Recipe

If you’ve heard a story about puttanesca it is likely that it translates as whore’s spaghetti – that it was born in the brothels of Naples’ Spanish quarters, a favourite of the prostitutes who worked there, for its quick, cheap and easy nature. But – ah, isn’t it always the way? – the truth is perhaps a little more prosaic. The word puttanesca is indeed derived from the Italian for prostitute (‘puttana’), but the same word is also used as a catch-all profanity, an Italian ‘crap’. In this vein, the dish would come to mean ‘any old crap’ pasta. This makes sense, because puttanesca is a true store-cupboard dish, made almost entirely from tins and jars and dried pasta (entirely if you forgo the parsley).

Eggs benedict is, I think, the perfect brunch dish. It combines the best bits of breakfast – eggs, some kind of pig product, a good sauce and bread – with sufficient elegance and composure that it doesn’t feel weird to be eating it after 10am. Although it is the balance of the individual components that make it such a successful dish, that hasn’t stopped restaurants and chefs the world over creating a host of variations. Swap the ham for smoked salmon to turn it into Eggs Royale, or spinach for Eggs Florentine.

When it comes to cooking, I make no secret of the fact that I’m something of a traditionalist: I like old-fashioned steamed puddings, I like the classic and the heritage. I like blancmange and rice pudding and suet. I am unashamedly unfashionable. I’m not sure whether I chose the Vintage Chef recipe writing life, or whether the Vintage Chef recipe writing life chose me. I just don’t see the point in reinventing the wheel, or injecting unusual flavours and twists just for the sake of it. But, as I look back through recipes I’ve written, Easter has always been my exception: hot cross bun ice cream sandwiches, hot cross bun bread and butter pudding, cakes topped with mini eggs.

We are lucky to live in an age of domestic culinary convenience: whatever your heart desires, there’s an appliance, gizmo or specific spoon for it. Want to make cakes in the shape of a shoe? Not a problem. Need twenty different ways to crush garlic? Your needs can be met. Looking for a boiled egg, but in the shape of a square? Or a teddy bear, or a duck? Easy, you can make all three. So it seems remarkable that when it comes to effective gadgets or assistance for something as popular as pizza, we’re high and dry. It seems virtually impossible to get your hands on something that will help you replicate the thin, crisp crusted Italian-style pizza at home for anything other than seriously big money.

I don’t often find myself longing for the industrial rigours of a factory when I’m baking in my kitchen at home. But as I patted the squiggle of fig paste with wet hands, corralling it into a rough sausage shape I thought ruefully of Charles Roser of Philadelphia and his patent for a fig roll machine. In the late nineteenth century, poor digestion was thought to be the cause of a number of wider ailments and, as with breakfast cereal, biscuits were seen as an aid to digestion – and figs, of course, were a particularly digestion-friendly fruit. Brought over from Britain to America, the fig roll tended to be made by hand in small batches.

Now that there's a chill in the air and it's getting dark at 4pm, it's time to turn to those comforting winter staples that get us through the bleaker months of the year. And with lockdown 2.0 in full swing, we have never needed these satisfying dishes more: Braised lamb shanks Lamb shanks are one of my favourite cuts to braise. When it comes to meat, braising is great for cooking tougher cuts – like shanks, but also the shoulder, neck and shortribs. It breaks down the connective tissues in the muscles; it’s this connective tissue that makes the meat chewy if cooked hot and fast. If cooked slowly, the connective tissue turns into gelatine, making the meat soft and tender – and also gives body to the sauce that forms around the meat, making it rich and luscious.

No-one is born knowing how to poach an egg. Indeed, the technique is hardly intuitive: the addition of a little vinegar, whisking the water to create a swirling vortex. Just as golfing enthusiasts barred from hitting the links have resorted to putting practice in their living rooms, a lazy lockdown weekend feels like an ideal time to perfect classic cooking techniques. Here are six to try. Spinning sugar Spun sugar is a guaranteed way of achieving collective ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from assembled guests at your next dinner party. Playing around with burning hot sugar is however the sort of thing that can tip you over the edge should you attempt it unpractised whilst trying to make polite conversation with the in-laws between courses.

In Britain, we mark the beginning of Lent with pancakes. Although nowadays relatively few of us strictly observe the Lenten dietary traditions which prohibit the eating of dairy and meat in the lead up to Easter, we happily leap on the annual opportunity to eat breakfast for dinner: sales of lemons and caster sugar soar, and we delight in filling ourselves full of pancakes. But pancakes are not the only Lenten final hurrah: the semla bun is the Scandinavian favourite. Following the same logic as pancakes, the buns are designed to eat up the dairy ingredients which would have been prohibited by Lent religious laws.

This week I decided to bring all the fun of the fair into my kitchen and make churros. Churros are a dough enriched with butter and eggs, that are piped into lengths and fried in very hot oil until crisps and light. There’s nothing quite like the smell of sweet, hot dough, frying. In the days when I used to churn out hundred of doughnuts overnight in our small kitchen for events, I’d crawl to bed in the small hours of the morning, wearing the distinctive perfume of that pastry. There are different types of fried dough all over the world – bombolini, beignets, gulab juman, yum yums, funnel cakes – all seeking to satisfy that universal craving for hot, fried dough.

I often find myself turning to lemon-filled recipes in January. I think it’s something my baking subconscious realises before I do - that cold, dark days require the antithesis, something bright and bold, something cheering. You know what they say: when life gives you lemons, make lemon meringue pie.  Unlike its austere, pared back French cousin, the tarte au citron, the lemon meringue pie is never going to be a subtle pudding: a lurid, chartreuse centre hidden by big billows of toasted meringue, piled ludicrously, disproportionately, toweringly tall. It quivers and wobbles on the plate, crisp and firm on the outer edge, giving way to a marshmallowy interior. But that’s the point isn’t it? It isn’t sophisticated or chic or cool.

Beef Stroganoff has had its heyday: terribly popular with both restaurant chefs and dinner party hostesses of the 1950’s to 70’s, I can’t remember the last time I saw it on a menu or dinner table. It’s been relegated to buffet dishes and ready meals, beige and bland, insipid and gloopy. It sits in canteen chafing dishes, or is blitzed in the microwave, until it’s rubbery, grey, congealed. No wonder we don’t think of it fondly. Of course, that’s not how it should be.  True beef Stroganoff is a treat: punchy and rich, with a silky brandy-spiked sauce made from beef stock, sour cream and mustard, covering sautéed onions and mushrooms and impossibly tender, rare meat. It’s a luxury dish, made with expensive cuts.

The name ‘toad-in-the-hole’ suggests something a little more whimsical (or saucy) than its reality. The origins of the name are spurious and, to be honest, a little tenuous: I’ve seen theories that the hole is a hungry stomach and the toad a ‘substantial meal’, another that suggests the dish resembles the way toads peep their heads out of burrows, and another which attributes the name to a trend in the eighteenth century for live toads to be incased in stone.

Braising isn’t a terribly glamorous way of cooking: you’re not flipping steaks over an open fire, flambéeing alcohol, or shucking oysters. No one is going to gasp at your cheffy technique if you plump for braising. And when you pull the dish from the oven, it may not look any more exciting: no soaring soufflés, or mahogany egg-washed wellingtons. It’s just a jumble of meat and veg in a single dish, cooked until the meat is yielding and the sauce luscious. Braising is pretty unassuming both before and after cooking – but for all its culinary modesty, it packs a real punch. Braising is an old-as-the-hills way of cooking meat or vegetables in a covered pot with a little liquid (this could be stock, wine or water).

Continuing in the vein of the last couple of weeks of Vintage Chef columns, this week’s recipe is designed to make the most of common ingredients, and give maximum reward for minimum effort with these incredibly simple flatbreads. Last week, I wrote about the joy that baking can bring even in adverse circumstances, how it remained a source of solace to me in this brave new world. These flatbreads are joyful (warm, pliable, smoky from the griddle), but when I make them, I tend not to be seeking joy as much as stability. These flatbreads require so little: no yeast, no proving time, no kneading – they don’t even need an oven. And it takes – from bag of flour to stuffing it in your mouth – about ten minutes.

I’ve spent the last few days wondering whether it is frivolous to give you a cake recipe at a time like this. But I’ve finally come to the conclusion that, actually, it’s probably more important than ever. Baking is a source of comfort and joy, both for those doing the baking, and for the recipients, and to willfully lose something like that when we face uncertainty and challenges, when many of our other sources of comfort and joy have been at least temporarily restricted, is sad. Having a simple cake recipe up your sleeve is reassuring – a taste of normality. I’ve gone for a cake which relies on store cupboard staples, one which you might recognise from school dinners: raspberry and coconut traybake.

I don’t like one-use kitchen gadgets. Well, that’s not true, I do like them actually. I love them. I am drawn to them in those little catalogues that come through the door, brimming with plastic and promise, like a magpie. But my small kitchen doesn’t love them. My overflowing drawers and crowded worktops don’t love them. After ditching my garlic peeler and my egg poacher, my milk frother and my (ahem) hot dog slicer, I have made a pact with myself that any utensil or equipment I bring into the kitchen has to do some heavy-lifting. No single-purpose gadgets shall darken my door any longer. But there is one exception: my waffle maker. I feel hypocritical, I do, but I can’t give up my waffle maker.

Spotted dick is synonymous with school dinners: it’s one of a field of puddings that divide the nation – like rice pudding and jam roly poly – into those who, haunted by sloppy or stodgy memories, cannot countenance the idea of enduring them again, or those who seek them out in a fit of nostalgia. The joy of writing this Vintage Chef column is that even those dishes I might otherwise avoid, I get to rediscover and share. I was extremely sceptical of blancmange; I treated coronation chicken with suspicion, but in exploring and experimenting with recipes, I was newly converted: blancmange can be heavenly, like an enormous panna cotta; coronation chicken need not be claggy, but can be vibrant and fresh and delicious.

I’ve been cooking for a little while now: professionally for huge quantities of people for a couple of years, writing about it for the thick end of four, and teaching myself at home for over six. I’ve been to pastry school for an entire full-time academic year. None of this matters to my family: all my family wants from me is sticky toffee pudding. At Christmas, it is mandatory, and every other occasion where I fail to arrive bearing a huge tin of the stuff, its absence is quietly resented. I’m going to visit my sister soon, but will be away just beforehand, so there’s already a large pudding sitting in my freezer.

Turkey curry, as a means of using up festive leftovers, has become something of a joke: the turkey curry buffet in Bridget Jones is the true low point of Bridge’s festive calendar. The prospect can strike fear into the most Christmas-spirited of souls. But actually, on Boxing Day, or the day after, the last thing you really want is the same meal you’ve been eating for the past two days, looking a little tired and fridge-worn, all the best bits gone. Don’t get me wrong: I’ll be first to the table for cold roast meats and my fifth serving of stilton in 48 hours, and if you hesitate for a moment, you won’t see that final portion of trifle for dust.