Tasting France. Part 1: The Artichoke Peril

By: Mr Robot

 In my head, I'm something of a Francophile. 

I think of France as a place we love, my French is only slightly more awful than my Spanish, and it was I, after all, who educated the cheesemonster that is Mrs Robot on the difference between Brie and Camembert, for goodness sake. I like to think I'm a moderately proficient shrugger.

So it was an appalling reality-check to realise our last trip was about 15 years ago. Fifteen years! How did that happen? Resolved to do better, I quickly booked a week in Paris (coming soon) and began my mission to cook my way through The Taste Of France. As already noted, it's a book we've had for years but I don't think have ever used in anger.

Where to start? Mrs Robot's recent dalliance with The Root Canal Man limited my options to fairly squishy stuff, and Riverford had kindly popped a couple of globe artichokes in our vegbox. So with that as my starting point I decided to kick off with an extravagant four-courser.

Le Menu

Artichauts Farci

Omelette a la Piperard

Loup de Mer "Auguste Escoffier"

Creme d'Homere

Stuffed Artichokes

I've you've never tried dismembering an adult artichoke, I urge you to give it a go. Only then will you understand the enormous satisfaction of NEVER EVER doing it again.

I'm kind of wishing I'd videoed it: I have no doubt it'd be a YouTube sensation with lucrative sponsorship deals rolling in from providers of medical supplies and mouth soap.

Suffice to say that after 90 minutes I had two tiny tiny bits of rapidly browning artichoke, a knee-high pile of discarded alien skin, and some excitingly arterial spray patterns across the ceiling.

From there, though, it was splendid. The forcemeat called for a mix of pork and veal, but having not planned ahead I couldn't get the veal, so substituted it with chicken thigh - much as I imagined an Anjou farmer might.

The meats are mixed with mushroom and a little double cream, and stuffed in the artichoke cavity.

This, in a stroke of genius, is wrapped with bacon to hold it all in, before being lightly browned and then simmered in half a bottle of white wine.

The artichoke tastes amazing, despite it all, and stuffing is both delicate and rich. The reduced wine has soaked into everything, bringing acidity and balance. It's real treat. 

I'm not doing it again.

Omelette a la Piperade

I've commented before that egg dishes seem tragically undervalued in Britain.

The Spanish Revueltos makes an art of scrambling, and the French do the same with omelettes. A good Omelette Fine Herbs is an extraordinary, revelatory experience.

This Pays Basque dish is your standard omelette filled with the sunshine: tomato, bell pepper, garlic, chilli, bay and thyme that have gently fried together for a good half-hour.

It's all served up with slabs of fried ham on the side.

I know what you're thinking - I'm buggered if I'm taking half an hour and three pans just to make an omelette. Well you should.

Sea Bass in Lettuce Leaves "Auguste Escoffier"

Yes indeed, we're in the big time now. There's no lengthy narrative or anecdote about the great man here: it just pops up, quite casually, in the pages of Provence between beef in red wine and (god help us) a recipe for artichokes.

It immediately put me in mind of Keith Floyd, which probably has poor Escoffier spinning in his grave, bringing simple things together with booze and cream to make a surprisingly sophisticated and happy dish. 

Incidentally if you're one of those people inclined to pull faces at the thought of cooked lettuce, I'm disappointed in you. Go and eat Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's lettuce risotto, and come back when you've grown up.

So, a stock is made with all the grim bits of fish (I had some langostine paws kicking around too - go me) with your regular stock veg and white wine.

The fish himself is cut into biggish pieces (to fillet or not? I did), dusted with flour and lightly fried for a couple of minutes each side. 

Then the brilliant bit. Blanch the lettuce leaves, wrap one or two around each piece of fish, and simmer really gently, with softened shallots, in the stock, some white wine and vermouth for a few minutes.

Finish with a splash of cream, naturally.

If the gods are kind you haven't overcooked the fish. The lettuce is soft but still light and fresh, and is a great carrier for the rich, slightly sweet sauce.

It's beyond my skill to make this thing look elegant, especially when it's my bloody dinner and the last thing I want is cold fishy lettuce, but that doesn't matter because all the elegance you need is on your palate.

Wine and Honey Cream

We're off to the Languedoc for pudding. At a casual glance I imagined it to be some syllabub-type whipped affair for serving in a tall glass (or possibly a jam-jar with a handle for those in Shoreditch). I still think that's a jolly good idea, but it ain't this.

Instead we have more of a baked custard, the kind of creme you find under a brulee: honey and wine are simply whipped up with eggs, cinnamon and lemon peel and baked on a low heat for half an hour, then left to cool. 

With typical style, I forgot to make a caramel for the moulds so they looked a bit anaemic when turned out, but you can't fault the taste.

I mean, wine and honey - if you're going to quibble with that, all I can do is shrug.

All images (c) PP Gettins

The Taste of France

By: Mr Robot

Over the last couple of years we’ve mainly been trying to expand our cookery repertoire – not least dabbling with Burmese food (largely thanks to MiMi Aye), Vietnamese (Uyen Luu), and Japanese (Tim Anderson), while my subscription with The Spicery is for a World Discoverer box that takes me all over the place (including the odd trip to pastry hell). And though we’d never claim an ounce of expertise it’s exciting and liberating and fun to explore these things.

But for a while I’ve had the nagging feeling that perhaps we’re neglecting classical European a bit, and a recent trip to the new Bistrot Pierre in Bath only confirmed that.

I’ve also had a yearning to properly do one cookbook in full, cover to cover, including all the stuff that makes me dubious or scared.

So in the spirit of a double-bird massacre I’ve decided to go full tilt at The Taste of France by Robert Freson, Adrian Bailey and Jacqueline Saulnier. 

This is a lovely book of proper traditional French fare and when we picked it up about 15 years ago

, it was very much in the foodporn spirit: it has acres of descriptive text and atmospheric photos covering each region of France, though at the time the recipes seemed impossibly challenging.

Looking at it now, there’s little to be afraid of (don’t mention the pastry) and it’s not ridiculously huge - though now I come to count I hadn’t realised it runs to 91 recipes – so meets my current needs nicely. With any luck I’ll be able to pull off a spectacular multi-course feast each month or so and we should be done in, erm, a couple of years.

It won’t be without it’s challenges, not least for ingredients. My local butcher is wonderful but we may have difficulty getting hold of the hare, calves feet, snails and frog legs I’ll need to do it in full – thank heavens for interweb mail order. 

The authors also seem strangely devoted to chervil, which appears to be extinct in Wiltshire supermarkets, so I might have to get my wellies on and sort the garden out.

I can’t say my wallet is looking forward to the Lobster pot-au-feu or Turbot gigot styke and frankly I fully expect the Dried and Salted Pig’s Liver to go to the cat. But I’m going to do them anyway, because that’s what being a Greedybot is all about.

Anglo-Indian Pilaf

By: Mrs Robot

I'm not going to review the cookbook yet as I haven't made enough recipes from it to do the job properly, but I just wanted to share a photo of one of the dishes from The Burma Cookbook, by Robert Carmack and Morrison Polkinghorne with you.

I mentioned in a post that my family's pretty much lost touch with the Asian part of its roots, and for me cooking food from the region is one way to try to reconnect with that. Well, this is about as connected as I can get: a dish from the mixed-race community within Burma. A lot of Indians and Anglo-Indians went to Burma with the British, and took with them all sorts of foodstuffs, many of which have become part of Burmese food. (Take Indian snacks and the Burmese love of salads, and what do you get? Samosa salad.)

You don't need any connection at all to Burma to enjoy this pilaf, however. It's really delicious. You start by making a sort of spiced lamb stew, then putting the rice on top after a couple of hours and waiting for that to absorb the excess liquid. The result is wonderfully soft meat and tasty rice, which you top with fried onions and bits of omelette.

It's fantastically easy to make, and can all be done in one pot, which I definitely appreciate because I hate washing up. If you make your own curries regularly you'll have all the spices at home already, and if you don't there aren't so many that it would all be really expensive to buy them - plus then you'd have the spices to make many more pilafs in future. The meat does take a couple of hours to stew, but you could make up that part in advance and freeze it, so when you wanted some after, say, a day at work, you's just need to thaw it and bring the meat up to a simmer before adding the rice.

I think I will be eating a lot of this in future...

Retro Recipe: God Save the Queen (of Puddings)!

By: Mrs Robot

I was once entertained to hear an American food critic say you could mess about with the savoury side of food as much as you liked and British people would eat it, but don't ever mess with their puddings. It's true: we do love a good pud, from venerable old Christmas Pudding to a steamed golden syrup one, to what has to be the UK's current favourite, sticky toffee pudding, which is a bit of a johnny-come-lately having been invented around the 1970s. Now, British puddings are not like American pudding, which seems to refer solely to custardy or blancmangey things. Being a guttersnipe, I'll label anything sweet served towards the end of a meal 'pudding', but when I talk of 'a pudding', I'll mean the spongy sort. Queen of Puddings is a bit of an oddity, then, as it's got a custardy (but firm) base. On top of that goes a thin layer of red jam, then a pile of meringue.

This was an unusual thing for me to make as there's an unstated division of labour here at Casa Mechanica; I do pastry, he does meringues. But as Mr Robot had crossed the line when he wrestled with the Moroccan snake, I decided to give this a whirl. The recipe was from Katie Stewart's Cookery Book, a reprint of The Times Cookery Book. I was worried about including this entry in our 'Retro Recipes' section, but that book was first published over 40 years ago! Despite that, the book isn't at all dated, just incredibly useful.

I don't know why it's taken me so long to give this a go. I'd feared it would be tricky, but it's incredibly simple. I suppose separating eggs might seem difficult to some people if they've never tried it, but it's really easy. You use the yolks in the custard mixture, which you then soak the bread in, beat smooth, and bake. Once the bread-custard base is firm, you smear it with jam - we used a jar of raspberry bought at the Bakelite Museum on a recent trip to Devon - and then top with meringue. Bake it again for about 10 minutes and hey presto! Pudding is ready to serve.

As for the meringue... I did it! I've always been terrified of over-beating it and ending up with a collapsed mess, and that's been leading me to under-beat. This time I got it really stiff and the whole experience was much more satisfying (ooh, matron).

One thing that struck me was how economical the whole thing was, enabling you to feed about six people (erm, or two greedy ones) using just a few eggs, a thick slice of bread, some sugar and some jam. If you've got other things going in the oven anyway, it would be easy to pop the base in on a lower shelf at the same time, making maximum use of the heat. She may be called a Queen, but she's a Pauper at heart!

Snakes on a Plate

or, The Spicery Box 2 - A Fiasco in Filo

By: Mr Robot

I was really looking forward to my second box from The Spicery because not only did it have very tasty-looking Cafreal kebabs, it had the terribly swish and exciting M’Hencha. On reflection that was stupid of me because my pastry skills are disastrous at best, and M’Hencha being a massive coil of filo, it could only ever go one way.

Anyhoo, the kebabs were great – quite subtle herby chicken onna stick backed up with an extremely punchy mango chutney. 

                                 

In fact the chutney was the highlight: dark, jammy and fiery hot. I’m more accustomed to that heat in more sour context so the sweet mango provided a novel and exciting backdrop. 

Mrs Robot was very grateful for the raita...

Inevitably, though, the star of the box was the M’hencha. It’s a spectacular - if done properly - sausage of ground almonds, orange and pistachios, wrapped in filo pastry which is then coiled like a snake (the literal meaning of M’Hencha apparently), baked until crunchy and then made soggy with an insane syrup of honey and citrus. 

Anyone who doesn’t find that a madly exciting prospect can leave the room right now.
As I’ve already hinted, pastry is not my strong point, and the fact that we’re using shop-bought helps not one jot. For some reason pastry drives me to flap and swear like nothing on earth. Think of an elderly relative trying to install a printer driver*  - that’s me where flour and fat are concerned.

We start off well enough, producing a lovely sweet goop fragrant with cinnamon, cloves, nuts and oranges. But that’s as far as it goes.
My instructions tell me to lay out my 270g pack of filo to a length of 1.5 metres, so in a spirit of terrified slavish obedience I measure out that distance plus a bit and start laying sheets. 

Well a third of a pack later I’m done, and I’m dithering. Should I be doubling up with extra layers, or is this all I need? Have I got the wrong packet of filo? What do I do? And how does spinning round in circles and flapping help?

It’s ridiculous because in any other kitchen situation I’d have coped fine. Not with aplomb, perhaps, and with no certainty of success, but I’d have had a decent go. I definitely wouldn’t have got hysterical. Eventually Mrs Robot delivers a Bogartian slap to restore my senses and I decide to proceed with just the single layer. But of course by now the pastry has already started drying out so despite painting it with butter (did I mention my painting skills? About as good as my pastrying), the rolling is more an exercise in folding and shattering.   

 

Coiling, therefore, goes no better and instead of a snaky circle I end up with something Pythagoras could’ve spent a diverting afternoon with.

Here’s where the instructions really let me down. They say you can bake this in a springform cake tin, or slide it onto a baking sheet, whereas of course it should have read, “bake it in a springform cake tin, or you can slide it onto a baking sheet BUT ONLY IF YOU’RE A BLOODY IDIOT”. 

 

Guess what I did.

Well as you can imagine at this point the air was blue, providing a lovely contrast to my face, and I was desperately in need of consolation.

About 40 seconds after shoving the accursed thing into the oven I got it, in the form of some of the most delicious smells ever to waft my way. 

It only got better, and by the time I’d taken him out of the oven, drizzled him with syrup and scattered him with pistachios and rose petals, my poor deformed snake promised to be something glorious. 

He may be a poor deformed snake, but at least I gave him a face

And it was. I mean you’d never expect bad things out of almonds and honey and pastry and oranges and more honey, so that was no great surprise but it was utterly wonderful sticky eating.

The phrase “preparation time 25 minutes” was clearly a big fat lie but at least the 35 minute cooking time allows for a pint or two towards recovery

Beauty's only crunchy-skin deep

All images (c) PP Gettins

*With apologies to all tech-savvy silver surfers, naturally. Please don’t hack me

Deliciously Moorish

By: Mr Robot

The butcher had Guinea Fowl this weekend so I couldn't help picking one up. I was immediately thinking of Andalucia and the joy that is poultry cooked with saffron and almonds.

Saffron and Almond - the start of so much goodness

 It's one of the classic Moorish flavours that comes up over and over again in Southern Spain and we've got about a zillion recipes for this but they all revolve around the same basis. Guinea fowl (or chicken if you prefer) pieces are fried until brown and then deglazed with fino, manzanilla or white wine and then simmered with a little chicken stock and saffron.


Toasted almonds, fried garlic and fried bread are blitzed up and stirred in for the last few minutes, and it's enlivened with paprika, lemon juice and fresh parsley to make a wonderfully thick, rich sauce that sends me through the Proustgate to the searing heat, white walls and jasmine-filled air of the plazas of old Seville.

I know it's appallingly expensive but I've learned that it's vital to have a heavy hand with the saffron. You want a full punch of it, not some miserly background hint. Those crappy little packs you get in the supermarket? You'll need at least half of it. It's best indulged rarely but well - saffron is made for bingeing, not homeopathy.

Far better value, I find, is to have a brilliant trip to Spain and bring back a ton of the stuff. It's much cheaper over there, and is overall a rather nicer destination than Tesco. But that's just me.

Since you're using a jointed bird this is a fairly quick dinner that only needs about 20 minutes cooking in total. It would easily work mid-week, especially if the sun is shining and the patio calls. There isn't really any veg that makes much sense to serve alongside. A light salad before or after is a much better bet - just serve it up with some nice crusty bread for mopping.

Oh, and make sure you've got a good supply of sherry or vino to hand, since this dish practically demands conviviality late into the night.

All images (c) PP Gettins

Retro Recipe: corned beef fritters

By Mrs Robot

When you think about it, the only reason people ate a ration book diet during the second world war was because they didn't have any option. Nonetheless, it seems to be a period people have great curiosity about, and when we were in Devon at the start of May I picked up a little book called Favourite Ration Book Recipes. One simple recipe was these corned beef fritters, which mainly consist of mashed potato and corned beef, plus some onion. They were very tasty, but one of the least-appetising-looking things I've cooked in a very long time. Bless him, Mr Robot ate his too.

Making the fritters was a simple matter of mashing everything together, and it's there that I suspect I went wrong: I overworked the mixture so it was very well blended but also extremely soft. (That said, it tasted pretty good at this stage.) The recipe called for a bit of milk, but I didn't add any, and even so the mixture was very moist. Chunkier bits of potato and beef would have had more texture, and might have fried up better. Also, the recipe said nothing about coating the patties with flour, which is something that I think might have improved the frying process, and might have stopped them sticking in the pan. Flour was rationed during the second world war, but bread was not, and breadcrumbs would have made a good alternative coating for the patties. I often turn leftover cottage pie into little mashcakes and they work really well, but these were too soft and attached themselves firmly to the frying pan.

As I had plenty of leftover mash, I fried up another onion with some cumin seeds, and worked it into the mash along with a finely-chopped green chilli, chopped fresh coriander and a little garam masala. This mixture was made into balls, dipped into a batter made of gram (chickpea) flour and water and deep fried. Much more satisfactory - and here's a photo, just to prove I can cook with leftover mash!