SERIOUS LUNCH FOR 8’ NO HOSTAGES
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CHOUCROUTE GARNIE
QUINCE SYLLABUB
In our enthusiasm for all things Mediterranean, some more northerly specialties have got lost. I love Scandinavian food, perhaps because I spent a lot of time in Norway as a child (taken by an adored au pair, Sissel), but I love too those robust, spicily sour Germanic constructs: pflaumenpfannekuchen, great solid pancakes bolstered with plums and weighed down with a thick layer of granulated sugar; plum tart made with shiny dark quetschen, sliced, and cooked till a reddy, coppery cinnamon on thick banks of hefeteig, a yeast dough; a long-steeped sauerbraten; stuffed cabbage; wurst mit senf (with mustard); and—we’re getting there—an astringent, tangled heap of sauerkraut with boiled potatoes, juniper berries, frankfurters, the works. The choucroute garnie of the title makes this sound Alsatian rather than uncompromisingly German. But, whatever, we’re talking about the same hangover-salving thing.
QUINCE SYLLABUB
You can leave all the sausages in this whole, or halve or cut them into chunks as you like. If you are going to cut them, you can reduce the amount you get; you just need everyone to be able to take some of each.
CHOUCROUTE GARNIE
¾ cup goose fat
2 medium onions, finely sliced
3 smoked ham knuckles
3 medium carrots, peeled and halved
1 bouquet garni made of 1 bay leaf, 8 juniper berries, 2 cloves, 3 sprigs thyme (see page xx)
¾ pound sauerkraut
freshly milled black pepper
3 cups dry Riesling
8 Toulouse sausages or bratwurst
8 frankfurters
Melt or heat ½ cup of the goose fat in a heavy casserole—I use a large cast-iron rectangular one that fits over a couple of burners—and cook the onion in it over medium heat, uncovered, for about 10 minutes or until soft. Add the knuckles, the carrots, and bouquet garni and stir. Then add the sauerkraut and a good grinding of pepper, and mix well so that all is combined and the knuckles are blanketed by the sauerkraut.
Pour over the Riesling and bring to the boil. Add the remaining goose fat in teaspoon-sized dollops over the top of the sauerkraut. Put the lid on, turn the heat down to very low, and simmer for 2½ hours.
Grill the Toulouse sausages or bratwurst and set aside till needed. When the knuckles are cooked, remove, let cool a little, then carve and slice into chunks (neither delicacy nor finesse are exactly required), getting rid of the bones (or keeping them to flavor soup), and return to the casserole along with the sausages or bratwurst and the frankfurters, halved or cut up, if you like. Put the casserole back on the heat, covered, and let simmer for 20 minutes till all’s heated through.
You can serve straight from the casserole or decant everything to a vast oval plate. With this, I like plain, that’s to say unbuttered, boiled floury potatoes with some juniper berries bashed and sprinkled over on serving.
If I have leftovers, I put everything back in the casserole, stash it in the fridge, and reheat it up to 3 days later—a little something for the week.
You cannot want much of a dessert after this, but the syllabub will seep comfortably into whatever small space is left. Turn to page 113 for the recipe, adjusting quantities as necessary.
If this sounds like too much hard work, then bring out a vast tub of yogurt, a jar of, preferably, Greek honey, and some flaked almonds you’ve toasted in a fatless pan over medium heat.
FINALLY, THE BASIC ALWAYS - WELCOME LUNCH FOR 8
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SAUSAGES AND MASH WITH RED WINE, CUMIN, AND ONION GRAVY
SEVILLE ORANGE CURD TART, OR LEMON CREAM WITH SHORTBREAD
Sausages and mash—sausages with mashed potatoes—have to be the most gratefully received lunch ever. For the mash, work on 8 ounces of potatoes per person, adding lots of butter, lots of cream, lots of pepper; as for the sausages, I exhort you not to be seduced by interesting-sounding combinations. I always regret falling for the wild boar and ginger, the venison and mint sausages; sausages should be just sausages. I do, though, buy my butcher’s Cumberland sausages, porky, herby links, now that he makes individual ones, not just the traditional yard-long spiralled kind. A reliable choice is any honest pork sausage that is without distracting flavors.
I always cook my sausages in the oven, set at 400°F. Use a roasting pan with a little bit of vegetable oil in it and prick the sausages before cheerfully shunting them into the oven and forgetting about them. Turn them over after 10 minutes. They should be done after 20–30.
With the sausages and mash, though, an onion gravy makes all the difference; I make mine spicy and wine-dark for this, rather than the more traditional one that accompanies my roast beef (page 252). If you’ve got some meat stock on hand, do use it, but I have no qualms about using one best-quality beef bouillon cube to make the stock.
For dessert I give the recipe for lemon cream as well as the Seville orange tart in part to make this doable whatever the season, but also because it’s incredibly easy and incredibly delicious.
RED WINE, CUMIN, AND ONION GRAVY
You can make this in advance and reheat it later; you might need to add some water when you do.
2 tablespoons beef drippings or vegetable oil
8 ounces onions, sliced very thinly
1 teaspoon ground cumin
scant tablespoon sugar
2 scant tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups beef or veal stock (see headnote)
½ cup red wine
Heat the drippings in a heavy-bottomed, fairly wide saucepan and add the onions. Turn down the heat to low and cook the onions for about 10 minutes until soft, stirring occasionally to push them around the pot and make sure they’re not burning. Stir in the cumin and cook for another 5 or so minutes. Turn the heat up and add the sugar; let the onions caramelize slightly by stirring over a medium-high flame for 3 minutes and then, still stirring, add the flour. Stir over the heat for 2 more minutes and then add the stock and wine and keep stirring—or stir now and again but with some concentration—while the gravy comes to the boil. When it does so, turn down and simmer very gently for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
SEVILLE ORANGE CURD TART
I ate this at influential chef Alastair Little’s Lancaster Road restaurant, just after it opened, one February when the Seville oranges were in the shops, and couldn’t believe how transcendentally good it was. I have introduced some muscovado sugar, which gives off a pleasurable hint of toffee-ish marmalade. I sometimes make a sweet pastry, sometimes a plain one for this. The sweet pastry is more delicate somehow, but there really is something to be said for using a plain, unfancy, nonsweet pastry, the better to set off the deeply toned curd.
3 whole eggs
2 egg yolks
½ cup superfine sugar
1/3 cup light muscovado sugar or light brown sugar
juice and zest of 4 Seville oranges
10 tablespoons (1 stick plus 2 tablespoons) unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch cubes
1 plain or sweet pastry shell (pages 37 and 39), baked blind and cooked through in a shallow 9-inch or deep 8-inch tart pan, cooled
Make the pastry shell. In a heavy-bottomed saucepan whisk together the whole eggs, yolks, and sugars until amalgamated. Make sure to stir in and scrape up any sugar at the edges or it will burn when it’s on the stove. Add the orange juice and zest and the butter. Put the saucepan over medium heat and cook, stirring constantly, until thickened; do not allow to boil. Again, take care to stir the edges as well as middle, otherwise the curd may burn. Remove the curd from the heat and pour directly into the tart shell. Eat warm, or cool before serving.
If you’re not making a tart but serving the curd to be eaten with shortbread, then pour into individual glasses when it is cool enough not to splinter the glass. Or accompany with really good plain dark chocolate cookies of a delicate nature.
LEMON CREAM
I made this by accident when
I had some mixture left over from a tarte au citron; I poured it into ramekins and baked it (in a bain-marie) along with the tart. I loved the lemon cream, and it’s easier than pastry and less commonplace than tarte au citron.
It really does make a difference to the intense, satiny lemoniness if you leave it to steep in the fridge for 2 or 3 days before baking it. You could always use Seville oranges, too, in place of the lemons.
zest and juice of 3 juicy lemons
1½ cups superfine sugar
6 eggs
1¼ cups heavy cream
In a bowl combine the lemon zest and juice, sugar, and eggs and whisk until well incorporated. Then combine the cream with the lemon mixture and pour into a measuring cup. Cover with plastic film and refrigerate it until required, but preferably for at least 2 days.
When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 300°F. Bring a kettle of water almost to a boil. Put 8 ½-cup ramekins into a roasting pan and pour the lemon cream mixture into them. Pour hot, not boiling, water into the roasting dish to come about halfway up the ramekins, and bake 20–30 minutes. The cream should be just set but still with some wobble; it will set more as it cools, but there should always be a slight and desirable runniness about it. Remove and cool. If you’re eating this soon, don’t put the cream in the fridge, and if you’re making it in advance and therefore need to refrigerate it, make sure you take it out to get it to room temperature for a good hour before eating.
SHORTBREAD
You do need cookies with the lemon cream; make these. There is no one way of going about shortbread, ask any Scot—this version is buttery and short (or rich), but with a certain gritty density. I find the way of shaping then baking the shortbread as specified below the easiest way to go about it, but you can press the dough into a traditional mold or push it into a jelly-roll pan and segment the shortbread when fresh out of the oven, if you prefer a more orthodox approach. Obviously, too, you can make these by hand if you don’t like or don’t have the machine.This will yield about 44 cookies.
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsweetened butter, very soft
½ cup confectioners’ sugar, plus more, if desired
¾ cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour
½ cup cornstarch
pinch salt
Cream the butter and sugar in the food processor; you may need to stop and push down the buttery bits if the mixture’s not combining properly. Add the flour and cornstarch and salt, and process to combine again; again, you may need to push the mixture down if it goes up the sides of the bowl.
Remove and knead into a cylinder shape. Cover with plastic film and chill in the fridge. At the same time, preheat the oven to 325°F. After about 20 minutes, when this buttery cylinder feels hard to the touch, slice into ¼-inch-thick disks—or thinner if you want and can—put onto a greased or lined baking pan, dredge with confectioners’ sugar if you want a sweet, crunchy edge, and bake for 20–30 minutes, or until the tops are dry and the base is no longer doughy at all. Remember, like all cookies, they’ll crisp up when they’re cold.
Remove with a spatula and cool on a wire rack.
A TRADITIONAL BRITISH SUNDAY LUNCH
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Proper British Sunday lunch is everything contemporary cooking is not. Meat-heavy, hostile to innovation, resolutely formalized, it is as much ritual as meal, and an almost extinct ritual at that. Contemporary trends, it is true, have hastened a reappraisal of traditional cooking. But neither nostalgia for nursery foods nor an interest in ponderous culinary Victoriana is what Sunday lunch—Sunday dinner—is all about. It doesn’t change, is impervious to considerations of health or fashion; it is about solidity, the family, the home.
One of the silent, inner promises I made myself on having children was to provide a home that made a reassuring, all-comers-welcome tradition of Sunday lunch. It hasn’t materialized quite yet, but few of my generation lead meat-and-two-veg lives any more. We are generally more mobile; the weekend is no longer homebound. Nor do we want to be kitchen-bound (and those with small children hardly have the time on their hands for involved cooking). The fact is that a traditional Sunday lunch is impossible to pull off without putting in at least a couple of hours by the sink and the stove. And it is far from being the sort of cooking anyway that finds favor now; the relaxed, “let’s throw this with that and come up with something simple and picturesquely rustic” approach will not put a “joint”—the roast—Yorkshire pudding, and roast potatoes on the table. To cook a decent Sunday lunch needs discipline and strict timekeeping.
But with modest organization, there can be something strangely reassuring about cooking a traditional meal. It is about choreography, about timetabling, and has its own pleasures. We are so accustomed to being invited to consider cooking an art that we forget just how rewarding and satisfying it is as pure craft. My Latin teacher, Miss Plummer, who had the misfortune to teach at one of the less academic schools I frequented, used to remark, with a sort of elegiac condescension, that none of us could know the simple yet substantial pleasures of the carpenter in making a chair. But cooking does give that pleasure, and there are particular satisfactions peculiar to the making of this Sunday lunch. For Americans, such a lunch would also make a wonderful evening or holiday meal, perfect when family and friends are gathered and one wants something intimately festive.
Whenever I cook for people, I find it easier to have scribbled down in front of me the times at which I’m meant to do any key thing—put things in the oven, take them out—just because once I start talking or drinking I tend to lose track. I haven’t suggested this alongside the dinner-party menus or elsewhere because I can’t know what time you’ll be eating and anyway have tried not to be too bossy. With full-on Sunday lunch, I have no such compunction. It has to be planned as efficiently as a military campaign.
Traditional British Sunday lunch does, of course, mean roast beef. It is essential to get good beef from a butcher you trust. You can also explain what you want, or ask what you think you should want, for how many people, how you want to carve it, and so on. A rib roast gives the best flavor, but it is very difficult to carve. But I am, anyway, a hopeless carver and believe that in cooking especially, though in everything really, it is better to play to your strengths than your weaknesses. Besides, if you can’t do much more than hack at it, it’s a waste. I am resigned to buying a boned roast. I have recently become very extravagant and gone for top loin; a boned sirloin would be good, too, though.
I have always found gravy problematic, but for beef I don’t think you can casually deglaze the roasting dish with some red wine and hope it’ll be all right. Nor does that mean the opposite extreme, the thick, floury, school gloop. Banish instant gravy powders and granules from your thoughts and your cupboards. Instead, start caramelizing your onions early and cook them slowly. This may be difficult when you’re trying to orchestrate everything else for lunch, but you can easily do the gravy the day before and then just reheat and add meat juices at the last minute.
Roast potatoes are another fraught area. I have, in the past, got frantic with despair as the time for the meat to be ready drew closer and the potatoes were still blond and untroubled in their roasting pan. The key here is to get the fat hotter than you would believe necessary before you start and to continue to cook the potatoes at a higher heat and for longer than you might believe possible. And you must roughen them up after parboiling.
The heat of the fat is again the crucial element in making a Yorkshire pudding rise. There’s no doubt this is easier if you have two ovens (one for the beef, one for the Yorkshire pudding), but the beef can either be cooked at a very high temperature for a quick blast and then at a moderate one for a while, or at a highish one all the time. You can always blast the Yorkshire pudding on a high heat while the beef is resting on its carving board.
Roast root vegetables are traditional, but I tend not to bother. With the roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, you hardly need more starch, though if I’m cooking roast pork, or ro
ast beef without the Yorkshire pudding, or the usual roast chicken, I might do parsnips, either roasted alongside the potatoes or in another pan anointed with honey and put in the oven to grow sweet and burnished.
As for other vegetables, I think you need two sorts. This can make life difficult, but not insurmountably so. It’s just a matter, again, of time management—the important thing is not suddenly to need about six pans on a four-burner stove. And there doesn’t need to be too much chopping. Choose, for example, frozen peas and something to provide fresh, green crunch: beans, Savoy cabbage, bok choi. I love broccoli, but it is very sweet, and with the peas you don’t really need any more sweetness. It’s unconventional, but I do rather like a tomato salad somewhere too, especially if it’s still warm outside.
I don’t often make my own horseradish sauce (though see page 265 for a recipe)—I buy a good bottled one and add a bit of crème fraîche, ordinary cream, or yogurt—but mustard must, for me, be English and made up at the last minute. I don’t mind having other mustards on the table, but for me the whole meal is ruined without proper English mustard.
Traditionalists will insist on a sturdy pie or crumble for dessert, but really, after all that carbohydrate, have you got room? I am immensely greedy, but I don’t like that invasive and uncomfortable feeling of bloatedness that can make you regret eating much more than a hangover can ever make you regret drinking.
Now that we seem to be able to get blueberries all the year round, I often serve them with a large, shallow bowl of Barbados cream. This—yogurt and heavy cream stirred together, fudgy brown sugar sprinkled on top—has the advantage of having to be done the day before (see page 117). I love lemon ice cream after this (and it’s good with blueberries, or indeed any berries, too) and I sometimes make one that doesn’t need fiddling about with while freezing—you just stash it in the freezer (see page 254). Nothing is quite as good as proper ice cream, made with a custard base and then churned until solid, but home cooking is based on compromises, and a simple dessert is a compromise I am often grateful to make. You could consider a crumble (see page 41 for a recipe and adjust quantities as necessary) if only because the crumble mixture can be made up earlier and just sprinkled on the fruit as you sit down, and cooked while you eat the beef. Remember, you are not trying to produce the definitive Sunday lunch to end all Sunday lunches. Nor are you a performance artist. The idea is to make a lunch that you want to eat and can imagine sitting down to do so without bursting into tears.
How to Eat Page 33