As Strong As Soup

This simple, versatile recipe is another one that I've been meaning to post for quite a while. It's a sweet and spicy sauce that gives you both colour and powerful flavour. It's based, pretty loosely, on a barbecue sauce that Peter Gordon made back in the London Sugar Club days. The sauce will work well with fresh, frozen or even canned mango but there's likely to be a big difference in the sweetness that each type of mango brings to the sauce, so taste and adjust the acidity as you see fit. It's a very forgiving concoction, so vary the spices and the amount of chilli as you fancy. The sauce is good with most simple meat suppers, like burgers, sausages, pork and venison. But it will also liven up leftovers and veg, including winter root veg. Use the sauce to baste during cooking and serve the warmed sauce over or alongside your chosen main ingredient. You could also try it cold as an alternative to the usual ketchup or chilli sauce. In theory, this makes enough for ...

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...

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...

Combining chillies and sherry might sound like an eccentric fantasy today but I remember the 1960s (even though I was there - just about). Back then sherry was one of the staples in dinner party and restaurant cooking and, despite what we're often told, chillies and spices were available to English cooks who wanted them. So it was perfectly reasonable to stick a few chillies in one of your bottles of sherry while listening to the new Beatles LP. In fact, this method turns up in the Constance Spry Cookery Book published way back in the mid 1950s. Since then, sherry in cooking has become a bit of a joke and faded from use. It deserves a revival.  How To Make Chilli Sherry (it's really simple):  Step 1 - Go and buy a bottle of sherry. The two types of sherry favoured these days seem to be the very dry or the very sweet. For sipping purposes, I totally agree, but for chilli sherry in the kitchen a medium or medium-sweet is probably the most useful of all in my opinion. ...

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...

Last year I grew a Scotch Bonnet chilli plant. It was hot, of course. This year I thought I should grow one that was a little less hot. I chose a plant called Paper Lantern because it looked pretty on the label. I hadn't quite grasped the fact that it's also very hot. In fact, hotter than the Scotch Bonnet. So I had a lot of hot chillies to use up. To turn the heat down a notch or two, I combined the chillies with plain old peppers (sweet or bell peppers that is) and made this Pepper and Chilli Jam, which will spread nicely on such things as burgers and sausages but will also stir easily into casseroles and stir fries without causing you to reach for too much iced water. Not that there's anything wrong with a hot sauce in my view. I used up the rest of the chillies by making some of my usual Tomato and Chilli Jam , some hot Chilli Ketchup (a similar sort of recipe but a thinner result) and some Caribbean Pepper Sauce.  There's not much in the way of pectin in a pe...

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...

Savoury jellies are great things to have in the store cupboard. They’re perfect with cheeses and cold or roast meats, but they’re also excellent as cooking ingredients in casseroles, marinades and stir-fries. The basic method for making jellies based on apples  is venerable and traditional but it does allow plenty of scope for variations in flavour. This is my approach to the traditional method and I’ve given options for my two favourite jellies: black pepper, cumin and fennel jelly and chilli jelly. There are plenty of other options that are worth trying, though; for instance, ginger is really useful and herb jellies such as rosemary and thyme can be used in many different ways. Bramleys are probably the most common apple to use when making jellies, although any cooker will be fine. (For these jellies, I used Endsleigh Beauty, which is a lovely old variety from Devon). You can also use crab apples rather than cooking apples, but, obviously, you don’t need to chop them up ...

For this month's We Should Cocoa Challenge Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog has issued the challenge of using chilli with chocolate. I have a slightly childish fascination for the way that chocolate can enhance and balance the flavours of savoury dishes and so this seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. I'd like to tell you that this is an authentic Mexican dish but I don't really do authentic. In fact, this started out as a Pat Chapman version of a Mexican recipe some time ago, but it's wandered a fair way from the original now and seems to have picked up some hints of korma on the way. It might seem like a long list of ingredients, but it's actually a pretty simple dish to put together. You can use more chillies if you like, but personally I think this dish should be fragrant rather than seriously hot. The amount given here should serve 2 – 3. 1 onion, chopped 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped 1 – 2 tbsp fresh chillies, finely chopped 2 tsp sesame seed...

For this month’s Random Recipe Challenge Dom of Belleau Kitchen has asked us to select  a recipe (randomly, of course) from our favourite cookbook. Well, I've got a fair number of favourites, mostly made up of books that remind me of good times. It's difficult to choose just one among those, so instead I've gone for my favourite practical cookbook. This is the one I reach for whenever I need to remind myself how to do something or when I need a reliable recipe in a hurry. That used to be Delia, but recently it's been Darina Allen's ‘Ballymaloe Cookery Course’.  (Not that I've got anything against Delia, I hasten to add. I wouldn't dare.). On opening this weighty tome I was faced with a page of chutney and relish recipes and, since I'm currently blessed with a generous harvest of chillies from the plants on my windowsills, I seized on a Tomato and Chilli Jam recipe. Once I started to make the jam, though, I felt a bit of a fraud since it's very simi...

While sipping a thoughtful cup of tea recently I came over all Proust-like and remembered a shop that sold tea near where I grew up in South London. I used to go to this shop in the late sixties and early seventies but I don't think it had changed much since Edwardian times. The shopkeeper would pull out dark wooden drawers and dispense small portions of exotic teas into little paper bags. The tea can't have cost much – I was pretty broke at the time (some things don't really change). It was the first time I'd tasted or even heard of green tea, maté, lapsang souchong, gunpowder and, the best name of all, broken orange pekoe. I would buy whichever tea the shopkeeper decided that I should try next and wander off to spend the afternoon drinking tea with a few like-minded friends. We'd talk (we had to, there was no internet then) and listen to Jefferson Airplane and the Incredible String Band – well, it was the late sixties and, yes, I really was that much of a nuis...