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Overview
Real Flavours is an entirely rewritten and updated third edition of Glynn Christian’s Delicatessen Food Handbook, described by Nigel Slater as “one of the only ten books you need.” It’s a handbook of specialty ingredient information, from salt and pepper through olive oil to caviar: It not only tells you what an ingredient is and what it should look and taste like, it also tells you what it goes with and how to use it.
Born in New Zealand and renowned in Britain for his BBC appearances, Glynn Christian offers plenty of wit and anecdotes from a life spent traveling, cooking on TV, and writing for magazines and newspapers—in a reference book you’ll end up reading like a novel.
“One of the best ever compendiums of gourmet and deli foods.” —Manchester Evening News
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781909166905 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grub Street |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 500 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Beans and Pulses
Beans, peas, and lentils are lumped together under the name 'pulses' when they are dried, but that term is little used outside Britain.
These most ancient of foods, cheap and nourishing, are sadly still looked upon with suspicion in the UK, particularly by the hard-up; those in fact who would most benefit from them. Earnest perpetrators of characterless lentil rissoles have only themselves to blame for the failure of their regimen to grip our imaginations. If only they could be as original with these foods as they are with their clothes.
The other oft-heard complaint against beans is wind. This is a very real and at times painful problem for many people, but sound knowledge will sort it out in most cases. First concentrate on the thin-skinned varieties of pulses, which cook faster, as they cause fewer side effects. Then, although lentils cook well and fast without the added bother of soaking, you do reduce windcausing content by always soaking, rinsing and parboiling before cooking in yet more fresh water.
The wind problems will not always be lesser, but if you introduce these products to your diet slowly, as side dishes rather than main courses, you will find the bowel will adjust and in a month or so without it going – or blowing – against the grain.
In just a few weeks you will be able to enjoy a red kidney bean stew or a chickpea salad with barely a grumble. Thus with a little care and patience when you begin it is possible to eat spectacularly well as a vegetarian, almost thoughtlessly obtaining the high fibre, low fat, low sugar ideals of modern nutritional theory. Milk, cheese or eggs each day, or some soy product, or a proper mixture of grains and pulses and you are safe and very well indeed.
Beans, peas and pulses are excellent sources of protein and carbohydrate but are not as balanced as animal protein, including eggs, milk and cheese. This does not matter if your diet includes such animal protein but ovo-lactarian vegetarians, who eschew everything from an animal source, should take care to balance the imbalance by also eating grains, done without thought if you pour a lentil dhal onto rice, eat baked beans on toast or scoop up hummus with pitta bread.
None of these ingredients has a fat content but it's difficult to find enjoyable recipes that do not add it in some form. They also have plenty of dietary fibre, and this is most important to those of us getting old, when a general trend towards eating soft food means it might take several days to pass through the alimentary canal, something that exacerbates any illness and contributes to general ill-health, too. Even small amounts of beans, peas, pulses or grains in the diet can make a major difference to the health of the elderly and is a good habit to start young, too.
You could cook these ingredients a different way every day, but I generally end up cooking them the same way – with tomato, lots of garlic, fresh herbs in a bundle and plenty of fat: bacon, olive oil, duck or goose fat. Butter is good but not as good as the less sweet fats and oils.
Often much of the fat, pork and garlic will come largely from chunks of something like Polish boiling sausage q.v. But be brave with peas, beans and lentils. With chickpeas, use cumin and coriander and tomato paste and olive oil when they are warm – just enough tomato paste to bind them together – and serve sprinkled with chopped chives as a salad. But not for me, as I never serve or eat chives because of their dominating onion flavour: I'd sprinkle the chickpeas with toasted cumin seeds. Serve cold tuna fish with cannellini in vinaigrette as a starter. Mix leftover butter beans with chilled orange slices, black olives and segmented tomato. See how easy it is?
To make a succulent sauce for any hot beans, take up to a quarter of cooked ones from the saucepan, add water, stock or tomato purée to them and cook to a mush or purée them. Return to the drained beans and cook on. A real chili should have a sauce of softened purée-like beans like this. Beans in their own sauce are excellent hot or cold, and reheat well, too – witness the famous refritos of Mexican and Tex-Mex cooking.
Whenever a bean recipe fails to excite you, and you have added enough salt and extra fat and more garlic, then add red wine vinegar teaspoon by teaspoon. Or sherry or Chinese or balsamic vinegars, of course. The difference will be wondrous, and fast.
Neither should you overlook the flavouring possibilities of oil. Olive oil is almost de rigueur unless you have very fatty bacon or a tin of goose fat. But beans cooked simply with tomatoes and then finished with a splash of walnut oil make a superb accompaniment to poultry and, after sitting in a refrigerator overnight, the most memorable cold salad. Better with garlic, it goes without saying.
Lamb, especially the cheaper fattier cuts, goes well with beans. I like to cook neck of lamb in tomato with garlic sausage and some fresh thyme, then to add in cooked haricot or butter beans and cook on for enough time to allow some of the beans to melt into the sauce and absorb the fat. Just put the pot on the table and let your family and friends help themselves.
For all I have said about the boring way these foods are generally seen, nothing can quite equal the feverish grip with which lentils hold our great chefs in thrall. From something to sneer at, lentils have become an essential accompaniment. Their affinity with fish is the most surprising discovery, but pigeon and every type of bird now seem naked without them and even aristocratic beef is served with lentils perfumed with herbs and glistening with pork fat.
Cooked beans in cans are a godsend standby. Heated and drained and dressed with oil and garlic as a salad base, puréed, or drained and reheated with a herb-rich garlic-laden tomato sauce, they make a fast vegetable stew appear to have taken you days to make. Of course, they instantly bulk out a soup, casserole or ready-made salad, too, if someone should come knocking upon your door whom you do not wish to send away. I think beans and lentils are good hot or cold but never at room temperature.
Storing
Although good keepers, all peas, beans and lentils will toughen with age and many reach a stage where even the most determined soaking and cooking will never soften them. It is better to buy them in smallish quantities from shops you expect sell enough to have a regular turnover of stock. Do check, if they are in bulk, for excess dirt or insect contamination, but expect some. Don't bother with stock that is broken. Store cool and dark.
Adzuki/aduki beans: small, ochrous-red and sort of pillow- shaped, these are an Oriental bean and have long been regarded as the best of them all in Japan, China and Thailand. The bean is the seed of a bushy plant that grows up to about 75cm/30 inches high. Juice made from the beans is still prescribed by Oriental herbalists to help kidney problems. Cook at least 30 minutes, perhaps longer.
Unknown to the West until George Ohshawa introduced the macrobiotic diet in the 20th century, they are now much favoured here because they are the most 'yang' of beans, and because they have an appealing, strong, nut-like flavour.
Adzuki are one of the most important ingredients in Oriental sweet cookery. I've always preferred these beans whole, eaten as sweets covered with sugar but they appear far more commonly as a red-bean paste and used as a starchy filling to spoil nice dumplings and steamed buns or to stuff those relentlessly dull and leaden Chinese desserts. But they are also served savoury: the most famed version is Serkhan or Festival Rice from Japan. Rice is tinted with the pink cooking water of adzuki beans, then the two are mixed together.
Begin with a proportion of about one part adzuki to eight of rice. This mixture is similar, of course, to the rice and beans of Jamaican cooking.
In macrobiotic cookbooks you will find suggestions for soups and desserts; I like the sound of one that cooks together adzuki and dried chestnuts, makes a purée of the mixture flavoured with cinnamon, and bakes that in a pie crust that is served with cream and almonds.
Black-eye beans/peas: these beans are actually peas, a variety of cow pea, and this is why they are also called black-eye peas in the United States. To add to the confusion, they are the seeds you find in the yard-long bean. I find I like the rather savoury flavour and interesting appearance of these more than most haricots. They cook comparatively faster too and I believe many people find them lighter on the stomach. Essential to Creole cooking and the related soul food. Soaked beans take 30-45 minutes to cook.
Broad beans: one of the few beans native to the Old World, dried broad beans have kept their honoured place in many Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries, but are rather over-run by new-comers in the rest of the world. They are different, bigger and with a tendency to flouriness, but that is also their appeal, together with a bit of a chew sometimes, particularly if you leave the tough skins on each individual bean. You either have to skin them after cooking, or buy the more expensive ready-skinned variety.
Easily recognized by being flatter and broader than New World beans, they are the fava bean, the horse bean, the ful and countless other names, and when dried are most often a brownish colour. These should have a good long soak and will then need about 11/2 hours cooking – less, of course, if you are using those without skins.
Ful medames, a stew of dried broad beans, has been fundamental to Egypt for countless centuries. Its rough, hearty flavour comes with the welcome vigour of garlic, oil and onion and is usually served topped with hamine eggs, whole eggs simmered in a spicy liquid for many hours so the spices penetrate and colour the egg white, which softens in an especially appealing way.
In some countries of the South Pacific, where frozen vegetables might come from China, I have found packets of gorgeous, small broad beans already shucked of their outer skins. Perfect for adding to salads, for dressing with oil and vinegar or for serving hot any way you can imagine. Triumph.
Butter beans/lima beans: many books divide butter beans from lima beans but I'm sure they are the same thing. If they aren't, it doesn't matter for they are both large, white, flat and aristocratic of flavour. They should not be cooked until pulpy, but must be very well pre-soaked and cooked otherwise they have some rather unpleasant constituents. Smaller ones will take 45- 60 minutes to cook; bigger ones will take 15-25 minutes longer.
Baby lima beans are pale green and usually sold fresh or frozen. Fresh baby limas are quite the best for mixing with sweet corn to make succotash, even though I have seen recipes that require cooked, dried ones. In the US you will also find the Chestnut Lima, which has a genuinely nutty flavour and mashes to give the texture of mashed potatoes.
Chickpeas/garbanzos: with their spicy, peppery flavour, appealing golden colour and hazelnut shape, these are amongst the most attractive of all dried pulses from any point of view.
They are the main ingredient in hummus, that standby dip of Middle Eastern, Greek and Cypriot restaurants, but one also found in Spanish and Latin American cooking, and make excellent additions to soups as well as fascinating salads. They mix well with other vegetables, too, and I always like to have some on hand in cans.
Cooking times can vary enormously. Older types may take up to three hours or more but newer varieties, the ones most likely to be bought today, should be cooked in something over an hour. They rarely go out of shape and are much nicer, I think, when rather floury, for then they absorb somewhat more easily the oils, spices and flavours with which they can be mingled.
But a warning if you plan to travel in the Eastern Mediterranean. Hummus has officially been recognised as a major cause of serious stomach upsets – a few years ago it was specially rife in Jerusalem and laid out its victims for almost a week. Best avoided in restaurants unless you know when it was made and that it has been refrigerated since that time.
Kidney beans: this is the biggest group of beans and one that causes much confusion. Simply, all beans that are kidney shaped without being flat are kidney beans. There is a variety of colour and flavour – but they are all kidney beans. The average time for cooking these beans is one hour, but haricots can be stubborn and need longer so be prepared to exercise patience.
Don't be confused if you don't find a bean you know here, throughout the United States there are local names as well as local varieties. When beans first crossed the Atlantic they were given new Spanish or Greek or Italian or anything names, and then when they adapted to their new homes they changed both their characteristics and their names again. Only if you are in pursuit of insanity should you consider tracing each bean to its original name. They won't taste any better when or if you do. Haricots Tarbais IGP are French and found fresh or dried.
Black beans: very popular in the Caribbean and in the southern United States, these shiny, very black beans are the most like better-known red kidney beans. They cook to a firm satisfying texture and have a meaty, full flavour. Used by themselves or with other beans they make an attractive change to the look of your cooking.
Borlotti beans: also known as rose cocoa beans, these are streaked with rose or crimson, and all the better for being pale of colour. These are particularly popular in Italy and excellent tinned examples are available. They seem usually to require little soaking when dried, and they have a rather sweet, soft texture.
Cannellini beans: a small white kidney bean that is absolutely interchangeable with haricots. In Italy cannellini might mean other white beans, too. These are almost always the right bean to use with rugged Italian sausages and with lots of garlic and tomato of some sort and they make excellent cold salads dressed with good olive oil. Sorana beans, fagioli di Sorana IGP, are milky white and almost flat or cylindrical and red: both colours have a full, elegant flavour and very tender skins.
Flageolet beans: these are very young haricots removed from the pod before they are ripe. Thus they are a delicate green, sweet and tender. They are far the most expensive of beans and a very special accompaniment to fatty birds, to young lamb or to hot ham.
Great Northern beans: a small white haricot bean that's thought to be the most popular in the US. It could be the navy bean with a different hat.
Haricot beans: these creamy kidney beans are perhaps the best known of all, for they are the beans for baked beans. Extraordinarily adaptable, they are the basis for the varying versions of cassoulets in France, cooked with bacon or goose fat. Some say they are called haricot because the French included them in their stews called haricots, but the late food writer Tom Stobart says 'haricot' is really a corruption of the Aztec word ayecotl, which I am romantically inclined to believe.
In America they are known as navy beans; and just to add to the confusion they are often shaped more like a cushion than a kidney.
Pinto beans: a shorter, fatter, squarer version of the borlotti, speckled and savoury of flavour. Rattlesnake beans are the same bean and so named because their pods grow into snake-shapes. Traditional in the US Southwest and in Mexico, they are the best choice for re-fried beans, refritos
Red kidney beans: because delicatessen counters discovered they were nice to eat cold as a salad, and because chili con carne has proliferated, these are as well known as white haricots now. Their rich colour and texture and full flavour make them worth the popularity, but they can kill. Red kidney beans must be very well soaked and very well cooked until really soft; during cooking they should actually boil for 15 minutes or can indeed be fatal.
Their uses abound throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean; they are the basic chili bean and, like their black brothers, add considerable flavour when mixed with white ones.
Lentils: one of the first-ever crops, lentils are richer in protein than other pulses, except for soy. They have a very high calorie content too, so even though lacking some essential amino acids they make an important food staple, especially in Third World countries. There are two basic types but both have many names:
Green or brown lentils: also called continental lentils. It is generally these lentils that are used in European cookbooks, old or new. They keep their shape when cooked and have a stronger, earthier taste than the red ones, which blend very well with smoked meats, fatty pork, herbs and onions, but quickly cook into a mush. Green and brown lentils take about 30-45 minutes to cook.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Real Flavours"
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Copyright © 2005 Glynn Christian.
Excerpted by permission of Grub Street.
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Table of Contents
Foreword,
Introduction,
Beans and Pulses,
Bread and Baked Goods,
Charcuterie,
Cheese,
Chocolate,
Coffee,
Dairy Products,
Eggs,
Fish and Shellfish,
Fruits, Vegetables and Nuts,
Game and Poultry,
Grains,
Herbs, Spices and Flavourings,
Oils,
Olives,
Pasta and Noodles,
Pies, Pâtés and Terrines,
Sugars, Syrups and Honey,
Sushi and Sashimi,
Tea,
Vinegars,
Postscript,
Index,