Cooking is as much about constructing a home as providing for one. When the natural rhythms of a family are interrupted - through sickness, through separation, through any number of afflictions - feeding each other, eating together, becomes a restitution, a recovery of something lost. For the cook, the manual preparation - stirring, sifting, folding... - can be an exit route from an otherwise overly cerebral sensibility. The truth of this hits me in my first few hours back home from a second home. My first impulse is to cook, despite the rather sad and depressed state of our fridge, groaning as it is with sackfuls of unloved and overripe carrots and pears. To transform these four walls in their nakedness into a home, there must be something over the gas hob, faintly bubbling, giving up its enticing aroma. The smell of baking infamously whets our sexual appetites. Yet the less provocative, soothing redolence of something savory, sustaining, arouses an altogether different carnal desire. In the face of 3 kilos of rather wimpish, English home-grown carrots, and the mass exodus of all my spices from London to Paris, I mustered up - with a little effort and imagination - this startling orange soup. It makes a welcome change from the Covent Garden Carrot & Coriander soup that, in an odd feat of cultural exchange, is mysteriously ubiquitous in France.
Comfort food need not be an anesthetising bowl of blankety starch; it has far more to do with memory. Madeleine moments are inexplicably arresting, a seductive marriage of sensual memory and nostalgia. A relived sense-impression, released and isolated from the chronology of our lives, splices us from the present. Its physicality is startling, though the scene may only partially be reconstructed; a face, a laugh, a tablecloth bloodied with wine.
Paris-London. I came home, sore-footed, to a midnight tea, raspberries, oatcakes and a last, nostalgic gauloise for the life I have left behind, and curled up in front of an episode of Nigel Slater's A Taste of My life with Nigella Lawson. I think would be somewhat exposing to wax lyrical and throw superlatives around irresponsibly, but for the full half hour I was grinning like a fool, sharing a somewhat artificial intimacy with two people who are for me - and this, worryingly, is not empty rhetoric - demigods; watching them eating, talking, laughing together in gluttonous abandon. Two of the three recipes that follow are in homage to these two cooks (somewhat amusingly close in their nomenclature), whose recipes and writings are so intimately bound to the living history of this family.
Spiced Carrot and Tahini Soup
1kg organic carrots
1 onion, finely chopped
scattering of coriander seeds
palmful allspice berries
2 dried chillies, crushed
2tbsp tahini
1 litre stock
toasted sesame seeds
1 tbsp flavourless oil, such as rapeseed
1 lemon, halved (optional)
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Toast the coriander and allspice in a dry non-stick pan, then grind in a pestle and mortar. In a deep casserole, gently fry the onion, coriander, allspice and chilli in the rapeseed oil for 10-15 minutes over a low heat, until all is fragrant and the onion is a light gold. Whilst the onion is cooking, grate the peeled carrots in a food processor, or, if you're feeling masochistic, by hand. Tip the carrots into the onions, and fry for a further minute. Pour in the vegetable stock, bring to the boil, season with salt and pepper and simmer for 20-25 mins. With a handheld blender, blend the soup until reasonably smooth, and check for seasoning. A spritz of lemon may do the trick. Serve in deep bowls, garnished with the sesame seeds. Some warmed flatbread on the side, rubbed with olive oil, would be just about perfect here.
Nigel Slater's Pot-roast Pheasant with Celery and Sage
This is superlative with a simple wild rice pilaf, prepared with lemon zest and scattered with toasted pine nuts. A rocket salad for afters - perhaps with a parmesan dressing - would be just the thing to mop up the gamey juices from the plate.
a pheasant - plump and oven-ready
butter - 2 thick slices (80g)
garlic - 4 large, juicy cloves
celery - 3 large stalks and a few leaves
(new potatoes - 12 smallish - if not serving with the pilaf above)
sage - 6 decent-sized leaves
white vermouth such as Noilly Prat - 250ml
Set the oven at 180C/Gas 4. Wipe the pheasant and remove any stray feathers, then season it thoroughly with salt and pepper. Melt half the butter in a deep casserole, one to which you have a lid. You want it hot enough to brown the bird but not so hot that it burns too quickly. Put the bird in the butter, letting it colour heartily on all sides. Whilst the bird is colouring in the butter, you can peel the garlic, trim the celery and cut it into short (2cm) lengths, (wash the potatoes and either halve them or slice them thickly, depending on their size). When the skin is a rich gold, remove the bird, pour away the butter and wipe the pan with kitchen paper (the trick is to wipe away any burned butter but to leave any sticky goo stuck to the pan). Melt the remaining butter (and add the potatoes, letting them colour lightly). Then introduce the garlic, celery pieces and the sage and celery leaves and season with salt and pepper. Pour over the vermouth, bring to the boil, letting it bubble for a minute or two, then return the bird and any escaped juices to the pan. Cover with a lid and transer to the oven for thirty-five to forty minutes. Remove the pan from the oven, take off the lid and gently split the bird's legs away from its body, nicking the skin with a knife as you go. Return the bird, legs akimbo and without a lid, to the oven for five minutes. Remove the legs, then remove each breast in one piece. Put a leg and a breast on each of two warm plates, then divide up the potatoes, celery and their juices.
Parmesan Biscuits with Sesame and Nigella Seeds
The prime reason for loitering in
Baker&Spice, though the French are far more fluent in the art of free
dégustation. If you make them yourself it's the cook's birthright to cheekily taste (or scoff) these golden discs fresh from the oven...
makes 40-50 biscuits
335g plain flour
300g 24-month aged parmesan, freshly grated
300g unsalted butter, chilled
1/3 tsp cayenne pepper
1 1/2 tsp maldon salt, ground fine
1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
1-2 tbsp cold bottled spring water
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 tbsp sesame seeds
2 tbsp black onion seeds (nigella seeds)
Put the flour, freshly grated Parmesan and chilled diced butter in a food processor with the cayenne, salt and black pepper. Whiz to a crumb, then slowly add the cold water through the feeder tube until the dough forms into a ball. Scrape out on to a lightly floured surface and roll into a cylinder. You will cut the biscuits from this, so size the roll accordingly. Cling-wrap tightly and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight. Brush the cylinder with the beaten egg and roll in the sesame and nigella seeds to coat all over. Wrap and chill for a further hour. Preheat the oven o 180C. Cut the cylinder into 5mm slices and lay these on non-stick baking trays, leaving at least 2cm space around them. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Orangette's post from 6/11/2006 has a recipe for
cheddar crisps which looks absolutely heavenly as well.
"In fact, I was slightly embarrassed when I wrote How to Eat. People would say something about it and I would say, Oh, it's just a food book. Somehow I felt it it didn't quite count. My father and my brother were political brains... and I ended up writing about egg whites. And yet - food is life." - Nigella Lawson
