by Ed Balls
We generally like gravy dark in our house, but when I did my usual roast chicken at home the Sunday before, Yvette wasn’t sure this was the best plan. ‘I know it’s really good,’ she said, ‘but I think Mary will prefer a lighter gravy.’ The kids looked at each other, none too sure. If they’d been clear about one thing during lockdown, it was that they didn’t like me cooking things differently.
In the studio the next day, I spent two hours making sure my roasting tin didn’t get too hot and start to caramelise the chicken juices, onion and white wine. My gravy was light and garlicky and lemony – just as Yvette thought it should be. I carried my finished roast chicken with all the trimmings up for the judging, feeling upbeat. And then it all went wrong. ‘It’s not really a gravy,’ Angela Hartnett reflected. ‘It’s more of a sauce.’ Mary nodded and my heart sank. ‘I prefer a darker gravy,’ she agreed. I couldn’t believe it – the chicken was exquisite, my Yorkshire puddings were a delight, the roast potatoes were perfect, but what did that matter? I’d always said a roast lunch lives and dies by the gravy, and my trademark dish – my family inheritance – had just dropped dead on national TV. Poor Yvette was mortified when I got home that night. ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said unconvincingly. She vowed not to give any more cooking advice until the end of the show. The kids just shook their heads and said, ‘We told you so.’
Oh well. We live and learn, and at least it reminded me of those two essential lessons for the home cook: there’s only one person in charge in the kitchen; and familiarity is always your best friend. And maybe one more on this occasion: trust the sound judgement and good taste of your kids; after all, they hopefully got both from you.
INGREDIENTS
1 large chicken
Salt
2 onions, peeled and halved
1 lemon, halved
1 whole bulb of garlic, halved across the middle
A bunch of fresh coriander (you can also use tarragon or parsley)
3 rashers of unsmoked bacon
Pepper
1 large glass of dry white wine (not essential but recommended for the gravy)
1 tbsp plain flour
500ml water or chicken stock
METHOD
Turn the oven on to 200°C/400°F/gas mark 6.
Untie the chicken and remove the string/elastic. If there is a large lump of fat in the cavity, remove it and then rub salt all over the skin and place in a large roasting tin. Put two onion halves in the cavity and two in the tin. Squeeze the lemon halves all over the chicken and stuff in the cavity, followed by one half of the garlic bulb.
Peel and dice the rest of the garlic cloves and slide some under the skin of the breast and into the leg joints by piercing the skin with a knife. Put the bunch of coriander stalks in the cavity and chopped coriander under the breast skin with some garlic. Lay a rasher of bacon on each leg and a rolled-up rasher in the cavity. Pour a slug of olive oil over the breast, grind on plenty of black pepper and then pour the wine into the tin.
Put in the oven and cook for 30 minutes, then turn the oven down to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4 and cook for a further 1 hour. For extra flavour and heavy-boned appetites, I often throw a dozen chipolata sausages into the tin for the final 25 minutes.
I usually remove the chicken to rest and carve and make the gravy in the tin using either chicken stock or the water the vegetables are cooked in. Pour off the fat from the top of the juices in the pan, stir in the flour and add the water or stock and stir as it comes to the boil and thickens. Alternatively, let the chicken rest for ten minutes and then carve into the tin. There will be less gravy, so my dad would not be happy, but the flavour is a little stronger.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Cooking, food shopping and family meals have been a big part of my daily life for decades now, though at no point did I ever expect to write a book about it. But I’ve learned over the last few years to embrace what life throws at you with open arms, and always to be grateful for the love and support of colleagues, friends and family. So this is my chance to say thank-you.
Credit where credit is due: the inspiration for this book came from my oldest daughter, who had the lovely and unexpected idea of asking for a collection of our family recipes for her 18th birthday. I loved putting her photobook together, writing out the ingredients, choosing the images and thinking about all the times our family had sat down to eat together. It was a true labour of love and the same was true with our son’s 18th birthday book. Our younger daughter’s is now in preparation.
But it was Covid-19 which turned these recipes from a private family affair into something more public. I was due to spend the summer of 2020 in the USA, tracking down Trumpland voters for the BBC. When all such travel ground to a halt, my brilliant and innovative broadcasting agent – and now my good friend, the wonderful Joanna Kaye – came up with an alternative plan. ‘You like to cook, don’t you?’, she asked me on the phone, one Monday morning. ‘Fancy a few weeks in the kitchen with Mary Berry?’
We had such fun making Celebrity Best Home Cook. And what a surprise it was – for all of us I think – to discover quite how much recipes and flavours were intertwined with family, memories and identity. Huge thanks to Tom, Rachel, Ferne, Shobna, Ed, Karim, Ruth, Gareth and Desiree; and to Claudia, Mary, Angela, Chris and the whole production team. Winning was quite a surprise; and then the brilliant and innovative Holly Harris at Simon & Schuster came up with the lovely idea of using the recipes to tell a bigger story of family and how the pandemic had affected us all. Appetite was born.
I can’t thank Holly enough for her insight and her brilliant editing – none of this would have happened without her. Thanks also to Sophia Akhtar and Rebecca McCarthy for steering us through the production process, Jill Tytherleigh for her lovely illustrations and to my long-time collaborator and friend, Julie McCandless, for transcribing my audio files and commenting as she typed. As the manuscript came together, I had detailed comments, suggestions – and deletions – from Phil Webster, Jo Coles, Damian McBride, and Balshen Izzet; thank you all so much – any remaining errors are all mine.
None of this would have been possible without the support, encouragement and nagging of Joanna and the KBJ family, especially Lucy King, Heather Winstanley, Megan Hart and the peerless Theia Nankivell, who also recipe-tested my Yorkshire puddings and trialled them on her young twins before giving me the thumbs up.
I’ve cooked for, and eaten with, so many good friends and colleagues over the years. I can’t possibly mention everyone from my time in government and politics – you’re all there in the Speaking Out acknowledgements – but thankyou to you all, and especially to Gordon Brown who almost certainly features in this book more than he would choose.
Since 2015, I’ve made new food memories in football grounds across England with the fabulous Delia and Michael and the Norwich City directors; with colleagues in Harvard Square and at El Vino’s with the King’s teaching team; in restaurants around Piccadilly with Jonny Geller for a pep talk and wise counsel; grabbing lunch with Lord Eric Pickles after a meeting of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, which we co-Chair; in Strictly arenas and studios with Katya and the gang; in hotels across America and Europe with dedicated and usually exhausted production teams on location; and 5,000 metres up an African mountain for Comic Relief with my fellow climbers. Thank-you to you all.
Some have endured more of my cooking than most. I have been experimenting culinary-wise on our New Year group of friends for 20 years now – Alison and Phil, Brendan and Karen, Bill and Hilary plus all the kids; Steve, Elin and the family in Boston, Mass; and with my oldest friends, Murray and Lois and their boys and Tom and Brigit and their daughters, especially my goddaughter, Rose.
Love and thanks to Yvette’s family, David and Alex, Nicky and Andres, all the cousins; and especially the magnificent Tony and June, who have been so generous and supportive to me over the years.
Huge thanks and much love to my sister, Joanna, and brother, Andrew, who bo
th read the first draft, corrected my mistakes and added some stories; and to their partners David and Erica and the cousins.
Much love to my toughest critics: to Yvette, who by retiring from all cooking when our first child was born, gave me no choice really – cook or starve – and whom I love very much; and our three magnificent children who have put up with a lot, and of whom I’m hugely proud.
Above all, love and thanks to my Dad who has suddenly, in his early 80s, become a born-again chef and master of social media food-posting, and has always been there for me. And to my Mum, who was there from the start, passed on everything she had learned about cooking, taught me so much more than just recipes, and who – deep inside – with eyes rolling and her usual mockingly disapproving stare, will, I believe, be proud of how her son turned out. I hope so.
Leftovers OTHER THINGS I’VE LEARNED…
My mum and dad were not fans of spicy food when I was growing up. We had one memorably fiery meal when I was a child at the home of one of my dad’s PhD students, Paul Moondie. We drove over after eating our usual Sunday roast lunch for what we thought was afternoon tea to find that Paul’s wife had cooked us an enormous Indian banquet. As my brother, sister and I exchanged troubled looks, Paul’s wife laughed and said she had sausages and chips waiting for us and her own kids in the kitchen. My mum and dad stayed in the dining room and – roast lunch notwithstanding – ploughed their way politely and resolutely through the entire banquet. My mum didn’t stop talking about how spicy it was for months afterwards.
The idea of cooking Indian, Chinese, Mexican or Thai food was unheard of back then for a family like ours, despite the odd restaurant and takeaway popping up in Norwich and elsewhere. But one day my mum returned from the supermarket with a packet of chilli con carne spice mix. I don’t know if she meant to pick it up or whether my little brother had slipped it in the trolley, but there it was on the counter – and not to be wasted. My mum didn’t make a chilli con carne, of course – that would have been an act of revolution. But she was planning a shepherd’s pie that evening and, without telling us, tipped half the spice mix into the mince and onions before topping it with the usual mashed potatoes. Despite the shocked looks on all our faces as we dug in, it tasted amazing; even my dad approved. Chilli con carne shepherd’s pie was probably the most exotic thing I’d ever eaten up to that point in my life, and it became a regular in our house.
I learned a vital cooking lesson that day. It was the same old shepherd’s pie meat sauce, but, with the extra addition of the spice mix, it was transformed. The same was true with the basic bolognaise sauce my mum had taught me – add pasta sheets and cheese sauce and it became a lasagne. Dial back the tomato purée instead, add cayenne, paprika, cumin, cinnamon and a tin of kidney beans, triple the simmering time, and – Roberto’s your uncle – it was a proper chilli con carne. The truth is there’s only a relatively small number of basic recipes that a home cook needs to learn – something I’m not sure I fully appreciated until I sat down to write that cookbook for my eighteen-year-old daughter. But if you’re willing to innovate, take a risk and make a change, there are so many more varied dishes you can add to your repertoire.
Once you’ve learned that eggs and yolks, beaten together with milk or cream and put in the oven, will set firmly enough to be cut with a knife after forty minutes, then you know how to make a cheese pie, a crab and samphire flan or, with some cooked bacon, that ’70s favourite, Quiche Lorraine. A simple quesadilla can become a burrito; or an enchilada if you pour over a lasagne-style cheese sauce and bake it for twenty minutes. And a cheese soufflé quickly becomes a haddock soufflé if you simply poach the haddock in the milk you’re going to use for your white sauce and then put the fish flakes in the bottom.
Home cooking is all about first learning the basics and then having the confidence to put the recipe books aside and have a go. But there are a few other vital tips that you pick up over the years, a few of which I’ve included below.
COOKBOOKS
It’s so easy these days to find a recipe on the internet – just search lemon meringue pie, chocolate brownies or beef gravy and you’re off. And if you put the name of a particular chef in front – Delia’s Yorkshire puddings, Mary Berry’s salmon en croute, Bobby Flay’s quesadilla, Nigel Slater’s chicken, Nigella’s butter cream – you’ll find a recipe that you know will work. But the internet can’t replace the vital role cookbooks play, especially when you’re looking for inspiration and new ideas or want a visual model for how a dish should ideally look. I love browsing page by page, but with many of my favourite cookbooks there may be only a handful of recipes that I’ve ever used. Once you’ve cooked them again and again, added your own variations, modified and perfected the method over decades of trying, and almost certainly forgotten which book you first got the inspiration from, you’ve had yourself a great bargain.
TASTING
Top chefs say that tasting as you cook is vital. I’m sure they’re right, but I’ve always felt a bit equivocal about this advice. Of course, if you want to get a dish exactly right, then you should test and taste as you go along – a little more salt, a little more pepper – and if you’re serving paying customers in a restaurant then you need to know your chefs are getting it right every time. But the downside for the home cook is that tasting as you cook takes away some of the excitement of the big reveal. When I follow a recipe, sometimes I want to wait to taste the final result with everyone else round the table, to see their reactions as I react myself. The more you taste in advance, the less surprise you’ll save for yourself.
REPETITION
Again and again and again, repetition is the sure route to success for the home cook. It’s hard to get a recipe right the first time, let alone be able to vary things and tailor it to what you or the family want. But repetition makes it so much easier. Do things the same way time after time, then adjust a little bit here, a little bit there, and soon you don’t need to refer back to the recipe at all, and you’ll probably be surprised by how far you’ve departed from it when you do. You’ll just have found the way that you like to cook, and the way your family enjoys the dish best.
PLANNING AND LISTS
I’m not one for writing out detailed cooking plans. Some people rely on long lists and timing schedules when they’re cooking a meal; with my father-in-law, it amounts to a small thesis every time. If you’re cooking ten courses, that might be necessary, just because of the risk that something will be forgotten. But personally, I like to hold the plan in my mind and juggle it as I go along, knowing what needs to be done and scrolling back and forth to make sure things are on track. It’s brain-training, like doing a sudoku or a crossword. But if you use that kind of method, then you must also use electronic timers. There are only so many balls you can juggle at once, and keeping track of how long something’s been cooking is one ball too many.
MISE-EN-PLACE
I don’t need a written plan, but I do like to get all my ingredients out, chopped and weighed in advance – it’s what proper chefs call a ‘mise-en-place’. If you’re following a recipe and you’re under pressure with time, you don’t want to be looking for ingredients and measuring them out as you go along, especially if you’ve got more than one dish on the go. Much better to have everything prepared and measured in individual bowls or ramekins so that when you’re ready to cook it’s all there. That way you’re much less likely to make mistakes.
INGREDIENTS
Some people swear by the quality of their ingredients, and it’s clearly the modern trend in the best restaurants. For the home cook, whether or not you’re the grandson of a butcher, quality matters when it comes to meat: finding a good and reliable butcher where you can see what you’re buying and know where it’s come from is really worth it, and I swear by Farmer Copley’s in Pontefract and Meat N16 in Stoke Newington. But at home, I don’t think you should get too hung up on this wider ingredients fetish, especially if you’re watching your wallet. Yes, different tomato
es can have very different tastes, but most carrots just taste like carrots. And does it really matter what kind of salt you add to a boiling pot? What counts far more for the home cook is knowing your audience – what the family likes, what your guests will enjoy. Innovation is fun, and varying your choice of ingredients can be a part of that. But the taste and food combinations we recognise, know and love are also a hugely important part of family cooking, so if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.
PRESENTATION
Should the home cook care about fancy presentation and individual servings? I’ve always thought family foods should be served in big tureens and doled out, just like they did every evening on The Waltons. But if you are cooking recipes which put different elements together at the last minute, like a quesadilla, it’s easier to serve on individual plates, restaurant-style. It’s also makes sense to serve individually if you are cooking for a family with different needs and tastes: gluten-free, vegetarian mince, no cheese. And it looks better. On this one, I’m in transition.
SURPRISE AND FAMILIARITY
For the restaurant chef, surprise and flair is vital. Amazing ingredients cooked in a novel way and served with panache can take your breath away. One time we went out with a group of old friends - The Millbank Wives (don’t ask) – to a Michelin-starred Spanish restaurant in a hotel which looked nothing special from the outside. And although many of the dishes we had that night were special and complex, the one I remember most was a cockle in a small glass with a light clear soup. When you drank it down, it was so fresh and salty, the sensation was like having your head dunked in the sea. When you’re preparing food as a form of art, then delivering those kinds of ‘experiences’ through taste is an achievement in itself.