaining, as it’s organised as a series of seasonal menus, most involving five or six dishes.

Not that this is a criticism. Her philosophy of vegetarian cooking is that rather than having a “main” ingredient (a chunk of protein) and some side dishes, a meal can be composed of a harmonious selection of smaller dishes. It’s a philosophy I like, even though it’s more work, so is likely to happen only on special occasions.

I haven’t cooked any complete menu from this book, but I have bookmarked a number of recipes. Actually, in true neglected cookbook style I hadn’t cooked anything at all from it till today, when I decided to try the cardamom rice with prunes.

Rice pudding and stewed prunes … hmm, sounds like British canteen fare. Happily, it is not. I’ve always liked rice pudding, although I do normally prefer to eat it hot, with jam or maple syrup. The cardamom makes this version decidedly un-English. The prunes are not an unappetising brown mush, but whole pruneaux d’Agen simmered in an Armagnac-laced syrup with cinnamon and vanilla. If I’d done the whole menu, I would also have served spaghetti marrow and vermicelli with watercress cream, cannelloni omelettes filled with spinach and gruyère, with a tomato sauce aux fines herbes, and a green salad with avocado and toasted walnuts. You can tell she used to run a restaurant.

Anyway, here’s my version of the rice. It turned out a bit runny, and over-sweet to my taste, so I’ve adjusted the quantities slightly to reflect this. It was very nice cold, with the prunes making an attractive colour contrast. And of course it can all be prepared hours in advance — fortunately, since the rest of the menu seems to involve an awful lot of last-minute frying, pasta cooking, and salad dressing. The recipe seems long, but really it’s very simple and not time-consuming. I’ll definitely keep this book because even if the complete menus are too much work there are a lot of small, stylish dishes. It’s out of print — so if you want to give it a try you can buy it for a penny on Amazon!

Serves six.

140 g risotto rice, or round-grain rice
450 ml milk
30 g butter
50 g sugar
10 cardamom pods

Custard
3 egg yolks
50 g sugar
250 ml milk
100 ml double cream

Prunes
85 g sugar
85 ml Armagnac, brandy, or Calvados, plus about 3 tablespoons
1 vanilla pod, split
1 cinnamon stick
1 bay leaf
300 g Agen prunes (they’re supposed to be pitted, but I couldn’t be bothered)

Preheat the oven to 200C. Bring a pan of water to the boil, add the rice, boil for 5 minutes, then drain in a sieve. In a fireproof casserole (I used one of my Spanish terracotta dishes), bring the milk, butter and sugar to the boil, then add the cardamom pods and the rice and give it a good stir. When it comes up to a boil again, cover with a circle of greaseproof paper and either a lid or silver foil. Put in the oven and immediately turn down to 130C. Cook for 40-45 minutes, until all the milk is absorbed and the rice is completely cooked. Remove the cardamom pods and set the rice aside to cool.

While the rice is cooking, make the custard. Beat together the egg yolks and sugar till pale yellow. Bring the milk to the boil, beat it into the eggs, and then put over a low heat and stir constantly till it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon — don’t let it boil. Pour into a jug and leave to cool.

Once both custard and rice are lukewarm, stir the custard into the rice along with about 100 ml of cream. Cut down on the cream if there seems to be too much liquid, bearing in mind that it will thicken a little while cooling. It should be the consistency of, well, creamy rice pudding. Chill for several hours.

To make the prunes, heat the sugar, 85 ml of Armagnac, the vanilla, cinnamon, and bay leaf with 350 ml of water until the sugar is dissolved, then simmer for 10 minutes. Add the prunes and simmer gently, covered, for 30 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the prunes to a bowl and add a generous glug of Armagnac or Calvados. If the syrup remaining in the pan seems very liquid, boil it for a few minutes to reduce it and then pour it over the prunes. Leave to cool.

Serve the rice either warm or chilled in small, pretty bowls with 3-4 prunes on top and a little of the syrup poured over. Any left-over prunes can be served with crèmes au muscat.

Living in the back of beyond in rural France means that you have a Michelin 3-star restaurant within 30 minutes’ drive. But not along broad, straight roads. Nope, get ready to thread your way along narrow, winding roads through classic Corbières scenery: gorges with streaks of pale rock interspersed with the deep green of holm oak, Aleppo pines and broom. Lower down, the gnarled fingers of pruned vines grasp at empty air. Be ready to pull over at the narrow bridges if you see something coming the other way. As you get nearer the restaurant, the reassuring signs are more numerous: yes, it really is up this hill, round this bend, through this gorge. You imagine the Japanese tourists who have vowed to point-score every 3-star restaurant in France thinking, “But it can’t be up here!” Later I laughed at a Trip Advisor review claiming that you need to be a rally driver to get there. No, these are normal back-country roads that locals drive along every day to get to work.

View Larger Map

You arrive in the village and find the gates, decorated with giant metal fish skeletons and tongue-in-cheek sardine-can lids rolled back around their keys. Hmm, somehow the style of this metalwork looks familiar, and inside we recognise the work of Robert Cros, a sculptor from a neighbouring village: giant bent nails, catapults, light-switches with correspondingly giant price tags. The restaurant has got bigger since we were last there 10 years ago, gobbling up the eponymous well that used to stand in the courtyard, now under glass in the bar area. Another TripAdvisor laugh: a Parisian, after slagging off the food, appears to claim that “quelconque” villages in the Aude populated only by peasants and with inadequate car parks shouldn’t be allowed to have smart restaurants; they should be in a place that is more “historique et exceptionnel”. Paris, presumably.

At the table, we are served tiny mises en bouche, on the inevitable piece of slate. We can’t remember the detailed descriptions reeled off by the waiter, but we taste them all in the order he suggests. I particularly love the two crispy bite-size spheres that explode in your mouth, one filled with gazpacho, the other with some warm, intensely flavoured liquid I can’t identify. There’s a home-made potato crisp with a tiny cone of potato puree balanced on top. Sounds boring, but it’s divine. A strange pink sphere on a stick with something crunchy inside it didn’t go down so well, but I liked the verrine of pork terrine with a sharp, acidic sauce gribiche cutting the fat.

I have a little fit of irritation over the menu: S’s has prices, mine doesn’t. Perhaps you have to do this to keep your three stars. If so: hellooooo, Michelin, we’re in the 21st century! Women earn their living just like men!

From the massive wine list, we choose a bottle of “Jules 7 ans” — not a reference to the age of the wine, but to the age of the vigneron’s grandson, whom we have met. Indeed we once spent 2 hours in M. Mazard’s tasting room while he showed us slides of every variety of orchid in the Corbières (there are quite a few) with a number of truffles, mushrooms, and other native species thrown in. Even as we left he pursued us across the yard to thrust an extra complimentary bottle of wine and a postcard into our hands. Anyway, his petit Jules is very good. I’m imagining a future cuvée called “Jules, 31 ans”.

Note: unfortunately, the markup on the wines is massive: this local bottle was 50 euros, and I suspect it’s no more than 10 if you buy it direct from M Mazard. But what do you expect? It’s a 3-star restaurant with a massive staff (10 in the dining room alone), and foodwise the cheapest of its category (for the record, our set lunch menu was 65 euros per person). Oh, and the water at 6 euros a bottle: “It’s from the spring in Fontjoncouse,” said our waitress; “we add the gas back in.” The bread is from a baker in Mayronnes, a place the Parisian and the reluctant rally driver would not wish to visit since it is certainly remote and probably quelconque as well if you are from Paris. The pain blanc is almost as dark as the pain complet; both have a yeasty, sourdough flavour and crackling crust.

The first real course was fabulous. I can barely describe it: a paper-thin translucent globe of sucre soufflé in the shape of a squash, balanced over a creamy white mousse and some fragments of truffle. At the table, the waitress poured over a pale gold, creamy butternut squash soup which magically made the dome collapse. The result was still beautiful, and the combination of flavours was unbelievable. This was the star of the meal for me — just sublime in both appearance and flavour.

Next, a truffle-stuffed courgette flower: pretty, but less memorable than the previous course — even though it was the first truffle dish I’ve had that contained enough truffle that you could actually taste it. At this point, something rather odd happened — for a 3-star restaurant anyway. The waitress removed the plates and placed new cutlery for the next course. Then we had time for quite a long conversation about what we plan to do when we retire, while we watched the people at the next table eat two further courses, one of which required the presence of M Goujon to slice it up. A purely nominal requirement, I’m sure, since it looked pretty straightforward to me. Anyway, he stopped to talk to everyone in the room, so obviously there was no pressure in the kitchen. I wasn’t particularly keeping track since we were relaxed and not that bothered about speed, but it must have been at least 20 minutes, possibly more, before our main course appeared. I concluded that they must have dropped something on the floor, or the apprentice didn’t do it to the required standard and had to do it again.

This course was duck done two ways: a boudin and a rosy piece of magret. It was fine, but it seemed to me that almost any self-respecting restaurant in the area could have produced exactly the same flavours and textures without breaking a sweat; heck, even I could in my own kitchen. The presentation was pretty of course, but there was nothing original about it.

The dessert was another handsome plate, if not as amazing as the butternut dish: a sphere of crackling clementine encasing praline ice cream, a thin slice of dried clementine, crisp and intensely flavoured, and a very classic clementine sorbet in a clementine shell. S thought the praline was boring, but I thought it was a good foil in taste and texture to the sharpness of the clementine. To our surprise, the waiter presented the box of mignardises while we were still eating dessert. Shades of Spanish restaurants; I almost expected him to snatch my unfinished dessert plate away. But it was certainly intentional, since everything is in a restaurant of this standard. We ate them with our coffee in the lounge area; they were extremely good, especially the chocolate filled with salted caramel. Oh, and being in a 3-star restaurant means you get sugar shaped like seahorses.

Total damage: 223 euros for two. It’s by no means the most expensive meal I’ve ever had, and much cheaper than the only other 3-star restaurant I’ve been to (Michel Bras in Laguiole). Of course, we did choose the cheapest menu (available at lunch only) — the next menu up is double what we paid, so you could easily spend a lot more here. Unlike other restaurants of this calibre, the atmosphere is relaxed given the inevitable constraints of 3-star service, sans chichi. We left feeling satisfied, and with half a bottle of Jules 7 ans to drink at home — since we had the rally-driving still to do.

In conclusion, here the three stars are all about the food and the service, not the village, the building, the décor or the place settings, which are understated, letting the meal you came for take centre stage. Not all of the food we ate was what I would call three-star standard, but in this class, you can’t beat the price. Bravo to Gilles Goujon for staying close to his roots, working with local producers he’s known for years, and not flitting off to Paris or Lyon as soon as he gets well-known. He is a true ambassador for all that is good in the Corbières.

1. The simplest: mincemeat palmiers

Buy a block of ready-made puff pastry and roll it out thinly into an oblong. Spread thinly all over with mincemeat, then starting from a short side, roll up the pastry like a Swiss roll. Cut into slices about 2 cm thick, and lay them on a non-stick baking tray (or a tray lined with silicone/baking parchment). Put in the fridge for half an hour or so.

Preheat the oven to 200C. Put the tray in and cook for about 10 minutes, till the pastry is golden. Remove and cool to lukewarm before sprinkling with icing sugar and serving. This is a great and easy alternative to conventional mince pies.

2. Classic and luxurious: almond paste mince pies

I used this recipe; I don’t know why it’s called “almond paste” because there are no almonds in it, only almond essence. I was very pleased with these; the pastry was crisp and golden, and the “almond” paste makes for a lighter topping than pastry. Delicious. I didn’t have a piping bag so I just rolled the paste into small balls, flattened them and placed them on top of the mincemeat. So they looked a lot less elegant, but still tasted good. If, or rather when, I make these again, I’ll substitute ground almonds for some of the flour in the paste though!

3. Comfort food: Eliza Acton’s mincemeat pudding

I loved this; it was my favourite of the three, although it’s a pudding rather than a teatime treat. I’d happily eat it instead of Christmas pudding. It’s basically bread and butter pudding with mincemeat in it. I found the recipe in Elizabeth David’s Christmas; the original is from Eliza Acton‘s Modern Cookery, and is labelled “Author’s Receipt”.

Eliza Acton’s mincemeat pudding
About 4-5 slices of brioche, milk loaf or, at a pinch, white bread
mincemeat
3 eggs
300 ml milk
150 ml single cream
60 g sugar
salt

Spread the slices of brioche thinly with mincemeat. Layer them in a deep, round baking dish (I used a souffle dish about 15 cm in diameter).

Whisk together the eggs, milk, cream, sugar, and a pinch of salt. Pour carefully over the brioche and leave to stand for an hour. Then preheat the oven to 150C and bake for 45 minutes, until it is just set. Serve at once (although I will happily eat the leftovers cold).

Normally, I cook frittata slowly in a frying pan and finish it off with a couple of minutes under the grill to set the top. This time, I had some left-over roasted vegetables to use up, and was inspired to do it differently. It’s a very quick and easy dish if you have left-over roasted veg, but of course you can cook them from scratch. I always do plenty when I roast vegetables, because they are one of the best kinds of left-overs you can have. Toss them into a salad with rice, pasta, or Ebly and some toasted nuts, blend with some home-made stock and spices and make a delicious soup, use them to fill quiches or omelettes …

For 3-4 people
About 400 g mixed veg — I used half a butternut squash and 1 large leek, but choose what you like
2 cloves garlic, chopped
olive oil
1 medium onion
5-6 eggs
salt and pepper
50 g cheese (I used feta, but cheddar or Gruyère will work fine)
Parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to 200 C. If the vegetables aren’t already roasted, peel and cut the squash into chunks of about 2cm, and clean and thickly slice the leek. Spread on a roasting tray, sprinkle with salt and plenty of olive oil, and then use your hands to turn everything over in the oil. Roast for about 15 minutes, then add the chopped garlic, give everything a stir, and return to the oven for another 15-20 minutes, till the vegetables are soft and beginning to caramelise. Reduce the heat to 180 C.

Meanwhile, heat some olive oil in a frying pan, slice the onion and fry gently, stirring occasionally until it is lightly browned, about 15 minutes.

Tip all the roasted vegetables into a gratin dish — I used a round one of about 22 cm diameter, but an oblong one is fine too. It’s important that the vegetables and egg combined should be at least 2 cm deep; thin, leathery frittata is not good. Pop the dish in the oven for 5-10 minutes to heat through. Sprinkle over the caramelised onion. Dice the cheese, sprinkle that over, and season with pepper.

Beat the eggs and pour over the hot vegetables. Sprinkle with grated parmesan. Immediately return the dish to the oven and cook for 10-15 minutes, until the egg is just set and lightly browned on top. Serve warm or at room temperature, with chilli jam.

An Elizabeth David book in the reserve collection? Yes, really! This was a Christmas present a few years ago, and I confess I’d forgotten I had it, so I pounced on it with a cry of delight. It was actually published posthumously; in her preface her editor Jill Norman says they’d discussed the concept off and on for years, but it never came to anything, so after Elizabeth’s death she was surprised to find a box with a pile of notes and clippings for the book, and even an introduction. So she pulled the material together and published it.

Many of the recipes are from ED’s other books, but it’s nice to have all these seasonal recipes in one place. Not that ED was much of a fan of the traditional British Christmas. She got bombarded with calls from friends and family asking how long to to cook the turkey or the pudding, or saying they’d lost the recipe for Cumberland sauce so could she give it them again — to the point where she printed a pamphlet of the most popular recipes and handed it out to them. Classic ED:

If I had my way — and I shan’t — my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of an omelette and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening.

What frenetic cook preparing for a family Christmas can’t empathise with that in the days leading up to “the Great Too Long”? It certainly makes a refreshing change from other Christmas cookbooks.

That being said, although there are token recipes for traditional Christmas food like mincemeat and Christmas pudding, much of the focus of this book is on simple but impressive small dishes that can be prepared ahead, pâtés and terrines that can be kept in the fridge for nibbling, and better-than-average ways of using leftovers (including one of my all-time favourite leftover dishes, émincé de volaille au fromage). And like all of ED’s books it is designed to be read for pleasure, not just to cook from. I happily spent an afternoon lounging on the sofa by the fire reading it while my untended bread dough bubbled over the edge of the pan.

Happily, the organic veg box provided all I needed for a simple soup of tomato, leek and celery. She writes “This is one of the most subtly flavoured of all these vegetable soups … a good soup with which to start the Christmas dinner.” It was indeed. Celery is something I don’t like as a vegetable, but as a herb it adds a nice peppery edge to soups and stews. My tail-end-of-season tomatoes weren’t the best, but they did the job — if I make it again at Christmas I’ll use tinned ones in preference to tasteless fresh ones (one day I’m going to start a campaign to ban the sale of fresh tomatoes between October and May).

Unfortunately, the box also contained parsnips, for the third week in a row. So I decided to give her cream of parsnips and ginger with eggs a go. I got as far as cooking and mouli-ing the parsnips and adding the ginger, and the result tasted so unutterably foul that I almost threw it straight in the bin. We just had soup and cheese and biscuits that evening. I don’t think I can blame Elizabeth David for this though — I just don’t like parsnips, and somehow mashing them makes them taste more parsnippy than just roasting would.

This book will definitely stay in my collection. And it’s a good Christmas gift for foodies as well, a reminder of how truly good food writing is impervious to fashion. So much so that the modish soft-focus photos that the publishers obviously felt had to be in any modern cookbook are entirely superfluous. Elizabeth David’s words are enough

Potato, tomato and celery soup

4-5 sticks of celery (the outside ones if you have a whole head to use)
2 large leeks, trimmed
2 large potatoes, peeled
250 g ripe tomatoes, or a tin of tomatoes, drained
60 g butter
1 litre water (not stock!)
salt
1 tsp sugar
2 egg yolks
parsley or lemon thyme

Clean and cut the vegetables into dice, and slice the tomatoes if using fresh ones. Melt the butter in a large pan, add the celery and leeks, and cook very gently for about 10 minutes, until the leek is getting soft. Do not let them brown, even if the phone rings while you are doing it. Add the potatoes and tomatoes, cover the pan, and cook very gently for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Then add the water, salt, and sugar. Don’t be tempted to use stock, because the whole point of this soup is the pure taste of the vegetables. Cook for about half an hour, cool slightly and put through a mouli. You can liquidise it if you want, but in my opinion soup containing tomato skins and/or celery benefits greatly from a mouli, which strains out the fibres, unlike a blender or food processor.

You can correct the seasoning and eat this just as it is, and it will be fine. But Elizabeth David suggests beating together the egg yolks and some of the hot soup in a bowl. Reheat the rest of the soup, stir in the egg mixture, and heat gently without boiling, until it has a rich, velvety texture. Garnish with chopped herbs to serve.

The result of googling to find a way of using up the rather flat Guinness left over from making the Christmas pudding. Yes, I could have drunk it, but that wouldn’t have been enterprising enough. Anyway, my search threw up at least a dozen variations of this ginger cake, all based on an original from the Gramercy Tavern, whatever that is. Since I like ginger cake and I had all of the ingredients except molasses, the decision was made.

But first, the usual trip to Diana’s Desserts to convert all those dratted American cup measurements. I started out with the version of the recipe at Smitten Kitchen, then reeled in horror when I found that my conversions resulted in 220 g of flour and 650 g of sugar. Beurkh, as we say in France. “No wonder Americans are so fat,” I ungraciously muttered. I bet Deb isn’t fat at all. Although I have tangled with an over-sweet cake recipe from Smitten Kitchen before.

Anyway, one of the comments on the Smitten Kitchen post led me to Epicurious where there was a version of the recipe posted by its originator, Claudia Fleming. For the same amount of flour and eggs, half as much sugar. Phew.

Taking due note of the many comments about spending half an hour scraping caramelised batter off the oven floor, I was slightly nervous as I poured the alarmingly liquid batter into the tin. It was more like pancake batter than cake mixture. Even though the batter was well below the top of the tin, I took the precaution of putting it on a baking tray to ease cleanup. But in fact it was fine and cooked in the time advertised. The cake turns out very moist with a rather coarse crumb, and — dare I say it — it could have been a little bit sweeter. Don’t stint on the spices, it needs them. I also have a sneaking feeling that some sliced pears arranged in the bottom of the tin to make an upside-down cake could be rather good, in which case you could skip the icing. Or you could serve it with vanilla or cinnamon ice cream.

220 ml Guinness or other stout
220 ml black treacle or dark molasses (not blackstrap), or 150 g dark soft brown sugar and 50 ml water
1/2 tablespoon bicarbonate of soda
3 large eggs
100 g granulated sugar
120 g dark soft brown sugar
150 ml vegetable oil
220 g plain flour
2 tablespoons ground ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 tablespoon grated root ginger

Icing:
icing sugar
lemon juice

In a large saucepan over high heat, combine the stout and molasses (or brown sugar and water if you don’t have any molasses) and bring to a boil. Turn off the heat and add the bicarbonate of soda. Allow to sit until the foam dissipates. Note, you do need a LARGE pan. I may not have needed to clean the oven but I did have to swiftly wipe up sticky, foaming beer from the hob. Mind you, I’m not quite sure what the point of this procedure is, other than some kind of magic. Won’t the bicarb be totally inactive by the time you put it in the oven?

Anyway, preheat the oven to 170 C. Butter a 22 x 15 cm tin, line the bottom and sides with baking parchment, and grease the parchment. In a bowl, whisk together the eggs and all the sugar. Whisk in the oil. In a second bowl, whisk together the flour, ground ginger, baking powder, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, cardamom, and fresh ginger. Combine the cooled stout mixture with the egg mixture, then whisk this liquid into the flour mixture, half at a time.

Pour the batter into the tin and bake for 1 hour, or until the top springs back when gently pressed. Don’t open the oven until the cake is almost done, or the centre may sink. Cool in the tin for at least half an hour, then finish cooling on a wire rack. When cold, store in a tin. Ideally keep for at least 24 hours before eating; the flavour definitely improves with keeping.

I made a simple icing by whisking together icing sugar and a little lemon juice to make a glaze. But you could make some cream cheese frosting instead. Or just eat it plain!

I’m making this a second entry for Jacqueline’s bookmarked recipes challenge.

I bookmarked Jacqueline’s bookmarked recipe challenge, originally started by Ruth, a couple of weeks ago. I have tons of bookmarked recipes: a long list in my browser bookmarks, a few more stashed in Evernote, a box full of magazine and newspaper clippings, cookbooks bristling with Post-Its and bookdarts. Where to start?

Well, my recent browse through Margaret Costa’s Four Seasons Cookbook provided inspiration in the form of tomato and pepper chutney, now maturing nicely in the larder. There’s something very satisfying about starting out with a pan full of chopped vegetables, reeking of vinegar, and finishing with these glowing jars of glossy red chutney, and it kickstarted me into more preserving. After a quick detour into Delia’s famous mincemeat, which I’ve had a printout of for ages and never made, I was prompted by the Cottage Smallholder site, fount of all knowledge about preserving, to make some sweet chilli jam using a recipe from the BBC Good Food site, a frequent source of bookmarked recipes. I love chilli jam and jelly — they make a lovely relish for cheesy and eggy things, and I’m also partial to them with scallops. I bet both jam and chutney will go very nicely with turkey too.

This is my version of the chilli jam recipe. I found the original rather imprecise in some ways. For example, it gives weights for some ingredients but then just specifies “8 red peppers”. Mine were huge, at least double the normal size, so I used four. Then it says “10 red chillies”, without any qualification — a little dangerous in my view. Throw in 10 Scotch Bonnet chillies with their seeds and the jam will blow your head off. I did like one comment on the BBC site which queried the “finger-sized piece of ginger” because “I have big hands”! As always, nothing beats tasting and adjusting as you go.

8 medium or 4 large red peppers
4-8 chillis, depending on taste
about 1 inch of root ginger
6-8 garlic cloves, peeled
400 g fresh tomatoes, or the equivalent of canned tomatoes
750 g golden caster sugar
250 ml red wine vinegar or cider vinegar

Deseed and roughly chop the peppers. Cut off a tiny bit of one of the chillies and taste it, then use your skill and judgement to decide how many to use and whether to include the seeds. Mine were large but not that hot; I used four, two with seeds and two without, and the end result was certainly hot enough for me. Roughly chop the chillies and throw them into a food processor with the red peppers and garlic. You’ll need to do this in a couple of batches. Whiz to chop everything finely, but don’t reduce to a puree. Tip into a large heavy pan. Wash your hands thoroughly to avoid any chilli-related accidents later.

If using fresh tomatoes, roughly chop them. You might also peel them; I didn’t bother, but later realised it might have been a good idea with the novelty black ones — I ended up fishing the black skin out of the jam with tongs because it didn’t look very nice! Grate the ginger into the pan and add the tomatoes, sugar, and vinegar. Bring up to the boil and simmer for about 50 minutes.

Put some clean, rinsed and dried jars and lids in a low oven (about 100 C) to sterilise them. At this point you might want to extract a spoonful of the jam, let it cool a little, and taste it. Then if you think it needs more chilli or ginger, you can add some. If you think it needs less, you’re a bit stuffed Turn up the heat a bit and boil until the jam gets thick and sticky and, well, jam-like. The original recipe says 10-15 minutes, but don’t rely on this. Mine took much longer, about 40 minutes. Just keep cooking, stirring very frequently to stop it catching. When it’s ready the bubbles will be big and gloopy, the jam will look glossy and translucent, and drawing the spoon across the bottom of the pan will leave a clear patch for a second.

Remove from the heat and pot in the hot jars, sealing well. It will apparently keep for 3 months, but the jars should be refrigerated once opened.

Margaret Costa’s Four Seasons Cookery Book has always lived in the reserve collection. I honestly don’t know why. Nigel Slater himself says: ‘If I had to choose only one book to cook from for the rest of my life it would be this one.’ Picking it up and starting to read, I instantly saw that she and I were of the same mind. The preface begins:

Professional chefs are notoriously bad at giving recipes for domestic kitchens. They are unable to think in small quantities for a start, they are maddeningly vague about times and temperatures, they use words which create total, unreasoning panic in the mind of the ordinary cook: déglacer, dégorger, tomber, revenir, beurre manié — no wonder we lose our heads.

Even the words we think we recognise — blend, beat, sieve — all mean something different to them because they use different equipment. And then they are used to having things to hand. “Garnish with truffles,” they cry, “cook in clarified butter, stuff with a duxelles, finish with a spoonful of hollandaise.” “The sauce? Oh, just a simple jus lié with the addition of a little demi-glace.”

She sums up everything I don’t like about 99% of cookbooks by professional chefs (the Roux brothers are a very honourable exception). And she was married to a chef! I like her introduction to the canapé section too:

Just listen to the next big party you go to: a party where there are enough nice little things to eat has a warm, contented sound, a sort of purr, quite different from the harsh, strident noise where there’s nothing but alcohol and cigarette smoke.

I’d love to go to a party catered by her; her “nice little things to eat” are all mouth-watering, and most are easy to do.

It’s a wide-ranging book, organised roughly by season (some dishes can be cooked all the year round though) — and within each season by theme. So Winter for example includes chapters like Christmas Classics, Party Pieces, Comforting Breakfasts, Winter Soups, Cooking with Wine (a sign of the 1970s that you had to have a special chapter for this!), Proper Puddings, Marmalade … Costa is from the same school as Jane Grigson: erudition worn lightly, with unpretentious yet elegant and classic dishes covering the whole range from dinner parties through everyday meals to preserves and bread baking. Perhaps part of the reason I don’t use this book more is precisely because Jane Grigson is my first port of call when I’m looking for this type of book.

Again like those traditional writers (Grigson, Elizabeth David, Patience Grey) this is a book you can read for sheer pleasure, even if you don’t cook a thing from it. The party pieces, the “proper puddings”, and the preserving chapters are the highlight of the book for me. So this post isn’t exactly a vintage feast, just a sampling of a couple of items from the book (which now sprouts a forest of bookdarts heralding future cooking sessions).

I have never cooked chutney in my life, apart from a brief and fairly successful flirtation with mango chutney. This is possibly due to traumatic memories of a house reeking of vinegar from top to bottom when my mother was engaged in her annual days-long chutney-making session, during which the rest of the family would move out to the garden for the duration. So it’s perhaps surprising that the first recipe I chose from here was the tomato and red pepper chutney, from the very comprehensive preserving chapter. Partly because I bought a big bag of peppers from the market for 3 euros, partly inspired by the chutney-making fervour displayed at the Cottage Smallholder forum.

Costa doesn’t weigh you down with instructions — she just tells you to mince or chop everything up, put it in a pan with the vinegar, sugar, and spices, and “simmer till thick”. The suggested 2 hours’ simmering stretched to 5 hours; I think my simmer must have been too low. But it did eventually acquire a jammy consistency, and I decided this was good enough. Into the jars it went, looking very convincingly like chutney. Verdict in a month or so, when it’s matured! Meanwhile, all the windows are open to eliminate the vinegar smell.

While that was bubbling away, I made some Belgian bun cake, because I’d made some lemon curd a couple of days ago. This is basically a rich brioche dough, spread with lemon curd and sprinkled with candied peel and currants, rolled up and baked. It turns out like a lemony panettone, best eaten while still slightly warm and fragrant from the oven. Delicious, and I already have plans for a very luxurious bread and butter pudding with part of it.

I won’t give the recipe for the chutney here, because I’m waiting to see how it turns out. But here’s my version of the Belgian brioche.

Dough:
350-400 g plain flour (not bread flour)
150 ml milk
50 g caster sugar
1 tsp salt
85 g butter
1 sachet instant yeast (or 15 g fresh yeast)
2 eggs
finely grated zest of 1 untreated lemon
Filling:
3-4 tbs lemon curd
150 g currants, sultanas, or other dried fruit
100 g candied peel
Glaze:
1 tbs milk
1 tbs caster sugar

I made the dough on the dough setting of my bread machine, first warming the milk, sugar, salt and butter in a jug in the microwave, just enough to melt the butter. The dough ended up a bit sloppy and sticky, so if you’re going to do this I suggest checking up on it after 5-10 minutes and adding more flour if you think it looks too wet — it should still be a very soft dough though, not like bread dough. I just floured it liberally when I took it out of the machine.

To make the dough by hand, warm the milk, sugar, salt and butter as above, letting it cool to lukewarm before adding to the dough. If you’re using fresh yeast, start it off in a couple of tablespoons of warm water with an extra teaspoon of sugar. Otherwise, just put the milk mixture in a bowl with the well-beaten eggs and add about half the flour and the yeast. Beat together well, add the grated lemon rind, and then work in enough of the rest of the flour to make a soft but not sticky dough. Turn onto a floured board, knead till smooth and springy, then turn into an oiled bowl, cover, and leave to double in bulk (about an hour, depending on how warm your kitchen is).

Whichever way you made the dough, spread a large piece of parchment paper on your work surface and sprinkle with flour. Turn the dough onto it and pat it out into a rectangle about 35 x 20 cm. Spread generously with lemon curd and then sprinkle liberally with candied peel and dried fruit (I used currants, but I think chopped dried apricots or dried cranberries would be lovely). Starting from a long side, roll it up — this is where the paper comes in handy, because if the dough is sticky, you can use the edge of the paper to lift up the edge, unsticking it from the paper with a table knife as you go.

Now cut the roll into slices about 2.5 cm thick. Butter a roasting tin about 20×30 cm, and pack the slices into it in rows. Cover with a cloth and leave to double in size again.

Preheat the oven to 220C. Bake for about 20 minutes, till golden brown on top. Meanwhile, warm the milk and sugar for the glaze enough to dissolve the sugar. As soon as you take the brioche out of the oven, brush the top with the glaze to make it nice and shiny. Leave to cool and eat just warm.

Following my last post about neglected cookbooks, I’m feeling a bit daunted by my reserve collection — I’ve just counted them, and there are 70 of them! I wouldn’t say Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book is “neglected” exactly — it sits on the living room shelves, not in the reserve collection — but it tends to only get pulled out when I need ideas for the contents of the weekly organic veggie box. Also I think it has been overshadowed by the plethora of TV chef books like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Veg Every Day. While I’m sure they are excellent, Jane Grigson has stood the test of time and her books are still true classics. As I’m fond of repeating, she is a calm and reassuring kitchen companion whose recipes have the air of trusted family favourites. Most of them are not fancy, they rarely use exotic, hard-to-find, expensive ingredients, and they are generally easy to do. Jane isn’t really the place to go for exotic; most of her recipes are European, with particular emphasis on French and British cooking, along with a few Middle Eastern recipes.

The reason I got the book out today is because there were parsnips in my veggie box. I’m not a great fan of parsnips, and happily they are rarely seen in France. They are considered to be pig food, so you don’t see them in shops, and when you do they are referred to as légumes oubliés, with the implication that they are best forgotten. But I suddenly remembered Jane Grigson’s curried parsnip soup, which was all the rage in the 1970s. I haven’t cooked it for literally decades, but it is well worth reviving. Even parsnip-haters like me like it.

This book is ideal if you have a vegetable box delivered, or you grow your own, because it’s organised by vegetable, in alphabetical order from artichokes to yams. Simply flip it open to the one you’re having difficulty using up. Each chapter starts with a pretty line drawing of the vegetable in question (no fancy photos, this was the 1970s!) and a short discussion of its provenance, history and use. There are so many interesting snippets of information here, although parsnips were evidently a challenge to make interesting, since we learn here that Boris Pasternak’s name means “parsnip”.

Then there’s a “How to choose and prepare” section that gives general advice. And finally a selection of recipes. The parsnip chapter is one of the more limited chapters — buttered parsnips, creamed parsnips, the famous soup, a couple of gratins, and a soufflé — but for more versatile vegetables you are spoilt for choice. She often gives a few variations or other ideas — for example at the end of the leek chapter she suggests preparing small ones in the same way as cauliflower à la grecque, which I duly did, and very nice they were too. With all these resources, I rarely fail to find something that at least gives me an idea for a dish, even if I don’t follow her recipe exactly. It’s not a vegetarian book, but meat plays a very minor role here.

At the end, there’s an appendix, which I’d actually never looked at until today. It tells you how to prepare various classic French vegetable mixtures such as mirepoix and julienne, and also includes a whole raft of classic sauces, from the common (bechamel, mayonnaise) to the more unusual (skordalia, Balkan walnut and garlic sauce). Then there are a few recipes for stuffing, a pancake batter recipe, and, oddly, a recipe for pitta bread on the grounds that they can be stuffed with vegetables. So it really is a compendium of vegetable cookery, for anyone from a beginner to an expert, and a great companion for any frugal cook.

Her Fruit Book is arranged along the same lines and is equally wonderful, if not more so, since it includes the recipe for Best British Pudding Ever, Springfield pear cake. It’s no coincidence that reviews of Jane’s books on Amazon always include at least a couple saying “I bought this because my old copy fell apart from constant use”.

And finally, my version of that 70s dinner party classic, curried parsnip soup. I reckon you could use other sweet root vegetables such as celeriac or turnips for this. But for me it’s primarily a way of making parsnips much more palatable.

either 1/2-1 tbs curry powder, or the following spices:
1 tbs whole coriander seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp turmeric
1 dried chilli, or 1/2 tsp chilli flakes
1/2 tsp garam masala
1 large or 2 smaller parsnips, diced
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large clove garlic, chopped
1 oz butter
1 tbs flour
1 litre hot stock of your choice (beef, chicken, or of course vegetable if you are vegetarian)
150 ml yoghurt, crème fraîche, or sour cream
chives, to garnish (optional)

If you’re using the spice mixture, pound all 5 spices together in a mortar, or whiz them in a coffee grinder. You’ll end up with more than you need; keep the rest in a jar for another dish.

Melt the butter in a pan and add the onions, garlic, and parsnips. Cover and cook very gently for 10 minutes, shaking the pan from time to time. Don’t let them brown. Then add the flour and, to start with, about half a tablespoon of your spice mixture or curry powder. Cook for a couple of minutes, stirring to stop it sticking. Add about half of the stock, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan until the liquid thickens slightly. Then add the rest of the stock, taste and add some more spices if it’s not spicy enough for you. Simmer gently till the parsnip is really soft — this will take about 20 minutes. Liquidise, taste, and adjust flavour and consistency with a little water if necessary, bearing in mind that the cream or yoghurt will soften the flavour. Reheat without boiling, adding cream or yoghurt to taste, and serve with fried croutons and a scattering of chives.

Like almost all keen cooks, I can’t resist buying cookbooks even though I know I already own far too many, with enough recipes in them to last several lifetimes of daily cooking. But even if I don’t cook from them, I love to browse and fantasize about cooking elaborate recipes, or just admire the photos (at least in modern books).

But still. The shelves in our living cum dining room cum kitchen are full, and the reserve collection has overflowed onto the landing upstairs. Some books are well-thumbed, others are pristine and have never risked the slightest gravy splatter or smudge of grease. It was time to take action, I decided, and cook at least one recipe from each of these neglected tomes, if only to establish whether they are unjustifiably taking up shelf space. I don’t know how long it will take me because I haven’t even dared to count them. But along the way I’ll review the books and hopefully find some hidden gems.

I started with The Art of the Tart, by Tamasin Day-Lewis. This lives in the reserve collection, even though I have actually cooked a couple of recipes from it. I’m not usually a fan of “single-dish” books (it was a present) — but it’s true that the tart is a very versatile concept. And some of these aren’t even what I would call a tart, in that they don’t involve pastry. There’s so much you can do with pastry and storecupboard ingredients, from a down-to-earth quiche made from the leftovers in the fridge to a drop-dead elegant dessert. And after all, many of my most successful and popular signature dishes are tarts (see the list at the end of this post).

I’m not keen on the arch title (she even published a follow-up called Tarts with tops on), or Tamasin’s wordy style and the odd bit of name-dropping, but there are some gems all the same. The recipes here range from the obvious (quiche lorraine, apple pie, tarte tatin) to the exotic or just odd (a tart filled with aligot??). The little tomato and prosciutto tarts on the cover are both beautiful and delicious — ideal dinner-party starter material — and quick to make into the bargain. I don’t usually like chocolatey desserts, but I made an exception for Simon Hopkinson’s chocolate tart (in the “Other people’s tarts” section).

For the purposes of this blog post, I started with cheese strata — one of the “not a tart” recipes. It’s basically a savoury bread and butter pudding. I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to me before to make something like this, given that buying baguettes inevitably results in a surplus of stale bread. A big chunk of two-day old pain de campagne, an ancient bit of Comté only fit for grating, some eggs approaching their sell by date, mustard, onion and cream. The result is well worth the status of default dinner, and I’ll certainly make it again. I skipped the lardons, but some sun-dried tomatoes would be a nice addition and would keep it vegetarian.

Next, I quickly cooked Mjuk Toscakaka, one of several Swedish recipes. This is another one that is easy to do and uses what you have on hand (and doesn’t involve pastry) — basically a simple sponge cake with a slightly crackly, fudgy topping of sugar and flaked almonds. On its own, a bit dull, and cream didn’t make it any more interesting. But it was considerably livened up with the complementary addition of some Italian cherries in syrup (an impulse buy in Lidl when they were having one of their Italian weeks). Any tart poached fruit would go well with this.

Verdict: I wouldn’t rush out and buy this book if I didn’t have it, but it’s a lot more useful and attractive than I expected it to be. It’s staying on the shelf!

My artful tarts

Apple crumble tart
Apricot frangipane tart
Courgette, cheese, and herb tart
Filo tarts with goat’s cheese
French tarte aux pommes
Pineapple tarte tatin
Prune and Armagnac tart
Rosemary-spiked apricot and almond tart
Tarte à la moutarde
Tarte au citron
Tarte aux myrtilles, or bilberry tart
Tarte Tatin