Deep France (30 page)

Merlu Koskera

This is one of several Basque recipes which put fish together with the new vegetables of early summer. With the white fish, green peas and shellfish, it looks extremely pretty,
particularly if you can find the carpet-shell clams, called
palourdes
in French, which open up to look like big striped butterflies.

Hake is probably the most popular white fish on the Côte Basque and the north Spanish coast, perhaps because cod, whose flesh is equally firm and creamy, could be preserved by drying and
salting, and so was a valuable commodity to trade inland and use to provision ships for long voyages. Now of course cod is an endangered species.

Wash and scrape the mussels and clams well so they don’t add sand to the dish. Don’t use any with broken shells or shells which refuse to shut tightly.

Serves 6

First trim the asparagus and cut into 1cm pieces. Blanch the peas in boiling water for 5 minutes, setting the asparagus in a sieve over the water to steam. Drain and keep these
vegetables aside.

Dust the fish with seasoned flour. If you prefer it in small pieces, slice the steaks into chunks before coating. In a saute pan or large frying pan, fry the fish on both sides until pale gold.
Add the bay leaves, the
espelette
or chilli, the wine and the stock or water, and allow to come to a gentle simmer. Then add the mussels and clams, and continue to simmer until they are
all open. Add the peas and asparagus and allow another 10 minutes of simmering. Cut the eggs into quarters lengthways. Pick out the bay leaves and add the parsley. Serve in soup plates, decorated
with the egg. Some good crusty bread or plain new potatoes are all you need to go with it.

Stuffed Courgette Flowers

For this, you need breadcrumbs, and for breadcrumbs you need a hearty
pain de campagne
. Gascon cooking has no truck with an urban frivolity like the
baguette
,
which, when it’s
made properly, will be stale in two hours. People who have work to do in the fields can’t be leaping off to the baker in the village twice a day.
In a traditional household, the baking was done once a week, and included country loaves which weighed in at about 2 kg each, with plenty of soft insides and good keeping qualities.

For this recipe, the best way to get breadcrumbs is my mother’s traditional method: letting the bread become slightly stale – overnight can be enough – then grating it or
rubbing it through a sieve. Result – dry, fluffy breadcrumbs. The easier way, soaking the bread in milk or water then squeezing it out, tends to make the stuffing mixture too wet.

If you examine your courgette plants, you will see that some flowers are on long thin stalks and some aren’t. Those which are on long stems are the male flowers, whose role is to pollinate
the female flowers. Since one male flower produces ample pollen for a whole row, you can pick as many of them as you like without robbing yourself of courgettes for the following week.

For each person, as a starter

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas4. Use the oil to grease an ovenproof dish. Mix all the rest of the ingredients, except the flowers, gently together.

Pick up a courgette flower and hold it in your hand with
the open end upwards. With a dessert spoon, gently pack the interior with the stuffing – very gently, or the
fragile orange petals will tear. Fold the petals around the mixture, then lay the little parcel gently down on the oiled dish. Repeat with the rest of the flowers.

Drizzle over a little more oil and put into the oven for just long enough to warm the parcels through and cook the tiny area of stem at the base of each flower – about 15 minutes. Serve in
the dish, if you can, to avoid the risk of the delicate things collapsing when they’re moved.

Pastis Landais
(Raion-des-Landes method)

When you first cut into this large, light dessert cake it releases the full aroma of the liqueurs with which it is flavoured. The other ingredients are simple to the point of
innocence – flour, eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla; it’s these flavourings and the lightness of the mixture that gives the confection a luxurious feel.

In texture, a
pastis landais
is halfway between a sponge cake and a
brioche
, traditionally made in a deep
brioche
tin, lightly glazed and given a crunchy topping of
sugar crys – tals. Sometimes, a few stoned Agen prunes are added to the mixture. Classically, the
pastis
is served as a dessert with fruit and
crème anglaise
, which
is real custard, made with fresh eggs. It keeps well and doesn’t even mind spending time in the freezer. Willingly, it will adapt to all kinds of dishes from elsewhere in the world, such as
trifle or tiramisu. If you have some left over, it makes a decadent treat for breakfast and an elegant cake to enjoy with a cup of tea anytime.

Pastis landais
is always made in a paper case inside the deep
brioche
mould that causes it to rise into a luscious dome
like the breast of a goddess. If
you haven’t got a traditional tin, it adapts happily to an 18cm (7in) or 20cm (Sin) cake tin, with a lining of foil to encourage it to turn out easily. The other essential piece of equipment
for this recipe is a really large mixing bowl.

Making the
pastis
before electric beaters were invented must have been a real workout for the cook’s right arm. Perhaps the fact that most Landais families prefer to buy a
professionally made
pastis
is a hangover from these labour-intensive days. I searched for months to find a recipe that worked; eventually Tony used his charm on Lucienne Dupouy, a friend
of Marie’s, who remembers her mother Marguerite making thirty
pastis
at a time on high days and holidays. She would give them away to her neighbours. Very kindly, Lucienne reduced
the original recipe for a modern cook.

The entire process will take about 6 hours, but for most of that period the mixture requires no attention as it’s just sitting in a bowl while the yeast works. So this is a fun recipe to
try on a day when you have to be at home most of the time – I tried it while I was correcting the manuscript of
Wild Weekend
. Don’t worry if you’re not used to working
with yeast. Although the process seems elaborate, it’s almost idiot-proof. The only thing that can go wrong is that the cook may get impatient and rush the cakes into the oven before they
have had time to rise to their full glory.

A word about ingredients: I’ve specified ‘strong’ flour, which is the high-protein flour used to make bread. If you use ordinary flour, the result is a bit heartless. The
liquid vanilla extract is not the same thing as vanilla flavouring; it’s more expensive but essential for its rich aroma. Amazingly, I managed to buy a vial of it in Tesco. And baker’s
yeast – well, you need to buy it from a real baker. In London, I found mine at Clarke’s in Kensington Church Street. It will
keep in a plastic bag in the fridge for
about a fortnight. The dried yeast in sachets is much easier to find and works pretty well, but doesn’t impart the same fresh flavour. If you go with dried yeast, follow the directions and
use the quantity recommended on the packet.

First, start the yeast working. Put the milk into a small bowl and mix the flour into it until you have a smooth paste. Crumble the yeast into this and stir briefly to mix it
in. Put the bowl in a warm place – a radiator shelf or the back of an Aga is ideal – and leave for half an hour for it to start ‘working’ – which means fermenting, so
that bubbles appear and the volume of the mixture increases.

Put the sugar, milk, rum, anisette, vanilla extract and
vanilla pod into a small saucepan, and warm over a low heat until almost at boiling point. Turn off the heat and
leave to infuse. In another small saucepan, or a bowl in the microwave, melt the butter.

Crack the eggs into a really large bowl and beat them briefly. Withdraw 1 tbsp beaten egg, add 1 tbsp of water to it, and keep aside for glazing. Then beat the rest of the egg mixture fast with
an electric beater, until it is a pale yellow froth honeycombed with small bubbles.

Slowly pour the melted butter into the egg mixture, beating all the time. Pick the vanilla pod out of the sugar–alcohol mixture, and add the mixture to the eggs and butter in the same way.
Then add three-quarters of the flour, sifting it into the mixture a few tablespoons at a time and beating continuously. By the end of this process, the electric beater may be struggling. Switch to
dough hooks or a wooden spoon.

Finally add the yeast mixture, with the last of the flour, while continuing to beat to obtain a smooth, homogeneous dough. Cover the bowl with a clean dry cloth and leave it in a warm place to
rise until it has doubled in volume. The exact time will depend on how warm the environment is and how feisty the yeast – ‘feisty’ being originally a Yiddish word describing the
general ebullience of a yeast mix.

Butter the 3
brioche
or cake tins generously and line the bottom of each with buttered foil. Divide the dough between the tins, pouring it or using a large spoon. Tap each tin smartly
on the work surface to settle the dough, then return them to the warm place and leave, uncovered, to rise again for about the same period. In the traditional tin, the
pastis
is ready for
baking when the mixture has risen up to the edge.

When the mixture is almost ready, turn on the oven to pre-heat at 200°C/350°F/Gas6. Put in the tins and leave
to bake for half an hour. Take a pastry brush and
quickly glaze the tops of the
pastis
with the reserved egg mixture, then sprinkle with the sugar crystals. Return to the oven to finish baking for 15–30 minutes – test with a
skewer to make sure the cakes are cooked through.

Take the
pastis
out of the oven and let them rest for 5 minutes before turning them out of their tins. Put them to cool – right side up – on a wire rack. When they are cool,
pick one to eat now and two to freeze or give away. Serve in slices, with
crème anglaise
or red-fruit coulis.

Crème Anglaise

Scald the milk. Beat the eggs and sugar briefly in a mixing bowl, and pour the hot milk slowly into this mixture, beating all the time. Either set the bowl over a saucepan of
simmering water, or pour the mixture into the top of a double saucepan, or heat very gently over a tiny flame, stirring frequently to keep the mixture smooth, until it thickens into a custard. The
anxious cook can blend in 1 tsp cornflour to be absolutely sure the sauce will be thick and smooth.
Crème anglaise
is usually flavoured with vanilla, but it’s a bit too much
of a good thing when the
pastis
is already redolent with this spice.