by Ed Balls
The home cook, by contrast, is just trying to deliver a great meal, and we know that too much surprise and complexity can get in the way of that. What matters is getting the familiar just right. With a roast dinner, you can get everything else spot-on, but the gravy will make or break the meal. Fish and chips? The batter matters, but if the chips are soggy it’s ruined. In a lasagne, you must get the right balance between runnyness and body, and the cheese sauce must be cheesy enough. After fourteen hours of slow cooking, when you break open your pork shoulder, the meat inside either flakes perfectly, or it needs carving and you’ve fallen short.
That’s what makes home cooking so challenging and exciting and sometimes tense. However many times you’ve made that dish, you never quite know whether today will be the day when it falls short or it’s the best you’ve ever done.
GADGETS
My mum wasn’t a big kitchen gadget fan. Despite the Moulinex bought when I was a baby, she tended to mix by hand when she baked. Her knives were old and never very sharp. She did have an astonishing metal contraption, medieval in its horror, into which you put a whole potato and pushed a mesh down and through, slicing the spud into sixteen evenly cut chips. But she’d cook them in a chip pan on the hob, not in a high-tech deep-fat fryer.
She taught me to do most things by hand and – while I’ve got an electric whisk – nothing beats the satisfaction of successfully whisking under your own steam. One of the highlights of my cooking career was managing to make a cheese soufflé on a boat out at sea. With two forks, and sheer elbow grease, it took me a full hour to get the egg whites to stiff peaks. But it cooked perfectly in the tiny ship’s oven; never has a soufflé tasted so good. Recently, however, I have learned to use a fancy food processor with bowl, paddle and multiple speeds, and I must admit I’m wavering. Compared to the challenge of making pastry by hand – trying to keep my hands cold and not over-work the mix – I’m now wondering if I should give in to progress.
OUTDOOR COOKING
I love outdoor-cooking gadgets. My twin-chamber slow-cook BBQ is the best present I’ve ever received. Twenty years on, it’s still going strong, churning out pulled pork shoulders infused with pungent hickory smoke. In recent years, I’ve also been using a big, egg-shaped, covered BBQ, which uses space-age technology to get your sausages cooked just right. You can fire it up and then shut it down very fast and control the temperature exactly.
My other recent outdoor gadget is a small aluminium pizza oven. Pizza is one of those dishes that is impossible for the home cook to do really well inside in the kitchen because you just can’t get the oven hot enough. Either the base feels doughy and undercooked or the top of the ingredients burn while you wait for the yeasty dough to cook. But my outdoor oven burns wood pellets and gets up to twice the heat of a home kitchen oven in just ten minutes. I stretch out my risen dough on a floured paddle, slap on some tomato sauce, mozzarella and a couple of toppings (not more than that or it all goes wrong), slide my pizza into the furnace, and it’s cooked in less than a minute. The base will be perfect and crispy, the topping oozing and melting.
BIG CATERING
All those years of constituency BBQs and lunches for seventy at the Morley Labour Rooms have honed my mass-catering skills. These days I love big family celebrations and the logistical challenge of cooking for them. I catered for Yvette’s dad’s sixtieth birthday and my mum and dad’s fiftieth wedding anniversary party and delivered pulled pork sandwiches and treacle tart for over a hundred guests for Yvette’s fiftieth birthday in the Queen’s Mill in Castleford. The key is to have plenty of time to get everything ready well in advance and do recipes you know like the back of your hand which can easily be cooked at scale.
Every year for nearly two decades now, the same three families have joined us in Castleford for New Year’s Eve – eight adults in total plus twelve kids – and it’s my job to do the cooking. In the early days that meant fish nuggets or spaghetti bolognaise for the children followed by something fancier for the adults. Now, with the kids all in their teens and twenties, everyone wants to sit and eat the same meal together. It’s a struggle to get twenty people around the table, but we manage it every time – including during the pandemic when we had to do it by Zoom. Even as they’ve become adults, with so many places to go and things to do, they all come back each year for the food and to be together as one big New Year’s family.
SHOPPING
I made my solo shopping debut when I was ten years old, after years of apprenticeship accompanying my mum to the local butcher and greengrocer in our village. She taught me to watch the butcher carve the joint, always better than choosing a ready-cut piece, and to watch to see if the meat had the right degree of fat and marbling. I learned to feel the fruit and vegetables, looking out for bruises and limpness.
These days I do most of our shopping on the internet, but with meat I always want to be in the shop to see what they’re carving. The best butchers are always happy to let you watch, check and choose, because they know they sell top quality. I also waste many hours I can’t afford in department stores, browsing through cookbooks in the books department or walking round the kitchen section. I have two favourites. The basement of any John Lewis store; and the Mecca of many Northern home cooks, the original Lakeland kitchen store in Windermere, where I can easily spend an afternoon comparing Yorkshire pudding tins, pancake pans, whisks and cake moulds.
FRENCH OR ITALIAN
When I was eighteen, and getting ready to head off to university, my mum and dad decided we should go abroad for a holiday, the very first time my sister, my brother and I left the country. We drove down to the south coast and then took the car ferry ride, possibly the most exciting moment of my life thus far, from Portsmouth to Le Havre. We then motored on down to Le Mans, driving on the other side of the road and marvelling at all the little Citroen cars that until then I’d only ever seen in my O Level French vocabulary book, along with real-life signposts for ‘La Piscine’, ‘Le Parc’ and ‘La Gare’.
We stayed in a tiny village, deep in the Loire Valley, and it didn’t rain once. We bought gorgeous French bread from the local village shop and the next-door farmer’s wife sold incredibly cheap homemade wine, honey and chickens. We ordered a whole chicken and when I walked over to collect it later that afternoon, I couldn’t believe it still had its head and feet on. It turned out my mum was less of a butcher’s daughter than we’d all thought and cowered inside along with the rest of us while my dad did the messy business in the garden with a kitchen knife. Needless to say, my little brother had all his vegetarian instincts confirmed.
The supermarkets in France blew our minds. The ‘E.Leclerc’ hypermarket was huge and had more types of yoghurt than we thought could possibly exist. But the most exciting outings were to local restaurants. My mum had been saving up for months so that we could eat out and have ‘Le Menu’. Going out to a restaurant wasn’t something that we’d ever done on our English holidays, but, as my mum said, ‘When in France…’
I really enjoyed eating out in France on that trip, but since then our French culinary outings have been a bit hit and miss. The contrast with Italy, where my parents moved just four years after that first French holiday, is striking. Perhaps the Italian cuisine is simpler, and I’ve had some really great meals in France over the years, especially in top-end restaurants; but the local restaurants I’ve been to in Italy over the years have been consistently more reliable. And that has also influenced what I cook. I realise now, looking back through this book, that while there are many English, American, Italian and Asian influences, at home I don’t often use traditional French recipes. Oh well. C’est la vie.
EATING OUT AND ORDERING
Every now and then us home cooks get worn out and need a break. I keep a file of restaurant review cuttings which I add to whenever I see somewhere I’d like to try, or an individual chef or dish getting particular rave reviews. I love restaurant writers, especially the ones who remember to include details of the
food among their wider lyrical reflections on life, society and interior decoration.
The world of restaurant-goers divides into risk-takers and safety-firsters when it comes to choosing from the menu, and I’m one of the latter. I like to try new things, but worry that I’ll end up regretting missing out on my tried and tested favourites. That is definitely an inheritance from my youth and the rarity of the restaurant experience: the guaranteed luxury of squeezed orange juice versus a step into the bright pink unknown of prawn cocktail!
However, the world of restaurant-goers also divides into those who share and those who don’t, and I’m a committed sharer, not least because it allows me to try the new things on someone else’s plate while playing safe on my own. When eating out with Yvette, we have a different system. We look at the menu together and discuss what each of us will order, usually something safe we love and something new we fancy the look of. But we have two golden rules: first, that whatever happens, we will swap halfway – no reneging on the deal, no matter how well or badly each other has chosen; and second, when it comes to starters, desserts or side portions, we both must order. There’s nothing more frustrating than when your dining partner says, ‘I’m full, I’ll just try a bit of yours.’ So if one of us is going for it, we both do. I won’t call it the recipe for a long and happy marriage, but it’s worked so far for us.
THAI CHICKEN CURRY
Serves 5
We home cooks need to know when to prepare from scratch and when to leave it to the professionals. Meringues from the shop don’t taste as good as the ones you make at home. I’ve never been to a pub or carvery and had a roast dinner which comes close to the roast dinners that we cook on a Sunday or that my mum cooked before me. But puff pastry? That has to be shop-bought every time. And the same is true with ice cream: however hard I tried, it was never as good as when mass-produced out of a tub. Thai curry paste falls into that same category: you can make the paste at home – I’ve used the recipe below a few times now and it works – but frankly the experts really know what they’re doing. As for the vegetable in the Thai curry, I usually use green beans, but aubergines are also really good.
INGREDIENTS
3 chicken breasts, each cut into 8 pieces
2 tbsp fish sauce (for marinade)
1 tbsp groundnut oil
4 tbsp Thai curry paste
Or, if you are going to make your own paste:
2 lemongrass stalks, outer layer removed and finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2cm piece of ginger, peeled and finely chopped (grated if frozen)
½ onion, peeled and finely chopped
3 green chillies, finely chopped
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tbsp fresh coriander, finely chopped
Zest of ½ lime
1 tbsp Thai fish sauce
Good grind of black pepper
400ml can coconut milk
200g French green beans or aubergine, chopped
1 tbsp fish sauce
½ lime
Handful of coriander, finely chopped
METHOD
Pour the marinade fish sauce over the chicken, add a squeeze of lime and leave for half an hour.
Heat the oil in a heavy pan, add 4 tablespoons of Thai curry paste. Stir the coconut milk in the tin to emulsify, add 1 tablespoon of the milk to the paste and cook for 3 minutes. Then add the rest of the coconut milk and stir to combine as the mixture heats. (If making your own paste, pulp everything together in a food mixer or by hand in a pestle and mortar.).
Add the chicken and the beans/aubergine and bring to a gentle simmer. Add the fish sauce and lime and cook for 7 more minutes. Stir in some fresh, chopped coriander. Transfer to a dish and sprinkle some more coriander on top. Serve with rice.
SWEET & SOUR BEEF BRISKET
Serves 8
I had a short-lived career as a restaurant reviewer. Back in 2017, the Sunday Times was looking for people to temporarily fill their prestigious ‘Table Talk’ restaurant review slot after the passing of A. A. Gill, and asked me to be one of their guest writers. I eagerly agreed and loved the challenge. To be asked to go to some of the most sumptuous restaurants in the country and be paid to write about what I ate – who could complain about that?
I wrote three reviews, sandwiched between the last columns of the acclaimed A. A. Gill and the arrival of the sublime Marina O’Loughlin. The best compliment I had for my reviews was from Delia Smith. ‘I enjoyed your reviews,’ she told me. ‘You actually wrote about the food.’
On my travels for the Sunday Times, I visited Skosh in York, a brilliant modern British restaurant with Japanese and Scandinavian influences and The Other Naughty Piglet, a superb French restaurant in London’s Victoria. My most memorable trip, however, was to a New York kosher-style deli and diner named Zobler in the old headquarters of the Midland Bank in the heart of the City of London, now a fancy new hotel. It was an odd experience, eating kneidlach and challah in an ornate former banking hall. It was made odder by the fact that – despite advertising its Jewish culinary roots – none of the food served was actually kosher, much to the disappointment of my dining companion. But the food was divine – there is nothing quite like New York deli-fare to warm the soul.
I have one recipe I cook regularly that would fit right at home on Zobler’s menu – a sumptuous New York sweet and sour beef brisket. It provides enough for eight or more people, and leaves plenty left for lunch for the next few days. It’s the kind of dish you can leave in the oven most of the day – this version has a 4 ½-hour cooking time, but you can easily make it seven hours by cooking at 135°C/250°F/gas mark 1. Always serve it with mashed potato.
INGREDIENTS
Large piece of beef brisket (approx. 2kg)
Salt
FOR THE MARINADE
2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
100ml red wine vinegar
75g brown sugar
4 tbsp tomato purée
2 tbsp paprika
½ tsp cayenne pepper
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp chilli flakes
500ml chicken stock
METHOD
Preheat the oven to 150°C/300°F/gas mark 2.
Put the beef brisket into a large roasting tin and lightly salt all over. Combine all the marinade ingredients and pour all over the beef. Cover with tin foil and bake for 4 ½ hours.
Remove the beef to a serving dish, cover with foil and leave to rest for at least 30 minutes before serving, but longer if you can, and overnight if you wish – time is your friend with brisket. Leave the sauce in the pan to cool and pour off as much of the fat as possible that gathers at the top. If you leave it overnight, it will set.
If you have left the brisket to cool slowly for up to an hour, then just reheat the skimmed sauce, pour over the beef and serve; if overnight, then preheat the oven to 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3, put the beef in a dish, pour over the skimmed sauce, cover with foil and leave in the oven for 45 minutes until hot.
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INDEX
A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Action for Stammering Children 148–9, 159, 220
American food 21, 34, 54, 171–2, 248–9
Armstrong, Alexander 192, 194
Ba
llas, Shirley 192
Balls, Andrew (brother) 3, 13, 15, 19, 22, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 93, 94, 122, 134, 203, 233, 236, 240, 255, 256, 260, 298, 299, 300, 312
Balls, Carolyn (mother) 14, 15, 18, 26, 27, 33, 92, 94, 132–3, 223, 285, 310, 312, 313 cooking 2, 3, 20–1, 36, 58–9, 102, 159, 229, 272, 299–300, 307
dementia 3, 233–40, 242, 243, 256, 259, 275, 278, 287
love of singing 169–70, 239–40, 278
teaches EB how to cook 34–5, 217
Balls, Ed agnostic 240–1
birth 1, 39
Cabinet appointment 130
Celebrity Best Home Cook 120, 225, 261–2, 266, 286–7, 291, 296
childhood 11–22, 31–5
cooking for the family 40, 111–14, 124–5, 131–2, 184–5, 253–4, 258–9, 275–7, 278, 309
embarrassing dad role 186–90
family roots and traditions, value of 272–4, 288–9
Financial Times leader writer 52, 54
food experimentation 5, 54–7, 132, 258
football and 201–10, 213, 218–19
at Harvard University 53–4
holidays 14–16, 20, 59, 165–73, 189, 312–13
Kilimanjaro mountain climb 4, 192–4, 221–2
Labour leadership contest 154, 155, 156
learns to cook 33–5
London Marathon 187–8, 220
loss of parliamentary seat 4, 133, 157, 183–4
love of music 186, 240, 241
marries Yvette Cooper 60
minister for Children, Schools and Families 92, 114–15, 130, 147, 150–3
MP for Morley & Outwood 86, 154
MP for Normanton 80–1, 86, 126
Norwich City chairman 204–7, 210, 213
at Oxford University 53, 255
parenthood 39–41, 60–1, 91–7, 107–8, 110–11, 127–8, 132–4, 184–7, 253–5