by Ed Balls
One unexpected bonus of my time on Strictly is that my mum and her carers can now watch my old dances on YouTube. Every time she watches, she’s seeing them for the first time, and can’t quite work out what on earth this vaguely familiar character is doing, dressed up in front of a cheering crowd, and prancing around in a check shirt, green face or blue suit. Even now, just sometimes, she will turn to her carer, shake her head, and roll her eyes: ‘What on earth is he doing now?’
CHEESE AND THYME SOUFFLÉ
Serves 5
My dad has become a soufflé fan in recent years, although he doesn’t want anything too fancy – just cheese is fine. This is not a dish my mum cooked, and so it’s not something he would ever have eaten at home before. But he has turned out to be rather more willing to try new things than I expected, which is to say more than not at all. In recent years he has become much more adventurous in what he cooks for himself. He has bought himself a new copy of Delia’s Smith’s How to Cook and sends us fabulous photos on WhatsApp most days. But he hasn’t tried making a soufflé. Yet.
This sounds such a frightening dish to attempt but it’s easy to cook, looks hugely impressive and works every time. Don’t worry that it won’t rise – it will. And don’t worry about opening the oven door to check it – once is fine if you are quick. You can substitute other strong cheeses and ditch the thyme if you prefer, or switch it for dried oregano or fresh parsley. One nice variation is to get a piece of smoked haddock, cook it for 10 minutes in the milk to release some flavour, perhaps with a bay leaf; and then put the flaked haddock at the bottom of the soufflé dish or ramekins with a teaspoon of double cream. Or you could buy a dressed crab, put a teaspoon of white crab meat in the bottom of each ramekin and then mix the rest of the white crab, along with the brown meat into the cheese sauce with the egg yolks. If using haddock or crab, I would drop the thyme from the recipe.
INGREDIENTS
6 tbsp butter
4 tbsp finely chopped thyme
150g Parmesan, grated
4 tbsp plain flour
400ml whole milk
8 eggs
175g Gruyère cheese, grated
Salt and pepper
METHOD
You will need a large soufflé dish or eight ramekins. Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a microwave, smear the dish(es) with it, and use 1 teaspoon of the thyme and 2 teaspoons of the Parmesan cheese to sprinkle over the butter to form a light coating on the dish walls. Separate the eight eggs, keeping all of the whites and six of the yolks. Melt the remaining butter in a large saucepan, add the flour and whisk for a minute before slowly adding the milk, continuing to whisk as it thickens. Bring to the boil, whisking regularly, and then set aside to cool for 5 minutes. Add the six egg yolks, half of the Gruyère and remaining Parmesan cheese, the rest of the thyme and salt and pepper and whisk until smooth.
Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4.
Put the egg whites into a clean bowl and whisk with an electric mixer until they form stiff peaks – they should stand up straight when you fluff them. Transfer a third of the stiff whites into the cheesy sauce and stir them in. Pour the mixture back into the gap you’ve just made in the stiff whites and fold in carefully. Add the rest of the cheese and fold in carefully until fully incorporated.
Pour into the soufflé dish (or ramekins), put in the middle of the oven, and cook for 40 mins (25 minutes if using ramekins) until nicely risen and brown on top. Serve straight out of the oven before the soufflé even thinks about sinking.
CRAB & SAMPHIRE TART
Serves 8
The recipes we love are, of course, about taste, but they are also about memory. A particular flavour, smell or crunch can transport us to a different time and bring back so many more recollections. When we went up to Sheringham on the north Norfolk coast to visit during my childhood, my Auntie Doreen would buy beautiful Cromer crabs for tea. My Uncle Frank, the local bank manager, was also the treasurer of the local RNLI and had to rush down to the sea whenever it was called out to certify the trip and ensure the volunteer lifeboatmen were properly insured. As a result, he knew all the local fishermen, and my uncle and aunt always had the freshest lobsters and crabs. Auntie Doreen didn’t go in for fancy ways with cooking and we always had crab sandwiches, rich and salty and tasting of the sea. For me, the smell of crab takes me back to my childhood, the Norfolk sea air and playing bowls in the back garden while my mum and aunt got the tea ready.
My own American cooking influences mean I like to make New England-style crab cakes, sweet and lightly fried with a pink mayonnaise. But concealing the crab among a wide range of other ingredients always seems a waste of a really good Norfolk crab. And while a simple crab salad always goes down well, this recipe for a rich tart bursts with crabby flavour. I’ve combined it here with another local Norfolk speciality, samphire, which grows wild along the coast and gives the tart an extra salty crunch. This recipe uses all the crab – brown meat as well as white – but whatever you do, don’t call the samphire ‘seaweed’, because, in my experience, that guarantees the kids will refuse to eat it.
INGREDIENTS
FOR THE PASTRY:
165g plain flour
Pinch of salt
25g lard
50g butter
1 egg, beaten
1 tbsp water
1 egg yolk, beaten
FOR THE FILLING
120g samphire, washed and roughly chopped
3 eggs
425ml whipping cream
½ tsp nutmeg
40g Parmesan, grated
1 tbsp olive oil
450g crabmeat, brown and white separated
2 bunches spring onions
METHOD
Preheat the oven to 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3.
To make the pastry, rub the butter and lard into the flour and salt until fine, add the egg and water and form into a ball. Rest in the fridge for 20 minutes and then carefully roll out and lay into a greased 25cm metal flan tin, trimming the edges. Lay baking paper over the pastry, cover it with baking beans, and put in the oven for 20 minutes. Remove the pastry from the oven, take out the baking beans, brush the pastry with egg yolk and return to the oven for a further 10 minutes.
While you allow the pastry case to cool a little, turn the oven up to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4 and blanch the chopped samphire in boiling water for 5 minutes, then drain and set aside.
Lightly beat the eggs, cream and nutmeg. Stir in the cheese and olive oil and the white crabmeat. Smear the base of the cooling pastry case with the brown crabmeat and sprinkle over the spring onions. Pour the crabby custard into the pastry case and then sprinkle the samphire all over and watch it sink in.
Put the tart in the oven for 50 minutes. It should brown and set in the middle – but still be a little wobbly.
14 FLYING THE NEST
Yvette and I approached our eldest daughter’s eighteenth birthday with trepidation. Her A levels finally over, she was on the verge of becoming our first child to fly the nest.
We couldn’t work out how to mark the occasion. What present would be sufficiently important or special? I was racking my brains for months. Then, a few weeks before her birthday, she told Yvette what she wanted. And it took my breath away. She asked for a cookbook with all the recipes that I’d cooked for her and the family over the past eighteen years. Something she could take away with her, use for herself in the years to come, and always help her to remember home.
I got to work. Yvette had made many photo-books over the years, but I was a novice, and this one needed text too. I wrote out all her favourite recipes, each with cooking tips and any associated family history, while Yvette searched out photos of our daughter over the years with family and friends, to make it more than a cookbook. After a week of editing, uploading the text and photos on an iPad, fiddling with fonts and margins, it was done and sent off to the printers. A few days later, three beautiful hardback books arrived – and I only found one annoying spellin
g mistake. I called the book ‘Dishes for My Daughter’, and it was the best present I’ve ever given.
We followed that first cookbook two years later with ‘Dishes for Our Son’ as he got ready to fly the nest himself. It was a rather different book, as befits our fussiest eater, with a very long final section entitled ‘Things Our Son Might Eat One Day…’ I didn’t know at the time whether these cookbooks would turn out to be useful, although the fact that both of our kids made a pre-university trip to Ikea with their mum to buy their own kitchen equipment was a good sign. It was only when I got photos back from them both, taken with their new university friends, sitting round in kitchens and eating one of the recipes they’d made from their cookbook, that I knew they had worked.
Our offspring leaving home is a time of great stress and challenge for us parents as well as the kids. They come and go, work, study and travel, and we learn to get used to them not being around, closing their bedroom doors to hide the truth, relying on text messages and late-night phone calls to keep in touch; and being OK with all that. We quickly discover that we are much more stressed about our kids leaving on these adventures than they are; and that the number of times they ring home will be in inverse proportion to how they are doing – extended periods of silence aren’t something to worry about, we learn; they’re the clearest indication that things are going well.
University departure day was nostalgic for both Yvette and me, remembering our own first nerve-racking steps into a new life. Three decades before, I had got ready to leave, sitting in our living room in Nottingham, surrounded by half-packed boxes and piles of books, watching Neil Kinnock make his famous speech to the 1985 Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth, confronting Derek Hatton and the Militant Tendency. My mum and dad drove me from Nottingham to Oxford with my bike on the roof rack, and spent a long time with me that day settling me in. I don’t remember being worked up about their presence at all.
It was very different with our oldest daughter. Yvette and I were issued with strict instructions on what we were and weren’t allowed to do, and injunctions to keep a low profile and not do anything that drew any attention. I suppose I had only myself to blame for that, having drawn far too much dodgy attention to myself in recent years.
The kids leaving home was stressful but, of course, we soon discovered they hadn’t left for good. They were soon back for Christmas, summer holidays or just for a weekend break away from the frenetic pace of university life. And that was in normal times. When the first lockdown of 2020 came along, we suddenly had them all back again living under one roof. To have all the family home together again like that, day after day, week after week, was totally unexpected, something we never thought we would have again, and a reflection of the unprecedented times we were suddenly dealing with.
My brother and I could see the way things were going in advance of the formal lockdown and dashed down to Norwich to check that my dad would be OK and that my mum’s care home was still functioning properly and fully staffed, even if we weren’t allowed to see her. We spent a couple of hours visiting local restaurants to see where my dad could carry on ordering takeaways if the lockdown meant everything else shut. He was in constant touch with my mum’s carers, especially Alise, Debbie, Tina, and his hugely dependable older brother, John, who lived nearby. I was moved by the proactive kindness of his neighbours, who came round to give us their phone numbers and tell him and us that if there was anything he needed, they were there for him.
Best of all, we met Suzy, my dad’s brand-new Golden Retriever, whom – by a great stroke of fortune and coincidence – he had decided to give a home to just a few weeks before. For my dad, like so many thousands more across the country, his new dog would prove a great source of comfort and companionship in the months to come, and it was a huge reassurance for me and my brother and sister that he wasn’t just on his own.
As for us, our kids were safe, so my main responsibility was making sure they had enough to eat. The scenes of empty shelves in supermarkets brought back uncomfortable memories of the 2000 fuel dispute when I was at the Treasury and watched in alarm as people started queuing for hours at a time to buy petrol, panicking that supplies were about to run out, and, by doing so, guaranteeing that was exactly what started to happen. You can’t blame people: it’s a natural human instinct so ingrained in our behaviour that whole economic theories have been written about it. After all, how many of us have been tempted to join a growing queue, with no idea what it’s for, just because other normal-looking people are doing so, and we’re worried we’ll regret it later if we don’t? At the very least, it takes a strong will not to wander over and ask, ‘What’s this for?’
Our biggest worry back in the summer of 2000 was that a lack of fuel – and gridlocked roads – would start affecting other supply chains, and we’d start to see shortages of basic food supplies or medicines in the shops. That risk, coupled with the real fear that the ambulance network would start running out of fuel, helped persuade the newspapers to stop egging on the protests. They may also have been wondering what would happen when the delivery trucks at their printworks ran out of diesel. For a few days in March 2020, things felt even more serious. But – aside from some short-term shortages of toilet roll and supermarket-enforced rationing of pasta and bread – the retail supply chains held up remarkably well and returned to normal fairly quickly. Hoarding may be silly and self-defeating, but it’s just human nature. I can vividly recall my own queasy feeling as I found myself – for no good reason – questioning whether I’d pressed ‘confirm’ on an online food delivery, only to find the website had collapsed under the weight of traffic. Fortunately, I had. But I had to ‘queue’ for two hours on the website to make sure.
What strange, frustrating and worrying times those were for all of us, and infinitely worse for the hundreds of thousands who lost loved ones or had to carry on doing vital jobs in incredibly difficult and frightening conditions, from doctors, nurses and care workers to bus and lorry drivers. While Yvette still had constituency and parliamentary responsibilities, all my work ground to a halt as conferences were cancelled, a BBC series I was about to film was put on hold and my scheduled TV filming in America suddenly looked highly doubtful. I knew I had it easy, but the sudden emptiness of my diary still came as a shock. When you’ve always associated work with sitting down at a desk, what happens when you sit there with nothing to do?
Even my alternative workspace at home, the kitchen, suddenly felt like less of a sanctuary than normal. The boredom and monotony of lockdown affected my feelings about cooking, and I very quickly got fed up with cooking my regular recipes. I decided it was time to innovate, and for a fortnight I tried new recipes, new ingredients and new cookbooks: Korean, Malaysian, and a new recipe book specialising in oven dishes, which all gave me some new twists on familiar dishes. Soon, however, I had to give up trying – it wasn’t that my new recipes didn’t work, but home cooks need appreciation, and every night I was dealing with disappointment from the kids. ‘What is this?’, ‘Is there anything else?’, ‘Why have you done it this way?’, ‘Can’t you just do it like you always do?’
I was disappointed initially, but realised it was no surprise that our kids weren’t warming to my innovative cooking. Lockdown was already so weird, everyone naturally just wanted things to feel normal and familiar where they could. In the kitchen, I just had to go back to basics. If I was going to find ways to break the boredom, it wouldn’t be at the expense of happy mealtimes. So, instead, I took up yoga, using a book I’d been given for Christmas, I think as a joke: Stiff Guy Yoga: Rediscover Your Twentysomething Self in 30 Days. It was taxing and stretching – literally – but also hugely relaxing, and I followed the online videos every day on a mat on the kitchen floor. Most days, I also went out for a run through what were relatively traffic-free, empty streets, and the colours and sights and smells of urban life felt much more vivid than they ever had before.
Every evening we all came together to have dinner a
nd then watch a box-set on the TV. Our best discovery was the kids’ choice: Friday Night Lights, a five-series American show about teenagers growing up in small-town Texas, and the family and friendship dynamics – and social politics – that revolve around a high-school American football team. It was escapist and compelling and gave a regular feel-good thrill without ever being schmaltzy. Then we turned to the seventeen series of Grey’s Anatomy.
As the weeks and months passed, the uncertainty about what was going to happen seemed to get worse and worse, and the future became harder to read. We were nervous at the start about my mum, and a number of residents did later lose their lives from Covid on her dementia wing while she worryingly tested positive but remained unscathed; but her care home was on the ball with regular testing from early on and handled a very difficult situation with great professionalism. It was my dad I was more worried about in the early months. Unable to go and see my mum or have visits from us, or even wander over to the Cathedral, he was very much alone, bar Suzy the dog. My brother, sister and I started a daily Zoom call with him to make sure he was OK. He read us chapters from the book he was writing about his life with my mum. We all had a glass of wine on a Friday. I started suggesting recipes for him to try and soon he was posting photos of his culinary efforts – roast pork, celery soup, cheese straws.
When the lockdown restrictions were finally first eased in June 2020, and we were able to visit him, we sat outside in a gazebo we put up in his front garden and ate takeaway from Shiki, a local Japanese restaurant which he’d started ordering from every other day for the previous three months. My dad, a man who didn’t eat pasta in Italy, who objected to unknown sauces, and liked every dish as simple as possible, had suddenly become a connoisseur of Japanese food. It was a revolution.