Omelette and a Glass of Wine (32 page)

To Mediterranean cooking the juice of the lemon is vital. It is the astringent corrective, as well as the flavouring, for olive-oil-based dishes and fat meat. By English cooks this point is not and has never been sufficiently appreciated. For example a home-made brawn or pig’s-head cheese seasoned with a generous amount of lemon juice (squeezed in after cooking and when the meat is shredded or chopped ready for potting or moulding) transforms an often insipid dish into a delicacy. And to me a lentil soup or purée is unthinkable without the complement of lemon and olive oil; then, just try to imagine lamb kebabs without lemon…

In scores of English and French creams, ices, cakes, soufflés, sweet omelettes and preserves, it is the aromatic oil contained in the peel or zest, rather than the juice, which is the operative part of the lemon. For these dishes choose thick-skinned fruit.

One of the best of lemon graters is lump sugar, although Hannah Glasse (
The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy
, 1747) who was perhaps partial to a pun, directed her readers to grate lemon skins with a piece of broken glass. Possibly in her day that practical little utensil known as a lemon zester had not yet been invented. And the lump sugar business, called for in so many recipes, is often exasperating because it is unexplained. When however it is remembered that sugar was bought in loaves, the whole procedure becomes logical. You simply hacked off a sizeable lump, and with this big piece, rasped off the skin of the lemon, thus releasing the essential oil of the zest which is so important to the flavour of creams, ices, and particularly of that uniquely English speciality, lemon curd. This lovely dish does of course also include the juice of the lemons. So do all the lemon recipes which I have chosen for this article. There is something especially satisfactory about using the whole of the fruit in one dish. Even more satisfactory are the beautiful flavours and scents of these dishes authentically made and eaten when fresh. (Lemon curd has been one of the most painfully travestied and ill-used of all our true English preserves. No commercially-made version gives so much as a hint of its true nature.)

ENGLISH LEMON CURD

To make 1 lb. approximately, ingredients are: 2 large lemons, preferably thick-skinned; ½ lb. loaf sugar; 4 whole large eggs;¼ lb. of unsalted or slightly salted butter.

Rub sugar lumps on to the peel of the lemons, holding them over a bowl, until each lump starts crumbling, then start on another. About four lumps will rub sufficient outside peel and oil out of each lemon. Put all the sugar together into the bowl.

Squeeze the lemons, and strain the juice. Whisk the eggs very thoroughly with the strained juice.

Cut the butter into small cubes.

Set the bowl in, or over, a pan of water. When the sugar has dissolved add the eggs, then the butter. Stir until all ingredients are amalgamated and the whole mixture looks rather like thick honey, with about the same consistency. Remove the bowl (older cooks still find an old-fashioned stoneware jam jar the best vessel for making
lemon curd. I prefer an open bowl. I like to see what’s happening) and stir until the curd has cooled. Turn into small jars and cover with good quality kitchen parchment such as Bakewell, to be bought at Boots, Fine Fare, John Lewis shops, and many Co-ops.

To the straightforward lemon curd, a couple of sponge fingers, broken up, are sometimes added. They thicken the curd, giving it extra body and making it more stable when spread into flan cases or flat, open plate pies. A richer alternative is a small proportion of ground almonds. Allow up to 2 oz. for the quantities given.

Writers of old recipes often claimed that lemon curd keeps for years. Perhaps it does. I would say that three months is about the maximum, and that long before this period is up the confection, like a fresh fruit sorbet stored in the deep freeze, has lost its exquisite flavour and the edge has gone from the sharp scent.

Use lemon curd to make a delicious filling for little brown bread sandwiches to eat with ices, to spread on brioche or currant bread, or as a sauce for little yeast pancakes as well as for the traditional lemon curd pie made with rich, sweet short crust.

SHORT CRUST FOR LEMON CURD PIE OR LEMON CHEESE-CAKE

Proportions for the crust, which is rich, sweet, and crumbly, are easy to remember. They are 3 oz. of sugar, 6 oz. of butter, 9 oz. of flour, 1 whole egg plus a little iced water for moistening the dough, which should be mixed and rolled out, very quickly and lightly, and cooked at once. The 3, 6, 9, formula makes enough for two 7-inch tins. It is easy enough to halve the quantities and use only the yolk of the egg, but easier still to remember the recipe in its original formula.

The pastry cases are cooked blind (do not forget to prick the base with the tip of a sharp little knife) protected with paper (it burns easily, like all pastry containing sugar) and filled with dry beans or rice. Put it into the centre of a hot oven, gas no. 6 or 7, 410°F. to 440°F., and bake for 20 minutes, then lower the temperature to gas no. 4, 370°F., and cook for another 15 minutes. This seems a long time. It is intentional. So much English pastry is spoiled by timid cooking and under-baking.

While still hot remove the beans and the paper. Fill with lemon curd – about 6 to 8 tablespoons – and put back into the oven for 5 minutes, just enough time for the filling to warm through, no more. The effect to aim at is a crisp, sugary crust with the contrast of a smooth, delicately aromatic and refreshing filling.

CURATIVE PROPERTIES OF LEMONS

It was during the last years of the reign of Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth that the curative effects of lemon juice on scurvy victims was observed, although neither cause nor effect were understood. Only as late as 1918 was it established – by a woman doctor – that the juice of lemons is more than twice as rich in anti-scorbutic vitamins as that of the lime, for long thought to be as or more effective than lemon juice in the prevention of scurvy. The lime juice myth was so firmly entrenched that it is still commonly believed.

TO PRESERVE LEMONS IN CLOVES

Finally, here is a beautiful little lemon recipe from the MS.
Receipt Book of Anne Blencowe
, dated 1694, and printed by Guy Chapman, the Adelphi, in 1925. The segments of lemon embedded in clear apple jelly must have made a ravishing little dessert dish:

‘You must pare them very close. Part ye cloves, then scrape all ye white off, but have a care not to break ye cloves when you scrape them. Take out all ye seeds, then weight them and take their weight in sugar. To a pound of sugar half a pint of water. Sett all on a slow fire and keep them covered with syrup & paper, but let them not boyl. So sett them by till ye next day; then heat them again as you did before, & when you think their sowrness is pretty well out, they are enough. Then make a Jelly with pipins & put them in. So let them have one boyl Then glass them. They must not stand upon the fire above an hour att a time. The cloves of ye Lemon must be taken clean from ye syrup to put to ye jelly.’

Wine and Food
, February/March 1969

Pleasing Cheeses

In food-song and travel-story the scene, the characters, and the opening dialogue are familiar enough: the inn is humble and is situated close to the banks of the radiant Loire. (In legend the Loire is always radiant. Quite often it actually is radiant. On this particular day it is super-radiant. The inn, ever-humble, of French cookery fables is, on this occasion, archi-humble.) The cook-proprietress is where she should be, in the kitchen, cooking lunch. Her own lunch, not ours. Frying-pan in hand, she is saying she has nothing for us, she hadn’t been expecting customers; at this time of year there are visitors only at weekends. The customers reply never mind about lunch, they will drink a carafe of wine and perhaps Madame has some bread and sausage? Oh, if that is all monsieur and madame wish, would they be seated? One will attend to them.

Enter the cross-eyed daughter, bearing wine, plates and cutlery. She sets the oilcloth-covered table. Couldn’t we eat out of doors? On such a beautiful day it seems sad to sit in the dank, scruffy room. The girl looks scared. She does not answer. We repeat our request. She shakes her head. Deaf as well as cross-eyed.

Oh well. We were thirsty and hungry. Not to make a palaver. Bread, butter, sausage and sliced raw ham were put before us. The loaf was very large, flat, brown-crusted, open-textured, a
pain de ménage
, the real household French bread such as is rarely produced nowadays in restaurants and inns. That bread alone was well worth the journey. We ate so much of it, it was so marvellous, that we hardly wanted the sausage and the ham, noticed only in passing that the wine wasn’t up to much, and that the eggs in the omelette which presently appeared were spanking fresh and buttercup yellow – in the French countryside one takes that for granted. And anyway, by now the son of the house had come in for his midday meal, turned on the television, created havoc out of the quiet day. Like his sister, the young man was cross-eyed, deaf and simple. His mother came in from the kitchen to ask if we’d like cheese or fresh cheese with cream. The two, please. We need not have bothered with the cheese proper. The fresh cheese with cream was all we, or at any rate I, wanted.

The telly faded, the shoddy oilcloth vanished, the beautiful sunshine we were missing was forgotten. There it was, the big glass
bowl half-filled with soft, very white, very fresh milk cheese with its covering of fresh thick cream. It was just as I had remembered it for over thirty years, it was just as it used to appear at least once a week at lunch in the Paris household where I spent two years of my youth with a greedy Norman family: two years of study interspersed with the most trying of family meals, endless and infinitely to be dreaded but for the blessed beauty of the food. It was first class, not at all, as I later understood, ambitious or opulent, but of consistent quality, very fresh and, in effect, just very good French bourgeois food, carefully bought, traditionally cooked, presented with much visual taste. Sorrel soups we used to eat, and lettuce soups, delicate vegetables such as salsify and celeriac, golden melting potatoes, a nutmeg-flavoured rice salad with tomatoes, apricot soufflés, and the famous
frontage frais à la crème
invariably presented in a glass bowl with sugar and more cream, Norman cream (well, I said they were greedy), on the table.

So what did she mean, the proprietress of the lugubrious little
estaminet
on the banks of the lovely Loire, what could she have meant when she said she had nothing in the house for lunch? She had that astonishingly good bread, did she not, and she had the freshly made fresh cream cheese–goat’s milk cheese and cow’s milk cream, not too thick, not rich, not yellow, appearing cream coloured only because the cheese it half-concealed and half-revealed (you see the point of the glass bowl) was so muslin-white and new.

Where did all our own home-made cream and milk cheeses go? Time was when we had scores of versions of them. Every English cookery book and manuscript collection from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century gave recipes for fresh milk cheeses, cream cheeses, whey cheeses, cream curds, bandstring curds, rush cheeses, napkin cheeses, snow cheeses.

Some of these cheeses were eaten the day they were made, with cream and sugar, some were for almond cheesecakes, some for the fillings of covered pies called Florentines, some for spiced cheese loaves baked in stoneware porringers. Some were salted and stored in brine in stoneware jars, some were laid between rushes and turned daily until ripe for eating. Some were whipped up with egg whites, lemon peel, and extra cream, some were served with raspberry, strawberry, redcurrant, apple, quince or medlar jelly. Once these cheeses were known collectively as green cheeses – green in the sense of being unripened, unmatured. Now they are all cream
cheeses even if they’re made only of milk. (Cottage cheese seems to be a term now applied almost entirely, and characteristically, in our looking-glass culinary language, to the thin and acid skim-milk product of big dairy factories. It is popular with slimmers but not much good in cooking.)

Possibly, somewhere along the line, green became corrupted into cream and hence the confusion of nomenclature. ‘Take yolkys of Eyroun and putte ther-to a gode hepe, and grene chese putt ther-to,’ directs a fifteenth-century recipe which includes chopped pork, minced dates, ginger, cinnamon, and hard-boiled eggs baked in an open pie. Although real cream cheese may be made from real cream it isn’t real cheese, since it is not a curd but simply ripened cream, semi-solidified and drained of its fluid content. Cheeses of this kind used to be known in country-house and home-farm dairy cookery as napkin cheeses. The following recipe from
The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie
(1909) is a typical one:

OSBORNE CREAM CHEESE

‘Take 1 pint of very thick cream, and put it into a fine damask cloth, previously dipped in strong salt water, and tie up. At the end of 2 hours, turn it into a clean cloth, and repeat the process every 2 hours throughout the day, when the cheese will be ready for use. The cheese will generally be of the right consistency in 12 hours if the cream is thoroughly good and the weather not too warm.’