Formula for Success

So, the big moment.  I had to cook from the most difficult cookbook we own, John Campbell's Formulas for Flavour.  The subtitle is ominous: 'How to cook restaurant dishes at home'.

The book has a certain sentimental history to it.  One of Katherine's and my last weekends away in England before I came to Princeton was at Campbell's flagship restaurant/hotel near Newbury.  We ate and drank memorably, and part of the package which we had bought was to get a signed copy of his book, as above (addressed to Katherine on her birthday).  A funny footnote is that a few days after we got back to Oxford, we received another signed copy in the mail.  Evidently, they had forgotten that they had given us a copy already.  We gave the spare copy to Caroline, who loved it.  (Again, this is ominous.  The fact that a professionally trained cook thought it was a good book should have sounded alarm bells!).

The first problem was to identify which dish in the book to do.  In the end I decided against "John Dory, Braised Lambs' Tongues and Red Wine Emulsion", or 'Rabbit Saddle, Tarragon Tortellini".  I plumped for "Tournedos of Salmon, Spiced Lentils and Foie Gras".  Except that we didn't do the Foie Gras: we would have had to find raw foie gras to pan-fry, and I was very worried that I would screw the cooking up (you have to flash fry it for 20-30 seconds, and screwing it up would mean $100 down the drain).  So I guess the recipe was "Tournedos of Salmon and Spiced Lentils".  It was four pages long in the book:

OK, one of the pages is a picture, but still!

Stage one.  Make the fig-and-apple chutney which goes on top of the salmon.  I did this on September 16th (one week exactly before we ate).  Here are all the ingredients lined up:

Notice the (hard to see) sugar alongside the mustard in the white bowl, bottom left - there's a story behind that (coming up later).  Anyway, basically, all you do is simmer the ingredients together for a couple of hours.  I have to say, this puzzled me: there was only a tablespoon-and-a-half of liquid (some white wine vinegar), so 'simmering' didn't seem like the right verb.  Anyway, this is what it looked like in the pan before the simmering started:

The recipe had 9 ingredients listed for the chutney.  The instructions for making the chutney started as follows: "Combine all the ingredients for the chutney in a heavy saucepan".  So that's what I did (that's what you see in the picture above).  But at the end of the paragraph of instructions for making the chutney the recipe reads: "Add the sugar and store chilled". So in fact, you don't combine *all* of the ingredients for the chutney at the start - rather, you combine all the ingredients except the sugar.  Grrrrr!  Perhaps it's just well known the world over that when you make chutney you only add sugar at the end, and so no one in their right mind would ever have thought that sugar be counted as one of the ingredients in a chutney.  Perhaps John Campbell would be laughing his head off at the thought that anyone would actually combine *all* the ingredients listed for the chutney - EVEN THE SUGAR - when the recipe says "Combine all the ingredients for the chutney in a heavy saucepan".  Anyway, I simmered all the ingredients, including the sugar, and then blended them.  The truth is that the chutney tasted delicious even though the sugar was added two hours too early.  Here it is about to be stored in the fridge:

Then, on the day of eating (today), I prepared the lentils in the afternoon.  After cooking the lentils in the usual way, you add an amazing list of things to them.  Balsamic vinegar, red onion, garlic, cumin, ketchup, sweet chili sauce, pickled ginger, etc. etc.  Here the final mixture is, cooking in the pan:

Into the fridge that went.

Next up, preparing the crème fraîche.  That was easy: just adding parsley, chives, and lime juice to the cream:

OK.  The next bit wasn't so easy and wasn't so successful.  The night before eating, I had divided a salmon fillet into two pieces, and rolled them together and wrapped them in cling wrap to make a cylinder.  This was in the recipe, before you ask any questions.  I left it overnight in the fridge, to 'firm up'.  The idea is that then, when the time comes to cook them, you cut pieces of salmon off the cylinder into rounds (hence why the recipe is called 'Tournedos of Salmon').  You actually pan-fry the rounds with the cling wrap still on (to hold them in place).  Well, this didn't work.  When I cut the rounds off the cylinder, the wrap slipped off and the two pieces of fish came apart.  So the pieces of salmon did not look as nice as Campbell's did in his pictures (as you can tell from the carnage on my chopping board below):

But salmon is salmon, and well seasoned pan-fried salmon is always going to be good.  And the final product still looked pretty good.  First, you put down some lentils (warmed through), then the salmon, then a quenelle (a reference to a kind of French dumpling which has a distinctive shape) of chutney on top, surrounded by the crème fraîche:

It was a success.  Katherine's favourite part was the chutney.  My favourite part was the bed of lentils.  But the crème fraîche was wonderful and tangy (and it was nice to have something cold on the plate).  All in all, I am very relieved to have got that book out of the way without any major mishap.  That recipe is definitely dinner party material: everything can be prepared ahead except the frying of the salmon.  It would make a spectacular starter.

Next up is the Good Housekeeping Cookbook.  Rather different, I suspect, to John Campbell's complex and difficult book.  ("Home Cooking" alert!)

Not the most successful dinner

It was time for Nigel Slater's Real Food.  In fact, we had had a recipe from the book a couple of weeks ago, when Helen had cooked us a meal the night we sneaked out to the cinema.  The dish was chicken pieces sautéed with chiles and garlic.  The dish I did had eerily similar ingredients.

Things started well.  The recipe was entitled "Crispy Fish with Garlic, Chilli, and Basil":

The title is very enticing, right?  Really, any recipe with the word 'crispy' in it gets me going.  It recommends hake or haddock as the fish.  I found hake at our trusty fish store, and it looked very good.  And I had bought a bottle of Viognier, which Katherine likes very much, to go with the meal.  I very thoughtfully decided it was important to have a few trial glasses while cooking:

Anyway, the recipe calls for dredging the fish in cornflour, which I duly did:

Perhaps you can see the problem.  The cornflour did not stick to the side with the skin on.  Still, I soldiered on.  I put the pot of oil on, to deep fry the fish:

I then put the fish pieces in to fry (in two batches):

I had the usual problem of not knowing what temperature the oil was.  I want a thermometer like the one Alton Brown has which is an L-shape (so you can take the temperature of oil properly even when it isn't very deep).  As a result, the oil was, I suspect, a little too cool, and the fish fell apart as it fried.  This was the final result:

It looks OK, but not great.  And what you can't see is that the pieces are really quite oily.

Then I made the sauce: that was easy, just a matter of flash frying garlic, chiles, scallions, and then adding soy sauce, Thai fish sauce, a little water, and cilantro and basil.

And I made Chinese noodles.  But then came the killer.  Evelyn refused to go to sleep.  So eventually we had to bring her down to the kitchen at about 10.00 p.m. so that we could eat.  (Thankfully, she sat in her bouncy chair and didn't cause a fuss while we were eating.)  The food had been ready for 30 minutes, and so the fish was cold and soggy, and the noodles cold and gelatinous.  The sauce turned out to be very spicy (there were three chopped chiles in it after all) - too spicy for Katherine.  All in all, not a very successful meal.  I blame Nigel Slater more than I blame Evelyn.  Perhaps I didn't fry the fish properly, but I don't think cornflour alone makes a good coating.  We've done several recipes from this book, and it seems as though they are rather hit-or-miss.  I am inclined to think the book is just not very good.

Next up, a serious challenge.  The recipes in this book are uniformly elaborate and demand skill, patience, and time.  I'm already nervous...