The Aubergine Dilemma

Aubergines are beautiful, with that deep purple colour, and those alluring curves. Whether they’re smooth, ridged, round or elongated, they’re gorgeous. And when you cook with them they add a luscious richness that’s unlike anything else. But have you ever cooked a recipe that starts by frying aubergine slices? I’ve tried them on numerous occasions. No matter how carefully I follow the instructions, I always seem to end up with a kitchen full of smoke, a burnt fat smell that lingers for days, and aubergine that’s soaked up pints of oil and usually releases it later so that the final parmigiana or moussaka ends up swimming in oil. Not to mention the cost of using half a bottle of olive oil to fry your aubergines.

The first solution I tried was a technique that Marcella Hazan uses in a wonderful pasta sauce that combines aubergines with red and yellow pepper. She very lightly sautées the aubergine, then adds just a little liquid, covers the pan, and allows it to steam until it’s fully cooked. It works very well in that context, but for some dishes, like parmigiana di melanzane, it somehow allows the acid notes to express themselves too strongly, and isn’t quite rich enough.

The method I use now came from Paula Wolfert. I slice the aubergine about 1cm, or just under ½” thick, brush the slices with olive oil, on both sides (you can be as generous or as stingy as you like with the oil – I prefer to be fairly generous). Put the slices on a baking tray, and cook at 220°C/430°F for 25 minutes, turning the slices over half way through.

For recipes like parmigiana di melanzane, where the slices are usually coated in breadcrumbs, it works perfectly well to sprinkle a few breadcrumbs over the slices as you put the dish together. By the time they’ve been coated in tomato sauce and baked, it doesn’t make too much difference whether the breadcrumbs were initially cooked with the aubergine or not.

You can use the baked slices in parmigiana, moussaka, etc, or drizzle them with a bit more olive oil and add them to your antipasti; with, or without, some good mozarella.

Sauerkraut

After the exotic pomegranate, a cabbage seems rather homely, but actually, I eat a lot more cabbage than I do pomegranate. By next summer I’ll be more than happy to abandon cabbage for a few months, but now, after my summer break from it, I’m pleased to see it again.

Most often, I just slice the cabbage and sweat it in butter and a very little water, with some seeds (usually carraway), salt and pepper. There are other options, but this one is the standard for red, white or savoy cabbage.

Today I’m replenishing my depleted supplies of sauerkraut. Sauerkraut is cabbage that’s pickled by fermenting the sugars in the cabbage into lactic acid. People have been making sauerkraut for a very long time. Apparently it originated in China and was brought to Europe by the Tartars. It’s taken such hold in Northern Europe that it’s practically become German. It certainly goes very well with German sausages. In the 18th century, Captain Cook loaded thousands of pounds of sauerkraut onto his ships to ward off scurvy on long voyages.

The bacteria that are needed to work the transformation into sauerkraut are already present on the cabbage, but if you’re worried that the wrong sort of biological activity will start in your cabbage, you can tilt the odds in your favour by adding a little bit of whey (the liquid that separates out from yoghurt will work). The salt in the recipe is not only for flavour, but also helps to make conditions more favourable for the kind of bacteria you want to encourage.

Either white or red cabbage will work. Slice the cabbage finely by hand, or use a food processor. Put it in a large bowl, add 1 tsp salt per pound/500g (or about 1% by weight), then add your seasoning. Caraway is my favourite here, as well: it just goes very well with cabbage. Bruise the cabbage thoroughly using a large pestle, or the end of a rolling pin and let it sit for a few minutes to bring out some of the juices.  Put the cabbage into preserving jars, pressing it down firmly. The jars need to have spring catches, not screw tops, so they don’t burst during the fermentation. If you really pack it down with your knuckles, you’ll get a lot more in each jar than you’d expect. I prefer to use 500ml/one pint jars rather than very large ones, so that I don’t have an opened jar around for ages. Keep the jars at room temperature for about a week, then move them to somewhere cooler. The sauerkraut will be ready to eat after about a month, but will keep for a year – until it’s time to make it again.

Sauerkraut can be eaten raw, or cooked, either briefly, or braised for a long time. You can rinse it if you want to reduce the saltiness and acidity. As usual, the traditional food combinations work well: sausages or corned beef go well. And don’t forget the wonderful Reubens: make a toasted sandwich with corned beef, sauerkraut, mayonnaise and cheese.

The Pomegranate is Here

The supermarket had pomegranates again yesterday! Their season is from now until January, so they haven’t been around for a few months. There’s something seductive about pomegranates. The myths and symbolism seem stronger than for other foods. I know about the temptation in the Garden of Eden, but I don’t think about it every time I see an apple. Somehow pomegranates keep their air of ancient mystery even when you can buy them in the supermarket.

I have childhood memories of picking out the grains with a pin (I’m not sure why, because these days they seem to come out perfectly easily without any pins being needed), and of the wonderful melograno bath oil from the Farmacia Santa Maria Novella in Florence, but there are more evocative images lingering in the air too, of the story of Persephone being kidnapped and taken to the Underworld by Pluto. The Fates decreed that she could not return if she had eaten any food, and she had eaten a few pomegranate seeds during her time in the Underworld, so a compromise was made allowing her to return to Earth for half of the year, and spend the other half in the Underworld (the proportions of time in each place vary in different versions of the story). During Persephone’s time in the Underworld, her mother, Ceres, goddess of agriculture, mourns, and the Earth is barren, apart from the pomegranate, the fruit of the Underworld.

It’s hard to resist the lure of such a fruit, but it’s not immediately obvious what to do with it when you get it home. A few seeds sprinkled on some Greek yoghurt are good, but there must be more than that!

One popular use is as a garnish for a warm salad of one of the richer meats, such as slow-roast lamb shoulder, or confit duck leg. Henry Harris makes a delicious version with a dressing of grated ginger, lemon, olive oil and poppy seeds, served with confit duck leg, with spring onions, walnuts, coriander, and a good scattering of pomegranate seeds. That combination of olive oil dressing, walnuts and pomegranates is very good.

Pomegranates originated in the Middle East, and are found in dishes all around that area. Paula Wolfert’s The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean has several examples: with summer savory salad; with grilled red pepper strips and cumin; in a hot and sweet red pepper dip with walnuts… and even more recipes that use pomegranate molasses. There’s a delicious one where chicken breasts are stuffed with mozzarella and roasted with a glaze of pomegranate molasses.

That should be enough to keep me going until they disappear in the new year.

Mushroom Catsup

I’m staying with the old English recipes this week. Today I started a batch of mushroom catsup, following Eliza Acton’s eloquent directions.

“One of the very best and most useful of store sauces is good home-made mushroom catsup, which, if really well prepared, imparts an agreeable flavour to any soup or sauce with which it is mingled, and at the same time heightens the colour without imparting the ‘bitter sweetness’ which the burnt sugar used as ‘browning’ in clumsy cookery so often does. The catsup ought, in fact, to be rather the pure essence of mushrooms, made with so much salt and spice only as are required to preserve it for a year or longer, than the compound of mushroom-juice, anchovies, shallots, allspice, and other condiments of which it is commonly composed, especially for sale.”

The word “catsup” isn’t much used in England these days, and the alternative version, “ketchup” is generally only used for the tomato flavoured condiment. Mushroom catsup is strongly flavoured and salty: more akin to soy sauce or Worcester sauce than to tomato ketchup. I looked it up in an online etymological dictionary:

ketchup

1711, from Malay kichap, from Chinese (Amoy dial.) koechiap “brine of fish.” Catsup (earlier catchup) is a failed attempt at Anglicization, still in use in U.S. Originally a fish sauce, early English recipes included among their ingredients mushrooms, walnuts, cucumbers, and oysters. Modern form of the sauce began to emerge when U.S. seamen added tomatoes.

I made some mushroom catsup a couple of years ago, and we’ve just used the last of it, so I picked up a couple of kilos of mushrooms from the farmers market this morning, and have just broken them into bits and salted them. Eliza Acton specifies 3/4 lb salt for 2 gallons of mushrooms. At that time, an English pint was 16 fl. oz, like the current American pint, not 20 fl. oz. like the British Imperial pint, so her 2 gallons is about 7 litres. My two kilos of mushrooms came a bit short of filling a 2 litre bucket, so I decided to stick with her quantities, and used 350g salt. The mushrooms will sit for three days, being stirred occasionally, then be simmered gently for fifteen to twenty minutes. The liquid is to be strained off without pressing , and boiled until it is reduced by half. Then, for every quart of liquid (about a litre) add ½oz (15g) black pepper, a drachm (5g) of mace (¼ tsp cayenne may be used instead of the black pepper). Store it in a cool place overnight, then pour it into bottles, leaving the sediment, and seal the bottles.

Apparently a second grade of catsup can be made by sqeezing the mushrooms, and mixing the squeezed juice with the sediment from the first batch. This second pressing should be more highly seasoned, using cloves, pepper, allspice and ginger.

I use the catsup for flavouring soups, stews and sauces – in the way you might use Worcester sauce, though it has a subtler flavour. It’s one of those things that sounds pretty recherché, but once you get used to having it around, you don’t like to do without it.

Update: 2 kg (4½ lb) of mushrooms produced about 1 litre (2 US pints) of liquid, which I boiled down to half a litre, so I added ¼ oz (7g) pepper and 3g mace. There was quite a lot of sediment, so I ended up with about 250 ml of catsup.

If you want to make a single 100 ml bottle of catsup, you’d need about 1 kg/2 lb mushrooms; 6 oz/170g salt; 2 tsp pepper and ½ tsp mace.

A Very English Pie

There’s a long  history of meat pies in England. Back in the eighteenth century, the pastry case was thick and hard, and was just there to seal the meat in, not to be eaten. The pies would be boxed up to send to relatives in other parts of the country, or to send out to sea. In country houses, a more refined version gave a way  to preserve highly perishable pork for a few weeks in the days before refrigeration.

The first pork pie I made was based on the recipe by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the River Cottage Meat book. One of the things I enjoy in cookery books is reading about the stories behind the food, so I always felt a bit cheated that rather than being a long-standing family favourite, he claimed this recipe came from his BBC research team. Since then I’ve found variations on the theme in Jane Grigson’s English Food, Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families, and Florence White’s Good Things in England. They’re all good – any of them will produce a pie that tastes much better than 99% of bought ones.

The basic idea is the same in all of them. The quantities here are enough to make a 20cm/8″ pie, using a loose-bottomed cake tin. If you don’t like pastry, or don’t want to make it, you can bake the same kind of filling in a loaf tin for a French-style terrine.

A day or two before you assemble the pie, make the jelly:
One or two pig’s trotter
A carrot, chopped into chunks
An onion, peeled and chopped into chunks
A bouquet garni

Everything in a pan and cover with  about 3 l/6 US pints of cold water. Simmer gently for several hours, then strain off the liquid into a clean pan and boil down to about 500ml/1 US pint.

Make the pie a day before you want to eat it.

Hot Water Pastry:
200 ml water
100g lard
100g butter
550g plain flour
2 eggs
1/2 tsp salt

Put the lard and butter in a saucepan with the water, and warm it until the fat is melted. While it is warming, put the flour and salt in a bowl, roughly mix in the eggs, then add the warm water and melted fat. Stir it all together, by hand, or with a mixer, to form a smooth dough.

Preheat the oven to 180°C, 350°F.

While the dough cools, prepare the pie filling:
1 kg pork shoulder
250g pork belly
250g streaky bacon (the bacon cure keeps the filling pink rather than going grey when it cooks)
20 sage leaves, finely chopped
leaves from 3 sprigs thyme, chopped
½ tsp anchovy essence
½ tsp each mace, nutmeg, allspice, black pepper, white pepper
salt

An egg for glazing

Chop the lean parts of the pork shoulder into 6mm/¼” dice. Put any fatty bits, together with the pork belly, and the bacon, through the coarse blades of a mincer.

Mix the meat and seasonings together.

Cut off a quarter of the pastry to make the lid for the pie. Roll out the bigger piece to about 8mm/ 1/3″ thick. Line the cake tin with the pastry. Put the filling into the case. Roll out the lid and put it on top of the pie, crimping the edges to seal it. It doesn’t matter if the pastry is quite thick at the join. Make a small hole in the centre of the lid, so that you can pour the jelly in later.

Traditionally, English sweet pies were not decorated, but savoury ones could be quite ornate, so you can use any pastry trimmings to make leaves, flowers, acorns, or whatever suits your fancy.

Brush the top of the pie with beaten egg, and put it in the oven. After half an hour, turn the temperature down to 160°C/325°F and leave it for another 1¼ hours. Take the pie out of the oven, remove the case, brush the top and sides with egg, and return it to the oven for another quarter of an hour.

When the pie has cooled a little, warm the jelly just enough to make it liquid, and use a small funnel to pour it into the pie through the hole in the lid. Leave the pie overnight to cool completely before you cut it.

The one I made today had a mixture of chicken and pork. Leftover turkey could find a good home in this kind of pie too. All kinds of poultry and game have appeared in various versions over the years.

Local and Seasonal?

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the idea of eating local and seasonal food. It appeals to the romantic and the purist in me. But I live in England, and while I enjoy some root vegetables and wintery stews, I don’t want to eat quite that much cabbage, or deprive myself of the lemons, spices and various other imports that brighten the winter months. I’ve always had a suspicion that the whole idea was invented by someone living in a place like California or Southern Italy.

Still, following the seasons does give a new appreciation for each food as it appears after its seasonal absence. I love broad beans, but I’m convinced that a good part of their appeal is that they’re only around for a few weeks of early summer. I can buy strawberries all year round, but the English summer fruits taste quite different from the imported winter ones. On the whole, I get more pleasure from my food if I avoid the watery winter berries.

Part of the romantic appeal of seasonality is that it evokes images of being in tune with nature and the seasons. Most of us these days don’t grow much of our own food. In fact the farmers’ market is the closest I usually get to the land! So it was a special treat this week to have some truly fresh food grown by my nephew and his gardening partner. Their offering nicely captured both sides of the local and seasonal question. This is England, we haven’t had the greatest summer this year, so not all of their crops thrived. They brought us carrots, onions, and the last of this season’s runner beans. Nothing exotic or flashy, but carefully grown, and eaten within hours of being picked. Even beyond the increasingly rare delight of carrots that taste of carrot, there’s a particular atavistic pleasure from food that’s grown, harvested, cooked by and eaten with family and friends.

Plus ça change…

“It cannot be denied that an improved system of practical domestic cookery, and a better knowledge of its first principles, are still much needed in this country,” said Eliza Acton, writing in 1845. That (and the fact that her publisher turned down the book of poems she’d written, and said he’d prefer a cookery book) was what prompted Acton to write Modern Cookery for Private Families. The statement is probably just as true today as it was when she wrote it, but these days every book shop food section bulges with more cookery books than one person could ever use in a lifetime. The reluctant cook has a seemingly limitless supply of restaurants to choose from, and there are ready made meals to reheat for a night at home. So why is Eliza Acton’s book still in print?

The recipes are good. They’re thoroughly tested, clearly written, and they work. Not all modern books can say the same. But that’s probably not enough to earn a 160 year old book a place on your kitchen shelf. I think that what keeps the book alive is that when you read these recipes, you want to read them aloud. Eliza Acton may not have been a great poet, but she wrote prose that just begs to be spoken. Her recipes are as satisfying to read as they are to cook and to eat.

It’s easy to get the impression of a maiden aunt kind of figure: very organised, precise, and respectable. But Miss Acton does have a somewhat racy past. It seems that not only did she write poetry, but she spent much of her youth in France, where she was engaged to a young French officer. The engagement was broken off when she found out that he had been unfaithful, but there were rumours that she had a daughter by him, who was brought up by one of her sisters.

Here’s one of her steak pudding recipes. You can make this with packet suet from the supermarket, but it will be incomparably lighter and better tasting if you get some fresh suet. I’ve found that farmers’ markets or farm shops are the places you’re most likely to find it.

SMALL BEEF-STEAK PUDDING
Make into a very firm smooth paste, one pound of flour, six ounces of beef-suet finely minced, half a teaspoonful of salt, and half a pint of cold water. Line with this a basin which holds a pint and a half. Season a pound of tender steak, free from bone and skin, with half an ounce of salt and half a teaspoonful of pepper well mixed together; lay it in the crust, pour in a quarter of a pint of water, roll out the core, close the pudding carefully, tie a floured cloth over, and boil it for three hours and a half. We give this receipt in addition to the preceding one, as an exact guide for the proportions of meat puddings in general.
Flour, 1 lb.; suet, 6 oz.; salt, ½ teaspoonful; water ½ pint; rumpsteak, 1 lb.; salt, ½ oz.; pepper ½ teaspoonful; water, ¼ pint; 3½ hours.

The idea of summarising the recipe at the end was a novel one, introduced by Eliza Acton. A few years later, Isabella Beeton copied the idea, but moved the list to the start of the recipe, setting the format that’s in more or less universal use today.