Nigella Bites (10 page)

The way I cook, more than what I cook, is so much a product of the way my mother cooked before me, and most of what I feel about food comes from my family. Every time I pick up a pan I am drawing on what I inherited – cooking is nothing if not about temperament and habit – but there are some special dishes which I either ate as a child, or which come from the family kitchen that have a special significance and which I want to keep alive and pass on.

Italian Sausages with Lentils

Soft-Boiled Eggs with Asparagus Soldiers

Whitebait

Liptauer

Granny Lawson’s Lunch Dish

My Grandmother’s Ginger-Jam Bread and Butter Pudding

Custard

Chocolate-Chestnut Refrigerator Cake

ITALIAN SAUSAGES WITH LENTILS

My mother used English sausages mostly, and those flat, sludgy lentils (Puy lentils weren’t so easily available then) but this is at its best made with highly flavoured Italian sausages (I love the ones tagged ‘Genovese’, deep with garlic and basil) and either French Puy lentils or the similar Italian ones from Umbria.

This isn’t about fancifying a downhome dish: it’s about doing what feels right and responding to what’s available; in short, it’s about cooking.

This incidentally, is what Italians serve traditionally on New Year’s Day; the coin-shaped lentils symbolise the prosperity that is hoped for over the coming year, much as Jewish tradition uses honey richly for the Rosh Hashanah meal to represent the wish for a sweet and happy life for the year ahead.

Serves 4.

3–4 tablespoons olive oil (not extra-virgin)

1 onion, finely chopped

sprinkling of salt

500g Puy lentils

1 fat clove garlic, squished with the side of a knife, and skin removed

8 Italian sausages

100ml red wine

50ml water

flat-leaf parsley for sprinkling

To cook the lentils, put 2–3 tablespoons of the oil into a good-sized saucepan (and one which has a lid that fits) on the heat and when it’s warm add the chopped onion. Sprinkle with salt (which helps prevents it browning) and cook over a low to medium heat till soft (about 5 minutes). Add the lentils, stir well and then cover generously with cold water. Bring to the boil, then cover and let simmer gently for half an hour or so until cooked and most, if not all, the liquid’s absorbed. I don’t add salt at this stage since the sauce provided by the sausages later (and which will be poured over the lentils) will be pretty salty itself. So, wait and taste. And remember, you can of course cook the lentils in advance.

Anyway, when either the lentils are nearly ready or you’re about to reheat them, put a heavy-based frying pan on the hob, cover with a film of oil and add the bruised garlic. Cook for a few minutes then add and brown the sausages. When the sausages are brown on both sides – which won’t take more than 5 minutes or so – throw in the wine and water and let bubble up. Cover the pan, either with a lid or tin foil, and cook for about 15 minutes. Using a fork, mash the now-soft garlic into the sauce and taste for seasoning, adding a little more water if it’s too strong.

Remove the lentils to a shallowish bowl or dish (I evacuate the sausages from their cooking pan, plonk the lentils in, then proceed) then cover with the sausages and their garlicky, winey gravy. Sprinkle over some flat-leaf parsley.

SOFT-BOILED EGGS WITH ASPARAGUS SOLDIERS

No, we didn’t eat this for breakfast when I was a child, so keep calm. It’s just that I remember eating asparagus like this, dipped into oily-yolked soft-boiled eggs or pronged into the soft, bulging, yellow belly of a fried one (in which case, it becomes Asparagus Holstein). It’s a good way of making the expensive bundles of early English asparagus go further and, besides, the richness of the flowing, viscous yolk provides the best and simplest sauce for the bud-tipped grass. Consider serving this as a starter; go further, too, if you like and provide plates of puce-pink salty-sweet prosciutto, the slices to be used as edible damask napkins with which to wrap and hold the juicy green stems.

Serves 4.

1 bunch of asparagus

4 eggs at room temperature

Maldon salt

Cut the woody ends off the asparagus, and cook it in a shallow saucepan of boiling water until it’s tender but still has some bite – about 5 minutes. Then drain them and keep them warm while you cook the eggs.

In a saucepan, bring some water to the boil into which you have dropped a matchstick; according to my Aunt Frieda this stops the white from billowing out into the pan should the egg crack while cooking. Am I going to promise this works? Well, all families have their folklore.

Lower the eggs into the water and cook them at a steady boil for about 4 minutes. Take them out of the water and immediately slice the top off each one; the yolk should still be runny enough to dip the asparagus spears in.

Make sure there’s salt on the table for sprinkling into the almost aggressive blandness of the egg and spear, as you eat, with the warm asparagus.

WHITEBAIT

I’d almost forgotten about whitebait until I saw it in the fishmonger’s recently, and – in honour of my new(ish) deep-fat fryer – bought it and took it home to cook. When I was a child, this was the restaurant starter; now it seems to have disappeared from the menu altogether. I didn’t eat it then, but my father and sister, Thomasina, always ordered it, and it is partly in her memory, and with the wish that she was still here to eat it, that I present it to you now.

It is so unfamiliar now that some of you may need me to tell you what whitebait is, or are. Whitebait is just small fish, indeed the original ‘small fry’, and it’s the size rather than the genus that’s significant. Generally, it refers to very young herring or sprats, and these are deep-fried and eaten whole. The fish comes, frozen now, in bags, which is straightforward enough. The cooking is minimal: the whitebait are dredged in flour (devilled whitebait being tossed in flour heavily dusted with cayenne), plunged into hot fat, piled on a plate and served with deep-fried parsley, a squeeze of lemon (muslin-covered if we’re being trad here) and brown bread and butter. Of course, the parsley in question is the old, curly kind (now curiously marketed, in seed packets at least, as ‘afro parsley’) which has long been awaiting rehabilitation.

Serves 2 as a main course or 4 as a starter.

vegetable oil for frying

500g bag whitebait

100g flour

salt and pepper

1 bunch flat-leaf parsley

Maldon salt

lemons for serving

Heat the oil for frying in a deep-fat fryer to about 190°C.

Put the whitebait and seasoned flour into a plastic bag, and toss everything around to coat the fish.

Shake off the excess flour by turning out the whole bag into a sieve, and then plunge the little fishes into the oil. Cook for about 3 minutes or until they look crispy and tempting – though I can see that for a squeamish generation, the idea of eating baby fish, whole, might not tempt. How wrong they are, if that’s the case.

Turn them out onto kitchen towels, and while the fish are losing any excess oil (we want desirable crunch) throw in a small handful of parsley to deep fry; watch out, it will spit. (A splatter guard is useful. Not charming, but useful.) When it has turned a very dark green, drain it and serve it with the whitebait, well sprinkled with Maldon salt and surrounded with lemon wedges.

LIPTAUER

What did I get myself into, deciding to put this here? It sounds, or will do once I explain it, so unlikely, so culinarily yesteryear. But if we’re talking family favourites I couldn’t leave it out. Liptauer was the deli-counter delicacy of my childhood, and another eating-item I’d all but forgotten about. But something made me remember it and, from taste-memory and some notes from the kitchen book inherited by my friend Olivia from her mother, I tried my hand at making it myself, and I can confidently and categorically state that it’s not some sentimental yearning that makes me now want to see its comeback. You don’t need to go in for the retro-moulding here, just mix the ingredients and plonk them in a bowl if you like: but whatever, this glorious, cream-cheese, caper, caraway seed and paprika combination, spread over sour black bread or – if you don’t have the genetic taste for it – over those hexagonal black charcoal biscuits which you can get from the supermarket, is rhapsodically unbeatable.

500g cream cheese

500g curd cheese

4–5 tablespoons capers

8 cornichons, chopped

3 teaspoons paprika, plus more for decoration

pinch of salt

good grating of black pepper

2 teaspoons caraway seeds

2 teaspoons French mustard

1-litre mould (optional)

for drizzling over:

1–2 tablespoons flavourless vegetable oil

fat pinch of paprika

Beat the two cheeses together until they are smooth, and then add all the other ingredients. Mix everything together well, and then turn into a small pudding basin or bowl with a capacity of approximately 2 pints, lined with clingfilm for easier unmoulding later (I give the imperial measure because my Tupperwares are so marked and besides, it is fitting here). Smooth the top with a spatula and cover with the overhanging clingfilm. Place it in the fridge to set. I put a couple of tins on top to press it down, but I don’t feel it’s crucial. I think it’s because my mother was always putting pâtés and suchlike in the fridge with weights on.

When it has become cold enough to turn out – a few hours should do it – unwrap the folded-over clingfilm on top, place a plate over the now uncovered bowl, turn it the other way out and unmould. Pull the clingfilm off and drizzle over a rust-red ooze, made by mixing the oil with a pinch of paprika.

Serve this with black bread, black biscuits or poppy-seed-sprinkled bagels, gerkins and, if you like, some chopped red onions.

GRANNY LAWSON’S LUNCH DISH

When my paternal grandmother died recently, I got all her old, battered cookery notebooks, and this is a recipe from one of them. In truth, I don’t remember her cooking it ever, but then she took the decision relatively early on in my life that she got vertigo in the kitchen and therefore, in the interest of health you understand, cooked rarely. But I love these sorts of domestic diaries, half-filled with recipes torn out from papers, the rest a handwritten mixture of tips passed on by friends or accounts of lunches served to them. Cooking isn’t just about ingredients, weights and measures: it’s social history, personal history.

I love too the simplicity of its name as it appears in my grandmother’s hand – just ‘lunch dish’. And yes, I won’t deny it has a retro-appeal – the chopped hard-boiled eggs and olives in the pie somehow even now convey the sense of adventurousness that a fifties’ housewife would have had in making this – but it tastes fabulously good, hot or cold.

In cooking this, I altered things as I went along. For example, I have my way of making pastry (freezing the fat and flour together for 10 minutes before rubbing them in) and prefer to use Italian 00 flour which makes for a helpfully elastic dough, but that’s part of what makes cooking alive. (Interestingly, though, the olive oil specified is not a contemporary addition but my grandmother’s untampered-with injunction.) It has to be an improvisational rather than a formulaic activity. As with everything that matters in life, if it isn’t honest, it’s nothing.

If pastry seems daunting to you, then this is a good place to start, because it’s a rough, ramshackle square of a thing: no fancy tins, no fancy techniques. That pleases me too: Frank Spencer here is always going to fare better freeform.

Serves 6.

for the pastry:

250g plain flour, preferably Italian 00

50g hard vegetable fat, such as Cookeen

75g cold, unsalted butter

approx. 4 tablespoons (60ml) chilled, salted water

1 egg beaten with salt for brushing over

325g (2–3) tomatoes or same amount of drained, chopped, canned ones

200g (about 2 small) onions

2 eggs, hard-boiled

90g pitted black olives

2 tablespoons olive oil, not extra-virgin

250g organic minced beef

fat pinch allspice

salt and pepper

To make the pastry, measure the flour into a dish that will fit into the deep-freeze (it doesn’t need to have a lid) and cut the Cookeen and butter into small – approx. 1cm – dice and toss them in the flour. Put in the deep-freeze for 10 minutes.

I tend to make pastry in my KitchenAid, but a processor’s fine too. In whatever contraption – fitted with the flat paddle in the one, with the double-bladed knife in the other – mix until you have a mixture that resembles coarse porridge oats. Now, dribble in the chilled salted water, slowly, with the motor still running, until the dough looks as if it’s about to cohere, but stopping short of it’s actually clumping totally. Turn out of the processor (though you could still do this in the bowl of the mixer) and squidge together with your hands until all the pastry forms a cohesive ball. Dribble in a little more water if you feel it needs it. Divide into two pieces of equal size and form into fat discs. Cover with clingfilm and leave in the fridge for 20 minutes. And this can be done a good day or two in advance if it helps.

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6.

Put the tomatoes in a bowl, cover with boiling water from the kettle and leave for 5 minutes. Drain, run under the cold tap, then peel, de-seed and chop roughly (or use tinned tomatoes, chopped and drained). Peel and chop the onions, hard-boiled eggs and olives, too.

In a large frying pan over medium heat, warm the oil. Cook the chopped onions until softened and beginning to colour, turning the flame down to low if they look as if they’re catching. Turn the heat back to medium and add the chopped tomatoes and cook, stirring for a minute or so before adding the mince. Stir well, breaking up the clumps of meat with your wooden spoon as you go, then, when the meat’s browned, stir in the chopped eggs and olives and season with the allspice and salt and pepper. Cook over gentle heat for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.