Cream of Celery Soup
Sole Veronique
Peach Melba
Sunday morning, and a sweet smell of alcohol hung heavily over the flat. And for once, it had nothing to do with weekend depravities, but instead was due to the white wine syrup in which four silkily depilated peach halves were sousing themselves silly. Meanwhile, next to them on the hob, a head of celery and two chopped onions were sweating gently away (think a spot of badminton on the back lawn before G&T time).
I had got up early (say, around eleven), donned my kimono and set about blanching the fruit briefly to aid with peeling, praising myself on my providence in having purchased an extra peach, since one of them seemed quite reluctant to give way to steam or knife (Cook’s Note 1: never count on your ingredients all behaving as you have been led to believe they will. The first peach fairly slipped out of its skin, so smooth and flawless and perfectly blushed pink; the second was sulky and uncooperative, and after a minute or two’s hacking was looking like a bloodbath in a barber’s shop; but luckily I had a magic third one up my sleeve, and I smiled the smile of the wise as I fished it from the boiling water and had my way with it). This done, the peaches were halved and lain in a warm bath of wine and sugar, there to poach for ten minutes and to be left alone to cool.
The soup veg duly softened, and in I went with the celery salt from a pretty glass jar, chopped potato and 1 litre of stock made from last Sunday’s chicken (sorry, but I’m allowed to be smug in my own kitchen and my own blog!). It all boiled away obligingly for about half an hour, then was liquidized and then… What fastidiousness, my lord… Sieved in batches and with endless patience, until all the roughage had been eliminated, and all that was left was a pale pistachio green liquor, almost worryingly thin to my eye. I admit to a coarse palate when it comes to soup. It’s not something I make as a matter of course, and when I do it’s the thick vegetable fill-your-boots-type soups of my motherland you can stand a spoon in. I’d decided to make this recipe because the idea of celery soup sounded so utterly farfetched, and possibly insipid, and I wanted to make things interesting and a touch exotic for myself. I left it at that for the time being, reheating and adding the cream and some white pepper (yes, the spice rack has been stocked! Also from a pretty glass jar, which pleases me more than I can reasonably explain. Am I just ever so slightly a packaging tart...?) just before serving.
I had had a disaster the day before, arriving at the fish counter at Wholefoods Kensington, fully expecting six beautiful scallops in their shells to be sitting there with my name on them, only to discover the fishmonger on Friday duty had omitted to specify “shelled.” So the cornerstone of my evening, those adorable little Coquilles St-Jacques a la Parisienne, with their white ruff of mashed potato and unctuous béchamel centre, was off the menu! It was 5pm on Saturday, and I made one desperate call to Chalmers & Gray, but to no avail. I was, of course, devastated, but you might be pleased to hear I didn’t let myself down by throwing a frop or panicking. Oh no, I gave every impression of being a seasoned and unflappable hostess, and not to be blown off course by this calamity, scanned the counter for an alternative, deciding on Sole Veronique instead.
So the following day there I was, with four delicate sole fillets in one hand, and two spiny fish skeletons in the other. Again, I praised myself for my presence of mind, and for remembering, on spec and without a shopping list (I’m not particularly neurotic on the whole, but for some reason I can’t seem to go out for a bulb of garlic without writing it down on a piece of paper, lest I forget when I reach the greengrocer’s and come back with an aubergine instead), to buy the mushrooms and shallots for the fish stock, and the double cream and the seedless grapes for the sauce. Then I looked at the recipe and realised I had omitted to get the one thing I couldn’t easily find within an easy radius of home: dry vermouth. I checked the drinks cabinet, utterly pointlessly, since I am not a drinker of martinis. Then I texted my downstairs neighbour, who was also one of my dinner guests this evening, asking her to pick up a bottle of said spirit at Oddbin’s in Covent Garden, only to be informed that it is not open on Sundays (!). So I fretted, and I fropped, and I panicked.
Then I got dressed and walked to all the corner shops and Costcutters within spitting distance of home. I can report that anyone seeking Vodka or Whisky in the vicinity of Bethnal Green tube will find themselves spoilt for choice, but that won't come as a surprise to any of my friends... Finally, and forced to think laterally, I pointed to a high shelf and asked for a lonely bottle of Pernod to be brought down. It was caked in dust, but it had the requisite aniseed kick about it. I walked home weaving great skeins of comfort around the words necessity and invention.
Sunday, 25 October 2009
Sunday, 4 October 2009
A Starter for a Start
We begin with a meal for one, a prawn cocktail on a Sunday night. Picture a small flat in East London (picture it as you will, after all there's no reason why you shouldn't be actively involved in some arm’s-length manner), and me walking in woozy and weary after three hours talking to publishers and artists at the Whitechapel's inaugural London Art Book Fair. I drop my bags heavy with catalogues, pamphlets and other trifles, and walk to the fridge, where the stock made from last night's roast chicken has been chilling, a thin skin of fat hardening on its surface. I skim it off, and return the stock to the hob to reduce it to one litre of clear amber broth, filling the room (open-plan living, you know the score) with a sweet warm fug.
The day’s been pure Indian Summer, but by 7pm the sun has set, and the large window overlooking the balcony is a dark rectangle suspended on the white wall and I feel it brooding at me like an empty movie screen. I tug on the blinds to shut its unsettling eye, then set about cracking two eggs that have been sitting on the counter all afternoon coming up to room temperature, discarding the whites and seasoning the yolks with salt and mustard (no white pepper in the house, as Sainsburys only had ready ground). For the next ten minutes I stand there, oil flask in hand (light olive oil - sorry Simon Hopkinson, Lindsey Bareham et al, but this is a sauce with a history for me, and in my home, we did not use groundnut oil), and begin to stir, dripping the oil in sparingly at first, drop by drop, then gradually in a thin stream as the runny yellow mixture emulsifies, growing unctuous and unyielding.
The building is silent and my attention is lulled by the circular sound of the wooden spoon as it ploughs like a rudder around and around, and with each stroke a presence takes firmer shape beside me, looking over my shoulder companionably. "Always stir in the same direction," I hear my mother say. Mayonnaise was her speciality, and a regular treat, as on Sundays we were left to fend for ourselves, and she was compelled to descend to the kitchen to feed us. She made a remarkably good fish cooked whole in a salt crust, or bacalhau roasted in garlicky olive oil and accompanied with roast potatoes à murro. For most of the year this was the sum total of her culinary input, although at Christmas she became enthused by the notion of sweets and might spend an afternoon or two romping about like Marie Antoinette in the Petit Trianon, whipping up the frivolous and the fabulous (marquise au chocolat, crème anglaise, a fruit compote).
So I begin with Prawn Cocktail partly because the mayonnaise element is my single link to what I can scarcely call a tradition of cooking in my family. In it lie all my roots, and in putting it together (the Prawn Cocktail being something one assembles rather than cooks), I lay down a seam which runs deeper than any other in anything else I shall ever cook.
But there are other reasons too. For one thing, prawns (together with Vache qui rit cheese) were my favourite foods in the universe throughout my childhood and I could while away hours in a happy daze simply thinking about them. It was a passion I shared with my cat, but he had a supra-human advantage in that he could smell their presence over vast distances. Felix’s raison d’etre was beauty, and he took his ornamental function seriously. Each morning, he would arrange himself at the window overlooking the park, reclining like an albino odalisque or sitting upright with his feet in first position, impassively observing the doings of squirrels and birds. Over the course of a day he might allow himself the occasional turn of the neck, but on the whole his dignity dictated that he should never find anything so interesting as to disturb his composure. He appeared to resent the inconveniences of fleshly existence and generally picked away at his food with a wrinkled nose and a penitent air. Mother may not have welcomed the idea of taking a cat when we moved to London, but over time they evolved a kind of grudging respect, or perhaps I could even call it a fellow feeling towards one another. In practice he may have been my pet, but in theory he was all hers.
As I was saying, what Felix and I did have in common was our love of prawns. The only thing that could move him was the whiff of crustaceans disrobing in the kitchen, and this would send him loping blindly the length of the building like a laser-guided rocket (although he was lamentably inelegant in motion). Whenever I saw a white blur careering through the hall, I knew there could be only one thing on for lunch, and I’d set out hopefully in his slipstream only to find that whilst his presence was welcome in the kitchen, that of a wheedling child was not similarly tolerated, and I was sent packing even as Felix made himself comfortable on a bench and snacked on tidbits from the chopping board.
Away from home was when the Prawn Cocktail made its appearance, my first course of choice whenever we ate out, and I took a connoisseur’s interest in its presentation and execution. I particularly loved the classic double glasses where the dish was suspended above a bowl of crushed ice. Its appearance at the table, all rimed in white, turned Starter into Dessert, festive and fun. All that fuss over a few prawns in pink sauce! What’s for an eight-year-old girl not to like? But last Sunday was the first time I’d tried this restaurant classic in a domestic setting. I guess it’s a mixture of nostalgia, amusement and a slight sense of ennui about the well-beaten track of my own cooking habits that’s made me decide the time has come to revisit some of these forsaken grande dames of the twentieth century menu.
I chilled a large dessert glass and lined its base with finely shredded Gem lettuce, and following Hopkinson and Bareham’s recipe, I sprinkled finely sliced spring onion and diced cucumber over it, laying the peeled prawns on top, and napping them with the ancestral mayonnaise seasoned with ketchup, cognac and Tabasco sauce, then sprinkling paprika like a powdered pigment over the top. It looked, as Michel Roux Jr might say, “pretty as a picture,” a dinner light on the stomach but redolent with associations. The spring onion and cucumber seemed redundant to my palate, and if I make it again, I would bother with neither of these intrusions into the perfectly balanced trinity of crinkly leaf, prawn and Mary Rose sauce.
I ate it with the book at my side, plotting my first Prawn Cocktail Years dinner, three courses from the “Fifties Hotel Dining Room” chapter. Of which, more next week!
The day’s been pure Indian Summer, but by 7pm the sun has set, and the large window overlooking the balcony is a dark rectangle suspended on the white wall and I feel it brooding at me like an empty movie screen. I tug on the blinds to shut its unsettling eye, then set about cracking two eggs that have been sitting on the counter all afternoon coming up to room temperature, discarding the whites and seasoning the yolks with salt and mustard (no white pepper in the house, as Sainsburys only had ready ground). For the next ten minutes I stand there, oil flask in hand (light olive oil - sorry Simon Hopkinson, Lindsey Bareham et al, but this is a sauce with a history for me, and in my home, we did not use groundnut oil), and begin to stir, dripping the oil in sparingly at first, drop by drop, then gradually in a thin stream as the runny yellow mixture emulsifies, growing unctuous and unyielding.
The building is silent and my attention is lulled by the circular sound of the wooden spoon as it ploughs like a rudder around and around, and with each stroke a presence takes firmer shape beside me, looking over my shoulder companionably. "Always stir in the same direction," I hear my mother say. Mayonnaise was her speciality, and a regular treat, as on Sundays we were left to fend for ourselves, and she was compelled to descend to the kitchen to feed us. She made a remarkably good fish cooked whole in a salt crust, or bacalhau roasted in garlicky olive oil and accompanied with roast potatoes à murro. For most of the year this was the sum total of her culinary input, although at Christmas she became enthused by the notion of sweets and might spend an afternoon or two romping about like Marie Antoinette in the Petit Trianon, whipping up the frivolous and the fabulous (marquise au chocolat, crème anglaise, a fruit compote).
So I begin with Prawn Cocktail partly because the mayonnaise element is my single link to what I can scarcely call a tradition of cooking in my family. In it lie all my roots, and in putting it together (the Prawn Cocktail being something one assembles rather than cooks), I lay down a seam which runs deeper than any other in anything else I shall ever cook.
But there are other reasons too. For one thing, prawns (together with Vache qui rit cheese) were my favourite foods in the universe throughout my childhood and I could while away hours in a happy daze simply thinking about them. It was a passion I shared with my cat, but he had a supra-human advantage in that he could smell their presence over vast distances. Felix’s raison d’etre was beauty, and he took his ornamental function seriously. Each morning, he would arrange himself at the window overlooking the park, reclining like an albino odalisque or sitting upright with his feet in first position, impassively observing the doings of squirrels and birds. Over the course of a day he might allow himself the occasional turn of the neck, but on the whole his dignity dictated that he should never find anything so interesting as to disturb his composure. He appeared to resent the inconveniences of fleshly existence and generally picked away at his food with a wrinkled nose and a penitent air. Mother may not have welcomed the idea of taking a cat when we moved to London, but over time they evolved a kind of grudging respect, or perhaps I could even call it a fellow feeling towards one another. In practice he may have been my pet, but in theory he was all hers.
As I was saying, what Felix and I did have in common was our love of prawns. The only thing that could move him was the whiff of crustaceans disrobing in the kitchen, and this would send him loping blindly the length of the building like a laser-guided rocket (although he was lamentably inelegant in motion). Whenever I saw a white blur careering through the hall, I knew there could be only one thing on for lunch, and I’d set out hopefully in his slipstream only to find that whilst his presence was welcome in the kitchen, that of a wheedling child was not similarly tolerated, and I was sent packing even as Felix made himself comfortable on a bench and snacked on tidbits from the chopping board.
Away from home was when the Prawn Cocktail made its appearance, my first course of choice whenever we ate out, and I took a connoisseur’s interest in its presentation and execution. I particularly loved the classic double glasses where the dish was suspended above a bowl of crushed ice. Its appearance at the table, all rimed in white, turned Starter into Dessert, festive and fun. All that fuss over a few prawns in pink sauce! What’s for an eight-year-old girl not to like? But last Sunday was the first time I’d tried this restaurant classic in a domestic setting. I guess it’s a mixture of nostalgia, amusement and a slight sense of ennui about the well-beaten track of my own cooking habits that’s made me decide the time has come to revisit some of these forsaken grande dames of the twentieth century menu.
I chilled a large dessert glass and lined its base with finely shredded Gem lettuce, and following Hopkinson and Bareham’s recipe, I sprinkled finely sliced spring onion and diced cucumber over it, laying the peeled prawns on top, and napping them with the ancestral mayonnaise seasoned with ketchup, cognac and Tabasco sauce, then sprinkling paprika like a powdered pigment over the top. It looked, as Michel Roux Jr might say, “pretty as a picture,” a dinner light on the stomach but redolent with associations. The spring onion and cucumber seemed redundant to my palate, and if I make it again, I would bother with neither of these intrusions into the perfectly balanced trinity of crinkly leaf, prawn and Mary Rose sauce.
I ate it with the book at my side, plotting my first Prawn Cocktail Years dinner, three courses from the “Fifties Hotel Dining Room” chapter. Of which, more next week!
Thursday, 1 October 2009
Caprice
The motor for this prawn-related adventure is no more than Poetry's insouciant second cousin, Whim. As you know, when Mallory was asked why he climbed Everest, he replied "because it was there." So it is that with me, should you ask why I cooked these recipes, I shall say grandly, and with a lyric glaze in my eye "because they were there."
Is there a method or a masterplan, you may be moved to enquire. Will you do a meal a day? a supper a week? Will you cook each recipe from each chapter with the diligence of a lover who cannot bear to leave a stone unturned in the headless dash for Consummation (the deranged first cousin of Knowledge), until you have truly consomméd, and fully possessed each last drop, or pinch, or sliver or smear?
No, I tell you, read my lips I shall say puckishly, I am slave neither to my stove nor to any object, be it animate or in-.
Please, my companion is Whim. He and I reserve the right to go for days or weeks in supine indifference to this project; we may be minded to plan far ahead, fastidiously and with a quiver of military zeal about us, sending out invites, specifying attire, candle-worrying and the like. Whim and I may wake up one morning of a mind, and set about rustling Tom, Dick or Harry out to dine on tournedos rossini and peach melba. Occasionally, I shall cast Whim out, and take Jade for a bedfellow. You have been warned. We are nothing if not capricious.
Think of this as a casual acquaintance, and we may yet hope to be happy.
Is there a method or a masterplan, you may be moved to enquire. Will you do a meal a day? a supper a week? Will you cook each recipe from each chapter with the diligence of a lover who cannot bear to leave a stone unturned in the headless dash for Consummation (the deranged first cousin of Knowledge), until you have truly consomméd, and fully possessed each last drop, or pinch, or sliver or smear?
No, I tell you, read my lips I shall say puckishly, I am slave neither to my stove nor to any object, be it animate or in-.
Please, my companion is Whim. He and I reserve the right to go for days or weeks in supine indifference to this project; we may be minded to plan far ahead, fastidiously and with a quiver of military zeal about us, sending out invites, specifying attire, candle-worrying and the like. Whim and I may wake up one morning of a mind, and set about rustling Tom, Dick or Harry out to dine on tournedos rossini and peach melba. Occasionally, I shall cast Whim out, and take Jade for a bedfellow. You have been warned. We are nothing if not capricious.
Think of this as a casual acquaintance, and we may yet hope to be happy.
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