Nigella Bites (14 page)

So, working along the premise of change what you can and accept what you can’t, I’ve found a way of cooking that satisfies my need to be hospitable while accommodating my hostessly shortcomings. The first imperative is that there should be a great deal, indeed too much, to eat. It might sound blasphemous to say that my Jewish-mother leanings are best satisfied by the roasting of a whole shoulder of pork, but I’m afraid I’ve found this to be the case. The fact that this great weight of pig needs hardly any interference from you while it cooks satisfies the second requirement, namely that you are not working yourself up into a lather during the little free time you might have. But it’s not quite as unsatisfying as that sounds: before you put the pork into the oven (where you leave it for a full day) you smother it with a fragrant paste of your own making, thereby giving yourself some essential element of kitchen pottering, without which you may as well be pinging the microwave, psychologically speaking.

Without wishing to sound like Marie-Antoinette, I do feel that pork does have to be the very best pork to start off with, not bred to flabby leanness in some godforsaken pig-penitentiary. These days this can be harder than it sounds. So I hope you’ll thank me for telling you where this miracle-meat can be found, and moreover that you don’t even need to go shopping for it yourself. You just phone Heritage Prime on 01297 489304 and throw yourself on Denise’s mercy. Their pork, from a farm near Lyme Regis, is so much better than any pork you’ve ever tasted or could ever hope to taste. To say it’s organic just tells you what isn’t in it. What they add at Heritage Prime is immense care, good feed and excellent conditions. This does mean the meat costs more than you’d pay at the supermarket, but it isn’t profiteering, it’s because it’s much more expensive to farm and rear animals like this. I’m not suggesting you spend more than you can, but with meat particularly –as we’ve learnt, or are beginning to learn, surely – it’s better to buy the best occasionally, than the disreputably cut-price often. And don’t necessarily disdain your local butcher, if you’re lucky enough to have one still; indeed if you don’t go to your butcher ever, there soon won’t be any left to go to.

Once, with my order, Denise sent me a photo of ‘the girls’ on the bluebell-flecked hill overlooking Lyme Bay, which I stuck on my fridge. And although I realise it might sound macabre to some of you to be gazing at a picture of live pigs while cooking a dead one, I actually think it is a whole lot healthier than buying sanitised packets of clingfilmed meat from the supermarket that pretends to have no relationship with its source. Tastes a whole lot better, too.

The paste I spread on this pork is made of ginger, garlic, chilli and sherry vinegar, which has a Chinesey tone to it. Indeed, the pork when it’s finished – the crackling glazed and crisp, the flesh beneath melting and to be torn rather than carved – reminds me obscurely of Peking duck. There’s the same mixture of velvet-tender meat and seared-crisp skin.

SLOW-ROASTED AROMATIC SHOULDER OF PORK

I first got the idea of cooking a shoulder of pork over 24 hours like this from the second River Café Cookbook; my take on it is really a de-Italianised version. Any mixture of herbs or spices you want would do: this isn’t a recipe so much as a suggestion.

1 shoulder of pork, skin scored (approx. 9½kg) and see above

6 garlic cloves

1cm length of fresh ginger

2 fresh red chillies or 1 teaspoon dried red chilli flakes

3 tablespoons olive oil (not extra-virgin)

4 tablespoons sherry or rice vinegar

The pork takes 24 hours to cook, which is no cause for alarm, because for about 23 hours and 55 minutes you are ignoring it absolutely. And it makes your house smell like a home should.

So, if you’re planning to eat this for Sunday lunch, at about Saturday lunchtime, preheat your (clean) oven to the hottest it will go. Sit the pork skinside up on a rack over a roasting tin. I like to use a pestle and mortar to make my paste because it makes me feel good, but you could just grate the garlic and ginger (one of my beloved, and often mentioned, Microplane graters is the tool for the job) and stir in chilli flakes, a tablespoonful of oil and two of vinegar if you want. Otherwise, pound together the peeled chopped ginger and peeled cloves with the fresh chilli, adding a tablespoonful of oil and two of vinegar when they’re squished and pastelike.

Using your fingers, rub this paste over the scored skin, pushing bits into the cut lines of rind. Stagger across to the oven and put in the tray, leaving it for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, into the bowl in which you mixed the paste, pour the two remaining tablespoons each of oil and vinegar. When the pork’s had its half an hour, remove it from the oven, switching it to 120°C/gas mark ½ as you do so. Now turn the pork over: I find it easiest to lift it by hand wearing ovengloves. It makes them dirty, OK, but there is the washing machine…

Pour the oil and vinegar over the underside (which is now uppermost on the rack) and put the pork back in the low oven, leaving it there for 23 hours. (Actually, you could leave it longer. One of the joys of this is that it cannot overcook.) Anyway, after 23 hours, or 30–40 minutes before you actually want to eat, turn the oven back to the highest it will go, remove the pork and turn it back crackling-side up. Put it back in the oven for 30 minutes, in which time it will get hot and crisp, though you can give it another 10 if you feel it needs it.

Remove, slice off the crackling in a horizontal swipe of the knife and break it into manageable pieces, then start carving or pulling at the the tender meat.

CREAMY POTATO GRATIN

My not entirely orthodox way of turning out this otherwise classic dish of cream-softened potatoes has a lot going for it here. The thing is, you cook the potatoes first in a pan in the stove, which means that, one, you can do it in advance up to the final and quick blast in the oven (always a boon for me); two, you don’t therefore need a double oven, because you blitz the potatoes while the pork’s having its post-roasting rest; and, three, this is the best way of making sure the potatoes are actually cooked to margin-blurring softness – there is nothing worse than biting into a potato gratin that bites back.

2kg floury potatoes, such as King Edward or Maris Piper

500ml full-fat milk

500ml double cream

1 whole onion, peeled

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tablespoon salt

approx. 50g unsalted butter

Preheat the oven to 240°C/gas mark 8.

Peel the potatoes and cut them into slices, neither especially thin nor especially thick (approx. 1cm) and put them into a large saucepan with the milk, cream, onion, minced garlic and salt. Bring to the boil and cook at a robust simmer or gentle boil (however you like to think of it) until verging on tender, but not dissolving into mush. The pan might be hell to clean afterwards, but any excuse for long, lazy soaking rather than brisk pre-or post-prandial scrubbing always appeals to me. And, for what it’s worth, I find that when pans are really, dauntingly, stuck with cooked-on gunge, it’s more effective to soak them in hot water and detergent (ie, the stuff you put in the washing machine, though I haven’t tried, and don’t think I would, with tablets) rather than washing-up liquid.

Use some of the butter to grease a large roasting tin (37 x 30cm) and then, after removing the onion, pour the almost sludgy milk and potato mixture into it. Dot with remaining butter and cook in the oven for 15 minutes or until the potato is bubbly and browned on top. Remove, let stand for 10–20 minutes and then serve.

This is not the most labour-saving way of cooking potatoes, to be sure, but one of the most seductive. And it reheats well as an accompaniment to cold roast pork, or indeed anything, in the days that follow.

STIR-BRAISED SAVOY CABBAGE WITH NIGELLA SEEDS

Forgive the culinary egomania, not meant entirely seriously you do understand, but I bought a tin of nigella seeds in Dean and Deluca, the world’s most pulse-quickening food shop, when I was in New York once, and I can’t just let it sit in the cupboard unused forever. Actually, this spice is no impossible-to-find delicacy: it’s a regular in Indian food, and can be found labelled ‘kalonji’, in a variety of spellings, or sometimes ‘black cumin’, in far-from-recherché outlets. Don’t think twice, though, about substituting ordinary cumin seeds.

1 large Savoy cabbage or two smaller

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 tablespoon nigella seeds

500ml vegetable stock

Maldon salt to taste

few drops soy sauce

few drops toasted sesame oil

Halve the cabbage or cabbages, cut out the core and finely shred it.

Warm the oil in a wide but deep saucepan that has a lid, and patiently toss the cabbage in the oil over a low to medium heat until it’s evenly but finely glossed and beginning to wilt. Sprinkle in the nigella seeds and turn well so that they are evenly distributed. Pour in the stock, toss the cabbage again, salt well or cautiously depending on how salty the stock is, and clamp on the lid, leaving the cabbage to steam for 4 minutes or so. Remove the lid and taste to see how cooked the cabbage is. I find that 4 minutes more or less does it for me, by which time I give the cabbage another minute, while stirring, with the lid off. Splash with soy and sesame oil, toss again and transfer to a warmed bowl or bowls.

EASY STICKY-TOFFEE PUDDING

This draws on the culinary technology of the surprise pudding – that amazing affair by which, on baking, a layer of sponge is formed, under which evolves a thick and luscious sauce – while playing with the flavours of a traditional sticky-toffee pudding. True, if you’re feeding 12 people you’ll need to make two, but given how almost provocatively easy it is, that’s no big deal. I can see this stretching to 8, maybe even a little bit beyond, but I wouldn’t want to ask much more of it, despite the gargantuan feast that precedes it. Better to have too much than give rise to even the slightest tremor of ration-anxiety at the table. Never Knowingly Undercatered, that’s me.

Serves 6–8.

for the cake:

100g dark muscovado sugar

175g self-raising flour

125ml full-fat milk

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

50g unsalted butter, melted

200g chopped, rolled dates

for the sauce:

200g dark muscovado sugar

approx. 25g unsalted butter in little blobs

500ml boiling water

Preheat the oven to 190°C/gas mark 5 and butter a 1½-litre capacity pudding dish.

Combine the 100g dark muscovado sugar with the flour in a large bowl. Pour the milk into a measuring jug, beat in the egg, vanilla and melted butter and then pour this mixture over the sugar and flour, stirring – just with a wooden spoon – to combine. Fold in the dates then scrape into the prepared pudding dish. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look very full: it will do by the time it cooks.

Sprinkle over the 200g dark muscovado sugar and dot with the butter. Pour over the boiling water (yes really!) and transfer to the oven. Set the timer for 45 minutes, though you might find the pudding needs 5 or 10 minutes more. The top of the pudding should be springy and spongy when it’s cooked; underneath, the butter, dark muscovado sugar and boiling water will have turned into a rich, sticky sauce. Serve with vanilla ice cream, crème fraîche, double or single cream as you wish.

I think I’d better start by explaining what Templefood is: it’s my term for the soothing, pure, would-be restorative food I make for myself after one binge or late night too far. ‘temple’ as in ‘my body is a…’

Well, mine’s not, but this is what I eat when I want to feel it is. And don’t think – as if – I’m counselling deprivation or restraint, but rather the holy glow of self-indulgently virtuous pleasure…

Prairie Oyster

Salmon with Greens and Shitake Mushrooms

Gingery-Hot Duck Salad

Hot and Sour Soup

Vietnamese Chicken and Mint Salad

Peaches and Blueberries

PRAIRIE OYSTER

How much pleasure you could get out of this I’m not sure, but it’s a preliminary rather than regular feature of the restoration process. My templefood times tend to start with, indeed are prompted by, a hangover and so I thought it made sense to start this chapter with a hangover cure. Working on Nietzsche’s principle that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I won’t make any apologies for the daunting concoction that follows. The point is, if you can survive this, you can survive anything.

There’s no oyster involved, but the name from this drink comes, I suspect, from the slang term used by ranchers for a bull’s testicle, which the egg yolk suspended in the alcohol was thought to resemble – and which I’m sure makes you all feel very much better.

Serves 1.

1 egg yolk

40ml brandy (approx. 3 tablespoons)

a few drops malt vinegar

couple of dashes tabasco

a few drops Worcestershire sauce

salt and pepper

Put the egg yolk in a marguerita glass. Mix the remaining ingredients and pour over yolk. Gulp down in one.

SALMON WITH GREENS AND SHITAKE MUSHROOMS

My templefood days do not consist of fey picking: this is gratifyingly substantial. In order to enjoy it you don’t have to know that salmon is rich in Omega-3 oils, which are beneficial, indeed essential, to good health, and that shitake mushrooms are believed, by the Japanese at least, to contain cancer-fighting properties, but it all helps in the aim of wallowing in virtuous well-being.

But the most important thing I can tell you is that this is good.

Serves 2.

2 skinned salmon fillets, preferably organic

1 clove garlic, finely minced or chopped

2 tablespoons vegetable or groundnut oil

125g shitake mushrooms, de-stalked and sliced

400g choi sum, roughly chopped

3 tablespoons soy sauce

1 teaspoon sesame oil

pepper to taste

Grill or fry the salmon fillets – preferably in a good non-stick pan or on the smooth side of a griddle – until just cooked through and remove them to warmed plates while you get on with or finish the vegetables (you can start them off as the salmon cooks).