A Return to Form

In 1987, when I was 17, I went to live in Paris for a year to study music at the Ecole Normale de Musique.  I was no stranger to living away from home, having been in boarding school since the age of 9.  However, life at boarding school is very cushy: all the cooking and laundry is done for you.  In Paris, I was to be on my own, living in a studio apartment on the Rue Collette.  The apartment had no washing machine, but it did have a small kitchen area.  My mother had a quiet word with the concierge, who agreed to do my washing and ironing once a week for a small fee.  (No doubt she also asked her to keep an eye on me.)  But as for the cooking, I was on my own.  And so at the beginning of my adventure, my mother presented me with an early 18th birthday present: Delia Smith's recently published One is Fun:

The occasion must have struck Mum as important, since she inscribed the book very formally:

The premiss of the book is that those who live on their own, but who like to cook, are often frustrated by the fact that recipes in cookbooks are typically designed to feed four or six people, and it is not always a straightforward matter to cut the recipe down.  What do you do if the recipe for (e.g.) spaghetti carbonara for four people called for one egg?  So Delia Smith set out to write a cookbook catering specifically to single people.

Thus, it was somewhat ironic that in preparing dinner for Katherine and me I found myself doubling Delia's recipes.  I say 'recipes' in the plural, because we ended up doing two.  The main one was the recipe for Cider-braised pork chops with cream and mushrooms:

The subsidiary one was for stir-fried red cabbage:

We also did baked potatoes.  In fact, they went in first:

While they were doing, I started the chops.  They were browned, and then onion and mushrooms sautéed in the same pan.  Then cider is poured all over.  Now, when I say 'cider', I mean what in America is called 'hard cider', i.e. the alcoholic drink ('apple beer', as the nice man in Claridge's Liquors  helpfully suggested).  In the pan, it all looked like this:

Notice how the onion and mushroom mixture is piled on top of the chops as they braise in the cider.  The sauce was reduced and finished with cream before serving.  Meanwhile, my beautiful assistant was chopping ingredients for the cabbage:

Apples and onion first:

Into the pot they went:

Then the red cabbage:

And then spices (cinnamon, ground cloves, and nutmeg):

That was cooked in the Dutch Oven for ten minutes or so, and vinegar was added at the end.

When all the elements were ready, it looked pretty good on the plate:

That was my plate (two chops and a delicate amount of butter on the potato).  Here was Katherine's:

Notice the large dollop of sour cream on the potato. We drank a nice bottle of our trusty Rhône red with it:

It was pretty much the perfect home-cooked dinner.  Tasty, seasonal flavours, and a straightforward recipe which was hard to ruin.  Our experiment with the cookbooks was back on track!

"The cook's classic companion"

OK, so this is a difficult post to write.  The dish we ate last Sunday (it's Wednesday now) was disgusting.  Well, actually, there were two things wrong with it.  First, it was disgusting.  Second, it was DISGUSTING.

The culprit was this cookbook:

It's The Good Housekeeping Cookery Book: 'The cook's classic companion'.  I could only find a link to it on the UK Amazon store, because I believe it's been banned in the USA.  The book was very similar in spirit to the infamous Illustrated Encyclopedia of American Cooking: published recently (this time, in the 90s) but aggressively retro in its recipes.  My theory was that they simply reused recipes from some previous version of the cookbook published in the 70s.

The first challenge was finding a recipe.  I chose unwisely.  I picked 'Spiced Chicken with Cashew Nuts'.

It had some interesting ingredients.  For instance, it involved marinating the chicken in a yogurt mixture containing ginger, coriander seeds, cloves, and peppercorns.  The instruction was to blend those ingredients together to make a paste for marinating.  But picture what happens when you try to blend those ingredients: the peppercorns are not going to grind up, nor are the cloves.  (I should have realized this, and ground them up with a pestle and mortar first.)  Anyway, the resulting mixture was decidedly lumpy.  I pressed on.  Here are the chicken pieces, in the marinade, about to go into the fridge on Saturday evening for 24 hours.

So, out they came on Sunday evening:

I dutifully sautéed them in clarified butter.  Here, I made a mistake: I didn't leave enough time to clarify the butter properly, so there was still a lot of moisture in the butter when I tried to sauté the chicken:

The result was that the pieces didn't brown up, but only 'whitened' up.  But then came the killer.  You add to the sautéed chicken the following mixture: onion, cashew nuts, cayenne pepper, turmeric, water, all mixed together in the blender.  Then you cover and cook for 20 minutes, and the dish is done.  Just take a minute to reflect on that.  The mixture you add is a suspension.  (Check that link out.  I love the first of the common examples listed).  It contains raw chopped onion and chopped cashews.  It is like slurry (another 'common example' of a suspension).  But close your eyes and try to imagine what the dish will actually taste like, and how it will feel in the mouth!  At the end of the 20 minutes, you have essentially chicken with boiled onions and gritty cashews.  It looks decidedly better than it tastes:

But it tastes disgusting.  No two ways about it.

Now, a few things need to be admitted.  First, I didn't sauté the chicken properly (because I didn't clarify the butter properly).  My fault.  Second, I didn't add turmeric, because when I found the turmeric in our cupboard, I discovered it had been bought here.  My fault for not checking beforehand.  But I refuse to believe that these things were responsible for the finished product being disgusting.  The whole concept behind this recipe was flawed.  Here are the problems with it.  (1) The chicken pieces ended up with large pieces of peppercorn and clove embedded in them (because of the mistake of thinking that blending them with yogurt would result in them being ground up). (2) Cashews, when ground up, do not dissolve in liquid.  They are suspended in it.  So the final product that you put on the plate sits in a mud-like sauce.  (3) Onions.  Boiled onions are not good.  You need to sauté onions in order for them to impart the proper flavour to a dish.  Boiled chopped onions dominate all other flavours - and not in a good way.

Here is the final dish, in all its glory.  (With peas and chinese noodles.)  I am so embarrassed to have served it.

One final thing.  If I HAD to choose another word to describe this dish, it would be 'institutional'.  I suspect that it brought back deeply-embedded memories for me of nasty school lunches at the school I attended from 1974-79, King's House School.  Boiled onions.  I'm sure of it.

Next up, a book with altogether more nostalgic memories.  Delia Smith's classic One is Fun.  Somewhat ironically, we're going to have to double the recipes.  I'll explain more in the next post...