by Ken Hom
So I sold most of my wine – more of which later – and I am extremely happy working my way through the vinous produce of the Lot. In the afternoons, I like to visit my friend at the wine shop and he is never short of suggestions. ‘Try this’ or ‘Try that’. He’s starting to get in saké for me. No, not very Lot, admittedly. Then I come home and start on my mise en place, as it is likely that friends will be coming for dinner. Friends are always coming for dinner.
Pierre-Jean Pébeyre became the brother I never had. I was amazed by his passion for the subject of truffles. In time, Pierre-Jean and I would come to produce a book together, which is entitled, appropriately enough, Truffles. He wrote of the fascinating history of truffles and the family business. I contributed the recipes, every one of them enriched by that special ingredient: truffle.
I can still taste, as I write, the truffle that was on the wedding breakfast menu yesterday; a glorious Friday in August 2016, when Jacques Pébeyre’s granddaughter Caroline – whom I have known for twenty-two years – married her sweetheart Thomas.
The ceremony took place in the Lot, at l’Abbaye Sainte-Marie de Souillac, a magnificent twelfth-century abbey laid out on the plan of a Latin cross. I have known the building for more years than I have known Caroline. I photographed it in 1973 for the History of Art department during my days at the University of California, Berkeley. I photographed the abbey for a second time yesterday, although rather than being the main image, it was the background to the joyful newlyweds.
After the ceremony, we proceeded to Château de Pechrigal; the family had rented the entire place for a grand dinner and party. One hundred and twenty guests toasted the very happy couple, and we ate a feast which began with gazpacho and was followed by veal with a sauce Périgueux, a classic, extravagant sauce of reduced Madeira.
The pièce de resistance was what accompanied the dish: instead of small, thick slices of truffle in the sauce, we were each given one whole truffle, served on the plate alongside the veal. What an amazing sight. Panache, Pébeyre style! We all ate the whole truffle. And boy, was it good. Better than sex (at my age).
There was cheese, of course, and then pièce montée, that impressive tower of profiteroles so traditional at French weddings.
My head hit the pillow at three-thirty in the morning, a wide smile on my face.
And what of my cherished framed photograph of Alain Pébeyre, sniffing truffles through his white beard? It had been with me for ever, it seemed. Shortly after moving to Catus, I was unpacking boxes and came across the picture that had hung in the kitchen of my house in Berkeley. It needed a new home. And I knew just the right place for that old photo on a page torn from Gourmet magazine. It is not I, but Pierre-Jean and Babé – uncle and aunt to Caroline – who now see it every day, as it adorns the wall in their kitchen.
* * *
We have come this far without a single mention of cucumbers. Now is the time to introduce them.
This is a luxurious purée, should you happen to have 1.5 kg (3¼ lb) of cucumbers, 900g (2 lb) of potatoes, 250g (9 fl oz) of double cream and 125g (4½ oz) of unsalted butter. I nearly forgot – you will also need 80g (2¾ oz) of fresh black winter truffles or high-quality tinned black winter truffles (cooked once). These ingredients, along with a little salt and pepper, will make the most wonderful companion to a perfectly fried veal chop.
Begin by peeling the cucumbers, and then slice them in half lengthways and use a teaspoon to remove the seeds. Next, cut the cucumber halves into slices. Sprinkle these with a couple of tablespoons of salt, and mix well.
Put the salted slices into a colander and let them drain for 45 minutes. This process rids the cucumber of excess liquid. When the slices have drained, rinse them in water to wash away the salt, and turn them into purée with a hand blender or in a food processor. In a tea towel or kitchen paper, squeeze any excess moisture from the puréed cucumbers. Set aside.
Now peel, slice and cook the potatoes in salted water for about 20 minutes, or until tender. Drain the potatoes and allow them to cool, before passing them through a ricer or food mill. Reheat them in a large, heavy pan.
In a separate saucepan, bring the cream to a simmer before whisking it into the potatoes. Incorporate the butter, mixing well. Add salt and pepper to your taste, and set aside.
All that remains is to chop the truffles, and chop them finely.
Just before serving, reheat the potato purée, fold in the cucumbers and truffles and serve at once. Your guests will be astonished by the transformation of the humble potato.
* * *
I have said that the house in Catus has a swimming pool. When I swim, I work out menus and recipes. What will go with this? Or, if I add this, how will it taste?
Swimming has not always been a part of my life. When I was child, aged about twelve or thirteen, we had swimming lessons: one class for girls, another for boys; we all swam naked, though not together. I was standing on the diving board when I felt a hand pushing on my back. The force sent me from the board into the deep water. I was petrified and flailing around, one second above the surface, the next beneath the surface. Then another hand, this time that of a Good Samaritan, grabbed me and helped me to the side of the pool. The trauma – the fear of drowning – had a lasting effect. For decades, I did not want to learn how to swim.
One day, I went on a boating trip with the Pébeyre family. It was in the middle of the summer, a glorious day, and we were canoeing along the Dordogne River. We were all wearing life vests, but I had not tied mine tight enough. This was to prove a problem when we came across some very rough rapids. The canoe capsized and my vest went up over my head. I could hear a voice – someone was shouting, ‘Ken is drowning.’ They were not wrong. I was not under the water for too long, thank God. Pierre-Jean’s sister, Catou, got to me, reached out and pulled me up. She dragged me through the water, out of danger, to a small island.
Now it was time to learn how to swim. Today, I will not stay in a hotel that does not have a pool.
I stayed in a hotel with a pool in March 2011. It was in the city of Tokyo and, on a Friday afternoon, I fancied a swim in the twenty-metre pool on the sixth floor. A couple of days earlier there had been a small earthquake and now, as I front-crawled my way through the water, a major quake struck. The entire pool began to sway and then the water splashed left and right in huge waves. There were two of us in the massive pool and we gripped the pool’s floating plastic separation cord. The shocked pool attendants scurried about. The earthquake lasted several minutes and was terrifying. We had to wait two hours until we got the all-clear to use the lifts to our rooms. Later that evening, there were a few aftershocks and the hotel room would shake occasionally but less violently.
FROM time to time, I am asked to go and cook a dish for passengers on a ship. One such request came through in 1996: would I do a sevenday trip from Japan to Hawaii? I said yes. I was packing for Japan when I got a call from Pauline, a dear friend in the States. I was best man at her wedding to Jim, who is half Native American. We had lost touch, you know how it is. She said, ‘I know we’ve not spoken for years, but I was ironing and heard a voice on the TV, and I thought, it’s Kenny.’
I was rushed and said, ‘I’d love to talk more but am on my way to Japan. I’ll call you the minute I’m back.’ So I set off on the voyage, which includes entertainment acts such as jugglers and a clairvoyant. The clairvoyant said, ‘Come to my cabin and I’ll give you a free reading.’ Well, there’s an offer I could not refuse. In the cabin, the clairvoyant took my watch, touched it, and said, ‘I see you alone on a boat … a canoe … in the Midwest.’ I thought, interesting. I’d never been on a canoe in America’s Midwest.
Back in California, I called Pauline and apologised for the abrupt end to our last conversation. ‘How’s Jim?’ I asked.
‘I have some bad news,’ she said. ‘Jim died a couple of years ago. A canoeing trip in the Midwest.’
25
Have Wok, Will Travel
; THE HOT WOK series included segments in which I cooked for well-known people, as well as unusual and interesting characters such as the shepherdess of the Scottish Borders.
At first, the BBC had said the series would be a fixture in the daytime TV schedule. Then Kate Kinninmont had a meeting at the BBC and was told, ‘Well, you could always throw in some celebrities if you want to make it primetime.’ So that’s what we did. I might add that I was so badly scarred by the process of memorising lines for my first series that this time round I insisted: no script!
For one episode, I went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where, in the beautiful grounds and on a sunny day, I cooked for Terry Waite. He was a hero of mine. He had spent five years as a hostage in Lebanon, much of it blindfolded. He told me that during the ordeal he was mostly chained to a wall and he was fed badly by his captors. ‘The food, you had to see it to believe it,’ said Terry. ‘One day I said to my guard, “Can’t you vary this diet? What have you got in the kitchen?”’
When the guard said there were potatoes, Terry pleaded, ‘Get one. Bake it. Cut it in half, and put some cheese on top of it.’ Terry recalled excitedly, ‘He did it. He did what I said. And it tasted really good.’ A heart-wrenching tale of taste.
He also recalled, with good humour, a story told to him by Terry Anderson, the journalist who spent seven years as a hostage of Shiite Hezbollah militants in Beirut. One day the cell door opened and a guard carried in a big pot. Anderson and his starving cellmates dashed to the pot, lifted the lid, and there inside the pot was a sheep’s head. It had been boiled and the eyes in their sockets seemed to be staring back at the hostages. ‘Well, if it’s got the eyes in, at least it will see us through the week,’ joked the American to his captives.
Terry Waite stood at my side, towering over me, as I made him a wokful of Burmese-style chicken, a dry-braised dish slowly cooked in spices and its own juices. Although I had never been to Burma, I had visited a number of Burmese restaurants which had opened in California. The food seems to be a cross between the cuisines of China, Vietnam and Thailand, and is an aromatic and fragrant style of cooking that uses spices to charm the flavours from the other ingredients in the dish.
* * *
For Terry’s dish, which would serve four, I used a couple of pounds (900g) of chicken thighs, blotted dry with kitchen paper and seasoned with salt and pepper. I peeled a couple of stalks of lemongrass, crushed them and cut them into 3-inch (7.5-cm) pieces. I heated the wok, added a few tablespoons of groundnut oil and, when it was smoking hot – you know the drill by now – turned down the heat and added the chicken, skin-side down.
Gently, I browned the chicken on both sides and, once that was achieved, I removed the chicken from the wok, drained it on kitchen paper and put it to one side. I drained off all but a tablespoon of the oil and chicken fat.
Then into the hot wok, I added 6 oz (175g) of thinly sliced onions, 6 crushed garlic cloves, 1 tablespoon of finely chopped ginger root, and the lemongrass. I stir-fried for 3 minutes, give or take. Next, I added a teaspoon each of turmeric and chilli powder, a tablespoon of light soy sauce and 3 tablespoons of water.
The chicken thighs were returned to the wok and stir-fried to ensure they were coated in the spicy mixture. I turned the heat right down – as low as it would go – and put a lid on the wok. Terry and I chatted for 20 minutes, by which time the chicken was cooked; the dish was done and ready to be eaten in the grounds of Cambridge on that warm summer’s day.
A brief PS regarding lemongrass. It looks like a dried, oversized spring onion, and imparts a lemony fragrance to dishes. It is widely used in south-east Asian cookery (south-east Asian immigrants took it with them to Hong Kong in the 1970s and early ’80s). When shopping for lemongrass, look for pale-green tops and avoid the dried-out lemongrass. Cut off the fibrous base and peel off the outside layers, and trim off the tops – save them to flavour oils or soups. It can be sliced and frozen for future use.
* * *
I went into the garden at the home of the actress Prunella Scales and her actor husband Timothy West. There, I cooked a vegetarian stir-fry dish of bean curd with shredded Chinese mushrooms, shredded ginger and spring onions.
I added dark soy sauce, a touch of sugar, black pepper and salt. Then I added the water from the dried Chinese mushrooms and covered the wok with a lid to let it simmer away. The bean curd was first fried to brown it, and it acts like a sponge so absorbs all the other flavours. Chinese emperors ate bean curd as a way of cleansing their bodies.
I cooked for the guards of Edinburgh Castle, and for firemen and nurses. And in Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, I cooked for a fisherman called Joe and his wife Sue, who would sell her husband’s catch from a stall at the harbour. Sue showed me how to tell the male crab from the female: turn them upside down, and the cock crab has a small apron, while the hen has a large apron.
When I told Sue that I would be cooking crab with garlic, she slightly surprised me by saying, ‘I’ve never tried garlic.’ Later she said that she should try it, ‘bearing in mind we’re in Dracula country … This is where Bram Stoker came, and he was inspired to write Dracula.’ Fisherman Joe pointed out that the best crabs are the heaviest ones; a tip worth sharing.
I made them a Singapore-style crab curry – using lots of garlic, which first I browned with finely sliced onion and spring onions and then added the crab, which I had chopped in its shell. I added coconut milk, a medium curry paste, a little sugar to balance the heat – whenever you are cooking something spicy hot, use sugar, just a touch, as a balancer. Twenty minutes later, it was done. Now, Joe had originally told me that he didn’t like spice, but, as he tasted, he said, ‘It might have been better if it had been spicier.’ Sue tasted, and loved it.
Although I say that it was cooked within twenty minutes, there were a couple of hiccups along the way. First, I insisted on using a live crab, and one that was not despatched before it went into the pot. That is the way I was taught, and I appreciate it is not to everyone’s approval. Second, there can be trouble with filming outdoors in public. In this case, a few teenage boys in swimming trunks thought it would be fun to disrupt the flow of filming on the quayside. As I was cooking and talking to camera, the teenagers leapt into the water behind me, screaming mid-jump, ‘Ken Hom’s wok is not hot!’ I can assure you, it was.
Kate asked Annie Stirk, our home economist, to deal with the situation. As the boys climbed out of the water, Annie was waiting for them. ‘We’re trying to film. Can you keep the noise down, please?’ Of course, a few minutes later, they were at it again – leaping from the quay into the chilly waters, while shouting with the projected volume of a Welsh choir, ‘Ken Hom’s wok is not hot!’ At this point, the crab that I was cooking decided that the wok was too hot, and it shifted the lid with a claw and started to make a run for it. The noisy boys and the crawling crab were cut from the final edit.
I cooked a spicy curry of halibut for the wonderful actress June Whitfield, and we ate in her garden, over a nice bottle of chilled wine. And the actress Jean Boht and her husband, the conductor Carl Davis, also featured in the series.
I visited Jersey Zoo, which was also the temporary set of Fierce Creatures, to cook crispy vegetarian parcels for John Cleese, who had written and was starring in the movie. In a large bowl, carrots, mangetout, celery, chillies, ginger, garlic, dried Chinese mushrooms, bean noodles, a touch of rice wine and sesame oil are mixed well, wrapped up and slowly cooked in hot oil in the wok. I christened the parcels Fierce Creatures, as the chilli was a bit fierce.
Kate Kinninmont came up with the idea of filming part of the series in California, and she managed to stretch the budget to make it possible (though, to save a bit of money, Kate and her assistant stayed at my place, sleeping in the spare room and on the sofa). So, for the series, I also rustled up dishes at my home in Berkeley and ventured out to cook for others.
Against the backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge, I made stir-fried fish with black bean sauce – with garlic
and spring onions (scallions, as they say in the States) – for a couple of Hawaiian-shirted yellow-cab drivers in San Francisco. One of them told me that he had three woks and said, ‘My pride is I can cook dinner for six in thirty-five minutes.’
They were really chilled out and when we wrapped up, one of them said, ‘Gee, is that the time? I’ve really got to get back because my nephew and his son are coming to my apartment and I don’t want them touching my gun collection.’ Come again? Gun collection? ‘Yeah, well, man, it’s kind of my hobby. My apartment is full of guns.’ Kate was pleased we hadn’t asked to film in his home.
Kate found two great San Francisco-based writers who said they would be delighted for me to cook for them. One was Amy Tan; the other, Armistead Maupin, whose series of novels Tales of the City had recently been dramatised for television.
Armistead was an absolute gentleman, though when we arrived at his house and started to talk, it made me wonder about his peculiar relationship with food. When I asked what he liked to eat, he said, ‘I have been on a low-fat diet. Well, it’s really a no-fat diet, and most of my food comes in horrid little frozen packets. It keeps me fairly happy, but it keeps my appetite under control. In the Bay Area, there are a lot of cottage industries run by hippies who will make a lot of this food…’ He took me to his freezer and, sure enough, it was crammed with scores of small boxes, which seemed identical and were filled with fat-free breakfast, lunch and dinner. He did not seem to own any real food.
Armistead invited friends over and, with bowls of salad and saffron rice, I served steamed chicken, which had been marinated in soy sauce and rice wine. I used a non-stick wok to make a French-inspired dessert of pears gently poached until tender in vanilla syrup (it takes about twenty minutes). ‘Armistead, have you seen a vanilla bean before?’ I asked (they are vanilla pods in Britain).