by Ed Balls
Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4.
FOR THE CRUMBLE
In a large bowl, rub the butter into the flour until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Mix in the sugar and mixed spice, followed by a large spoonful of double cream. Spread the crumble mixture over the fruit and bake for 30 minutes.
FOR THE COBBLER
Rub the butter into the flour until you have light breadcrumbs. Add the sugar, cinnamon and baking powder. Whisk the egg into the milk and add to the dry ingredients. Combine until you have a soft scone mix. Form the mixture into eight balls, flatten and lay over the fruit. Sprinkle with demerara sugar and cook for 30 minutes until golden brown.
FOR THE CUSTARD
Put the milk on and slowly bring it to the boil. Meanwhile, mix the egg yolks, sugar and cornflour until it resembles a yellow paste.
When the milk is hot but not quite boiling, take it off the heat and pour roughly a quarter of it onto the paste, mix quickly with a wooden spoon and return the smooth mixture to the milk pan.
Return the milk to the heat and stir to thicken, making sure the milk doesn’t boil. Take off the heat and pour into a jug.
3 COOKING TO IMPRESS
‘I’m not sure you’re quite appreciating what a big deal this is,’ my new girlfriend Yvette told me, a little sharply. It was April 1994 and we were driving down to her parents’ house for my first-ever meeting with her mum, June. ‘She’s going to cook you a chicken curry,’ Yvette continued. I was pleased, but a bit confused. After all, isn’t that normal behaviour – to cook a meal when your offspring brings a new partner round for the first time?
But, as Yvette went on to explain, there was rather more to it than that. Apparently, her mum had taken the rather drastic step of retiring from doing any cooking at all when Yvette’s younger brother had left home the year before. After twenty years of slaving in the kitchen, June had decided enough was enough. But she was making an exception: her daughter was bringing home a new boyfriend, and she was taking out the apron again to cook for me. At the time I was honoured by the significance of the moment, but, in retrospect, I was missing the warning signs. Like mother, like daughter – this was a sure indication of things to come, or rather things not to come, where Yvette’s cooking was eventually concerned.
Yvette and I had met a couple of times through mutual friends, but we only got to know each other properly when I left the Financial Times in 1994 to work for Gordon Brown, the then shadow chancellor. Yvette was already working for Harriet Harman, then Gordon’s deputy as shadow chief secretary, but only part-time while she continued to recover from a year-long debilitating bout of ME. I was assigned to share a small office with Yvette in a Parliament building on Millbank. I’m not sure to this day whether us being paired together was something Harriet and Yvette had managed to engineer, either to spy on Gordon’s new adviser, or to set the two of us up. The only thing I’m sure about was that Gordon himself had nothing to do with it. He possesses many great abilities, but I doubt very much that matchmaking is one of them.
Regardless of the reasons we came together, however, from the beginning we got on very well. And after just a couple of months we had what I guess you would now call our ‘first date’ – watching a film at my flat in Dalston, East London. We drove down the Embankment that evening in my Renault 5 automatic, singing raucously to Elvis Presley’s ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ – ‘Take my hand, take my whole life too’ – which four years later we had the whole congregation sing at our wedding. And as we drove into Hackney, we stopped at the best local fish shop, Faulkners, and bought cod and chips twice, both with mushy peas, to take back to my flat.
Yvette soon raised the stakes on the food front, taking me to a Japanese restaurant. I’d eaten sushi before in Tokyo, when I was working there for the FT, but never before in the UK, so this was the height of exotic dining. Jin Kichi had great sashimi, and diners could sit upstairs around the yakitori bar, watching the chef barbecuing and enjoying the smells of smoky mackerel and sweet and salty chicken caramelising over the coals. We had beer and warm sake and lots of raw fish dipped in soy sauce and wasabi, and it became a favourite place.
But we didn’t cook for each other to begin with. Yvette had lived on pasta and bacon sandwiches when she was laid low with her illness, and for me, cooking had gone on the back burner since I’d left home. Being elected student president meant I lived in college accommodation all three years, with no proper kitchen to work in; and from Oxford I went straight off on a scholarship to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. It was my first trip to America, and my first-ever flight on an aeroplane. This was the world before emails and the internet, and calling home was hugely expensive so I had to make do with a 10-minute phone call once a week. While I was there, I should have taken a leaf out of my mum’s book and expanded my culinary range. But the reality was the enormous choice of great, cheap restaurants and diners in Cambridge, Massachusetts – Mexican, BBQ, Chinese, pizza – made cooking unnecessary. I made up for lost time in my youth and ate out as much as possible instead.
With my Harvard graduate degree complete, I then travelled with my English friend, Murray, on an enormous summer car journey – Boston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Salt Lake City and back to Boston. We saw the July 4th fireworks in Washington DC and came dangerously off the road late at night in Mississippi after dinner at a roadside BBQ shack. We were stranded for days in Louisiana with car trouble, which we spent slurping thick Cajun gumbo soup, eating sugary donuts and listening to daytime jazz. We saw the oldest house in America in Santa Fe, said to be built in 1495, marvelled at Disneyworld in LA and camped in Yellowstone where we had a close shave with a bear. And we ate in amazing roadside diners across the continent, usually massive breakfasts of bacon, pancakes, eggs and grits. One evening we stopped at a chicken chain place on the way into Atlanta. ‘Are you boys foreign?’ the waitress asked us, hearing our accents. ‘Let me guess. Are you from Massachusetts?’ Even more foreign than that, we replied.
Nor did I do a lot of cooking when I returned from America to work, aged twenty-three, as a leader writer at the FT. First sharing a flat and then living alone in East London, I continued eating out a lot. Hackney had recently seen big influxes of Kurdish, Turkish and Cypriot refugees to add to the big Caribbean and Jewish communities from previous generations. As well as many new travel agents and neon-lit basement clubs, we benefitted from the rapid expansion of late-night Turkish food joints – not just kebab shops, but smoking ocakbasi grills and fancier restaurants. They all stayed open until 3 or 4 in the morning and served sumptuous grilled chicken and lamb, börek pastries and soft, flat bread. Mangal and Istanbul Iskembecisi were my favourite places.
Linking up with my friends Tom and Brigit, who lived in the flat above, we held parties that went on even later into the night than the Turkish restaurants, and where multiple hosts meant random guests arriving at all hours. The 1 a.m. arrival of Evan Davis at one party, now the distinguished presenter of BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, decked out in leather and extensive chains is an image I will never forget.
Within six months of us sharing an office, Yvette and I were sharing that flat in Dalston. Over the next couple of years, we indulged our mutual love of the Little Chef Olympic breakfast and expanded our range of cafes, pubs and restaurants: experimenting with Swedish (smoky cured fish and aquavit); Vietnamese (super fresh and tasty beef and prawn spring rolls); and Thai (rich and fiery green and red chicken curry) – all dishes that went in my mental recipe book, and that still remind me of the early years of our relationship when I eat them.
When Yvette moved in, our home cooking took off. She was working at the Independent newspaper in Canary Wharf and would pop into the little Tesco next to her office and buy things to cook that evening. Our inspiration was The 30-Minute Cookbook, newly published that year by the Observer journalist Nigel Slater. He was one of a new wave of celebrity chefs who focused less on teaching technique, like Mrs Beeton and Delia
Smith’s invaluable How to Cook, and more on easy, day-to-day cooking but with more exotic ingredients. His recipes were tasty and simple, designed for busy working people like us, and perfect for developing new specialties.
Yvette became a dab hand at mushroom risotto and Italian bean salad. I experimented with stir-fries and simple Thai curries. We made sauces and marinades for sausages, pork and lamb chops. My favourite Nigel Slater-inspired creation was grilled chicken with mustard and herbs – chicken marinaded for half an hour in a tangy mixture of red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, olive oil, salt and pepper with some fresh tarragon or coriander, and then cooked on a griddle pan.
This was all a big change in my cooking style. The dishes I had learned from Mum had always been very straightforward. One hangover from war rationing was a deep distrust of mystery stews and sauces, when leftovers of different ingredients would be thrown together to form some type of substantial meal. After growing up on a diet like that out of necessity, my dad liked his meat, potatoes and vegetables to be easily identified and separated on the plate, with any gravy poured over them himself so he knew exactly what he was eating.
By contrast, throwing loads of ingredients together was the essence of the Slater style, and I loved the way his recipes transformed a simple pork chop or chicken breast by injecting new flavours like chillies, lemongrass, coriander and limes which I had never used before. As cooking fashion changed, so too did the kind of food you could buy at the supermarket. In the 1990s, celebrity chefs with cooking shows – Delia, Nigella, Rick Stein, Gary Rhodes – were now cooking recipes using more exotic ingredients, which the supermarkets were able to source from around the world much more easily. We could soon buy fresh herbs and fancy ingredients that just weren’t available to our parents’ generation, even after rationing had ended.
Yvette and I cooked for each other, but also for friends at the weekend. We became more adventurous, serving up our version of new tastes we had tried in restaurants – fresh Vietnamese spring rolls, sesame prawn toast – but also dishes I had sampled on my travels in America and at the FT: Cajun jambalaya, spicy quesadillas and sweet, yam-packed Ghanaian peanut stew. One Friday morning we woke up to a terrible stench at 5 a.m. to realise that I’d forgotten to turn off the chicken stock pot that I’d got going the night before. The smell lasted well over a week.
A year later we set up a joint account to start saving for a deposit, and shortly afterwards decided to take an even deeper plunge by inviting both sets of parents round to meet each other. We waited until my mum and dad would be over visiting from Italy, where Dad had become head of a European Commission research centre, and, in their honour, we cooked lasagne using my mum’s recipe. The stress was incredible as we waited for them all to turn up. Would our mums get on? Would our dads argue about politics? Was the food going to be up to scratch? And would the flat be clean enough to pass my mum’s inspection? During dinner itself, we were so tense that Yvette and I packed, ran and then unpacked the dishwasher three separate times – just for something to do, to avoid having to sit at the table and deal with the embarrassment.
But of course, our parents weren’t embarrassed at all. They tucked into the food and wine and got on like a house on fire. In fact, they all drank much too much. At one point, my dad was sitting on the back of the sofa regaling everyone with some long story about European bureaucracy when he lost his balance, fell backwards over the sofa and did a full backward roll onto the floor. He didn’t stop talking during his tumble, however, or even let go of his – now empty – wine glass. Yvette’s parents didn’t bat an eyelid.
My mum adored living in Italy, learning the language and the new cuisine, even if my dad’s deeply inconvenient dislike of pasta made things challenging. Yvette and I visited regularly and loved the Italian bread, which you had to buy daily as it quickly went stale, and the fresh pasta which I didn’t know even existed – I just assumed it always came dried. Every Sunday, however, even in the baking Italian sun, my mum still cooked a Sunday roast. That became Yvette’s first experience of my mum’s cooking, and given our preference for a pinker, juicier slice of beef, Yvette struggled to get through it. ‘It’s a bit well done,’ she whispered to me when my parents were in the kitchen. But she did agree the gravy was good.
Italy became our automatic summer holiday of choice. We could have flown out to Milan. But why make it easy? Yvette and I instead regularly drove down through France to Italy in my small Renault 5. On one occasion, we tried camping, but Yvette only managed an hour before declaring that she was too uncomfortable and went to sleep in the car instead. And that was that.
We also regularly visited Yvette’s parents, where, with Yvette’s mum in culinary retirement, her dad had been forced to take on all the cooking. It quickly became clear he was also a very good ‘event cook’ – his menus took weeks to prepare and his Christmas meals grew ever more complex. I was deeply impressed and learned a lot from watching him, although sometimes the complexity became a bit too much even for him. One Christmas Day, his five-course meal included a cheese sorbet – not two words I’d previously put together. But Tony had clearly put a lot of thought into it, making the concoction weeks beforehand, storing it in an ice-cream tub, and serving it fresh from the freezer in champagne glasses. It was truly disgusting and, much as all of us round the table tried, we couldn’t hide the horror of each mouthful. Thankfully, Tony eventually tasted it himself, instantly removed all our glasses, went back to the freezer and returned with a full tub of the sorbet he had intended to serve, which, while a little odd, did taste as a cheese sorbet probably should. Goodness knows what we ate the first time round – it’s still a mystery.
The following February, with the general election looming, Yvette organised a family party for my thirtieth birthday. The menu was sausages and mash and, on the spur of the moment, I decided to hint at a proposal in my thank-you speech. But it was already getting late and I managed to be so subtle with my phrasing that none of the twenty-five people there understood what I was saying, least of all Yvette who just stood up and said it was time for dessert.
A couple of months later, with the Yorkshire Post having written a profile of the newly elected MP for Pontefract and Castleford in which I was labelled her ‘current boyfriend’ – which made me rather grumpy at the time – we decided we had better get engaged. We were married in Eastbourne in January 1998, in a seafront hotel that Yvette’s dad often used for trade union conferences. We organised a bouncy castle, a magician and the seaside novelty train to do afternoon rides and, rather than have a sit-down meal, we had evening stalls serving fish and chips (of course) plus lamb curry and lots of desserts. Bacon sandwiches were served at midnight, and all our friends with small children declared it was the best wedding their kids had ever been to.
When I think back to that very child-friendly wedding, I can see now that our biological clocks were ticking loudly. Having kids wasn’t something Yvette and I had talked much about. I think we probably just assumed we would stay together and, both being from families of three, eventually have three children. And we had been in training.
Tom and Brigit from the upstairs flat in Dalston had a little girl called Rose in 1992 and I was honoured to be asked to be one of her godparents. She started nursery school just up the road from where we lived, and when her parents both needed to go to work early, they would drop three-year-old Rose off with Yvette and me in the flat below so we could take her to nursery when we were ready to leave.
One weekend, with Tom and Brigit away at a distinctly non-child-friendly wedding, Yvette and I offered to spend the whole Saturday babysitting. We went to the zoo and passed the morning looking at tigers, snakes and elephants – but I suspected if my god-daughter was anything like me as a child, she’d be most interested in lunch. At the café clutching our trays, I tried to put Rose at ease with her Uncle Ed by ignoring all the fancy options on the menu and ordering the kids’ option – sausage, chips and peas – for Yvette and me and asking Ros
e if she’d like the same. ‘No,’ she replied after giving it great thought, ‘I’ll have the aubergine pasta bake’…
CHICKEN WITH MUSTARD & HERBS
Serves 5
This midweek chicken dish is quick, easy and very tasty. It’s good with green vegetables, or you could put it in a sandwich with mayonnaise and tomato. You don’t need to make the sauce if you don’t want to – I usually just pour all the marinade in the pan with the chicken and let it bubble. It also works well cooked under the grill. I generally use coriander, but parsley or tarragon work just as well.
INGREDIENTS
4 chicken breasts, cut into quarters
6 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
4 tbsp red wine vinegar
A good handful of finely chopped fresh herbs – coriander, parsley or tarragon are good
2 tbsp white wine (optional)
METHOD
Put the olive oil, mustard and red wine vinegar into a bowl and mix well. Add the herbs and chicken and mix. Leave for at least 30 minutes if you can.
Heat a griddle pan on the stove until hot. Add the chicken with the marinade (though shaking the excess off if you want to make the optional sauce below). Turn the heat down to medium and cook for about 8–10 minutes until cooked through – I usually start with big chunks of chicken and halve them in the pan during cooking. Transfer the chicken to a serving dish.
If you want, you can keep the pan on the heat and add a couple of tablespoons of white wine to sizzle while you scrape off the bits stuck to the pan. Then add the excess marinade, let it bubble for a minute and pour over the chicken. If you can’t be bothered, though, it doesn’t matter.