Battered Blossoms

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Tags

Cooking, Food, Ingredients, Italy, Marcella Hazan, Patience Gray, Recipes, Rome, Stories, Summer

I just think these are lovely. Lovely looking, creamy, blossomy, with echoes of the courgette itself. A welter of these, piled high on a plate, having been plunged and fried in batter is the way. And eaten alone. That’s how I remember them when I lived in Rome as a student. This was the early nineties and even my pajamas had shoulder pads. Everyone had a cleavage and shoals of men followed me (and every other young woman in the area) home, loitered and then dispersed to find other prey. I remember these blossoms in their crisp casings were handy at parties – you could walk around with one, and a napkin would quickly blot up any lingering grease. Either that or it could double as lip gloss.

Everyone of my age in Italy lived at home and remained there in their childhood bedrooms doted on by housekeepers until they found someone to marry. No one left home to go to university, except I was at the university of Rome and needed a place to stay, so I lived in the garden flat of an Italian family in Parioli, a swish, hilly enclave.

The flat was actually a garage with a bed in it and a small toilet. I remember a window but not much light entered the place and I often woke up at midday or even later, muddled and confused and late for class. I taught English as a foreign language on the side, but this was tricky if still asleep. The dampness and general humidity both in the flat and in Rome in deep summer gave me what is known commonly as il colpo della strega (translated as ‘the witch’s blow’), a lower back paralysis eased almost immediately by plunging into a hot bath.

I remember stepping over Marcello Mastroianni who was sitting on my doorstep, having a break from filming, and thinking that I should probably stop and say something, but I was more concerned about getting to the bakery in time to get my bread rolls. Mantovani rolls were thinly crusty on the outside with a warm belly of bread beneath; they were sweet and soft, and I would often walk along eating them bare from their paper bag – they needed absolutely no accompaniment. The same applies to these battered blossoms. Eat them bare, preferably walking, and find a skyline or seascape to stare at, or even a wall, and feel their grassy tentacles dissolve on your tongue. Actually, some soft airy bread might work alongside: ungreased and ripped open with savage fingers.

Though these flowers look fragile and papery, they are in fact rich, and a few can make you feel quite woozy. The idea of the batter, known in Italian as la pastella, is to do justice to the delicacy and brightness of the flavour, and so the cleanest, plainest sort is required. I used only flour and water, and a pinch of salt.

If you want an upgrade, you could follow Patience Gray’s instruction in Honey from a Weed, and add an egg yolk, a tablespoon of grappa and just enough water to the flour to make ‘not too liquid a batter’. The egg white is also incorporated just before making the plunge. I have never got to this recipe, because I have found the original batter to be exactly as it should be. You could use elderflowers instead of the courgette blossoms.

Courgette blossoms fried in batter

Adapted from Marcella Hazan, The Classic Italian Cookbook

12-14 courgette blossoms

Vegetable oil, enough to come 18mm (¾ inch) up the sides of a frying pan/skillet

Flour-and-water batter ( see below)

Sea salt

Put 250ml (scant ½ pint) of water in a bowl and sift 80g (2¾ oz) of plain flour over it, beating all the while. By the end, the batter will have the consistency of double/heavy cream. Leave to rest while you get on with the courgette blossoms.

Wash the blossoms quickly and tenderly under cold running water and dry them gently on kitchen paper (this is not essential if you know where they’ve been). Snip off the stem and the little hook-like leaves at the base of the blossom. Slit the blossom open on one side (imagine you’re reading a book) without dividing it. Remove the little orange bulb within, otherwise known as the pistil.

Heat the oil over a high heat. When it is very hot (drip the minutest drop of batter into the hot oil and see it shrivel up instantly to gauge readiness) dip the blossoms quickly in and out of the batter and slip them into the frying pan. It is important to get the blossoms as open and as flat as possible, otherwise clumps of uncooked batter get secreted in the grooves. When they are golden brown on one side flip them over to cook on the other side. Transfer to kitchen paper to drain, sprinkle with sea salt and eat quickly, while still hot and crisp.

Give peas a chance

07 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Cookbook, Cooking, Elizabeth David, Food, Ingredients, Italy, Recipes, Spring, Yoghurt, Yogurt

There is something quite lovely about peas. You can grow them easily and their tendrils are pretty, curling things that latch on to poles and wind their way upwards and sideways as if trying to escape the garden, and their fate, in slow motion.

If you’re feeling in any way disconnected from nature, or yourself, sitting down to shell a mound of pea pods will slow your heart rate and give you room to ponder. You can watch the news and get a good rhythm going, with a pot for the empty pods and one for the peas. Use the empty pods for broth and wrap the peas in a damp towel so they don’t dry out. I was surprised by the colour and the taste. We have been seduced by the frozen pea’s excessive sweetness, its nursery softness, and now it’s hard to go back. Pretend you’re Edwardian.

I am not decrying frozen peas – I love them and would happily live on them all year round. But it’s a shame in the spring to pass by peas in the pod. Their tendrils are sold by the wodge at farmers’ markets here (above in their fetching blue rubber bands).

You can use the leaves as a salad ingredient or wilt them in butter. They’re lovely in a frittata along with some peas and scallions. And then there is bacon, of course. Or pancetta, if you’re a bit posh. And ham, properly thick and strongly permeating. Peas also have a natural affinity with ricotta – or perhaps it is I who have the affinity.

Ricotta (meaning “re-cooked” from the whey of semi-hard cheeses) is a soft, sheep’s milk cheese originally from Rome and is at its best in spring, eaten spankingly fresh with a little salt and black pepper. It has a wonderful blankness, aerates easily and doesn’t smother like cream can, meaning that the peas remain the star of the show. I know people make ricotta; so much is dependent on the quality of the milk. I made ‘yoghurt cheese’ instead (also known as labneh), and treated it in a similar way, along with some lemon zest and a touch of rosemary.

Both recipes below are inspired by Italian Food by Elizabeth David, a book I can’t read for long without the need to rest my head in my hands and inhale memories of my time there. It is almost impossible not to feel longing. I love food, what can I say? And Italy is where for me the heart of good food lives. Espresso and cake, olive oil, vinegar, leaves, lemons, hot cornetti steaming at midnight from a paper bag, tomatoes crackling with salt. Thinnest of thin pizza, charred and warm. I am a ruined woman.

Piselli al Prosciutto (green peas and ham)

Adapted from Elizabeth David, Italian Food

2lbs shelled or frozen peas

A small onion

1 oz (or a small knob) of butter

3 oz of very good cooked ham cut into strips

Melt the chopped onion in the butter, and let it cook very gently, so that it softens without browning. Put in the shelled (or frozen) peas and a little water. After 5 minutes, add the ham. Add a little more water here if it needs it. In another 5-10 minutes the peas should be ready.

Yoghurt cheese with lemon zest and rosemary

Adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Easy Cheesy, The Guardian

Makes about 350g. If you want this for pudding instead, withhold the pepper, serve with a scattering of berries, or dried fruit, some toasted nuts and a drizzle of honey.

1/2 tsp black peppercorns

1kg whole milk organic yoghurt

1 tsp of salt

1 small sprig rosemary leaves, finely chopped

Zest of a lemon

Extra virgin olive oil, for preserving

Crack the pepper in a pestle and mortar, or with the end of a rolling pin in a bowl, until it’s slightly coarser than if it came from a pepper mill. Stir it into the yoghurt with the salt, lemon zest and rosemary, then spoon the mixture into a scrupulously clean jelly bag or a double layer of damp muslin/cheesecloth (or a sterilized hankie). Place in a sieve resting over a bowl or jug in the fridge (or suspend it over the sink or hanging from a door knob somewhere cool), for two days.

Discard the whey. Lightly oil your hands and roll the yoghurt cheese into balls and place in a sterilized jar. Pour enough oil over to cover. They’ll keep in this way for a few weeks in the fridge. When you’re ready to use a ball, you could roll it in some finely chopped herbs and a further scattering of zest. Or if you want to go the Labneh route, you could roll them in spices such as cumin or paprika.

If-in-doubt Lemon Tarts

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Cookbook, Cooking, Dessert, Failure, Food, Ingredients, Lemons, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories

Sometimes I feel that I’m losing my touch. I’m sure this is normal, but it’s unnerving. How can you go wrong with lemon tart? Anything with lemons, I’m told, and I’m a sure-fire winner. I have a way with the lemon. So I was feeling rather cavalier, particularly as these reminded me of jam tarts. Not so much jam as gel, admittedly, and a bit rubbery. And the way the pastry rose up in the oven was odd, upending the lemon mixture, which lay blank and flabby on the floor of the pan. It was all rather irregular.

I was unsure what to write about this week. Or what to make. Perhaps this was what did it. The Oscars were coming to Hollywood for which we needed to be prepared. Halle Berry and Ben Affleck and various plasticated lovelies would be sashaying down the red carpet, and the road was closed off for days in preparation for this world-changing event. We had people over to watch it live and bet on who would win. I decided to make something with lemons. We have a rather bedraggled-looking lemon tree which produces small, intensely perfumed and rather sweet Meyers, but mainly we just pilfer them from the overhang of other people’s trees. You walk along and pop them in your pocket, while looking innocently around you as if new to the area.

I started off exploring a new recipe. It looked easy, but following a recipe is never just about following instructions. The language is important: it needs to be straight-forward, clear, unfussy. Lyrical is fine but too much information and I am apt to skip things, become impatient. I am not a baking nerd. And an old recipe is like an old friend – you pick up where you left off. One look at the page covered in pencilled amendments and various spillages, and I know we’ve been through something together, this recipe and me. There is also such a thing as muscle memory – the body remembers even if you don’t. A few swipes of a wooden spoon, an egg in the hand about to be cracked and the page warrants only a cursory glance from then on in. So the recipe below is a tried and trusted one – a lovely, simple Rick Stein offering that has never failed me.

The rather prosaic-looking bars (above) are easier to manage at a party, but go for the classic and classier tart shape if you wish. You can certainly improvise here with other citrus, such as grapefruit, lime and even bergamot, if such a thing exists near you. Passion fruit (the juice of) may work too. However, nothing quite does the lemon’s job. I also add the zest for a bit of textural oomph. Use the left-over squeezed lemons for cleaning the sink.

Lemon tarts

From Rick Stein, Food For All Occasions (Puddings)

For the sweet pastry: (makes about 350g/12 oz)

175g (6 oz) plain flour

A small pinch of sea salt

50g (2 oz) icing/confectioners’ sugar

100g (4 oz) chilled butter, cut into pieces

1 egg yolk

1 – 1½ tsp cold water

For the filling:

6 medium eggs, beaten

3 large lemons

250g (9 oz) caster/superfine sugar

150ml (5 fl oz) double/thick cream

For the pastry – sift the flour, salt and sugar into a food processor or bowl. Add the pieces of chilled butter and work together briefly, either in the food processor or with your fingertips, until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the egg yolk and enough water until the mixture starts to come together into a ball (or add to the processor and process briefly), then turn out on to a lightly floured surface and knead briefly until smooth. Roll the pastry out thinly on a lightly floured surface and use to line a lightly greased, 25cm (10 in), loose-bottomed flat tin, 4cm (1½ in) deep. Prick the base here and there with a fork and chill for 20-30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F. Line the pastry case with crumpled greaseproof paper, cover the base with a thin layer of baking beans (or rice) and bake for 12-15 minutes, until the edges are biscuit-coloured. Carefully remove the paper and beans/rice and return the pastry case to the oven for 3-4 minutes. Remove, brush the inside of the case with a little of the beaten egg and return to the oven once more for 2 minutes. Remove and lower the oven temp to 120C/250F.

For the filling – finely grate the zest from 2 of the lemons, then squeeze out enough juice from all the fruit to give you 175ml (6 fl oz). Beat the eggs and sugar together until just mixed but not frothy. Mix in the lemon juice and cream, pour through a sieve into a jug and stir in the lemon zest.

Partly pull out the oven shelf, slide in the pastry case and pour in the filling. Slide the shelf back in and bake the tart for 40-45 minutes, until just set – the mixture should still be quite wobbly in the centre but it will continue to firm up after it comes out of the oven. Remove and leave to cool, but don’t refrigerate it. This tart is best served on the day it is made. Wedges or bars – you decide, and a bit of crème fraîche is lovely alongside.

Strange fruit

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

California, Citrus, Cookbook, Cooking, Food, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Ojai, Oranges, Recipes, Stories

“If I had nowhere to go in the world, I would come to Ojai. I would sit under an orange tree; it would shade me from the sun, and I would live on the fruit.” Krishnamurti

It is hard to do justice to how central the orange is to Ojai. After a few hours of green forested land and glinting orange orbs, you find yourself stepping over dead and dying fruit. Blackened, hollow oranges lie dead on the branch. There are only so many oranges you can carry on a walk until the sight of yet more oranges lolling at your feet, often cloven in two by insects and small animals, feels like the end of a particularly debauched feast.

The fruit that we ate was pleasingly sour. There were lemons too, and grapefruit and tangerines. We walked through avocado groves, their long leaves scissoring the sky. Horses stood nearby on a patchwork of green. Because of the rain, the grass was almost neon and along the street were honesty boxes with trays and bags of fruit, all for a dollar – a nice round figure. Amazing to think we were only an hour and a bit from Los Angeles and its manic, urban sprawl. Up the road was Santa Paula, home to Mud Creek Ranch and their tantalizing bergamot trees.

A year ago, I began this blog and wrote about my first encounter with bergamots. So it feels right to revisit them after this weekend in Ojai, where citrus perfumed the air and sank into the pores. It came with us in the car, back to LA, as we let go of leaves and branches along the way. It would be wrong to surmise that Ojai is just oranges. But sometimes it’s good to simplify. Oranges are at its core. They are the view. The view Beatrice Wood looked out on, as did Krishnamurti, and countless free-ranging artists and thinkers who have called this place home. Where going out, as the saying goes, is really going in.*

The bergamot is the most intense experience you can have with your pants on. So heady as to be almost nauseating, a little goes a very long way. A marmalade or curd made exclusively with this fruit would be too punishing, but combined with lemon and orange you have a touch of the exotic, which is just enough.

For a citrus fruit, the bergamot has a deep, oily character, and the zest has an olive-green hue. The bergamot, orange and lemon curd below is unctuous and rich, rather like a citrus mayonnaise. If you find bergamot hard to come by – or just don’t fancy it – replace with lemon and adjust the sugar, according to taste. Don’t be tempted to use only oranges, as the results will be appallingly sweet. Curd needs acidity to work.

Citrus curd

Adapted from Skye Gyngell, My Favourite Ingredients

Zest & juice of 2 bergamots, 3 lemons, 1 orange (to make 300ml/10 oz juice)

125g (¾ cup) of sugar

6 organic egg yolks

180g (¾ cup) of unsalted butter, cut into pieces

Method

Rub the citrus zests and sugar together – the essential oils in the peel are released in this way. Mix the juice, sugary zest and egg yolks together in a heatproof bowl until well combined. Stand the bowl over a pan of just-simmering water and stir continuously (meaning; a lot, but feel free to look around etc) with a wooden spoon as the mixture begins to warm and eventually thicken. Many curd recipes claim this takes about 7-10 minutes. I have not known the thickening to occur under 20. Also, do not be alarmed by the sheer amount of juice here – it does eventually surrender. The spoon will start to drag, and once the mixture coats the back of it, remove from the heat and immediately stir in the pieces of butter. Strain the curd through a fine strainer into a warm sterilized jar. Seal and store in the fridge for about a week – it doesn’t last that long generally.

* I’m paraphrasing from naturalist John Muir.

Bitter chocolate olive oil cake

03 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Cake, Chocolate, Cookbook, Cooking, Dessert, Food, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Olive oil, Recipes, Stories

This is not a rant against butter. Far from it. But I am rather in love with olive oil and its peculiar affinity with desserts. And while butter highlights sweetness, is dense and comforting, olive oil is less weighty, making the crumb lighter, almost bubbly. Initially, I was scared of going for an extra virginal oil, but the fruity-pepper quality is reminiscent of spice. And good olive oil will have traces of bitterness and pungency, with echoes still of the actual olive. I know I’m probably a bit behind, but the notion of tasting fresh olive oil, sipping it like wine, was new to me, until I tried it. Weirdly, it’s not oily or greasy, but fresh and clean, spring-like.

And here in LA, it is spring; particularly early in the morning with the desert air still biting but with a still and steady sun above. After months of wet (it’s true what they say – LA in the rain is basically Slough with palm trees), it is good to remember the heat, the sharpness and dryness of the air. Things are budding again. Magnolia with its slip of pink just pushing through. Lemon trees a forest of blossom, with the first yellow fruit like tear drops. And everything is green, courtesy of the rain. Troughs of dried mud have appeared next to banks of luminous grass. It’s all very Hollywood.

Olive oil is big business and full of controversy. It’s a minefield, frankly. Here in California, olive trees were brought to the state by Spanish missionaries in the 18th century. Everywhere the silver-grey leaves, stark as bullets in the sun, remind you of the fact that despite its New World appearance, the terroir of this part of California is fundamentally Mediterranean.

I cannot begin to unravel the complexity of what makes a good olive oil, but apparently it has little to do with colour and everything to do with freshness; olives are a stone fruit and the oil is essentially the juice of the olive, and like all juice, it is perishable. Look for bottles with a ‘best by’ date, or better still a date of harvest. Early harvest oil will be generally much more pungent and more flavourful than late harvest. And the oil should be extracted by cold-pressing, using neither heat nor chemicals. This is obviously in an ideal world.

Anyway, back to cake. Try not to be cowed by the robustness of the oil you are using here; the bitterness in both the chocolate and the oil is tempered by the delightful texture of the almonds and the fissured exterior of the cake once baked – the way it cracks like a dinosaur’s egg and sinks gratefully into a thick mound of cream. It is not as truffle-like as it looks – it’s glistening because I decided, erroneously, to fleck it with olive oil for presentation purposes. I also sprinkled it with flaky salt, but have a glass of water on hand if you decide to go this route.

Bitter chocolate olive oil cake

Adapted from The Bojon Gourmet/Alice Medrich

50g (1/2 cup) blanched whole almonds

1 tbs cocoa powder

150g dark chocolate (70-72% cocoa solids) broken into pieces

120ml (½ cup) extra virgin olive oil

Pinch of flaky sea salt, plus some for serving

4 large eggs, separated at room temperature

170g (¾ cup) caster sugar, divided use

¼ tsp cream of tartar

Position a rack in the centre of the oven and pre-heat to 325F/170C. Grease an 8 or 9″ (20cm) round cake tin with a bit of olive oil. If using whole almonds (which I would recommend) toast them for a minute or so over a medium heat until they start to smell nice and turn a little golden. Then grind them with the cocoa powder in a blender or coffee grinder until powdery but with a few stray bits of nut left, for texture. Place the chocolate in a heat-proof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Once it looks well on its way to melting, add the oil and the pinch of sea salt and stir.

Remove the bowl from the pan and whisk in 110g (½ cup) of the sugar and the almond mixture until combined. Whisk in the egg yolks. If the mixture starts to get cold, it may ‘seize’ or look grainy. If this happens, place the bowl back over the simmering pan and stir until it loosens again. Place the egg whites in a very clean bowl and whisk until just frothy. Then add the cream of tartar and continue until foamy. Rain in the remaining sugar, continuing to whisk until the whites hold soft peaks.

Without delay, use a rubber spatula to stir a small portion of the whipped whites into the chocolate mixture to loosen, then gently fold in the remaining whites until the batter is just combined and no streaks remain. Immediately pour mixture into the prepared pan, smooth out the top and bake until a toothpick inserted comes out with moist crumbs attached – 35 to 45 minutes. Let the cake cool completely, then remove from the pan and sprinkle with sea salt – this may not be to your liking, so omit if not. The cake improves with time, courtesy of the almonds. Keep covered at room temperature for 3-4 days for the full effect.

Read on Read Tom Mueller’s book Extra Virginity if you’re interested in olive oil intrigue. Also check out his website and blog truthinoliveoil.com for lots of fascinating facts.

Green Soup & Onion Jam

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Cayenne, Cookbook, Cooking, Dinner, Food, Ingredients, Lunch, Nonfiction, Onions, Recipes, Soup, Spices, Stories

I feel the need for some green in me, if you’ll pardon the expression. It’s all very well chowing down on sugar and coconuts and chocolate – and God help me, it’s good – but it’s not exactly lunch. So here’s to soup. And the sweet fug of caramelizing onions, the searing of greens, a few cooling drops of extra virgin olive oil.

I grew up with a book called The Vegetarian Epicure, though no one as far as I could tell was a vegetarian. It was plain and unpretentious with sweet illustrations reminiscent of a children’s book from the Seventies, with easy to follow recipes. In fact it was from these pages that I made my very first dessert; a summer fruit tart – pastry smothered in lemony, zesty cream cheese, with fruit piled on top. I made this endlessly, whatever the season. But occasionally, if it all got too much, I’d turn to the soup section.

Soup was a big thing with us. Onions were cheap, as were potatoes (and of course there was potato water). Greens you could pull up in the neighbour’s garden. The big pan of spitting, lurching soup, the calm silence of the soup bowl, a handful of toughened bread and melting clumps of butter. The book was thumbed to oblivion, daubed with grease and finally hung by a thread. What I particularly liked about it were the intros, the preamble to the thing itself; it had a way of leading you to the subject like a firm but friendly teacher. At the back of the book, most intriguingly to me, was the author’s bio. Apparently, she was doing this book to fund her studies in film at UCLA (wherever that was). Anna Thomas was someone in print only. She had no bearing on my actual life.

So imagine the oddity of switching on the radio and hearing Anna Thomas speak. It was hard not to feel a sense of possession; she was ‘mine.’ And she was talking about soup. I was right back in our kitchen in Devon with the long windows and the trestle table and other people’s small gardens down below. Except I was here, in LA, with Anna Thomas. I had got here where she was. I was impossible that day, apparently. In the end, I had to do the only thing that made sense, the only thing that would shut me up: I opened the book and made soup.

This recipe calls for chard and spinach, but I have also used mustard, collard and turnip greens to good effect. Also, not everyone likes chard’s rather bullying strength. If you don’t want to use rice, the creaminess can come from other sources, such as cooked squash, potato, parsnip or Jerusalem artichoke. The onion jam is simply onions taken to the very edge of burnt. You want some crispness without too much charring. The trick is to leave them for a very long time over a low heat until they become sticky and sweet.

Green soup

Adapted (and some liberties taken) from Anna Thomas, Eating Well

2 glugs of olive oil, plus more for drizzling

3 onions, sliced into half moons

Sea salt

2 tbs plus 3 cups (750ml) of water

¼ cup (50g) of arborio rice

1 bunch of green chard (about 1lb)

About 14 cups/12 oz/340g (your average bag) of gently packed spinach/greens

4 cups (1litre) of vegetable broth or potato water

Big pinch of cayenne pepper

1 tbs of lemon juice, or more to taste

Heat 2 glugs of oil in a large skillet/frying pan over a moderate heat. Add onions and a pinch of sea salt; cook until the onions go translucent. Reduce the heat to very low, add 2 tablespoons of water and cover. Cook, stirring frequently until the pan cools down, and then only occasionally, always covering the pan again, until the onions are greatly reduced and have a deep caramel color, at least 25 to 30 minutes. Take a handful and put to one side for use as your garnish.

Rice: Meanwhile, combine the remaining 3 cups (750ml) water with a pinch of sea salt in a soup pot; add the rice. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to maintain a simmer, cover and cook for 20 minutes.

Trim the white ribs out of the chard (save for another use, such as to add to a stir-fry or other soup). Coarsely chop the chard and spinach or other greens. When the onions are caramelized and ready, stir a little of the simmering liquid from the rice (or whatever you have to hand) into them; add the greens to the onions, give it all a stir, and then add the broth and cayenne. Add the rice here if you are using, or if not then the starch of your choice, or nothing. Return to a simmer, cover and cook, stirring once, until the spinach is tender but still bright green, about 5-10 minutes more.

Return the handful of onions to a pan to crisp up. Puree the soup in the pot with a hand-held blender until perfectly smooth or in a regular blender in batches (return it to the pot). Stir in a tablespoon of lemon juice. Taste and add more lemon juice, if you like. Garnish each bowl of soup with a drizzle of olive oil and a few strands of the onion jam. Hot bread is good here, of course.

Chocolate pots with cardamom

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Chocolate, Cookbook, Cooking, Dessert, Dinner, Food, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Spices, Stories

I know there are many cultures where you buy in dessert and LA is one of them. I wouldn’t gripe, but the bought stuff here is dazzling in its aesthetic perfection but tastes of nothing. And it’s incredibly sweet. So here’s what I’m thinking: I write a book (which will be read by about seven people, but to those people I say thank you) about what you can make or bring that is neither horrifically sweet nor terribly complicated. But it will taste good. And ‘afters’ need not be pudding or cake at all, but a rough cheek of apple and a chunk of crumbling Cheddar. Some toasted, spiced nuts. A bowl of sloping apricots with cardamom. Or a chocolate pot.

Cardamom was imported from its native India in the Middle Ages by Arabic traders to the Muslim Mediterranean (Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt for example), where it now belongs to the sphere of cooking known as the saffron-cinnamon link*. Beloved of Scandinavians too, it does well in sweet things (including sweet vegetables like carrots and parsnips). It is strong, searing almost – as if you have found yourself in a clearing after a recent bonfire involving eucalyptus: charcoal, menthol, ash, smoke and the shock of clean air combine, particularly if you whizz up the seeds in a blender and stick your head in. It belongs with almonds, pistachios, rose water, oranges and lemons. Good in bread and cake, bewitching in a poaching syrup for fruit. Chocolate it loves, including the white stuff where it cuts through the sweet gloop with masterful directness.

Oh yes, and Happy New Year! Due to technical ineptitude, I was unable to get my head round the so-called interactive report I posted at the beginning of January and those wishing to use it would have been blocked. I would like to say thank you to everyone who has read and enjoyed me, followed me and either commented publicly or privately and generally cheered me on. It is also very exciting to be featured on Freshly Pressed. It’s a solitary business, writing, so any encouragement is my meat and potatoes.

These chocolate pots have the minimum of sugar and no flour. There is cream though so forget it being good for you, except in the psychological, spiritual and sensual sense. As for chocolate, you can take the bitterness right to the edge, but try to keep it this side of fruity. I would stop at 70% cocoa solids myself. Though the recipe asks for an egg, I made it without and it was still lovely; a handy detail for the egg-intolerant.

This recipe comes from Lucas Hollweg’s so-much-more-than-just-good book Good Things To Eat. My take comes with a toasted almond or two, which gives the pudding a sort of carb-like purchase and is in keeping with its Moorish provenance. But go bare if you dare.

Chocolate pots with cardamom

Adapted from Lucas Hollweg, Good Things to Eat

Serves 6

15 cardamom pods

200ml (7fl oz) whole milk

200g (7oz) dark chocolate (60-70% cocoa solids), broken into small pieces

150ml (5fl oz) heavy/double cream, plus extra to serve

50g (1¾ oz) caster/superfine sugar

1 medium egg

“Crush the cardamom pods in a pestle and mortar, or roughly chop, squashing the black seeds inside as you go. Put in a small saucepan with the milk and bring to a simmer, then turn off the heat, cover and leave to stand for 1 hour.

Put the chocolate in a mixing bowl. Add the cream and sugar to the milk and bring to a simmer. Turn off the heat and leave to stand for a minute, then strain through a sieve onto the chocolate. Allow everything to melt for a minute or two, then beat together until smooth and silky. Beat in the egg until everything is well combined.

Divide the mixture between 6 espresso-sized cups or small glasses and put in the fridge to set for a couple of hours. Add a splash of cream to the top of each one if you feel like it.”

*Read Sam and Sam Clark’s beautiful cookbook Moro for more on this.

Sweet and salty almonds

David Lebovitz, The Sweet Life in Paris

Deborah Madison, Seasonal Fruit Desserts

Serves 2

1 cup (170g) blanched almonds

1 tbs (15g) butter

1 tbs dark brown sugar

A good pinch of flaky sea salt (fleur de sel) or smoked sea salt

A good pinch of freshly ground black pepper

Spread the nuts on a baking sheet and roast in a 300F (180C) oven for about 5 minutes to ‘tickle out’ their flavour. Try to avoid colouring them too much. Melt the butter in a pan over a medium heat and then add the warmed almonds. Sprinkle the brown sugar over them, and stir until the sugar has melted. Remove from the heat, then sprinkle with the salt and a fresh grind of pepper. Let cool to harden. Tap the almonds gently with a rolling pin to break them up or leave them whole.

Savage stuff

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 71 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Art, Cooking, Dinner, Food, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Spices, Stories

Paprika is a savage red, and though it might sound strange, I like a bit of savagery. I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown LA yesterday where there was a lot of visual angst on display. Cavernous warehouses full of ripped metal and brown swaddling, swirling red daubs and matted roadkill. The colours were rust and grey and dried blood. Nothing had a frame, the frame was no longer needed. The only room I liked was the one housing the permanent collection, the ones always there: Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns.

But it was a small, angry picture, the first one I saw as I entered, that held my attention. It was by Dubuffet, and it was called Le Havre. It was a map of sorts and the colours were wild and fierce. There was little attempt at verisimilitude. The painter’s quote next to it caught my eye. It said “Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.”

The paprika in the photo was in a bowl, powdery like pigment, along with other spices and teas in a stall at the farmers’ market. You were allowed to lift up a spoon of it and smell, and this helped because the one above was smoky and the other paprika was not. But the colour was the reason I bought. It made me want to stick a finger in the middle. It was an angry red, savage, mad and violent.

Just so you know, paprika is the dried and ground flesh of peppers (cayenne pepper comes from dried and ground chillis – it’s easy to get confused). The peppers are dried from the oven, sun or smoke (the best over oak fires) and used mainly in Spanish and Hungarian dishes. Paprika can be sweet, smoky or hot with a huge variation both in flavour and colour. Try not to put the powder over direct heat or it will scorch and taste bitter. It has an affinity with coriander and cumin and potatoes, as well as chickpeas and dusted over halloumi. I tried it with Jerusalem artichokes to very good effect. The roasted almonds with paprika recipe is a Spanish one and smoked paprika is recommended.

Roast almonds with paprika and rosemary

Adapted from Sam and Sam Clark, Moro

250g whole blanched almonds

2 tsps of olive oil

1 tsp of smoked sweet paprika

1½ tsps of flaky sea salt, like Maldon

2 sprigs of rosemary, chopped finely without any wood

Preheat the oven to 150C/300F. Place the almonds on a baking tray and dry-roast in the top of the oven for about 10 minutes or until starting to turn golden. Remove and stir in the olive oil, paprika, salt and rosemary. Return to the oven for around 10-15 minutes. Everything should be sizzling and fragrant. If you would like to crisp everything up a little more, give the nuts a shake in a dry frying pan/skillet at the end. Remove and cool before eating.

Jerusalem artichokes with garlic and paprika

Adapted from Nigel Slater, Real Cooking

Serves 2

500g Jerusalem artichokes (3 or 4 big handfuls)

Butter, about 75g

6-8 cloves of garlic

A couple of bay leaves

1 heaped tsp of paprika

Peel the artichokes and slice them into rounds. Melt the butter in a shallow pan, one which has a lid. Drop the garlic cloves, whole and unpeeled, the bay leaves and the paprika into the butter and whirl it around with a wooden spoon. Add the artichokes and cook over a moderate heat until the chokes and garlic are slightly golden. Take care not to let the butter burn. Pour in a small glug of olive oil if it looks that way. Turn the heat down so the butter is lightly bubbling, cover with a lid and cook for about ten minutes. Shake the pan as they cook. Remove the lid, turn up the heat and continue cooking until the artichokes are tender, golden and crusty. Eat with the smashed open garlic pearls.

The first figs

25 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Cooking, Dessert, Food, Fruit, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Spain, Stories, Travel

I never know what to make of figs. They look slightly obscene, but then purple always does (think of aubergines). They are so delicate, shaped like an engorged teardrop, with that satiny, touchy skin. Each fruit contains, not seeds, but a mass of curled-up flowers that will never be. Certain things they like, I’ve noticed. Like honey, a scattering of thyme leaves, a slake of lemon juice, walnuts. I feel on safer ground when they are tarred by the heat of the oven, reduced to their buttery essence. They blister and bead – droplets of sap line the fruit’s seams. They eventually cave in, turning to jam with only the slightest provocation.

Of course if you have a fig tree, you need do nothing but tear one open and suckle, especially if it has already been warmed by the sun. Forget fruit salads, and cold of any sort. Figs are usually a late summer crop, but ‘breva’ figs* (meaning ‘first fruit of the fig tree’) are with us now. They grow on last year’s wood, a couple of months before this season’s crop ripens. They are not quite as spectacular as the ‘higo’ (second crop), not quite as burstingly succulent, less beauteous to the eye, but they are worth investigating.

I first tried breva figs when I was lost on a mountainside in southern Spain. I wasn’t particularly hungry or thirsty, but they were hanging about us as we tramped along the road and so it passed the time. I was wearing corduroy shorts – a fashion fad that lasted about a week in 1991 – and in the midday sun it was like wearing a pair of blankets. I remember the fig’s sweetness, and the way we popped each plump little confection whole into our mouths, the flesh turning into a dewy, flowery syrup. So I associate them with heat and dust and a certain wildness of spirit.

Our house, bought for £2,000 in Las Alpujarras in Spain, was white and chalky and if you brushed past a wall, part of it would come off on your clothes. Swallows nested in the beams. The rats never came upstairs. They preferred the bathroom that had been built in the middle of the cellar, with a makeshift wall around it, like a turret. We had no transport so hitched lifts with the postwoman or a friendly tractor driver, or walked. Occasionally, somebody would throw fruit through our window. This was if they were unfriendly and wanted us to go away. Locals who liked us, and owned fincas in the area, came to the door and handed us their harvest directly. Tomatoes, oranges, lemons, peppers, garlic, figs, sometimes nuts, everything was saddled to the mule standing morosely in the background while they did the deed.

Children played outside our window until 2am. The afternoons were always dead while the whole village slept. Pigs were slaughtered, also outside our window, and the children continued to play under a canopy of dead pig, strung up by its hooves. But it was also easy to disappear. The village was surrounded by farmed terraces, and acequias – streams of melted snow from the Sierra Nevadas – and we dunked ourselves in whenever the heat got too much. No one was about, apart from the local shepherd and his goats, the bell around their scruffy necks sounding their arrival. We picked figs and thought nothing of it.

Figs do well in southern California, having come here in the eighteenth century via Spanish missionaries, hence the name, Black Mission. I am being quite brutish, roasting them with gay abandon, but there are many applications for these treacled beauties and they hang around for ages; dolloped on ice cream, smushed through a sieve and turned into fig butter, partnered with tangy goat’s cheese, piled on hot, yeasty bread, or thrown into a bread dough or cake batter. Or simply potted up and eaten one by one like sticky, gummy candies.

Roasted figs with honey and thyme

Serves 4

I committed the cardinal sin of leaving fresh figs in the oven overnight so they looked like tarmac. They tasted divine, though, so I suggest you do the same.

12 figs (or thereabouts)

3 tbs of clear honey

Walnut-sized knob of butter

A posy of thyme (about 15 sprigs)

Juice and zest of a lemon

1 roasting pan

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C. Bruise the lemon zest and thyme leaves together using a wooden spoon or pestle and mortar. Fish out any woody stems, but don’t worry too much if some remain. Put the butter, honey, thyme leaves, lemon juice and zest in a small saucepan. Heat gently, stirring until liquid. Take off the heat and leave to infuse for about 15 minutes. Cut off the stem at the top of each fig. Cut a deep cross down into each one, then squeeze the sides to expose the flesh. Place them upright in a roasting pan. It’s fine if the pan is crowded, but each fig should be resting on the bottom. Pour over the liquid. Roast for at least half an hour, then turn the oven off and let the figs stew in their own juices. Because first-crop figs can be a hit-and-miss affair, you can be quite brazen about the roasting, and general neglect here. These are not jewels, and they taste better for the wait.

“They say that the Fig-tree, as well as the Bay-tree, is never hurt by lightning; and also if you tie a bull, be he ever so mad, to a Fig-tree, he will quickly become tame and gentle. As for such figs that come from beyond the sea, I have little to say, because I write not of exotics; yet some authors say, the eating of them makes people lousy.“

Nich. Culpeper, Gent., The English Physician Enlarged, 1653

* Also known as ‘breba’ figs.

Apricots

25 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Chocolate, Cookbook, Cooking, Dessert, Food, Fruit, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Spices, Stories

Apricots can go either way. Flabby, woollen and pointless or lush, tender and – in the case of apricot jam – unforgettable. Also, like plums, apricots are blissful with chocolate. I came over all funny when I realized this. I’d love to know who originally dreamt up apricot and chocolate tart, and give him/her a medal. I think the chocolate brings out the spice and sweet acid in the fruit. Whatever. No glossy cooking terms can possibly do justice to how successful it is. It’s the Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti of food marriages. He’s the chocolate.

Apricot compote is brilliant as an almost-jam. It is also divine on its own, or with a plain summer cake. Ice cream also works – chilly tufts of the stuff melting into syrup – and almost any flavour. I think apricots are one of those stone fruits enhanced by cooking. Particularly poaching, which brings out the fruit’s complexity and freshness. It blooms under heat; its sharpness is mellowed, but still there is edge, and the texture becomes burstingly fragile.

Now to the difference between one apricot and another. One word: water. Dry farmed, however counter-intuitive this may seem, is the reason why the best apricots have that intense concentration of flavour. If apricot trees are too wet, the fruit will be big and puffy, and the texture like eating someone’s earlobes. Arguably the finest apricots, at least in this area, are Blenheims. Their proud owners – or one of the very few – are Eric and Helle Todd from Forcefield Farms in Santa Paula. Their apricot trees grow in a dry riverbed, the fruit is small and has an intense aroma of honeysuckle. This season has been tough on them, and the crop is depleted due to an early frost, but they will be bringing out their little jewels in a week or so. Track them down at your local farmers’ market.

Royals are also very good indeed; some are almost as small as a pea, and rosy-cheeked. These tangy apricots go well with goat’s cheese; Leonora, from Leon in Spain, is gorgeously dense, creamy and cave-like.

It is an early fruit, precocious in name and nature – the word apricot comes from the Latin praecox – and its blossoms often fall prey to the cold. More fragile than peaches, ‘cots have none of their glamour or following, but they are a cook’s dream. I had to do some serious whittling to arrive at these two recipes.

Poached apricots

Adapted from Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book

About 12-15 apricots, whole

2 cups (500ml) water

1 scant cup (200g) cane sugar (or maple sugar)

2-3 cardamom pods

1 cinnamon stick

1 star anise

Zest of an orange

3-4 apricot kernels (optional)

Method

Poach the apricots gently until soft and tender, but still holding their shape (about 15 -20 minutes) with all the other ingredients. Remove the apricots with a slotted spoon, and discard the cardamom pods and star anise. Wash and dry the cinnamon stick to use another time. Reduce the syrup by half by bringing it to a boil. Add the grated zest of an orange, and pour the syrup over the fruit. Cool and chill. Remind people there are stones.

Extracting the apricot kernels: this is not obligatory but if you’re feeling game, you need a hammer and some sort of cushion. I used an oven mitt which I placed over the apricot stone. It muffled the sound, and also stopped the bits flying all over the room. Always try one before adding them to the syrup; some kernels are very bitter.

I understand the antipathy many feel towards putting chocolate and fruit together, but I hope you’ll make an exception here. This is the companion to the chocolate and plum tart that fell apart in the last post. I’ve since tarted up the pastry – removing the amaretti entirely – and this one stayed whole. I include the recipe for the amaretti crust if you feel like giving it a go, though it will melt into nothingness on your spoon and will not be coerced onto a cake slice, even for money.

This is an idea from Sam and Sam Clark, of Moro fame, and in their tart they use apricot paste called ‘amradeen’ – a Syrian and Lebanese speciality. I’m using poached apricots in its stead, but dried ones also work. Serve with a few extra ‘cots on the side and some crème fraîche.

Chocolate and apricot tart

Adapted from Moro, Sam and Sam Clark

For the filling

180g (1 cup) poached apricots or paste/amradeen

2 tbs lemon juice

135g (9tbs) unsalted butter, cubed

110g (4oz) dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids) broken into bits

2 large eggs at room temperature

60g (¼ cup) cane sugar

For the pastry

Adapted from Rick Stein’s Food Heroes

50g (2oz) toasted slivered almonds

175g (6oz) plain flour

A pinch of sea salt

175g (6oz) butter, softened

65g (2½oz) cane sugar

1 medium egg, beaten

½ teaspoon of ground cinnamon

For the pastry

Put the toasted almonds into a coffee grinder or spice mill and blitz until fine but with some texture still. Mix with the flour, salt and cinnamon and set aside. Cream the butter and sugar together until smooth. Beat in half the egg, followed by the flour mixture and enough of the remaining beaten egg to bind the mixture. Knead briefly until smooth. Pat into a round disc, cover in plastic wrap and chill for 20 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 190C/375F. Carefully roll out the pastry between 2 sheets of plastic wrap and use to line a greased 8ins (20cm) loose-bottomed tart tin. Prick the base here and there and chill for about 30 minutes. Line the pastry case with greaseproof or parchment paper and baking beans (or rice) and bake blind for 10-15 minutes (check at ten). Then remove the paper and bake for a further 5 minutes. It should look and feel crisp and golden. Remove and leave to cool.

For the filling

Press the poached apricots through a sieve. Add the resulting puree to a pan with the lemon juice and a few splashes of the syrup. Heat gently until the mixture thickens. Stir to prevent the puree sticking to the bottom of the pan. The mixture should taste slightly tart. Spread the puréed apricot over the base of the cooled tart shell. Leave for a few minutes – the apricot will form a slight skin.

While this is going on, put the butter and chocolate in a bowl over barely simmering water. Whisk the eggs and sugar together until pale and thick and fluffy. When the chocolate has melted, take the bowl off the heat and fold in the egg mixture. Give this a good stir, bringing the chocolate up and over, until it is a uniform deep, dark brown. Pour this into the tart shell and smooth out any peaks and troughs with a spatula. Bake on the middle shelf of a pre-heated oven for about 25 minutes. There should still be a slight wobble – not too firm, glossily dark but with just the beginnings of a crust. Serve with some poached apricots, ice cream or crème fraîche and a slick of the poaching syrup.

If you insist – amaretti crust

200g (1 cup) amaretti biscuits

80g (5tbs) butter, melted

Put the amaretti biscuits in a freezer bag and give them a few whacks with a rolling pin. Mix with the melted butter. Tightly press the amaretti into a tart tin and chill until needed. When you’re ready, put this in a pre-heated oven (350F/180C) and bake until the crust is nicely browned. Continue as above.