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07 Saturday Jun 2014

Tags

Cookbook, Food, Frugal, Ingredients, London, Recipes, Stories

Yesterday I put away most of my cookery books. The majority went into boxes, which were marked ‘cookery books (keep)’. I didn’t realize objects had the collective name of ‘chotskies’ and that anything from shells to bowls to framed photos could come under this new heading. Something about seeing all these books lined up, sentry-like, on the floor gave me pause. How many cookery books do I need? Or use? The sheer bulk of them was imposing, but sitting down to read them felt like displacement, a putting off of something. I returned from England to an entire bookcase full of recipes, gathering dust, slouching in the heat, cascading one on top of the other and tried to remember when I had developed this learned helplessness in the kitchen. For years and years I think I owned three cookery books. Which I barely used. They had pencil drawings of legumes and dainty fruits, or there were close-up photos of salad and cake where everything looked vaguely menacing and shapeless.

Mostly I was drawn to implements, because during my teens and twenties I lived ad hoc often for months at a time in such and such a place, as an au pair, as a cook in Venice, in someone’s converted garage in Rome, in a deserted flat in Peckham. I made do with what had been left behind or what I could use when the owners weren’t looking. What I could eat, how much of something I could take before it was hidden from me or labelled ‘keep out!’. The borrowed cup and saucer, the endless pilfered spoons, the bag of buns that would be tea. All those cafe and deli jobs when I lived on ham scraps and Danish pastries. Food was fodder, fuel to power me through the walk from one postcode to another.

When I was in my late twenties, I worked as a live-in au pair for a French couple in the London borough of Fulham, which subsidized my drama school fees. They had a three-year-old boy called Antoine and it was my job to look after him in the evenings and weekends. They had the best kitchen that I’d ever seen and the best implements. It was never made clear whether I was allowed to cook, so mostly I didn’t. I’d eat bread and butter, toast, a banana, things I could pick up surreptitiously and leave the room with; four biscuits curled into my palm, a slab of cheddar.

They had a food processor. This was new to me and very exciting. I had no idea how it worked, so when they were out I’d experiment; the best thing it did was shred carrots. Mounds and mounds of desiccated carrot, damp and juicy, which I’d salt and fleck with oil and lemon. They had no cookery books and I had none either, because I was living with the bare minimum, in a small lemon-yellow room next to Antoine at the top of the house.

I made the shredded carrot every day and ate it with an upended tin of tuna. I think that was how I never got ill. I read fiction, not Nigel or Nigella who only existed then in the margins, if I walked through a bookshop, say, or flicked through the television channels. I was never invited to cross the threshold of the French couple’s sitting room. I’d stand in the doorway and we’d have conversations, but I was never invited in. Only if Antoine saw me would he take my hand and lead me to the sofa.

Sometimes, in the night I’d hear him crying next door, and though I was given instructions never to go in, I often would, and he’d be standing on the other side clutching his trucks to his chest in a way I still think about. He also gave me food, invited me to sit with him at the kitchen table, and took me into the garden. Sometimes I ate my shredded carrot with him and he’d eat his mashed apple or his sausages (and then I’d eat what he left behind). I hope he is doing well.

I read this book by Alain Coumont at Le Pain Quotidien in Larchmont. I resisted the urge to buy it and instead I read it. I hope the simplicity of this recipe doesn’t offend, but really it’s not a recipe, more an idea; a thought about food that you might have and decide to execute. It’s permission more than anything. And it reminded me of what I did before books told me to. When I just fed myself.

Carrot and lemon salad

Serves 4 as a side dish or appetizer
4-6 carrots, peeled, julienned or finely grated
2 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
Juice of half a lemon
3 pinches of sea salt
Black pepper

Put the shredded/grated carrot in a bowl and mix with the oil, lemon juice and salt. Mix gently with your hands if you like, and then add some freshly ground black pepper. Serve quickly.

Cutting for stone

24 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Conversations, Food, Fruit, Los Angeles, Recipes, Stories, Summer

One of the main differences between England and Los Angeles that I have found is that where I’m from there isn’t a van on the side of the road selling mangoes. And coconuts with a straw. On the way back from the beach, tailing our way back from Malibu, wending our way up through Topanga Canyon, past the waves of blossoming, listing fennel and tall grey-green hills, there is always at least one open-backed van with a Mexican lady selling her boxes for $10 a piece. It could be avocados or strawberries, you’re never entirely sure, but you’ll be alerted by the signs. And then inside there’ll always be more. We bought a box of nine mangoes, but by the time we got home there were only seven. Mangoes are very hard to resist particularly when they have that give to them; these were on their way to softness, heavy as artillery in the hand, but oddly human to the touch, like a thigh or a calf.

There is none of the banter here that you would get in England. A box of mangoes would yield at least a bit of to and fro about the weight – are you alright there, love? Oh, these ones are gorgeous, just cut it in two and have it with a bit of cream, lovely – a bit of rough and tumble, someone sighing that you were taking too long. There’d be something. Here the exchange is reduced to the price. There was no acknowledgement I was there from the man standing next to me, even though it was just him and me on the side of a dusty road. Him, me and the lady with the fruit. She had her hair in pigtails, which on her looked expedient rather than odd. The three of us did the deed knowing we would not be seeing one another again. It was on the tip of my tongue to say something, because as an English person it is hard to let a moment go by without some kind of dithering nicety.

Hot isn’t it? The sea is cold. This road is long, isn’t it? It’s very green here etc. There’s none of that in LA. Here strangers tend to the loud and polite school of conversation – as if you have fallen down a well or a manhole but have sustained no serious injuries and would be up for a chat. “HI, HOW ARE YOU?” “Good, how are you?” “GREAT. ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND”. Or they’re silent, as if you’re not there at all. I have swum close enough in the pool to be able to read the typeface on a novel (by John Green), without so much as a flicker from the reader, perched on the steps with her legs under water, her torso dry as a bone, her nails a perfect peach. I would love to have said “Who’s John Green?” but that would have been to break the seal of silence, opening up a conversation possibly without end, and anyway I could always look it up on the internet. I don’t really want to know who John Green is, I just want you to know I’m here.

I gave two more mangoes away so we were left with five. It was after a conversation with one of our B&B guests. She’d stayed for only two days and was on her way out, up the coast to Big Sur. But we got chatting and then an hour went by, and she left with a mango in each hand and the rest of the chocolate-cardamom cookies, because they spoke to her ‘Indian soul’. Originally from New Delhi, she is a writer, a reader and a lover of food. We exchanged favourite books; I will now be reading Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid. I hope my book recommendations made the grade, but it really doesn’t matter, because I had a conversation. A proper one. I made a friend. I bought some mangoes and gave them away. ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND!

The trick to cutting into a mango, I have learnt, is to cut as close to the stone as possible. Cut on either side, vertically, so that you have two even slabs of orange flesh, and then a central panel with the stone embedded, which you can gnaw around. There is no point trying to be demure; you will be dripping in mango juice and picking the fibres out of your teeth, so you might as well enjoy yourself. Score the two halves of flesh (which will have the skin still attached) into cubes, which you can eat as you would an orange quarter or slice them off into a bowl to which you add lemon or lime juice.

A meal would be a mango and avocado salsa, to which you have added some chile, cilantro, sea salt and lime. But to my mind, one of the finest uses for mangoes is in kulfi, the Indian ice cream. It is made traditionally with malai (milk boiled down to cream) but it can be reasonably faked with evaporated or condensed milk.

Cutting for Stone is the name of a novel I have had languishing on my shelves for a while, unread, and now unreadable due to its being dropped in the bath (although the first chapter is fine and also very compelling so I will press on). I thought the title apt.

The little lunch

10 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Art, Bananas, Cake, Chocolate, Food, France, Recipes, Stories, Stories from the Stove

I seem to have an endless supply of browning and defeated bananas. We buy them principally for the B&B guests who never eat them. But they may do. They never say outright that they don’t like bananas; there may come a time when they will feel like one, and that moment will be hard to define, but when it comes we better have a bunch of bananas standing by.

I think in the last year we have probably had two straight-forward banana-eating guests. Still, we continue to buy them and then I make banana bread with the softening, spotting ones, which I give to the guests who don’t eat bananas and strangely they wolf it down. We have French guests now and they have what I think is the classic French attitude to breakfast – it should hurt. Their plates afterwards are beautifully smeared with arabesques of apricot jam and chocolate (from the chocolate banana bread, a variant*), the French press empty but for the coffee grounds, the French girls’ voices throaty from their first blissful draw of nicotine. Of course they are beautiful and slender. This is how it is.

If you are English and were at school during the 1980s you would have gone on a French exchange programme; you lived with a French family for a few weeks and the French student then came and lived with you. You learned their language and way of life and they learned yours, sort of thing. I also did this in Bilbao, northern Spain where I lived on chocolate biscuits for four weeks and learned to say “I know what you’re up to and I’m going to tell my mum what you did when I get home” in Spanish.

Annie was nicer; she was from Normandy and liked smoking and camping. She drank bowls of black coffee just before she went to bed, and wore extremely tight jeans. We were both fourteen but I got the impression she was worldlier than me. Sometimes we went on long walks into the countryside, or at other times she would hitch up the family’s pony – what she called a ponette – to a wagon and we would ride to an old lady’s house nearby and buy Coke from her fridge.

Annie lived in a rural area and there was not much to do except this, and eat chocolate sandwiches. I met other kids in the area because they too would wade into the fields, pale wheaten and straggly, and we would all smoke. I had never smoked like this before; filtered Gitanes, in a beautiful, uniform white that made me think of freshly laundered shirts. I watched them gulp back big blue lungfuls. I think I knew then I wouldn’t be able to inhale and remain standing. It was on my return to England that I did it in the privacy of my bedroom – I inhaled a Gitanes and fell to my knees.

Anyway, it’s all rolled into one in my mind; the smoking, the Coca Cola, the way Annie sat on a bench outside the boulangerie and handed me the long snout of bread to try, its crust sharp, almost splintery in the mouth followed by chunks of dark chocolate that she had fed into the crevices – our petit déjeuner, our ‘little lunch’ eaten vaguely in the morning. And lastly (and lastingly), the boys in the field one of whom in a lull in conversation languidly enquired “Do you make love?”

I think I pretended not to understand which wasn’t too far from the truth; something to do with the strangeness of the present simple. As if it was a hobby. It was the only time I remember being singled out for attention. I replayed the moment endlessly in my mind, trying to reframe my muteness as intrigue, but really I was just lost for words.

I wanted to showcase these beautiful drawings of bananas and chocolate by Jasmin Bhanji, who currently lives in Kenya, though is formerly of north London, and it’s strange because since she’s gone to Africa, I’ve got to know her better and that is one of the wonders of the internet. I knew her in person in England (she’s my new cousin) and now I know her through her drawings and photos of her amazing pots and her blog, Jasmin Bhanji Studio.

*I lifted the recipe for double chocolate banana bread wholesale from Emma Gardner’s baking blog Poires au Chocolat (who in turn adapted it from Smitten Kitchen), so it would seem a bit silly to repeat it here when she has already done such a lovely job and I did nothing to improve it seeing as it was, in my view, perfect. If you like bananas and chocolate and a big fistful of cocoa powder and eating oblong cake, then this is for you. A bit naughty you might think for breakfast, but not if you imagine you’re a Parigot (slang for Parisian), in gold sandals and a lamé cardigan.

Life is butter

15 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Cooking, Food, Ingredients, London, Los Angeles, Recipes, Singing songs, Stories

melon cauliflower. Get it? Life is but a melancholy flower. I used to sing this as a round in the days before iPhones and laptops. Before all the screens. We would sit in a circle in the garden and sing. That’s how we got our kicks. Singing songs and then cooking porridge if it all got too much.

Most of the songs were Elizabethan, and almost all were sad; someone was dead, or they refused to marry you, or you were trying to persuade the ferryman to ferry you over to the place you’d rather be, or there was a rose you knew who would remain forever a spinster. We would often begin in the spirit of silliness and jocularity and steadily it would overcome us, the words sung in strange counterpoint, soaring and dying; My poor bird wing thy flight, far above the sorrows of this sad night. And before we knew it, we were gone, transported to this other place of words sung and soaring.

I learnt the songs predominantly from a girl called Helen who I met in Rome when I was on my academic year abroad, and who then moved to London around the same time I did. She had a French girlfriend called Valerie and at that time it was trickier being gay in Rome than in London, and better all round for work, so they moved. It was her garden in north London that we sang in and occasionally she would accompany the rounds with her recorder. I don’t know what it is about the recorder but Helen stamped on any snickering which only led to more, and us having to begin again. It was better without.

I have no idea where Helen is, because this was before social media, and I lost her phone number many address books ago. She is lost to me. I don’t even remember her surname. We laughed a lot in Rome, where we helped out at an international school and managed the outings for the children (three months of panini and prosciutto, always warm and wet from the heat of the bus, and an orange). There was a lot of snorting and inappropriateness, looking back. We would never have been allowed if the time was now.

Those summer evenings in Helen’s garden got me through the London roughness after Italy, and I lazily lost touch because at that age I thought the world was full of Helens. I still can’t look at a cauliflower and not think of her. And I don’t know many people these days whose idea of bliss is to sit in long grass and sing for hours on end and then get up and make salty porridge.

I sometimes wonder what she’s up to, but I never worry. My grandmother would have said ‘she doesn’t make enough of herself’ because she wore no make up and scraped her wild blonde hair into a bun, but we were all tomboys and wore the same clothes day in day out, and nobody seemed to mind.

And actually, life is butter. Not sure about melons, though they’re perfectly nice. And cauliflower – well, let’s see. They are so much in abundance in the farmers’ markets here in LA (see how I did that? Got on a plane, crossed the Atlantic and before you know it…) and appear in a variety of colours and sizes: purple, popcorn-yellow, small as apples, big as bazookas. I chose one that looked as if it had been smoking Gauloises its whole life, roasted it with some anchovies and garlic and a few glugs of olive oil. The anchovies disintegrate into a salty tacky juice which works very well. It’s really brown salt. For Helen.

Roasted cauliflower with anchovies and garlic

Adapted from table366

Head of cauliflower, chopped
Parmesan cheese (optional)
Tin or jar of anchovies
Olive oil
4-5 cloves of garlic, unpeeled

Oven Proof Dish (8×8 or 9×11 is a good size) lined with parchment

Preheat the oven to 400F/200C. Spread the cauliflower out evenly in the dish in one layer (otherwise it won’t cook as well). Drop the anchovies round and about; remember they are very salty, so the more you use, the saltier the dish will be. Pour over a few glugs of olive oil; you want to wet the cauli but not completely drown it – say 4 tablespoons. Salt (very lightly if at all) add the garlic and give everything a good toss with your hands. Roast for 20-25 minutes until the cauliflower is slightly caramelized and the anchovies have melted. Stir and then grate over some parmesan or whatever hard cheese you like as long as it’s the melting kind – you can leave it out entirely and it will still taste lovely. Roast for another 5-10 minutes so the cheese has a chance to thoroughly melt. Let it sit for a little bit so it doesn’t burn your mouth or serve at room temperature.

Paul’s cod

27 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Cooking, England, Fish, Food, Ingredients, Lemons, Recipe, Sea, Stories, Sussex

‘Local cod’ said the sign outside Paul’s Plaice, the only fishmonger left in Seaford, and then you go through the little chain-mail curtain into a shop that smells of the sea.

Paul works alongside his brother and I’ve never worked out which one is actually Paul, although it’s been explained to me enough times. Perhaps my brain has discounted it because it needs to stay alert for ‘novelties’ such as an oncoming car or a mountain lion. Apparently this is what the brain does, it has this discounting mechanism which I read about in Where’d you go Bernadette. I have also discounted the sea which roars all through the day and night outside my window. Every day it lies there, a different colour, doing something slightly different with itself. Occasionally it catches me and I notice it – a thin pencil line on the horizon or a big mushroom cloud of rain the same gunmetal grey as the waves, gulls flapping over a fishing boat like washing on a line, something suddenly surfacing – a snout? – and then going under. Then I forget.

Back in Paul’s Plaice, I notice a box of tiny fish as small as matchsticks with the name Smelt written above, which I think sounds rather Dickensian. They’re baby whitebait, according to ‘Paul’. They look too small to taste of anything, too fragile, almost pre-fish. They also have local plaice and cod, and everything is from the nearby fishery. They’re caught trawler style, because netting taints the fish with all the seaweed that gets caught up with it. What about line-caught, I ask him. ‘That’s just a bloke standing there with a fishing rod’, he says. ‘I can get it for you but it’s really expensive.’ I know from past experience that my mother has got mackerel for free by walking past a full bucket at just the right time, but obviously this takes a certain louche opportunism that is beneath Paul, who I can only describe as ‘bubbly’ though I know that makes him sound like an Avon lady.

I cooked the cod and let me tell you it was so flipping good I went out and bought another three pieces, and ‘Paul’ thrust a whole handful of parsley into the bag for good measure. It was meaty yet tender, and chunks dissolved, not actually like butter, but with a gentle yielding buttery quality. I baked the cod in one of those parchment parcels, where it steams but also seals without drying out. You want the cod to somehow give itself to you, each layer opening, each cavity glistening, the smell of lemon and salt and heat and herbs, pale discs of pearly white, soft and supple. I think I’ll stop now.

Cod in a bag

With advice from Paul

Serves two

2 pieces of cod fillet, cut from the thick end (3 cm/1½ inches thick)

Olive oil & a small pat of butter

Lemon juice and the rind of 1 lemon

Sea salt

Fresh parsley (about four healthy sprigs)

Parchment paper

Butcher’s twine

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Arrange 2 sheets of parchment paper on a baking tray about double the size of each cod fillet. In the centre of the sheet put the cod and add what you like: here I added a pat of butter, some fennel fronds, a little glug of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon juice, the lemon rind cut thickly and some sea salt. But you can add anything; bay leaves, thyme, chillies, garlic, thinly sliced potatoes etc. Pull the corners of the parchment paper together and twist shut. Secure with some butcher’s twine. Slide the tray into the oven and bake for about 15-20 minutes. Open the bag to check it’s done and sprinkle the insides with chopped parsley.

Snap out of it!

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Not food

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Cafes, England, Fitzrovia, Food, Guide, London, Nonfiction, Stories

Actually, I’m fine. And I’m English so it’s my job to suppress all those untoward feelings of failure and loss and give myself boils and cysts instead. And something unusual has happened: I love London! All of a sudden, the place I have hated for about 25 years, give or take a year or two in the middle, has become somewhere rather exciting and magical. I think you have to have a few seminal moments in London; something has to have happened to you there, otherwise it’s just another capital city with a lot of people and escalators. And it’s so expensive it brings tears to your eyes and I will never ever go on the London Eye ever again.

RADA happened to me fifteen years ago. I went up for the day last week and went to the same area, though this time it was to meet the lovely bloggers, Rachel from Rachel eats and Evie from Saffron Strands, and to eat at Honey & Co, the Middle Eastern café (very good cakes, a bit hectic). It’s not that Fitzrovia is particularly beautiful – it’s not Prague or anything (I’ve never been to Prague).

It’s just that when I stepped out at Warren Street tube station, there I was, back in 1997. And it’s more or less the same, minus the porn shops and O’Brien’s, an Irish café that sold the biggest and cheapest coffee and the biggest, cheapest croissants ever, and no one had any money so that was brilliant. And if we weren’t paying – it was a benevolent acting teacher wanting us to do ‘a Pret run’ – then it would be off to Pret a Manger, returning with a box of hot pastries and smouldering Mochas and little change out of a twenty.

But what’s amazing, what’s strange and unsettling is that really it’s the same. If you get out at Warren street tube station, then clearly you’re doing that because you want to go to French’s Theatre Bookshop. I did this the other day and it was still run by a man who looks as if he hates you, because he knows you’re not going to buy anything. He looks a bit like Philip Seymour Hoffman though and I think that’s why on this particular day I didn’t mind his sullenness.

I never liked this shop and still don’t. I’m not sure why; something to do with young hunger and ambition and where it all goes. Then you walk down Tottenham Court Road, unless you want to go the other way to Villandry on Great Portland Street, which is one of those glittering delis with a very posh café and people who look like they have no pores. Instead, you go down Tottenham Court road (past the Scientology shop, don’t go in) to Goodge street, which is where RADA students generally disgorge themselves from the tube station. Goodge street is an interesting street, full of little places to eat and drink and if you walk on you get to Charlotte Street, which crosses it. Charlotte street is home to the Charlotte Street Hotel, where I have taken the odd eye-wateringly expensive tea.

It’s also home to my uncle Alex Hollweg’s paintings and whenever I see them, they remind me of the wooden fruit he made in the same jauntily rich colours that sit in his sitting room. The Charlotte Street Hotel, though they serve nice nuts, deals in the kind of exclusivity and luxe that made me feel forever an outsider. I remember sitting at the bar feeling like a scruff. But I have sat at the bar, and I can say it is a fine place to be, particularly if someone else is paying. My brother for one. I remember it was an evening of convincing; him trying to convince me to do something I wasn’t sure about. Anyway, I did it and it was a disaster. But thanks for the wine.

Back then I would have bumped into people – teachers, other students, Val. (Val worked at the front desk at RADA and basically ran the entire school and I think still knows my bank details. She also knew her way round a bagel). The place was a village in the middle of the city. You couldn’t go a hundred yards without seeing someone you knew, sometimes even someone who happened to be in the area by chance, an old friend apropos of nothing. It was all so easy; I have never quite got that back, that feeling of effortless unfolding, of friendships made blithely. It was that kind of place and time. Young love. So it was all the more delicious when the three of us last week went for a walk after eating. We did the back streets and didn’t really notice anything, too wrapped up in each other and our exuberant conversation. Streets were missed, the tubes came and went, we crisscrossed London, still mithering on about Nigella and Nigel and Simon, our faux friends from the world of food. So anyway, I went back and it was good.

Made me snap out of it.

Nowhere but here

08 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Food, Health, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories, Utensils

020

I’ve been here three seasons; a whole autumn, one full winter, the beginnings of spring. That translates as cold, long, dark, wet and angry. Gusty gales, the inexplicable (to me) spring and neap tides, the winter solstice and the darkest night. I’ve watched too many documentaries on BBC4, and I keep bumping into people who think I’ve already left. “Haven’t you gone yet?” “Still here?” or the weirdly judging “shouldn’t you have gone by now?”. And the sun is tepid – bright and cheerful but not warm. At the moment, and this moment is long, there is nowhere but here. Here is where I have a good doctor and no bills, no frightening and incomprehensible bills that have to be explained to me in a way that makes them even more incomprehensible.

Because Obama is still sorting out his healthcare, and for now we have no insurance and to be without insurance with a chronic condition in the US is scary. And people love to tell you how scary; a medical insurance broker in LA, over the course of a two-hour conversation, cheerfully painted a picture of precise Breugal-like horror at what would befall me if I continued to live an uninsured life. One of her client’s had walked out of the door one morning and dislodged one of her eyeballs – or her retina flew off. Or anyway, something happened to her eye and she had no insurance! I probably would have followed Francis Bacon’s lead in this case and popped my eyeball back in, which I read he used to do often after a few stiff ones at the French House.

So I’m here and it’s spring and I’ve already said goodbye at least twice to everyone. I am in that strange, drained nothing-doing state. An oddity in a world where everyone works, a permanent tourist, which is not half as fun as it sounds. And I don’t want to write about leeks or rhubarb, and I have tramped through enough Sussex undergrowth to know that the ubiquitous wild garlic leaves of which everyone writes are having an off year, or simply spring is late. So anyway I started cleaning. Sponging down the insides of my mother’s cupboards, shaking out the bowls and the bits of plastic appendage and the darkly mottled casserole dishes and the 70s colander. This bit was fun, discovering what was there and had been forgotten about. There were things that have followed me from Devon up to London down to Sussex, and sometimes even before my birth; some predate Woolwich!

001

The pestle and mortar originally belonged to my Australian grandmother and came from her home in Sydney. I never knew her really, but I have her postcards and letters in her kind capitals and lots of photos, and a memory of brushing her long silver hair. Now that I am apart from my things, I can see how wonderful it is to hold something like this – its weight and shape, and to imagine fingerprints and palms. The beechwood handle has come unmoored from its porcelain head. There are marks from not sure where or what all over the bodies of both mortars. The very act of pounding is to replicate what she would have done, her hands under mine; a form of conjuring. Spices, herbs, pigments and powders – I know she was a natural alchemist. Maybe, who knows, if I pound away and for long enough I’ll get healed.

034

Pounding herbs and garlic in a mortar is not nearly as arduous as it looks. It is actually very efficient – the whole thing comes together within a few minutes, the addition of oil is very satisfying, and then you’ve made it yourself and probably worked through a few grudges while you were at it. You are also ‘tempering’ the ingredients, putting them back into balance; in the Middle Ages, honey tempered vinegar, wine tempered fish and the mortar was the vessel to do it.* You are in control of things too, able to see and feel when particles become slosh (as it were).

The Catalan sauce romesco is still made in this way; peppers, nuts, oil, vinegar, bread and garlic are pounded into heady oblivion. As is pesto, skorthalia, the garlicky sauce from Greece, tahini, the Turkish classic tarator made with walnuts and stale white bread and Catalan picada, made with parsley and almonds (below).

It’s better to give approximations when it comes to pounding, because this is where feel is paramount, and it’s good to taste as you go; you can always add more of something. Add oil in very small increments to begin and then increase. I like herb/garlic sauces to have texture, with nuggets of this or that. If you don’t, pound on.

My version of a Catalan picada
1 small handful of blanched almonds (about 20)
1-2 garlic cloves peeled & a pinch of sea salt
4 big glugs of extra virgin olive oil
One big handful of roughly chopped flat-leaf parsley
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Crush the garlic with a good pinch of salt in a mortar until you have a smooth paste. Now add the almonds and keep pounding until amalgamated. Now add the parsley to the mortar, a small bit at a time, and pound until incorporated. Add the olive oil, trickling it in slowly and stir well before adding the lemon juice (add the juice after the oil otherwise it’ll turn the parsley brown). Lovely stirred into a fish casserole or simply served alongside mackerel or clams, sprats, lightly steamed veg or chicken, or stirred into salted yoghurt – really anything.

*Consider The Fork, a history of how we cook and eat by Bee Wilson, is a fascinating book and goes into some detail on the history of the pestle and mortar, if you wanted to read on…

Chop, chop

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Uncategorized

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Food, Ingredients, Kitchen, London, Shops, Stories, Theatre, Utensils

David Mellor’s shop lives at No.4 Sloane Square in London, yards from the Royal Court Theatre. I would at this point in my life far rather go into a kitchen shop and buy a chopping board than go and see a play, or indeed audition for one. In fact, I steer well clear, scared of bumping into someone from my former life, the theatre bar at the Royal Court witness to a handful of deeply felt humiliations. A theatre bar is not in and of itself a relaxing place to be anyway; everyone is subtly networking or nervous for a friend or relative about to perform (or jealous), everyone is sweeping the room, status – yours and theirs – is being constantly, silently re-negotiated.

You can’t just go up to someone. Which is what I used to do before I realized it was not done. There’s Tom Stoppard! Why, he gave me a small but not insignificant cheque at the beginning of my drama school career. I shall go over and thank him in person. Why not? He looked through me. And then he carried on smoking.

I never developed the right persona – some people do and it’s like armour, I suppose. I know them – charming, robust, flirtatious when needed, personal and then oddly impersonal. After my theatre bar exchanges, after auditions, and meetings, I always felt as if I’d just emerged from a car crash. Or a beheading.

I think that’s when I started going into kitchen shops and reading cookbooks; the balm at the end of a day of commercial castings, speaking my name and my agent’s into a camera before pretending to have road rage or candida (sometimes both). At David Mellor’s I headed straight for the chopping boards, past the sparkling glasses and his signature cutlery. And there it was; the smooth, rounded rectangular board with the hole in it. I had been admiring it at my cousin’s. New it was planed smooth of any imperfections, a plain, pale ash wood, but I knew what it would become with time.

I have always had a thing about chopping boards – I notice them in the same way people notice shoes or jewellery. A chopping board is a living thing and the more it lives with you the more it absorbs all the things you chop on it. I love the way Becky’s board has those little serrations all round the edge, which makes me wonder what they were for and why the centre is relatively empty.

I suppose you could call it a character study. Though I like a bit of pummelling and pounding – the vivifying effects of a pestle and mortar – there’s something to be said for smashing something, breaking it, or chopping it, or creaming it with a knife. You know the way that garlic can be chopped into a paste, the knife swishing this way and that like a paintbrush until the garlic is practically emollient: I like that.

So I bought the chopping board, and the beautiful, slightly MI5 assistant wrapped it in white paper and slipped it into a black paper bag, and we emerged into the Sunday sunlight and walked to the Tate. All the way there and all the way back, (and during) I thought about the board; what I would anoint it with. Garlic. Lemon zest. Parsley or basil. Splat, Chop, chop, scrape, crunch, chop, chop, chop, chop, swipe, swipe, bang. Smile. Repeat to fade.

You can make a pesto (basil, garlic, pine nuts, parmesan) or a picada (Catalan version with parsley and almonds) or a pistou (Provencal version using garlic, basil and oil) on a chopping board, as long as you transfer everything to a bowl before adding the oil (though olive oil is the perfect way to replenish your board – rub it in with a soft, lint-free rag if you have any spillage). Gremolata is a ‘dry’ sauce usually served with osso buco (braised veal shank) and uses garlic and parsley and lots of lemon zest. Try two large handfuls of parsley, the zest of two lemons and two cloves of garlic, reducing them all to a thick slurry. The board, the kitchen, your hands and you will smell intensely of these things afterwards.

Empty legs

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Baking, Food, Jane Grigson, Lemons, London, Los Angeles, Stories

I had my first shiatsu session the other day (along the same lines as acupuncture but using physical pressure instead of needles), and the man told me I had ’empty legs’. I had empty legs and empty feet, particularly my arches. This is nothing new – when I was a drama school student, the teachers’ main beef with me was that I had ‘dead legs and frozen eyes’. Someone else was described as having ‘no back’. It’s something to do with parts of our bodies being absent to us. The answer these days is to swim more, but I have not ventured into the English Channel since November and certainly don’t intend to now, with the huge brown swell, the sudden big lurching tide that would vanish me in a second. All I do is look at it from the balcony; a passenger on a boat that never docks.

But I know what he means about swimming. In LA I swam every day in an open-air pool. The area was fringed with merry red Bougainvillea, insubstantial as paper and smelling of nothing. My wet footsteps evaporated behind me making me handily invisible. It was all man-made and relatively new; units instead of flats, everything built for the purpose, everything clean. At first glance there is nowhere to hide, no nooks or crannies so you are exposed to the neighbours wanting to chat/complain about the perfect temperature of the water, the ‘chill’ in the air when there is none, the only thing fluttering being the leaf of a book or a butterfly. It feels an empty landscape.

Until you take yourself off; behind the tennis court is a narrow pathway where there is a pendulous lemon tree; Eureka lemons that are thick and pock-marked and heavy in the hand and need a hoe to get a purchase. Sprouting like mad hair is wild fennel and the smell is strong and medicinal and follows you to the orange trees, their diseased leaves and strongly floral blossoms heady like some kind of deathly elixir. A wild peach tree stands anonymously with blossoms like any other and tough herbs lead the way round the complex. Yards from the pool is this alchemy of smell coming up from the dust.

For me the pull to this landscape is stronger, particularly now that I know about our own Meyer lemon tree and its rash of blossom and the ‘eight or nine’ hummingbirds that visit it every day. And Joe is there doing the B&B in my stead, greeting the guests, not making the lemon shortbread or jam or ironing the sheets (‘I’m not going to do it like you’), but feeding the stray cat and getting rave reviews and being lovely as only he can be. Here in England there is rhubarb and snowdrops and long cold doused days and the obscene trickle of rainwater as it finds the nape of the neck. Bay trees stand to attention outside glossy eateries but it rarely occurs to me to take a leaf and scrunch it up, and smell its warm spiky clove-ness.

Occasionally it feels like fun; the new roomy Circle Line and the hoards of children on half term holiday on the tubes and the buses up in London (‘hold on to the yellow, Imogen!’). A small boy in a bike helmet traces his F Words To Work On next to me with his finger: frightened, fallow, fall, fat. And suddenly I feel bereft that there’ll be no Imogen in LA, none of these terribly English moments. So I make myself think of the sun, like a huge melting pat of butter in the sky. The blue will be the most unEnglish blue. The herbs will be virulent, wild and prolific and the air will smell of them. I’ll stride out, lunge into water and then feel it evaporate on my skin. I’ll have my own bowl of lemons, the car, the pool, that constant sun again (always the same), a brilliant dry cleaner, empty streets. Hopefully no more empty legs.

The B&B lemon shortbread began life as Jane Grigson’s shortbread knobs in her Fruit Book though I have doctored them with lemon zest and almonds. They are incredibly simple to make: melt 175g unsalted butter over a medium heat and add the finely grated zest of two lemons. Allow this to infuse and cool. Then add to the butter 200g of plain flour, 25g of ground almonds, 125g of sugar and a pinch of sea salt (all mixed together beforehand in a bowl). Make a sandy paste and then roll the mixture into little teaspoon-sized balls which you then press slightly to flatten. Bake on trays with parchment paper at 150C/300F for about 25 minutes. They’re done when they’re golden brown. Sometimes I drop a couple of torn bay leaves into the melted butter to infuse – is this wrong? I don’t know but I like the smell and fish them out before adding the flour.

Power of two

27 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Baking, Biscuits, Chocolate, Food, Hospital, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories, Sussex

I can’t get excited about root vegetables. Pressure-cooked parsnips and celeriac and the flaccid broths I am now closely acquainted with have started to distance me from their virtues. Yes, warm, inviting, steamy, filling, healthy, earthy, beefy and sustaining etc. Worthy.

If I want something wet and warm it is to be tea; strong, lactic and the colour of a cheap suntan. The cup is important: wide, thin-lipped and bone china, something that warms the hands through. And then there is the all important dunking element: the biscuit. Not cookies, which are too soft and yielding and will flop into the tea and turn it to mush. It must be a digestive. Sandy, burnished brown, the texture of rubble. A slight saltiness. Plain as plain can be. My childhood friend, Tuppy, would layer her digestives with butter and salt, an act I found impressive – she was the first as a child to make the connection between sweet biscuit and salted dairy. Digestives and cheddar are also a winner.

Digestives are also the fulcrum of the NHS – after a short stay you will be offered a dainty red packet of two and a cup of tea. It gets your blood sugar up, gives you something to gnaw on, brings you back to life. Sitting the other day with the curtain round me in a hospital ward, after a routine though still rather rugged procedure, I ripped open the red wrapper; the two fitted into my palm like medals. I made them last as long as I could.

“Are you alright in there?” the nurse asked, suspicious at my lingering. My answer was muffled with starch and sugar. I couldn’t just have one. “Fine!” I called out. She whipped the curtain back, but I’d already eaten most of the evidence. 24 hours of not eating and nothing can prepare you for the high. Digestives are genius. And she gave me another packet to go home with. She balanced them on a tray and walked beside me like a butler.

My cousin was waiting for me looking normal and smiling with the colour of a windswept sea walk still on her cheeks. I showed her my little red packet and she was impressed. It reminded me in that moment to be grateful – to be there in the first place and to be going home. With her, with digestives.

You can dip the digestives – once cooled – in melted chocolate, and then leave them to harden on non-stick baking paper. Here I used dark chocolate but milk would also work. As you can see, they are not particularly pretty to look at, but very nice to eat, and will enrich your tea dunking activities. The unchocolated ones mimic shop-bought digestives in their sheer plainness. They are also nicely crisp and not overly sweet – you can serve them with cheese or pâté. They are very good eaten on the day but can be stored in an airtight container and enjoyed a few days later.

The term ‘digestive’ was reportedly derived from the belief that the biscuits had antacid properties due to the use of bicarbonate of soda. They were originally made with exclusively ‘brown meal’ – composed of fine bran and white flour. Because brown meal includes the germ, the flour was sweet, and perhaps because of this, digestives have also been called ‘sweetmeal’ biscuits.

Ginger and chocolate digestive biscuits

Adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The Guardian

No, he’s not paying me. I just happen to like his column. These are based on the classic River Cottage digestive, but made with the addition of ginger and dark chocolate. Both are optional, but if you do go down the ginger route, be generous with the little squares of stem ginger or the flavour and texture can get a bit lost. I used light muscovado here for the soft brown sugar. Makes 20-25.

125g wholemeal spelt flour (or plain wholemeal flour), plus extra to dust
125g medium oatmeal
75g soft brown sugar
½ tsp ground ginger
Big pinch of fine sea salt
1 tsp baking powder
125g cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
5 – 6 largish squares of stem ginger, finely chopped
A little milk (I didn’t find this necessary)
200g dark chocolate (or good milk chocolate), broken into small pieces

Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4 and line two baking trays with nonstick baking parchment. Put the flour, oatmeal, sugar, ginger, salt and baking powder in a food processor and pulse. Add the butter and pulse again until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. (Alternatively, combine the dry ingredients in a bowl, then rub in the butter with your fingertips.)

Add the stem ginger and, with the processor running, trickle in just enough milk (about 30ml) to bring the mix together into clumps. I didn’t need to add any milk in my batch, my dough was already fairly sticky, but see how you go.

Lightly dust a work surface with flour, tip out the dough and knead gently into a ball. Press into a fat disc, wrap in clingfilm and chill for 30 minutes.

Cut the dough in half. Dust one half with flour and roll it out to 3-4mm thick, dusting regularly with flour to stop it sticking. The dough is slightly sticky and crumbly, so don’t worry if it breaks up a bit; just squash it back together and re-roll. Use a 7.5cm cutter, or a glass or cup, to stamp out biscuits, and transfer these to the baking sheets with a palette knife; re-roll the offcuts to make more. Repeat with the second piece of dough (or chill for use later), then bake for 10 – 12 minutes, until golden brown at the edges and lightly coloured on top.

Remove from the oven and leave the biscuits to cool and firm up on the baking sheets, then transfer them to an airtight container or eat them all.

If you want to: melt the chocolate in a basin over a pan of simmering water. Dip in one half of each biscuit, and leave to set on a silicone mat or a sheet of nonstick baking parchment, before serving.