Nigella Bites (11 page)

Get a baking sheet out, and flour a surface and rolling pin. Remove the pastry from the fridge and roll out one of the discs until you have a thin, but not exaggeratedly so, rough square that will fit on the baking sheet, then place it on the sheet. Now roll out the second disc and leave it there while you cover the layer on the sheet with the minced-beef mixture, leaving a margin of about 3cm all around. With a bit of cold water and your fingers, dampen this edge. Place the second square of pastry on top and press the edges together to seal. Now, roll these edges back on themselves once or twice, then get a fork and press it, the tines curved-side down, against this rolled border. Prong the top of the pastry to make air holes and then beat the egg with a generous sprinkling of salt and brush the top and edges of the pie with it to glaze.

Put it in the oven for 20 minutes, by which time the pastry will be golden and cooked. Slice it into fat oblongs and eat warm with a vegetable or salad, or cold, wrapped in a napkin and without ceremony or cutlery.

MY GRANDMOTHER’S GINGER-JAM BREAD AND BUTTER PUDDING

This recipe comes from my maternal grandmother’s recipe folder, a wonderfully retro piece of design, circa late sixties, early seventies. Bread and butter pudding has, I know, gone from stodgy disparagement to fashionable rehabilitation and back to not-that-again clichédom, but I am not prepared to let any of that bother me.

This version uses brown bread rather than white, and between the buttery sandwiches is heaped chunky-hot ginger jam, sometimes sold as ginger marmalade, but most usually, if quaintly, as ginger conserve; on top is sprinkled demerara sugar mixed with aromatically warm ground ginger, the spice of the old-fashioned English kitchen.

My grandmother, more austerely, used milk; I go for mostly cream: nothing creates so well that tender-bellied swell of softly set custard.

Serves 6.

75g unsalted butter

75g sultanas

3 tablespoons dark rum

10 slices brown bread

approx. 10 x 15ml tablespoons ginger conserve or marmalade

4 egg yolks

1 egg

3 tablespoons caster sugar

500ml double cream

200ml full-fat milk

1 teaspoon ground ginger

2 tablespoons demerara sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4.

Grease a pudding dish with a capacity of about 1½ litres with some of the butter.

Put the sultanas in a small bowl, pour the rum over, and microwave them for 1 minute, then leave them to stand. This is a good way to soak them quickly but juicily.

Make sandwiches with the brown bread, butter and ginger jam (2 tablespoonfuls in each sandwich); you should have some butter left over to smear on the top later. Now cut the sandwiches in half into triangles and arrange them evenly along the middle of the pudding dish. I put one in the dish with the point of the sandwich upwards then one with flat-side uppermost, then with point-side uppermost and so on, then squeeze a sandwich-triangle down each side – but you do as you please. Sprinkle over the sultanas and unabsorbed rum that remains in the bowl.

Whisk the egg yolks and egg together with the caster sugar, and pour in the cream and milk. Pour this over the triangles of bread and leave them to soak up the liquid for about 10 minutes, by which time the pudding is ready to go into the oven. Smear the bread crusts that are poking out of the custard with the soft butter, mix the ground ginger and demerara sugar together and sprinkle this mixture on your buttered crusts and then lightly over the rest of the pudding.

Sit the pudding dish on a baking sheet and put in the oven to cook for about 45 minutes or until the custard has set and puffed up slightly. Remove, let sit for 10 minutes – by which time the puffiness will have deflated somewhat – and spoon out into bowls, putting a jug of custard, should you so wish, on the table to be served alongside.

CUSTARD

If you are going to eat this sort of pudding, it can’t hurt to know how to make the custard to go with it. It is useful to know, that you need 1 egg yolk for each 100ml of milk or cream. It’s harder to be precise about the sugar, which depends on your taste, what you’re eating the custard with, and whether it’s going to be hot or cold.

Serves 4.

1 vanilla pod or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

500ml single cream, or half milk, half cream

5 large egg yolks

1 tablespoon caster sugar

Half-fill the sink with cold water.

If you’ve got a vanilla pod, cut it lengthways so that the seeds will be released, and heat it in a pan with the single cream till nearly boiling. Take off the heat, cover and leave to steep for 20 minutes. If you’re not using a pod, put the cream and vanilla extract on the heat, and beat the egg yolks and sugar together in a bowl. When the cream’s warm, pour it over the sweet yolks, beating all the while. Pour the uncooked custard back into the rinsed-out and dried pan and cook over a medium heat, stirring constantly, until the custard’s thickened. Ten minutes should do it, unless you’re being very timorous and leaving the flame too low. When the custard’s thickened, plunge the pan into the cold water in the sink and whisk it for a minute or so. You can eat it straight away, or if you want to make it in advance, reheat later in a bowl over a pan of simmering water.

CHOCOLATE-CHESTNUT REFRIGERATOR CAKE

This is another of my maternal grandmother’s recipes and in truth reminds me much more of her than the bread and butter pudding. I’ve changed it a bit, not least substituting dark rum for her juice and zest of an orange and a slug or two of Grand Marnier. It’s not that I didn’t like her version, but it was just a bit too much like a homespun Terry’s chocolate orange for comfort. You do as you please.

This is very much a period offering: from a time of fridge-cooked loaves of things, sliced at dinner parties and served with dainty fruit salads (my grandmother suggested some sliced oranges here, which is of a piece), but it nevertheless resolutely deserves a place on the contemporary table. It’s incredibly easy to make, and dangerously compelling to eat, one of those puddings about which everyone says ‘it’s very rich’ before going on to third helpings.

I think it needs a smooth, sour blob of crème fraîche alongside: it is sweet; but the crystallised violets you see adorning the slice below are just a sentimental touch. My grandmother loved them, as did my mother – they are, as it happens, the traditional sprinkling accompaniment to monte bianco, that gunge-heavy mixture of cream, chocolate, rum and chestnut purée that – more freeform, less prinked – my mother went in for.

Makes 10–12 slices.

500g (2 tins) sweetened chestnut purée

175g soft, unsalted butter

300g dark chocolate, minimum 70% cocoa solids

3 tablespoons dark rum

to serve:

crème fraîche

crystallised violets

Beat the purée in a bowl until it’s smooth, and then add the butter, beating again to make a well-blended mixture.

Melt the chocolate and let it cool slightly, before adding it to the chestnut and butter in the bowl. Beat in the rum, and spoon the chocolate mixture into a 23 x 10cm loaf tin, lined with clingfilm, in two batches, making sure the first layer reaches the corners and sides of the bottom of the tin before you smooth over the rest. Wrap the overhanging clingfilm over the cake so that it is completely covered, and put it in the fridge to set for at least four hours, but a day or so in advance if you want.

Don’t take the loaf tin out of the fridge until you want to eat it, when you just unmould the cake, cut it into thin slices and serve with crème fraîche or sour cream.

There is a way of inviting friends over for dinner without hating them, yourself, the kitchen and the world. Cooking isn’t performance art – or shouldn’t be. Perhaps it’s unrealistic to hope to be a model of serenity throughout, but if you can manage to relax, both the food and the evening will be better. The answer is to cook in a way that doesn’t involve huge amounts of effort or time. Ease yourself into a repertoire, make the food welcoming rather than fussy and remember that it’s not a test of your worth and acceptability: it’s just dinner.

Salmon with Ginger, Soy and Rice Vinegar

Bream with Anchovies and Thyme

Chick Peas with Chilli, Garlic and Thyme

Egyptian Tomato Salad

Chocolate Pots

Aromatic Lamb-Shank Stew

Couscous

Creme Brulee

THREE-COURSE DINNER FOR 8

Salmon with ginger, soy and rice vinegar

Bream with anchovies, thyme and chick peas; and Egyptian tomato salad

Chocolate pots

I don’t, as a rule, always bother with starters, but sometimes you want to go in for a fully-fledged dinner party. By that I don’t mean that you have to start folding your napkins into fancy shapes or pushing yourself beyond all known gastronomic boundaries. However important food is, it’s a part of life, not the whole point of it. A good dinner party is one where people enjoy themselves: the last thing you want is a tense and hallowed silence to descend as you, exhausted, slump some perfect creation on the table, desperate for their approval and admiration. The food – and the drink – are there to give rise to, not upstage, conversation and companiability.

This dinner is eminently do-able without your having to devote the best part of two days to cooking it. Certainly, some of the food is fiddled about with, in a low-effort kind of a way, in advance, but that’s just to make life easier on the night.

SALMON WITH GINGER, SOY AND RICE VINEGAR

This is a very easy starter, not least because no cooking is involved at all. All you need to do is mix the first four ingredients, leave them to steep for 10 minutes or so in a jug (longer if it helps), arrange the salmon slices on a couple of large plates and then pour the liquid over before scattering with some finely chopped spring onions.

I get the salmon from the fishmonger and ask them to do the fiddly slicing, but otherwise you could use the rag-like salmon escalopes some supermarkets sell. And if the idea of raw salmon appals you, simply flash fry the escalopes, transfer briskly to waiting plates, slice them into wide strips then pour over the gingery juices and serve either as is, still warm, or left to cool to room temperature.

This is also wonderful made with sliver-thin slices of tuna.

60ml Kikkoman soy sauce

60ml rice vinegar

3cm ginger peeled and grated (preferably with a Microplane grater)

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil (optional)

750g salmon, preferably organic, sliced as thinly as smoked salmon, or as near to that as possible

2–4 spring onions, finely sliced

Mix the soy sauce and rice vinegar together and grate in the ginger. If you want to add the sesame oil, do – its aromatic nuttiness adds a rounded mellowness – but salmon is oily enough not to need it, so leave it out if you want something a little more delicately astringent.

Cut the very thin salmon pieces (and I use kitchen scissors for this) into wide strips and arrange them any old how on a couple of plates. Pour over the gingery dressing and scatter the finely sliced spring onions on top.

Now was that hard?

BREAM WITH ANCHOVIES AND THYME

May I make a suggestion? Please don’t tell people that the sauce has anchovy in it. What comes through is not fishiness, but a robust, rounded saltiness. So many people have an anti-anchovy prejudice that it’s hardly worth the explaining: deception, I’ve found, is the more sensible route. I use anchovy fillets that have been stored in an olive-oil-filled jar, though a squirt of anchovy paste from a tube is a perfectly respectable substitute.

I make a version of this sauce a lot, with a variety of fish, mostly white; but I ought to tell you it also makes a wonderful sauce for lamb (in which case replace the sherry with red wine). The chick peas, below, are perfect with the fish or lamb variant too. And the useful thing is that with all the meaty pulsiness of them, you don’t need to bother with potatoes. (And although I’ve given the recipe for the chick peas after this, the main course, you do need to get on and cook them first. Be warned.)

Red bream (sometimes called redfish, though generally known abroad as Norwegian Haddock) which is common to our shores is not quite the same – and certainly a lot cheaper – than the seabream caught in warmer waters. It’s perhaps not quite as delicate, but there is a fleshy firmness that makes these chunky fillets stand up well to robust flavours. And the pearl-pink skin, like the flash of a Barbie mermaid’s tail, is quite beautiful.

2–4 tablespoons olive oil, plus dribble of oil from anchovies

12 fillets of red bream, skin on

1 clove garlic, minced

2 anchovy fillets

leaves from a few sprigs of thyme

2 tablespoons sherry

1 fat knob unsalted butter (approx. 15g)

In a large, non-stick frying pan (I use a Woll fish pan here) pour a little olive oil and, when warm, start frying the fish. They won’t need much, but keep an eye – some fillets may be thicker than others – and remove to a couple of warm plates, tented with foil, as they’re cooked. I think these look best with the pearly pink skin uppermost.

When all the fish fillets are cooked, add a tablespoon of olive oil plus the dribble of anchovy oil to the pan and stir in the minced garlic and the anchovy fillets. Keep stirring with a wooden spoon or spatula and, as the oil warms, the garlic should soften and the anchovies seem to melt into a sauce. Add most of the thyme leaves, then the sherry. After a scant minute’s bubbling, replace the wooden spoon in your hand with a magiwhisk – one of my favourite pieces of equipment – and, off the heat, whisk in the butter. Pour this small amount of viscous sauce over the two plates of fish (this is for flavouring, not coverage) then sprinkle with the few remaining thyme leaves. Serve with the chick peas and tomato salad. I know this sounds like a lot for 8, but I like to work on making enough for half those present to have second helpings. At any rate, I’ve found that a good rule of thumb.

CHICK PEAS WITH CHILLI, GARLIC AND THYME