Recipe: Chicken with Porcini & Marsala

Who could resist this combination? The seductively earthy tones of porcini, along with Marsala, in all its rich complexity. In Italy, a standard chicken from the local Polleria will have enough flavour to do justice to the dish - but I suspect that in the UK you'll need to shell out for a free-range bird if you want something with sufficient flavour to punch in the same weight as the other ingredients here. The recipe is very straightforward, good enough for a dinner party, and robust enough that you can do the entire thing in advance, and just reheat gently when the time comes to serve it. Since there's a lot going on in this particular dish, then I think it goes best with a vegetable which is plain but good - broccoli, for example, or green beans (something which has a slight crunch to it)

For Four:

Ingredients: 1 Chicken, cut into eight pieces; 3/4 Cup of dried Porcini; 1 oz Butter; 1 tablespoon Olive Oil; 1 medium White Onion, finely chopped; Seasoning; 1/2 Cup of Flour; 3 fl oz Marsala.

Method:

1. Put the Porcini in a heat-proof bowl, cover them with about a pint of boiling water, and leave to steep for twenty minutes or so. After they have soaked for the appropriate time, drain the Porcini through a sieve held over another bowl, to catch the soaking liquid; rinse the Porcini under running water to remove any grit, then chop finely on a board. Place a piece of kitchen paper in the sieve and filter the soaking liquid through it into another bowl or jug, and reserve to use later.

2. Over medium-high heat, melt the Butter with the Oil in a heavy casserole (one that has a lid). Roll the Chicken pieces in Flour, and put them in one layer in the casserole. After two or three minutes - by which time they will have browned on the underside - turn them over, and sprinkle them with the chopped Onion, and add appropriate seasoning. Lightly stir the Onion in, as the underside of the Chicken pieces brown in turn.

3. After a couple of minutes more, add the chopped Porcini, and the Marsala. Let the Marsala bubble slightly in the heat, and stir everything together. Pour over about half of the Porcini soaking liquid (discard the rest, once the recipe is completed), and once the liquid is bubbling, turn the heat down to low and place the lid on the casserole.

4. Leave to cook for fifty minutes or so, by which time the Chicken will be very tender. Check from time to time to see that the casserole is not dry (I find it isn't, but it will depend on the fit of the lid and pan you're using); if it needs more liquid, then add some more of the reserved Porcni soaking liquid.

5. just before serving, lift the Chicken pieces out onto heated serving plates, and pour the cooking juices into a fat strainer; leaving the fat in the strainer, pour the 'sauce' into a small saucepan, and reduce for a minute or so over high heat - you just need a spoonful or so of sauce for each serving - then divide the sauce between the Chicken pieces and serve.

Riga...

...on a Friday night, is enough to make one feel ashamed of being British!

I hadn’t before been aware of its reputation as a booze-fuelled mecca for stag-night parties from the UK…..but that is definitely what it has become. The combination of cheap flights and cheap alcohol means that the streets of Old Riga at weekends are given over to groups of blobby-looking Brits – youths for the most part, although some hen parties are in evidence as well – who are clearly out to get as wasted as they can manage in as short a time as possible. Already by eight in the evening, some of them can be seen weaving unsteadily around the cobbled streets, clearly the worse for wear.
And equally depressing is the idea that presumably one from amongst each of these groups of nerdish-looking lumps is the object of somebody’s affection, and is about to walk – or weave? – their way up the aisle as somebody’s lifetime commitment. Yes, I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that inside each of these deeply unattractive individuals is probably a truly beautiful person – but then, if they are truly beautiful people, what are they doing behaving in quite such an unattractive way?

The power of the stag-night pound has shaped business development in the Old Town such that by late evening, as night is eventually falling, as one walks through the winding little streets, past medieval architectural gems, the incongruous scent in the air is that of the serious party-goer’s friend: kebabs.

What makes it worse is that it’s easy to see what Riga has been and might be again. The town is deeply charming – if a little self-consciously so at times – and the centre of the town is an amalgam of the prettiest elements of Stockholm and Amsterdam, with the occasional example of Russian Neo-classicism thrown in for good measure. The northern sky is striking – going on for ever and ever - and the view of the town alongside the expanse of the river revives dim memories of the Hanseatic League and Riga’s historic importance in centuries past as a major trading port. The low skyline, frequently pierced by domes and spires, is straight from the stories of the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen – slightly marred by only one Stalinist profile, soaring skywards, as an inescapable reminder of Latvia’s more recent unfortunate history. The people here refer often to ‘The Occupation’, and memories of that period and all that it meant are clearly never far from the surface. More than one person I’ve spoken to has expressed concern about Russia’s current intentions and whether the Latvians might once again be on the receiving end of Russian aggression – they see it as a real and worrying threat. People are nervous of Russia flexing its military muscle – and you can understand why they might be…

I tried, and signally failed, to find anywhere to eat in the Old Town that was serving properly traditional Latvian food. Presumably, all the old businesses disappeared during the long period of Russian occupation – and when the Russians left, the newly liberated taste was resolutely for things Western……with all the worst that that means in the shape of McDonalds and TGI Fridays. In the end I made do with a steak house on the Royal Square, where I sat and drank German Beer, and quietly revelled in the fact that it was the first time this year I’d dined al fresco, and in the fact that although it was well past nine o’clock in the evening, daylight was only now just starting to fade from the cloudless sky. I would have stayed longer, except that a group of blobbies materialised at the table behind me and started calling raucously for multiple bottles of Veuve Cliquot. Time to go…

Tonight’s dinner:

Spaghetti alla Carbonara
Scaloppini with Cream and Orange Sauce; Braised Fennel

Pear Clafouti

Recipe: Blanquette of Lamb

Probably for ever, whiteness has been associated - in food, at least - with elegance, refinement, and luxury. White sugar and white bread in more modern times, white asparagus and white chicory before them, and all in unbroken descent from the blancmanges, syllabubs and marzipan creations of medieval and renaissance ages. I suppose the process of whitening food has always been associated in some way with removing the natural 'impurities' - although increasingly these days there would be schools of thought that go entirely in the opposite direction, and favour instead leaving the 'natural goodness' in (hence their equally baseless and irrational faith in brown eggs, wholemeal bread, and 'natural' pulses).

I've always thought of blanquettes as falling within this cultural tradition - not least from my belief that they invariably involved a stage of blanching in order to remove 'impurities' from the meat before the actual process of cooking was started. It appears not, though. In Larousse Gastronomique, mention is made of blanquettes of - amongst other things- fish, which would certainly not stand up well to the sort of blanching process one finds with blanquette de veau; LG places blanquettes very definitely at the 'refined' end of gastronomy, which fits with the earlier associations of white food with perceived luxury, but seems to accept that a blanquette is essentially a poached preparation of any white foodstuff, which is then served in a thick white sauce. I'm not entirely convinced that this isn't the sort of bastardisation of the language which should be treated with great caution - shades of the etymological slippage of things being cooked 'a la nage' (adjective) instead of being cooked 'in a nage' (which is, in fact, a non-existent noun) , which is designed particularly to make the Technical Department's hackles rise. However, I suppose at a certain point one needs to clamber free of the language and just get on with the cooking....

The success of this recipe depends entirely on the sauce. It is into this that all that wonderful flavour has gone during the cooking, and for the dish to work, you must make sure that the sauce is good and thick, and will coat the pieces of meat well - if your sauce just sits on the plate in a dispirited puddle, I'm afraid you've wasted your efforts!

For 4-6.

Ingredients: 2.5 lbs Lamb (leg or shoulder, removed from the bone and cut into 1" cubes); 2 pints Chicken Stock; 1 teaspoon Salt; 1 large Onion (studded with a clove); 2 Carrots; 1 Leek; 1 Bouquet Garni; 12 Button Onions; 12 Button Mushrooms; 3 oz Butter; juice from one Lemon; 2 tablespoons of Flour; 2 Egg Yolks; 4 fl oz Cream.

Method:

1. Soak the pieces of Lamb overnight in water that has been acidulated with a little lemon juice (this is actually an optional step - soaking will leach the blood from the meat which will give you a whiter end result, and will make the flavour of the meat milder; if these two things don't bother you and you're in a hurry, go straight to step 2) . Drain the Lamb pieces and rinse them.

2. Place the Lamb pieces in a deep casserole; pour in enough stock to cover, then season with Salt & Ground Pepper and bring to the boil on the stove. Be ready to skim away any scum which rises to the surface with a slotted spoon, just as you would when making stock. Add the Onion, Carrots, Leek, and Bouquet Garni. Place the lid on the casserole and simmer for one and a half hours.

3. Bring a small pan of water to the boil, and blanch the Button Onions for three or four minutes until softened but still firm. Drain and put to one side

4. In a small sauté pan, melt 1 oz of the Butter, then squeeze in the juice from half the Lemon and simmer the Button Mushrooms in this mixture until lightly coloured. Put to one side.

5. As the Lamb finishes cooking, make a roux in a double boiler or zimmertopf: melt the remaining 2 oz of Butter; stir in the Flour, to make a paste; add 1 pint of the cooking liquid from the Lamb, and stir until everything is well amalgamated; leave to simmer for fifteen minutes or so, stirring from time to time, to ensure it thickens evenly; finally, off the heat, stir in the egg yolks, cream, and remaining Lemon Juice.

6. Drain the Lamb of ites remaining cooking liquid, and either clean the casserole before returning the lamb pieces to it, or else put them into an unused casserole. Strain the sauce over the meat, and add the Button Onions and Button Mushrooms. Stir to mix thoroughly, and keep warm in a 100 degree C oven, with the lid on the casserole, until ready to serve. Before serving, taste and adjust seasoning as appropriate.

Marzipan.....

On reflection, I would definitely have to include Almonds in my Desert Island 'Eight Top Foodstuffs'. Increasingly, I find they feature in my cooking: roast with paprika and coarse salt, to serve with aperitifs; slivered and sprinkled between sheets of phyllo pastry when making tart shells (the almonds give a good crunch to the shell, and the flavour of almonds goes with absolutely everything, from cheese to chocolate to shellfish...) ; as the basis for praline, and every dessert that stems from that; and increasingly, as the predominant ingredient within marzipan, which is creeping ever more frequently into my kitchen, these days - most recently, as the secret layer of extra flavour concealed within rich fruit cake. Marzipan combines particularly well with fruit of any kind, and for years I've been using discs of the stuff as the base for a simple apple tart, where the marriage of the concentrated flavour of slices of roast apple with the intense almond sweetness of marzipan is incomparable!

It's one of the few foodstuffs that can readily be traced back effectively unchanged for the last millenium, so it certainly presses all the buttons concerned with 'food from times past' that so often give particular foodstuffs or finished dishes that extra element of travel-through-time and connection with other ages . Certainly, as far back as the end of the fifteenth century, it is possible in european writing to find references to marzipan as an element in most banquets and lavish feasts, where it tended to be used in its basic form, but transformed three-dimensionally into fantastic reliefs or sculptures, to be marvelled at before being eaten. Not only is it delicious, but it lends itself to being used as a kind of modelling clay, and the awe-inspiring creations from sixteenth century banquets survive today in a simplified form as marzipan sweets, shaped and painted with food-colouring to look like pieces of fruit, or in other more unfortunately kitsch 'works of art' .

Frustratingly, the origins of the stuff are impossible to pin down, and - depending on your preferred reference source - it came originally either from Persia, or from China, or from the Arabs. Take your pick. There appear to be references to something like marzipan being around in Toledo, in the tenth or eleventh centuries - when Spain was firmly in the control of the Moors - so that would tie in with an Arab provenance, maybe.....The Romans definitely didn't have marzipan - we can state this both on the basis of the roman food writers whom we are still able to consult, but more fundamentally because they couldn't have had marzipan, since they didn't have refined sugar (but relied instead on honey as a sweetening agent in cooking). That last point rather begs the question about when refined sugar itself first appeared, and this again is a rather vague area of knowledge - the OED first cites references in English to refined sugar at the start of the fifteenth century, although the Arabs, at some point between the eighth and twelfth centuries A.D., appear to have imported the knowledge of the process of refining sugar from India, where the practice can be dated back to the eighth century B.C. So, again, the idea of marzipan first having appeared in Europe in tenth century Spain is entirely possible.
And frankly, for the purposes of 'did you know?' dinner table conversation, that's probably quite sufficient for our needs....

In trying to track down its earliest manifestation, though, I was fascinated to come across a reference from Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C (he of the famous oath) which was for a cough cure, in which all sorts of beneficial (but not necessarily delicious) things were wrapped inside a coating made from pounded almonds combined with honey. Who would have thought that the spoonful of sugar had been helping the medicine to go down all that time ago.....or that Mary Poppins was only one stage removed from Classical Greece!

Tonight's Dinner:

Gorgonzola and Cherry Tomato Tarts, in Puff Pastry Shells.

Blanquette d'Agneau; steamed Purple-Sprouting Broccoli.

Baked Apples, with Hazelnut-Ratafia stuffing

Recipe: Excellent Fruit Cake

I've been exploring fruit cake recipes recently, in search of the wonderfully moist and fruit-laden version that I remember from my childhood. To my surprise, actual recipes are a little thin on the ground, and I've found I've had to cast my net quite wide. I found one flourless version from New Zealand which involved soaking all the fruit in quantities of Orange Juice, and which emerged from the oven looking like a large muesli bar (although, to be fair, it tasted better than it looked) ; another one which included vast amounts of demerara sugar, and which used mincemeat rather than dried fruit - the end result was light and delicious, but was consumed in its entirety in twenty minutes flat! There was a recipe from the Scottish Tourist Board which - rather pointlessly, I thought - included a couple of tablespoons of whisky, and the end result was good, but somehow a little two-dimensional. And then, there's this one. Seriously delicious - and with the unexpected bonus of a layer of white marzipan in the centre, which really kicks the whole thing up into a class of its own....

One of the problems I have with these cakes is the patience required to let them mature sufficiently in order to do themselves justice. This one really does need three days minimum - if you broach it any earlier, then the cherries are somehow just cloyingly sweet, and the cake itself hasn't yet acquired the general moistness that a good fruit cake should have. Leave it for three days, though, and it is stellar!

Makes one cake, 8" in diameter.

Ingredients:8 oz Plain Flour; 1.5 teaspoons of Baking Powder; 6 oz unsalted Butter; 6oz Muscovado Sugar; 4 Eggs; 2 oz Ground Almonds; 12oz mixed Dried Fruit; 4 oz halved Glacé Cherries; 1.5 tablespoons Milk; 8 oz White Marzipan; 1.5 oz Flaked Almonds.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 180 degrees C.

2. Sift the Flour with the Baking Powder, and put to one side.

3. With a hand beater, cream the Butter with the Sugar, then beat in the Eggs, one by one. With each of the last two Eggs add a tablespoon of sifted Flour.

4. Fold into the creamed mixture the Flour & Baking Powder, along with the Ground Almonds.

5. Into this mixture, fold the Dried Fruit and Cherries, then mix in the Milk. It should be the right consistency just to drop gently from an upturned spoon.

6. Grease an 8" false-bottomed cake tin, and spoon half of the cake mixture into the tin. Roll the Marzipan into a circle the same diameter as the tin, and place it on the cake mixture in the tin; spoon the remainder of the mixture over the top and sprinkle the surface with the Flaked Almonds.

7. Bake half an hour in the pre-heated oven, then reduce the temperature to 170 degrees C, and bake for a further hour and a half.

After removing from the oven, leave it to cool completely, then turn it out and keep it in an airtight container for three days before cutting into it.

Enjoy - it is sensational!

It's a Sad Fact...

....but, when it comes to the British National Cuisine, there isn't in practice a great deal to write home about. I've always been aware, to a degree, of this fact - but I suppose some innate sense of patriotism has generally dredged up happy memories of the delicious Jugged Hare or Spotted Dick that used to be served in days of old in The Hungry Horse in Fulham Road, and I would persuade myself that these were just the tip of a gastronomic iceberg, and that a cornucopia of mouth-watering regional delicacies exists just out of sight ...........all that's needed is a bit of effort to remember exactly what they all are.

Well.......not so, it seems. Not really.

Over the past few days, I've been picking at an intriguing volume that the Brancolis dropped off when they came for dinner at the weekend, called The Taste of Britain. At first, I couldn't quite get to grips with it: encyclopaedic lists of regional food specialities, interspersed very occasionally with a recipe from one or other of the usual celeb-chef suspects: I noticed input on this basis from, amongst others, Gordon Ramsay, Rose Prince, and even Galton Blackiston. The main body of the text, though, stops short of recipes, and is frankly pretty dry stuff - nothing of the personality of Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food shines through, or the practical and informative treasure trove that is Larousse Gastronomique. Without wanting to be too damning, picking through its pages is a little like discovering a gastro-version of the phone directory, and I couldn't fathom why anybody had actually bothered to produce it in the first place.

So, I dug a little further, and was rewarded in my search. It transpires that the origin of the book was a Brussels-inspired project early in the nineties, the point of which was to list all regional culinary specialities within the EU - and one can only assume that this in turn was to provide a basis on which regional trademarks could be awarded in order to protect against slippage and copying from opportunistic manufacturers elsewhere across the continent. Shades of Parmesan from Parma, Champagne from Champagne, and Cheddar from....well....Cheddar. All well and good, and I can imagine that the French and Italian equivalents of the same thing are bursting with references to Cognac and Limoncello and Mortadella and Paris-Brest ...and I'm really getting quite hungry just thinking about it.

The problem with this version of the British list - tarted-up with an introduction by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and the aforementioned media-kitchen-luvvies - is that one can sense the effort the authors have had to go to in order to cobble the whole thing together. For starters, they've included a whole lot of 'regional specialities' which I suspect would be fair game for pretty much any country within Europe: Gulls Eggs, for instance, and Blackberries. I had no idea that blackberries were an exclusively British thing, and those gulls had better be travelling on passports issued by HM's government! Goose - that was another thing which appears to have become strangely and exclusively British - as are nasturtiums.
And, moving beyond the dubious 'Britishness' of some of the things in the list, there's then the issue of the 'interest factor' of much of the stuff that they've dredged up. Truth be told, there are an awful lot of items which hale from some remote village deep in the provinces, where the recipe would have been insufficiently interesting even to make it to the next valley, let alone into the consciousness of the World at large. 'Cumnock Tart', for instance. No, I'd never heard of it, either. But then, why would I have done, since it appears to be merely a double-crust pie which is filled with either apple or rhubarb, and then brushed with a bit of sugar syrup during the process of baking.......probably perfectly palatable, but hardly deserving of four-square protection from serried ranks of lawyers in Brussels.

When all's said and done, I suspect that The Taste of Britain is probably all too accurate a reflection of what 'British' food is all about, and that of its 420-odd pages of entries, about 400 of them are in fact a damning indictment of the reality of British 'cuisine'. Oh, I expect it's all perfectly edible stuff......but there's an entirely practical reason why the drawing rooms of Paris and Milan are not graced with the presence of La Tarte Cumnockois, or Il Torte di Cumnock. It's just not that interesting.

So, I suppose that iceberg was all tip, in fact, and what you see is what you get....

Tonight's Dinner:

Tiger Prawns, sautéed with shallots and Paprika, in a sauce of Cream and Vermouth.

Beef & Pepper Burgers, with Green Beans.

Chocolate, Hazelnut & Cointreau Mousse, with (British!) Blackberries.

Recipe: Lemon & Gin Syllabub

With thanks to John Tovey. This is a couple of steps on from the straightforward nursery-favourite lemon syllabub, where the lemon-flavoured cream is delicious......but is recognisably nothing more than just that: lemon-flavoured cream. In this version, the introduction of Gin does a very strange thing to the lemon, and in fact the end result doesn't taste obviously either of Gin or of Lemon. Possibly, it tastes of juniper? I'm not entirely sure....
Somehow, the Gin changes the shape of the lemon flavour on the tongue in a way which is difficult to describe, but the end result is quite tight and complex on the palate. Anyway, delicious, and definitely worth trying, if only to see what I mean.

It's very important to leave these syllabubs to chill for at least a couple of hours once they've been put into their serving glasses - not just to get the temperature right, but also to let the flavours intermingle and do to each other whatever it is that they do.

This goes very well served with two or three langue de chat egg-white and almond biscuits per person. An indulgent and languorous way to end a good dinner....

For four.

Ingredients: half a pint of Cream; 2 tablespoons of Icing Sugar (or Splenda) ; rind & juice of 1 Lemon; 75 ml Gin; 2 Egg Whites.

Method:

1. Beat the Egg whites until stiff.

2. In a separate bowl, beat the Cream, along with the Sugar and Lemon Rind, until firm enough to hold its shape in a spoon.

3. Gradually add the Gin and Lemon Juice to the whipped Cream, stirring it in as you do so. (Don't be tempted to beat it in with the electric whisk - for some reason, this just makes the whole thing seize)

4. Finally, fold in the beaten Egg-White, and divide the mixture between four serving glasses that can be put into the fridge. Chill for at least several hours.

I was tempted when making this to put toasted slivered almonds on top, to serve, but in fact I think it doesn't need it and presents better without.....