As Strong As Soup

This is another step on my nostalgic journey through the past looking for the recipes and types of cooking that I've neglected or forgotten so far in this blog. This time we're back in the 1980s again for a style of British cooking that was based on classic cuisine but was a bit eccentric and purposefully never trendy. It also tended to be upmarket and expensive and so copying it at home was pretty much my only option. This dish is based, rather loosely, on a recipe by the indomitable John Tovey. The combination of liver, gin, lime and jam may sound like an outlandish notion now but back in the 1980s it didn't seem strange at all. There were certainly buckets of gin around back then but, with some noteworthy exceptions, I think they tasted pretty similar to each other. You can't go about your daily business these days without falling over a craft gin or three (and I'm all for that) but I wouldn't choose a modern gin that's too exotic in its flavour here. I ...

In my nostalgic journey through the past looking for the recipes that I've neglected or forgotten so far in this blog, I've arrived today at the mid to late 1980s. Not surprisingly, I'd come across Caribbean food by then, but only really the best known dishes like jerk chicken and goat curry. Around that time I became aware of a much wider range of flavours and styles in the Caribbean and Fusion restaurants in South London. This included very different recreations of dishes, like chicken liver pâté, that I thought I knew well.  This dish includes pickled chillies in the topping and I used pickled Havana Gold chillies that I grew last summer. This is a superb chilli to grow in the English climate with a mild, fruity, habanero-like flavour and a good colour. It's at its best grown in a greenhouse but it will also fruit well when grown in pots in a sunny spot. If you use commercial pickled chillies in this recipe, make sure that they're not so hot that they mask the f...

Recently I heard someone happily reminiscing about the recipes and styles of cooking that represented the different stages of their life. This blog has been going since 2009 and has close to 300 recipes and I imagined that it would fulfil that function for me. But when I looked back through the blog I realised that there are quite a few gaps. So, before I admit that enough is enough with this blogging malarkey, I've decided that my project for this year should be to try to fill at least some of those gaps. Yes, I know this is self-regarding nonsense, but I'm too old to care.  This isn't a history lesson, though, and I wouldn't necessarily want to recreate dishes from the past in their original form. I'd rather offer versions that I really want to eat today. I suppose that I should present these recipes in chronological order but I'm afraid that my mind doesn't work that way. So I'm starting in the 1990s for no very good reason at all. This recipe is a ri...

These biscuits are my modest (token, you might say) contribution to Christmas food this year. It may be a modest effort but it's a wonderfully simple recipe to put together and that's got to be a good thing. They're really pleasing with coffee and they're not just for Christmas. Confusingly, this montecaos recipe is based on a French interpretation of an Algerian original that I came across a few years ago and they're sort of remote cousins of the mantecados that are made around Christmas time in Spain. The traditional Spanish mantecado recipe uses pig fat (manteca de cerdo means pork fat or lard, or so I'm told) but North African biscuits, not surprisingly, replace the pig fat with oil. It's best to use a fairly neutral oil in this recipe to avoid more powerful oils dominating the taste. Cinnamon is often used as the primary flavouring but there are many variations such as orange, almond or coconut. I've used lemon because I love it and it makes me thin...

The recipes on this blog can be eclectic and random but they're definitely not cheffy. Just this once, as we come towards the end of another year, then I think I'm allowed one dish that might seem a little more elaborate. Actually, it really isn't difficult to put together but it might possibly impress your friends. Admittedly, I'm assuming that you have friends who like black pudding. I put this together after I stumbled across some lovely smoked garlic and some even more lovely black pudding in a local market. There are four elements to this little treat: First, a base of peas flavoured with smoked garlic. The smoked garlic might seem a little intense when raw but, when it's roasted, it becomes mellow and intensely savoury. Second, the black pudding, which is cooked very simply. Choose whichever black pudding you like but I prefer to use a softer style. My favourite types are usually either from Stornoway or Normandy. Third, an apple reduction. This sounds a bit ...

This yoghurt bread is a soft, close-crumb, light bread that's great for breakfast but, I think, works well with savoury dishes too. I like it toasted and served with pâté. It's my alternative to a slice or two of brioche when I don't want too much sweetness or richness.  Not for the first time, I'm happy to allow my breadmaker to get on with the hard graft of making the dough for this bread. (Actually, this isn't a difficult or irksome dough to make if you don't use a breadmaker, but I've got other things to be getting on with.) I first came across similar yoghurt breads in France and so I tend to use a French T65 flour in this recipe (there's something about the softness of the flour that seems to work well) but other white bread flour will be fine.  I prefer to use a Greek-style 0% fat yoghurt for this bread but richer, higher fat yoghurts will be good too. It's best to avoid very thick, strained yoghurts, though. 1 tsp dried, fast-action yeast 225...

It's getting very autumnal and, for me, that means it's soup time. Recently I was listening to someone talking on the radio about how unusual it was to use wine in a soup. I wasn't convinced that it was that unusual and I began trying to remember any soups that I'd made with wine. From somewhere deep in my confused memory,  I recovered this one from the distant past. It's a simple enough soup but if the balance between the sweet ingredients (the leeks and sweet potatoes) and the sharp ingredients (dry white wine and lime) is just right, then I think it's a bit special. The touch of chilli heat rounds it off very nicely for me. Of course, there are a lot of variables such as the size and sweetness of the sweet potatoes, so it's the perfect excuse to taste carefully and repeatedly before serving to your victims , sorry, I mean guests. You could use any chilli paste or sauce you like in this soup but one with a good savoury flavour and maybe a little smokiness...