As Strong As Soup

The cherry trees at the local pick-your-own farm appear to be laden with fruit, which hopefully will begin to ripen nicely over the next few weeks. So I thought I'd get in quickly with this recipe that I've been saving up since the last year's cherry season. This is an easy and refreshingly different little pickle that works particularly well alongside cold meats, terrines and pâtés, but will also sit very happily alongside cheeses and richer meats like duck. As a bonus, once you've eaten the cherries, filter the pickling mixture and you’ll have a very fine cherry vinegar that can be used in salad dressings and marinades. The cherry vinegar is also excellent when used to deglaze the pan after cooking beef, lamb or duck. There are a number of old British recipes for cherries in vinegar as well as many different versions of ‘cerises au vinaigre’ in various parts of France. My version is actually based on recipes from the Picardy region and I reckon that makes it virtu...

I haven’t added any recipes to the blog lately because, due to circumstances being completely out of control, I haven’t cooked anything for several months. I'm hoping that situation will change soon, but for now here’s something that I baked last year and didn't get around to posting. I'm aware that the world is in danger of disappearing under a sea of chocolate fondant and coulant recipes but they’re undeniably delicious and decadent and there’s still something special about cutting into a little cake and watching the chocolaty loveliness flow out. This particular version is adapted from a recipe by Pierre-Yves Lorgeoux of the ‘Le Pyl-Pyl’ restaurant in Vichy. I’d love to say that I've been there but I have to confess that I saw it on an episode of ‘Les Escapades de Petitrenaud’ a while ago. It does look to be an excellent restaurant, though, so if you're ever in the area maybe you could go on my behalf.  I can still remember the first time I ate a cho...

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...

This is a classic and simple way of making a cake that turns up with minor variations in quite a few different countries. I first came across it in France where it often seems to be the first cake that children are taught to make because it’s easy, very forgiving and there’s no weighing needed. For this month’s Random Recipe challenge Dom of Belleau Kitchen has asked us to select from our cuttings, clippings and old hand-written recipes. I'm very happy to do that – in fact, I should do it more often. Reaching into the magic cupboard containing my ‘library’ I came up with a notebook containing a mixture of hand-written and torn-out recipes dating from the 1990s. From that I randomly selected this yogurt cake, or I should really say ‘gateau au yaourt’ since it's taken from a French magazine (although I'm not sure which one). Lemon or lime is more commonly used to flavour this cake, but grapefruit is actually a very pleasant change. I have to confess to making two m...

If you've not come across this little pudding before, then you might think that the recipe sounds ridiculous. Well, it is a bit odd, but it does work, honest. It's one of those puddings that separates out during cooking. You should end up with three layers: a crunchy sweet topping, a chocolate sponge middle and a chocolate fudgey base.  It's indulgent and delicious without being too ridiculously high in fat. What's not to like there? This recipe used to be famous. Around the early to mid 1980s this dish seemed to turn up everywhere. OK, it's old-fashioned and it's not photogenic but it's also delicious and it definitely doesn't deserve to be forgotten. I really don't know the origins of this dish. When I first came across it in the 1970s I'm pretty sure that I was told it was named after the place in Essex. Later someone told me that it was named after a Mrs or Mr Debden. More recently I found that there’s a similar American dish called Denve...

Gaze into the window of a boulangerie in the north of France and there’s a chance that you’ll spot some palets de dames.  Gaze into a number of boulangerie windows, though, and you might notice that the palets look very different.  They’re a pleasing little treat that’s somewhere between a cake and a biscuit but sometimes they have a smooth covering of fondant icing, sometimes no icing  at all and sometimes they contain currants or candied peel. Well, my version has a coating of apricot jam and a thin, lemony icing. I don’t really know if that’s authentic but it’s a recreation of the first palets that I ever came across while wandering around the Baie de Somme. If you’re unfamiliar with the Baie de Somme, then I’d describe it as an area of spectacularly large and rapid tides, seabirds, seals, fine seafood,  salicorne (samphire), salt marsh lamb and some excellent baking among many other things. Happily for me, it’s also not all that far from the south of England. ...

Today we make another stop on my annoyingly long tour de cakes de France and find ourselves in the Creuse. The Creuse is a lovely region, although the last time I was there it was around this time of the year and it was really cold. Anyway, it’s there that you’re likely to find examples of a gâteau called ‘Le Creusois’ on sale. It’s also possible that you’ll find several similar cakes under slightly different names in French supermarkets, as well as a number of versions of gâteau Creusois recipes which people will tell you are the real, authentic recipe that their grand-mère made. They may well be authentic and ancient recipes – I have nothing but the greatest respect for grand-mères – but the particular cake sold as ‘Le Creusois’ was actually born shortly after the Beatles gave their last performance on the Apple roof in 1969. It appears that the gâteau was inspired by a 15th century parchment found in a monastery around that time, although the actual recipe itself is a closely...