Omelette and a Glass of Wine (46 page)

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Those bottles of indeterminate sherry and port, Christmas puddings and tins of tea and fancy biscuits are survivals from the days when such things were distributed by Ladies Bountiful to old retainers, retired nannies and governesses and coachmen who would probably much rather have had a couple of bottles of gin. Well, wouldn’t you? And really one would have to have quite a grievance against
somebody before one felt impelled to give them a hamper – this is one from the list of a great West End store a year or two ago – containing one tin each of chicken, ox-tongue, steak, cocktail sausages, shrimps, ham, crab, dressed lobster and steak pie, plus one box of assorted cheese, and all costing 63 s. Then there was the writer of a handout I once received from a public relations firm flogging Italian tomato products whose Christmas hamper idea was for two tins of tomato juice packed in a beribboned wicker basket, price about 21s. as I remember, which would make, they ventured to suggest, a gift acceptable to ‘elderly people or neighbours’. As Christmas approaches, people (and neighbours, too, I dare say) do tend to rather morbid ideas about others. But that bad?

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I’m not sure about the precise technical distinction between mushrooms and
champignons
, but Fortnum’s hampers this year have come out in a rash of tinned
champignon
butter and
champignon
bisque; and here and there in the parcels directed at overseas customers are ready-made
crêpes Suzette
brought over from the United States; perhaps pancakes travel exceptionally well, and if they don’t, they are, at any rate in Fortnumese, ‘Conversation Pieces of memorable quality.’ Harrods’ man seems to have been bemused by dates in glove boxes and something called Bakon Krisp; Self-ridges are bent on spreading the joyful tidings that you can buy shoestring potatoes in tins; Barkers’ cheese hampers would be rather sensible, except that Prize Dairy Stilton
and
Assorted Cheese Portions seem to make such unlikely basketfellows.

Inconsistency is characteristic of all Christmas hampers, but at least Christopher’s, the wine merchants of 94 Jermyn Street, is one firm which has eliminated it from their Christmas lists this year. A case containing a bottle of Manzanilla and two tins of Spanish green olives stuffed with anchovies, all for 25s., makes sense; so does a bottle of Sercial Madeira and two large jars of turtle soup for
£
2, and a bottle of champagne, plus a tin of foie gras for two, at 45 s., or a bottle of Club port and a jar of Stilton for 44s., are better value by a good deal than the contents of most store-chosen hampers, and since Messrs Christopher’s also sell first-pressing Provence olive oil and Barton and Guestiers fine white wine vinegar, it shouldn’t be beyond the ingenuity of their directors to devise a salad-making or kitchen case which would be cheap and imaginative.

The Spectator
, 23 November, 1962

Traditional Christmas Dishes

How the food of a past age tasted seems to us almost impossible to imagine. We know roughly what our ancestors’ kitchens were like, what sort of pots they cooked in and what fuel they used. We have their cookery books and recipes and ample evidence of how their meals were composed. All this still doesn’t convey to us what the food tasted like to them.

The reproduction of dishes cooked precisely according to the recipes of a hundred or two hundred years ago is a fairly pointless undertaking, not only because our tastes, our methods of cookery and our equipment have so toally changed but because even the identical ingredients would no longer taste the same. Period clothes for the stage inevitably bear the stamp of contemporary fashion, however much trouble the designers and the cutters have taken over the authentic detail. So it is with food. And I always feel a bit dubious when I read about traditional English puddings and pies, cakes and creams, pickles, hams, cheeses and preserves being made ‘precisely according to a 300-year-old recipe’. Even were this really so, I can’t help thinking our ancestors would have considerable difficulty in recognizing them. Chemical feeding stuffs and new systems of breeding and fattening animals for market, vegetables and fruit grown in artificially fertilized soil, the pasteurizing of milk and cream, the production of eggs from battery hens, the refining of salt and flour, the substitution of beet sugar for cane, the preservation of fish by modern methods, and even the chlorination of water – in what way these developments have caused our food to deteriorate or to improve is not under discussion here, but certainly they have changed the nature of almost every single ingredient which comes into our kitchens.

In
La Cuisine de Tous les Mois
, a cookery book published in the nineties by Philéas Gilbert, a great teaching chef and one of Escoffier’s collaborators, is to be found the following very relevant observation. ‘Cookery,’ says Gilbert, ‘is as old as the world, but it must also remain, always, as modern as fashion.’ And as Christmas is the season when rather more improbable talk than usual goes on about what is called ‘traditional English fare’ I have tried to take Philéas Gilbert’s hint and to produce recipes which, while based on the old ones, are modern in treatment. It is a system which works so
long as the spirit of the recipes is preserved, for then we do get some sense of a continuing tradition into our cookery, avoiding the farcical effect produced by ‘traditional’ recipes made up almost entirely of synthetic or substitute ingredients. I have not forgotten that recipe sent out a few years ago by a publicity firm and said by them to have been dropped by Richard the Third’s cook on the field of Bosworth. (A careless crowd, Richard and his followers.) By a fascinating coincidence this recipe called for the use of a highly advertised brand of modern vegetable cooking lard.

On the other hand, methods, quantities, and, especially, seasonings, have to be modernized, or all we get is a sort of folk-weave cooking perilously close to that hilarious land of which Miss Joyce Grenfell is queen, with the American advertisements of the British Travel Association for hand-maidens.

SPICED BEEF FOR CHRISTMAS

This recipe has perhaps a somewhat unrealistic sound, but it is a lovely one; it is not exactly a recipe of kitchenette cookery, but those who have the space and the patience will find it well worth doing once in a while. Beef dry-pickled with spices, very different in flavour from the brine-pickled beef of the butchers, used to be a regular Christmas dish in a great many English country houses and farms. This is more a Christmas dish than any other time of the year,’ says John Simpson, cook to the Marquis of Buckingham, in his
Complete System of Cookery
(1806), ‘not but it may be done any time, and is equally good.’ He calls it rather grandly
Bœuf de Chasse
, but under the names of Hunting Beef or Beef
à l’Ecarlate
, or simply Spiced Beef, various forms of the recipe have certainly been known for at least three hundred years.

In former times huge rounds of beef weighing upwards of 20 lb. were required to lie in pickle for 3 to 4 weeks. Today, a modest 5 to 12 lb. piece will be ready for cooking after 10 to 14 days. Here are two prescriptions for the spices for varying quantities of meat. The presence of juniper berries among the pickling spices makes the recipe somewhat unusual. They appear in old recipes from Yorkshire, Cumberland, Wales and Sussex – those areas, in fact, where junipers grow wild on the hills. They can be bought from grocers who specialize in spices, such as Selfridges, and Coopers of Brompton Road.

For cooking the beef you will need only water, ½ to 1 lb. of shredded suet, and greaseproof paper or foil. Ask the butcher for the best quality round or silverside beef and explain to him what it is for. He will probably be incredulous but will know how to cut and skewer it.

First rub the beef all over with the brown sugar and leave it for two days in a glazed earthenware bread crock or bowl. Crush all the spices, with the salt and saltpetre, in a mortar. They should be well broken up but need not be reduced to a powder. With this mixture you rub the beef thoroughly each day for 9 to 14 days according to the size. Gradually, with the salt and sugar, the beef produces a certain amount of its own liquid, and it smells most appetizing. But keep it covered, and in a cool airy place, not in a stuffy kitchen.

When the time comes to cook the beef, take it from the crock, rinse off any of the spices which are adhering to it, but without sousing the meat in cold water.

Put it in a big deep pot in which it fits with very little space to spare. Pour in about ½ pint of water. Cover the top of the meat with the shredded suet; this is a great help in keeping the meat moist during cooking. In the old days the pot would now have been covered with a thick crust made from a pound of flour and 2 oz. of lard, but this can be dispensed with – two or three layers of greaseproof paper or foil being used instead, to make sure there is no evaporation of juices. Put the lid on the pot. Bake in a very low oven, gas no. 1, 290°F., for 4 to 5 hours according to the size of the joint. Take it from the oven carefully, for there will be a lot of liquid round the beef. Let it cool, which will take several hours. But before the fat sets, pour off all the liquid and remove the beef to a board.
Wrap it in foil or greaseproof paper and put another board or a plate on top, and a 2- to 4-lb. weight. Leave until next day.

The beef will carve thinly and evenly, and its mellow spicy flavour does seem to convey to us some sort of idea of the food eaten by our forebears. Once cooked, the beef will keep fresh a considerable time. ‘A quarter of a year,’ one cook says. At any rate it will certainly keep 10 to 14 days in an ordinary larder if it is kept wrapped in clean greaseproof paper. Those who feel that all this really is too much of an undertaking will be interested to know that beef spiced according to the same recipe, and ready for cooking, will be on sale at Harrods butchery counter during December.

GINGER CREAM

A recipe adapted from a much more elaborate one given by John Simpson; it provides a useful way of using some of the ginger in syrup which one gets given at Christmas time.

Ingredients are a pint of single cream, 5 to 6 egg yolks, a strip of lemon peel, a sprinkling of cinnamon and nutmeg, 3 or 4 tablespoons of sugar, 2 tablespoons each of the ginger syrup and the ginger itself, finely chopped. Put the spices and lemon peel into the cream and bring it to the boil. Beat the yolks of the eggs very thoroughly with the sugar. Pour the hot cream into the egg mixture, stir well, return to the saucepan and cook gently, as for a custard, until the mixture has thickened. Take the pan from the fire, extract the lemon peel, go on stirring until the cream is cool. Add the syrup and the chopped ginger.

Leave it in the refrigerator overnight, then, stirring well so that the ginger does not sink to the bottom, pour it into little custard glasses, small wine glasses, or coffee cups. There will be enough to fill 8 glasses.

If you subtract a quarter pint of cream from the original mixture, adding the same quantity of whipped double cream when the custard is quite cold, and freeze it in the foil-covered ice-trays of the refrigerator (at maximum freezing point) for 2 hours, this makes a very attractive ice cream.

Vogue
, December, 1958

GOOSE WITH CHESTNUTS AND APPLES

The chestnuts and apples are prepared like a stuffing, but they don’t go into the goose, they are cooked separately. This is because if you are going to have your goose cold, a stuffing is too fat-soaked from the bird to be attractive, whereas if it is baked separately in a terrine or a pie dish it comes out almost like a
pâté
and can be cut into nice even slices as an accompaniment, and all you will probably need besides is a big bowl of salad (endive, celery, and beetroot is a good one) and baked potatoes for those who have given up caring about their weight.

To start on the chestnuts – about 1½ lb. Score them right across on the rounded side, preferably with a broken-off, but still sharp knife which isn’t going to be ruined in the process. Put them in a baking tin, half at a time, and cook them in a moderate oven for 10 to 15 minutes. Take out a few and, to shell and skin them, squeeze each nut in your hand so that the shell bursts. Then it comes off quite easily with the aid of a sharp knife, sometimes bringing the inner skin with it, sometimes not. And if this inner skin will not come away easily, leave it, do not hack at it. When all except these resistant ones are done, put them in a basin and pour boiling water over them. This should succeed in loosening the skins. Put the chestnuts in a saucepan with ½ pint of milk and 4 tablespoons of water and simmer them for about half an hour, or until they are quite soft.