"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...