As Strong As Soup

This recipe produces a rich sauce with some very tender, intensely-flavoured, shredded lamb. It takes a while to cook, but doesn't demand much effort.  The crucial aspect of the sauce is the sweet and sour balance that comes mostly from the combination of Marsala and vinegar. My ideal combination of vinegars in this dish is balsamic (unless you're rich, a cheap version will do in this case), sherry vinegar and a soft style of white wine vinegar, such as one made from Riesling wine. But I'm being annoyingly fussy, so just use what you have that's interesting but not excessively acidic. As for the Marsala, I use a dry style but they can vary quite a bit in just how dry they turn out to be. So, in short, be prepared to taste and adjust the flavours to your liking if they don't seem perfectly balanced. Although this doesn't produce a large amount of sauce, it's intense enough to serve 2 or even 3 people. Of course, you don't have to serve it with pasta, that...

I'm saddened by the permanent loss of so many restaurants in the last year. I don't normally cook restaurant-style dishes. I'm too incompetent for that. But occasionally nostalgia gets the better of me and I try to recreate something I've enjoyed.  This dish is based (loosely) on one that I ate in a restaurant overlooking a vineyard near Chinon many years ago. I'd just come across poires tapées and I wanted to try anything made with that local speciality. This dish isn't difficult to put together (the sauce and celeriac accompaniment can be prepared in advance) but if you want to get the flavours just right or impress someone special, then there are one or two details here that are worth taking trouble over. I'm not going to attempt to give a scholarly history of the poire tapée because there are plenty of people far better qualified than I to do that. Very briefly, they're pears dried in wood-fired ovens which are then pressed flat and end up deliciou...

I'm told that ‘bhuna’ means ‘brown’ and refers to the way that this curry is cooked until the colour darkens. In yet another of my shameful fits of nostalgia I'm attempting to recreate a curry that used to turn up on the menus of some of the nicest South London Indian restaurants back in the 1980s when I just happened to be living there. I've come across many bhunas that look and taste nothing like this in the intervening years. To be honest, this is close to the original but not entirely faithful. I think I've toned down my spice craving a bit since the 1980s and I definitely use less oil these days. I imagine that you can still find something like this dish in restaurants somewhere in the country, but it's probably not fancy enough for many London establishments these days. I've checked Google and the place where I first ate this bhuna is now an estate agents. That sums up the recent history of South London rather well I think.  The number of spices h...

I've been rereading 'Flaubert’s Parrot' by Julian Barnes, which is a funny, sad, literary novel from the 1980s and in my lightweight view is one of the finest written during my lifetime. Mr Barnes refers to the Normandy travels of the Reverend George Musgrave Musgrave (that's his name,  not an accidental duplicate word) and, in particular, a conversation he reports in his 1855 book 'A Ramble Through Normandy'. The Reverend Musgrave amuses himself by questioning  'a thriving merchant of Rouen' who, despite being 'upwards of sixty years old', had never heard of mint sauce! Of course, the Reverend 'advised him to take up a new set of notions on English cookery'. It isn't what the Reverend intended but I was reminded of this dish from Normandy. Some French people (well, Parisians, at least) can still be very dismissive of British food. In my experience, if you try to defend British cooking to them, then you might well get the response...

This flavouring paste (or rub, if you prefer) is based on an old, perhaps even ancient, Welsh method for flavouring lamb. I used it a lot back in the 1980s and I was reminded of it when I visited Anglesey a few years ago. The sight of fine Anglesey honey for sale made me crave the intense flavour of this dish once again. When I was young and easily-led, I used to listen to TV cooks telling me not to use dried herbs because fresh herbs are always better. I remember one of those cooks saying that if we needed proof, then we should try making mint sauce with dried mint and see how horrible it is. Years later I came across cooks choosing dried rather than fresh mint to flavour some very fine dishes and realised that dried herbs are different but by no means always inferior. You just need to use them in the right dish. To be fair to those ancient TV cooks, though, there are certain dried herbs such as basil or parsley that really don't seem to work at all. And so what, you may ask,...

Before it was swallowed up by the spreading suburbs of Paris,  Argenteuil was known for being a good place for messing about in boats, knocking together the occasional Impressionist painting and growing asparagus. At that time pretty much any French dish that used asparagus tended to get the word ‘Argenteuil’ nailed on to it. Argenteuil was best known for its white asparagus but this dish uses green. To be honest it's a slightly alarming green at first sight, but please don't be put off. This recipe seems to turn up in books in some form or another but very rarely in real life. I can't remember ever seeing it on a modern restaurant menu and I've never met anyone else who makes it. That's a shame because it might seem a little eccentric (and green) but it's also pretty easy to make and tastes delicious, especially if you love asparagus anywhere near as much as I do. You might come across some versions of this recipe that are much richer but this is my slightl...

This recipe is in two parts, both of them resurrected from the 1980s. The yoghurt coated lamb is based on the dishes that I ate in the Indian restaurants of south London in that strangely beguiling decade. It was made with larger cuts of lamb back then (leg usually) and used to cost a fair bit. Since I didn't have much money, it wasn't long before I tried making my own version. I think I first used a recipe from the Curry Club but I've played around with it over the years since. I find that this is a good way to use those small (and hopefully cheap) cuts of lamb from the supermarket. Quite often the smaller cuts can be a little dry once cooked but the yoghurt and spice mix will seal in the juices and keep the lamb full of flavour as well as moist. Of course, you can serve this lamb hot alongside vegetable or lentil curries but I've always enjoyed eating the leftovers so much that I thought I'd make some specifically as a cold dish instead. The redcurrant “mayo” ...

A while ago I was asked what was the first ever recipe that I'd collected. I've been tearing recipes out from newspapers and magazines and jotting others down for a very long time but everything before about 1983 has been lost somewhere along the way. I did some digging and came up with this which is just possibly the earliest surviving recipe in my collection. I can't remember where the recipe came from but I'm fairly sure it wasn't called “bogus” in the original. It is bogus, though, and has only a distant connection to the original Café de Paris recipe. This may be partly my fault because I think I played around with it a fair bit before I wrote it down but I believe that the real sauce served in the Café de Paris in Geneva is a creamy sauce that’s allegedly made using chicken livers. (Although maybe not - the actual recipe is still secret). To make things even more confusing, there are plenty of recipes for a Café de Paris butter around and that’s an entirel...

Although I'm the homeliest of home cooks, every now and  then I get an urge to recreate something that I've eaten in a restaurant and today is one of those occasions. This dish probably started out long ago as a traditional Parsi dish but by the time that I came across it in a south London restaurant it had been adapted to British tastes and to restaurant cooking. Sadly, I didn't get the recipe at the time and the restaurant is long gone now. In my attempts to recreate the dish I've used some decidedly inauthentic ingredients. But who cares? It works. The dried fruit brings a lovely sweetness to the dish while the spices add both depth of flavour and fragrance. There are a lot of ingredients listed, but it’s actually pretty easy to put together. If you can, allow yourself enough time for the overnight marinade – it really does make a difference. The dish is fine on its own but it would also sit well alongside a vegetable curry or you coul...

I’ve made a few versions of this dish in the past but I can’t remember where I first came across the recipe. Until recently I’ve used a more complicated set of spices and only dried chillies. Back in 2010, though, a local restaurant 'Massala' (now sadly defunct) sent out a newsletter containing a recipe for laal maans that used fresh chillies and black and green cardamom. I've not used the 'Massala' recipe here but I’ve taken those two ideas and shoehorned them into the recipe I’d already scribbled down from somewhere else. Anyway, this is my version of laal maans and I like it even though it’s almost certainly a very long way from an authentic Rajasthan dish now that I've finished messing about with it. This should serve 2. 3 red chillies, deseeded and chopped ½ tsp hot chilli powder 1 tsp turmeric 150 ml yoghurt 2 onions, peeled and finely sliced 3 cloves garlic, crushed 2 black cardamom pods 3 green cardamom pods 375 g lamb neck fillet, cut into chu...

This is a simple and traditional recipe that I hadn’t made or even thought about for many years until the other day when I saw it mentioned in a restaurant menu dating from the early eighties. I think Lamb Shrewsbury is most often found as a sauce accompanying roast lamb and that’s probably the most authentic version. The recipe here, though, is for pieces of lamb cooked in the sauce and is a recreation of the way I first came across the dish sometime in the early or mid seventies. It’s a little retro but then so am I, probably. I seem to remember that this dish was often served with buttery mashed potato to soak up the sauce, but for this remake I served it with some roasted new potatoes and steamed green beans. This will feed 2 but probably with some sauce left over. You might need to play a seventies album while eating in order to get the full impact – maybe ‘Fleetwood Mac’ or ‘The Year Of The Cat’. 4 tbsp redcurrant jelly 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce Juice of 1 lemon...

I made some  lime pickle recently and, in doing so, I deliberately made too many preserved limes so that I'd have some to use in other recipes. I got carried away with the idea of limes in this recipe and added dried and fresh limes into the mix as well. Let's face it, I really like limes. If you've not tried using preserved or dried limes then I promise all three of the types of lime used here really do taste very different from one another. 1 small onion, finely chopped 2 garlic cloves, crushed 2 cm fresh ginger, grated 250 g lamb neck fillet, trimmed of excess fat and cut into roughly 3 cm pieces 1 tsp ground cumin ½ tsp paprika 1 small dried lime, pierced several times with a knife 300 g new potatoes, peeled and cut into small chunks 125 g carrots, peeled (if necessary) and cut into small chunks Small handful of green beans, cut in half Peel from about ½ a preserved lime, salt wiped off and finely sliced 2 tsp fresh lime juice ½ – 1 tbsp runny honey In...

I couldn't bring myself to eat mulligatawny for a long time. In the distant past, long before I became a happily married man, I was eating a bowl of mulligatawny in a London pub garden with my then girlfriend. Suddenly she  jumped up, shouted “I've got to see my bodhrán teacher while I've still got the chance” and, without finishing her drink, ran off – very fast. I've never felt quite the same about mulligatawny since. No two people seem to agree what should be in this soup. This recipe makes a mild soup of contrasting textures which is how I like to think that mulligatawny tasted all those years ago, although, to be honest, it probably didn't. The easiest way to make this soup, I think, is by pre-cooking the lamb in a slow cooker, but you can cook it in a more conventional way if you prefer. This recipe should make 8 portions. For reasons I've already discussed, I wouldn't personally recommend listening to traditional Irish music while eating mull...

I’ve just been reading a disappointing new cookbook (no names, no packed lunch) by an author so full of himself that it's a wonder he has any space left for food. The author gives his readers the familiar lecture on authenticity and how we should know the origins of a recipe and never use any ingredient not available to the cook who might have created it. That’s not really my cup of authentic British tea. It made me want to cook something as inauthentic as possible at the earliest opportunity. This recipe is about as inauthentic as it gets. It's based on a dish that I remember seeing made many years ago although I didn't get the recipe at the time. This is very much my own inauthentic recreation of the dish and should serve 4 people . For the meatballs:    1 onion, finely chopped    30 g breadcrumbs    1 egg, beaten    Zest of ½ lemon    30 g sultanas    3 dried apricots    ½ tsp dried lime, ground  ...

I haven't made this for quite a while - I think I might have bored everyone by making it too often a few years ago. Anyway, I dug out my scruffy notes from way back then and I've decided that I still like the dish. One of the main reasons I made it that often is that, even though it may take a while, it's really easy to put together and very comforting on cold nights. It's not what you'd call authentic, though. I normally serve this with couscous (possibly flavoured with lemon or with some roast veg added) but it's also good wrapped up in flat breads and served with a side salad. Serves 2 350 g boneless shoulder of lamb, cubed 2 tbsp sunflower or other neutral-flavoured oil 1½ tsp ground cumin 1 tsp ground coriander 1 tsp paprika 1 tsp minced fresh ginger 1 onion, finely chopped 2 cloves garlic, very finely chopped 6 (or 8 if small) dried apricots, preferably the dark, organic kind Chopped dates, about half the volume of the apricots 2 tbsp choppe...