The Best of Jane Grigson: The Enjoyment of Food
360
The Best of Jane Grigson: The Enjoyment of Food
360eBook
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Overview
This delightful and essential compendium of recipes from Jane Grigson, author of cookbook classics like Good Things and Mushroom Feast, begins with a delightful introduction from the equally renowned food writer Elizabeth David.
Organized into regional cuisines from around the world including the Americas, the Mediterranean, the Europeans, India, and the Far East, as well as sections entitled “At Home in England” and “At Home in France.” In addition to a detailed chapter on charcuterie, there are graphs, illustrations, and tips on picking the best ingredients and making the most of them when they are in season.
This astonishingly diverse and accessible selection of recipes has entires for all occasions from simple weekday dinners to elaborate celebratory feasts. A fitting tribute, not only to Grigson’s culinary and literary skills, but also to the warmth, wit, and intelligence that shine through all her books, The Best of Jane Grigson is essential for home chefs of all levels.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781910690567 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grub Street |
| Publication date: | 06/19/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Sales rank: | 869,054 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
AT HOME IN ENGLAND
JANE GRIGSON'S ENTHUSIASM for English food and cooking stemmed back to her childhood in the north-east of England. 'We lived in Sunderland, in a tall house, with taller, much grander houses across the back lane which had become slum tenements. We spent holidays near Whitby, at the seaside or on farms with ducks and chickens in the yard, peas and gooseberries in the garden.'
She was a relentless champion of the fine tradition of English cooking and of the quality of ingredients produced in these islands. Throughout her career, whether in articles for the Observer or in her books, she showed, time and again, that not only does Britain have a culinary heritage to be proud of, but that it is one that is still extremely active. English Food was a celebration of that heritage. Ten years later, in The Observer Guide to British Cookery, Jane explored the current state of food production and preparation; she gave support and encouragement to the new generation of chefs, producers and retailers who shared her vision.
Her optimism, however, did not blind her to the considerable culinary inadequacies of the country. She was tireless in her condemnation of falling standards, limitation of choice and the sacrifice of flavour and texture in the interests of appearance and profit. The following piece, which is taken from English Food, shows this clearly.
The English are a very adaptive people. English cooking – both historically and in the mouth – is a great deal more varied and delectable than our masochistic temper in this matter allows. There's an extra special confusion nowadays in talking of good and bad national cooking. The plain fact is that much commercial cooking is bad or mediocre in any country – it's easy enough to get a thoroughly disappointing meal even in France where there exists an almost sacred devotion to kitchen and table. The food we get publicly in England isn't so often bad English cooking as a pretentious and inferior imitation of French cooking or Italian cooking.
It is also true that a good many things in our marketing system now fight against simple and delicate food. Tomatoes have no taste. The finest flavoured potatoes are not available in shops. Vegetables and fruit are seldom fresh. Milk comes out of Friesians. Cheeses are subdivided and imprisoned in plastic wrapping. 'Farm fresh' means eggs which are no more than ten, fourteen or twenty days old. Words such as 'fresh' and 'home-made' have been borrowed by commerce to tell lies.
In spite of all this, the English cook has a wonderful inheritance if she cares to make use of it. It's a question of picking and choosing, and that exactly is what I have done for this book. My aim has been to put in obvious dishes on a basis of quality: even more, I have tried to show how many surprises there are. I have also included a number of Welsh dishes because I like them, and because they are linked closely with much English food, while retaining a rustic elegance which we have tended to lose.
No cookery belongs exclusively to its country, or its region. Cooks borrow – and always have borrowed – and adapt through the centuries. Though the scale in either case isn't exactly the same, this is as true, for example, of French cooking as of English cooking. We have borrowed from France. France borrowed from Italy direct, and by way of Provence. The Romans borrowed from the Greeks, and the Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians and Persians.
What each individual country does do is to give all the elements, borrowed or otherwise, something of a national character. The history of cooking is in some ways like the history of language, though perhaps it's harder to unravel, or like the history of folk music. The first mention of a dish, the first known recipe for it, can seldom be taken as a record of its first appearance. As far as origins go, there's seldom much point in supposing that a dish belongs to Yorkshire, or Devonshire, or Shropshire because it has survived in those places and may bear their names. What goes for counties goes for countries. Who is to say whether Pain Perdu or Poor Knights of Windsor is really English or French; both in France and England it was a dish of the medieval court. Did the English call it payn pur-dew out of the kind of snobbery we can still recognize, or because they took it from France? And if they took it from France, where did the French take it from? It's a marvellous way of using up stale bread, especially good bread, and who is to say that earlier still the Romans, or the Greeks before the Romans, didn't see the point of frying up bread and serving it with something sweet? In England today Pain Perdu has been anglicized into a nursery or homely dish, Poor Knights of Windsor. In France with brioche to hand, or the light pain de mie, Pain Perdu remains a select dish gracefully adorned with brandied fruit and dollops of cream under such names as Croûte aux Abricots.
There is no avoiding the fact that the best cooking has come down from the top. Or if you don't like the word 'top', from the skilled, employed by those who could pay and had the time to appreciate quality. In England on the whole the food descends less from a courtly tradition than from the manor houses and rectories and homes of well-to-do merchants – latterly from a Jane Austen world. It hands down the impression of the social life of families in which the wives and daughters weren't too grand to go into the kitchen and to keep a close eye on the vegetable garden and dairy. This was the world in which the great amateur horticulturalist Thomas Andrew Knight in his Herefordshire manor house diversified and improved so many fruits and vegetables in the late years of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth.
One thing to note is that the great English cookery writers from Hannah Glasse to Elizabeth David have always been women, in contrast to the French tradition of cookery writing by male chefs. Our classical tradition has been domestic, with the domestic virtues of quiet enjoyment and generosity. Whatever happened when the great mass centres developed in the nineteenth century, English cookery books of the eighteenth century to early Victorian times had been written from an understanding of good food and good eating, a concern for quality. Mrs Beeton had her great qualities, and gave many marvellous recipes. But from the first edition of her book in 1859, you can see the anxiety of the new middle class, balanced between wealth and insolvency, and always at pains to keep up appearances. And keeping up appearances remains the leitmotiv of much modern food advertising. Showy photographs in what is called 'full' colour and the message 'Impress your Friends' or 'Impress his Boss' suggest that without taking any trouble or thought at all, marvellous food will fall out of the packet on to the plate. We need to renew and develop the old tradition of Hannah Glasse, Elizabeth Raffald, Maria Rundell and Eliza Acton as far as we can in our changed circumstances. It is no accident, I hope, that these early writers are being reprinted, often in facsimile, and that their dishes appear on the menus of some of our best restaurants as well as in an increasing number of homes. [English Food]
SOUPS AND STARTERS
ALMOND SOUP
SERVES 6
60 g (2 oz) ground almonds
2¼ litres (4 pt) chicken or light veal stock freshly ground white pepper
1 bay leaf
300 ml (½ pt) milk
1 tablespoon cornflour
150 ml (¼ pt) single or double cream
1 tablespoon lightly salted butter salt
60 g (2 oz) toasted or fried almonds to garnish, or croûtons of fried bread
A beautifully white soup which goes back to the cookery of the Middle Ages, the courtly cookery of England and France (the French name is soupe à la reine). Almonds then played an even larger part in fine dishes than they do today. As well as its flavour, this soup has the advantage of being made from the kind of ingredients that most people have in the house in summer or winter: perhaps this is another reason why it has survived so many centuries, not just in palaces but in the homes of people of moderate prosperity.
Simmer the first four ingredients for 30 minutes. Remove the bay leaf. Add the milk, and liquidize the soup to extract maximum flavour and texture from the almonds (in the old days it was a question of sieving repeatedly). Mix the cornflour with the cream and use to thicken the reheated soup, without allowing it to boil (if you do, the almonds will tend to separate from the liquid and turn gritty). Stir in the butter. Taste and correct seasoning. Pour through a fine sieve into the heated soup tureen. Float the almonds on top and serve. If you have chosen croûtons, put two or three in with the soup and serve the rest in a bowl. With this kind of fine delicate flavour, it is most important that the almonds or croûtons should have been fried in butter. [English Food]
CAWL
SERVES 8–10
about 1½ kg (3 lb) boiling cut of beef and best end of neck of lamb, not cut up, or brisket and smoked gammon etc. (see introduction for proportions)
beef dripping or bacon fat
2 large onions, thickly sliced
2–3 carrots or 2 parsnips, small to medium, peeled and sliced
1 medium swede or turnip, peeled and cut up
2 stalks celery, sliced bouquet garni, with 2 extra sprigs of thyme
500 g (1 lb) potatoes, preferably new, or 1 medium-sized old potato per person, scrubbed small white cabbage, sliced salt, pepper, parsley
2–3 slender leeks, sliced
Pronounced 'cowl' this is the great nourishing dish of Wales. Like a French potée or Scottish cock-a-leekie, it is soup, meat and vegetables in one, a heartening cauldronful when people had only a fire to cook on. To give a recipe with stated quantities is an artificial thing to do. Each cook used what there was to hand, following the general principles. Cawl varied. At the end of the winter, it tasted a bit dead; when new potatoes arrived, it cheered up.
In First Catch Your Peacock, Bobby Freeman – who introduced me to cawl – notes that in summer, the tops of young leeks may be cut as they come through the ground and added to the soup. She also points out that the modern style of browning the meat and vegetables was impossible in earlier days: everything had to go into the pot willynilly, to cook with the water. One thing I did not know was that in Brecon, cheese and rough brown bread are eaten with cawl, with the liquid I take it, meat and vegetables coming as a second course. Any broth left over was reheated next day and revived with new vegetables, and the next day, and the next. The fat that sets on top was used for other cooking.
There is no doubt that the mixture of two meats improves the flavour, and that 500 g (1 lb) of shin of beef works wonders with 1 kg (2 lb) of best end of neck of lamb, or 500 g (1 lb) smoked ham or gammon or bacon or a hock end goes well with 1 kg (2 lb) of brisket. Extra leeks can take the place of onion: use the white part for the long cooking, the green for the final garnish.
If you are using shin of beef, brown it and simmer it for 1 hour on its own, before adding the best end of neck which cooks faster.
Brown the meat, then the root vegetables in the fat and transfer to a huge flameproof casserole or pot. Put in the celery, and bouquet, then water to come within 5 cm (2 inches) of the rim. Bring slowly to a bare simmer. There should just be an occasional bubble. Remove the scum conscientiously. No need to cover, if you are worried about keeping to a low enough simmer which can be a problem with electric rings: uncovered, you can keep an eye on it more easily, and replace evaporated liquid by the occasional addition of hot water.
Leave to simmer for 4 hours. After 3½ hours, add the potatoes, which should sit on top. After 3½ hours, put in the cabbage. Season to taste: this late seasoning prevents the meat being tough, and if bacon is being used, gives you a chance to judge the saltiness it has added to the broth. Cut up the meat into convenient pieces. Discard the bouquet.
Just before serving, add the leeks and plenty of chopped parsley.
To serve: put the whole thing on the table in a deep wooden bowl, and serve everybody a bit of everything. Have Welsh cheese and wholemeal bread and butter on the table, to make a meal of it.
Or remove meat and vegetables to a serving dish and keep warm, while you serve the soup with bits of leek and parsley.
When Mrs Freeman had a restaurant at Fishguard, she followed the first style, and in summer would float marigolds on top of each bowl. This is an old English habit with all manner of stews: I believe Charles Lamb complained about the dreadful stew and marigolds that were served at Christ's Hospital when he – and Coleridge – were pupils there. [British Cookery]
COCK-A-LEEKIE
SERVES 10
1 kg (2 lb) shin of beef or 2 litres (4 pt) beef stock
1 capon or large roasting bird
1–1½ kg (2–3 lb) leeks, trimmed and washed
18 prunes, soaked salt, pepper
An old and distinguished dish of Scottish cookery, dating back at least to the sixteenth century, made particularly famous on account of its association with the great French statesman, Talleyrand.
'At a formal banquet given by the late Lord Holland, Talleyrand, who was as celebrated for gastronomy as diplomacy, inquired "earnestly" of Lord Jeffrey the nature of "Cocky-leekie" and wished particularly to know if prunes (French plums) were essential to its scientific concoction. Mr Jeffrey was unable to give the Ex-bishop and Prince any satisfactory information; and the sagacious diplomatist, with his usual tact, settled for himself, that prunes should be boiled in the famous historical soup patronized by "gentle King Jamie", but taken out before the potage was sent to table.'
This story appeared in 1826 in Meg Dods's book, Cook and Housewife's Manual, with the added comment that prunes are nearly obsolete in Scotland in the soup, but that conservative English cooks still insist that prunes treated in Talleyrand style are what the Scots go for. To me, prunes are what make the soup, the fourth element, the dark accent that pulls the whole thing together both in look and flavour.
If you are using beef, put it into a large pot with 2 litres (4 pt) water, bring slowly to the boil, skin and simmer for 2 hours. Put in the bird, plus half the leeks tied in a bundle. Bring back to the boil and simmer for 45 minutes.
If you are using beef stock, start the chicken directly in the heated stock, with the leeks in a bundle.
Add the prunes. Continue simmering until the chicken and beef are tender – about 30 more minutes. Remove the beef and chicken and put in the rest of the leeks, sliced, cooking them 1–2 minutes.
Serve a slice each of beef and chicken with their broth in a soup plate with prunes and some of the barely cooked leeks (discard the bundle), saving the rest of the meat for a cold meal next day. Or strain off the liquor and serve with a little fresh leek as soup, with the hot meats, prunes and leeks remaining as a main course.
A sixteenth-century traveller, Fynes Morison, noted that the top table in a grand Scottish household got 'pullet with some prunes in the broth', and that the lower orders had broth with a little bit of stewed beef – another way of dividing the dish. [British Cookery]
CREAM OF MUSHROOM SOUP
Here is the basic recipe for mushroom soup. If you can use wild mushrooms, the flavour will be exquisite – field or horse mushrooms, parasols or ceps or fairy-ring mushrooms.
SERVES 4–6
500 g (1 lb) mushrooms juice of a lemon
90 g (3 oz) butter
1 shallot, chopped, or 1 tablespoon chopped onion
1 small clove garlic, chopped salt, pepper
60 g (2 oz) flour
1¼ litres (2 pt) beef stock
125 ml (4 fl oz) double cream
Chop the mushrooms finely. Sprinkle with lemon juice. Melt one-third of the butter in a pan and cook the shallot or onion and garlic in it until soft and yellow, but not brown. Add the mushrooms and continue cooking until the juices have evaporated, making a duxelles. Season. Meanwhile, melt the remaining butter in a large saucepan, and stir in the flour and moisten with hot beef stock gradually, whisking all the time to avoid lumps. Simmer for 20 minutes. Add the mushroom mixture, and simmer a further 10 minutes. Correct the seasoning and add the cream. Pour into a soup tureen, straining out the bits and pieces if you like; serve very hot. [The Mushroom Feast]
CURRIED PARSNIP SOUP
SERVES 6–8
1 large parsnip
125 g (4 oz) chopped onion
1 clove garlic, crushed
90 g (3 oz) butter
1 tablespoon flour
1 rounded teaspoon curry powder
1¼ litres (2 pt) hot beef stock
150 ml (¼ pt) cream chives
This is a wonderful soup, delicately flavoured yet satisfying. One doesn't immediately recognize the parsnip taste, but no other root vegetable can produce such an excellent result.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Best of Jane Grigson"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Sophie Grigson.
Excerpted by permission of Grub Street.
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Table of Contents
Note by the Compiler: Roy Fullick,
Introduction by Elizabeth David,
AT HOME IN ENGLAND,
Soups and Starters,
Eggs,
Fish,
Meat, Game and Poultry,
Vegetables and Fruit,
Cakes and Puddings,
AT HOME IN FRANCE,
Soups and Starters,
Fish,
Meat, Game and Poultry,
Vegetables and Fruit,
Cakes and Puddings,
CHARCUTERIE,
BLD[Terrines and]BLD Pâtés,
Sausages,
Hams and Salt Pork,
Fresh Pork,
Frying and Grilling,
Extremities,
Insides,
Picnic Guide to the Charcutier's Shop,
THE MEDITERRANEAN,
Soups and Starters,
Fish,
Meat, Game and Poultry,
Vegetables and Fruit,
Cakes and Puddings,
THE EUROPEANS,
Soups and Starters,
Fish,
Meat, Game and Poultry,
Vegetables and Fruit,
Cakes and Puddings,
THE AMERICAS,
Soups and Starters,
Fish,
Meat and Poultry,
Vegetables and Fruit,
Cakes and Puddings,
INDIA AND THE FAR EAST,
Soups and Starters,
Fish,
Meat and Poultry,
Vegetables and Fruit,
TREATS AND CELEBRATIONS,
Starters,
Fish,
Meat, Game and Poultry,
Cakes and Puddings,
Drinks,
Menus for Special Occasions,
The Spirit of Christmas,
A Mediterranean Christmas,
Edible Gifts,
Bibliography,