Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (15 page)

Unpublished, 1960s

THREE-MINUTE TOMATO SAUCE

Chop 250 g (½ lb) of fine ripe skinned tomatoes. Put them with a teaspoonful each of butter and olive oil into a heavy frying pan or small saucepan. Cook them for 3 minutes, no more. Season them with salt, sugar and a scrap of dried basil or a teaspoon of freshly chopped parsley.

This is the sauce, or fondue of tomatoes, which makes the best filling for a tomato omelette. It is also the best sauce to go over toasted or baked cheese croûtons.

Cook it in double quantities and for a little longer and have it with scrambled eggs, fried bread, and baked gammon rashers or sausages.

Nova
, July 1965

SWEET-SOUR TOMATO AND ORANGE PICKLE

This is a pickle which can be made at any time and with almost any tomatoes, although very firm and slightly unripe ones are the best. Half and half green and red tomatoes produce good results.

1 kg (2 lb) of firm tomatoes, 2 small oranges, 750 g (1½ lb) of sugar, 300 ml (½ pint) of tarragon vinegar.

In a preserving pan (preferably an aluminium one, don’t use an untinned copper jam pan for pickles or chutneys) boil the sugar and vinegar to a thin syrup. Pour boiling water over the tomatoes. Skin and chop them.

Slice the oranges, the peel included, first into thin rounds, then cut each round in four, discarding all pips and the ends of the oranges. Blanch the pieces in boiling water for a couple of minutes and drain them. The preliminary blanching is to soften the rinds.

Put the chopped tomatoes into the hot syrup, bring to the boil, continue the boiling, not too fast, for about 30 minutes, skimming from time to time. Add the orange pieces. Cook for another 15-20 minutes or until the mixture sets when a little is dropped on to a plate.

Pack into small jars. This is good with cold pork, gammon and ham and also with cold salt beef.

Note

When the pickle is to be made in quantity, the easiest way of preparing the tomatoes is to pack them in a big earthenware pot and let them soften in a low oven for half an hour or a little longer. Then push the whole batch through a coarse sieve or Mouli-légumes.

Unpublished, 1970s

The Besprinkling of a Rosemary Branch

To judge by the frequent references to lamb with rosemary, veal with rosemary, chicken with rosemary, which I note in recent editions of the
Good Food Guide
as dishes which invariably draw enthusiastic comment, rosemary must be a high favourite in current English cookery. I can’t say I share the taste to any great extent. I have never cared for the way the Italians use it to flavour veal roasts, very often to excess. In Provence it often smothers the natural taste of lamb, and in the same region the little white goats’ milk cheeses coated with rosemary spikes tend to taste of nothing else. (The alternative version, coated with
poivre d’ane
or wild savory is more to my taste, but is becoming rare.)

Then in France there is the current mania for olives packed in jars of oil crammed to the corks with
herbes de Provence
– predominantly dried rosemary and thyme – and costing twice as much as olives which actually have their own taste. It’s quite difficult to overpower the flavour of those little black olives, but rosemary does the trick. Sure, rosemary is for remembrance. I’d just rather it weren’t for the remembrance of those little spiky leaves stuck in my throat.

It isn’t that I have anything against rosemary as a plant. In the garden it smells delicious and looks enchanting. In my cooking it has little place, although I did learn a useful trick years ago in Capri when I caught sight of an old woman dipping a branch of rosemary in oil and gently brushing it over a fish she was roasting over a charcoal fire. An excellent notion. And recently I have collected a few other forgotten uses for the rosemary which was such an important plant in the herb gardens of our ancestors.
Toothpicks, for example, and skewers for grilling small items such as chicken livers, were cut from rosemary twigs, and in the seventeenth century much use seems to have been made of rosemary as a decorative element in dessert dishes. Robert May, whose famous book,
The Accomplisht Cook
, was first published in 1660, the year of the restoration of Charles II, mentions a rosemary sprig planted upright in a snow cream, a frothy confection of sweetened cream and egg whites set on bread. I think this manner of using rosemary must have been standard practice in the seventeenth century. At any rate the 1611 edition of Cotgrave’s French–English Dictionary gives an entry for ‘
neige en rosemarin
, the besprinkling of a Rosemarie branch with salt or froathe creame’.
^*

A curious and unexplained custom involving the decorative use of rosemary is one recorded in the archives of the master bakers of Paris. Every baker who had served his apprenticeship, spent a minimum of two years as a journeyman baker, and having finally passed his test as a master – he was required to make several kinds of loaves, the most difficult being the
pain coiffé
, the equivalent of our cottage loaf – was summoned to attend a convocation of the entire corporation presided over by the Grand Panetier, the Grand Pander of France. At the ceremony, the new master baker, bearing in his hand a new earthenware pot containing a rosemary plant ‘with all its root’, hung with sugared peas, oranges and other fruits suitable to the season, was to stand before the Grand Pantler and say ‘Master, I have done my term.’ The Grand Pantler asks the Judges if this is true, and the answer being in the affirmative, he asks them if the pot is in the correct form and fit to be received. If the answer is again in the affirmative the Pantler takes the pot and presents the new master with his certificate.

The significance of the rosemary in this context is not clear, but according to Alfred Franklin, who describes the ceremony in
Comment On Devenait Patron
, Paris, 1889, the custom continued until about 1650, when the pot of rosemary was replaced with a gold louis, a more prosaic but surely easier way of paying homage to the Grand Pantler than decorating what must necessarily have been a rather substantial rosemary plant with oranges and the like, but in the hands of a skilful decorator, how charming they must have been, those rosemary bushes
ceremonially decked out with precious and brightly coloured fruits and sweetmeats.

Sir Kenelm Digby, a dashing young man at the court of Charles I, later a staunch friend to the widowed Queen Henrietta Maria, and passionately devoted husband of the legendary Venetia Stanley, was a many-sided man interested in science, alchemy, astrology and philosophy. He was also soldier, adventurer, traveller, writer, book collector, something of a medical quack, and an inspired recorder of recipes and cooking experiments. The brewing of mead, metheglin and hydromel was another of his favourite preoccupations. Into his vats went herbs and flowers by the sackful, rosemary flowers of course among them.

Rosemary itself, however, is conspicuous by its absence in all his cookery receipts with the one exception of a syllabub, when he suggests bruising a sprig in the cream ‘to quicken the taste’.

It is an interesting point that Digby suggested his sprig of rosemary a little bruised to liven up the taste of the cream and wine, whereas Robert May’s appears to have been only for decoration. Rosemary and wine seem in fact to have been considered to have affinities, and John Evelyn, in his
Acetaria, A Discourse of Sallets
, 1699, says that while the leaf is not used in ‘A Sallet furniture’ the flowers ‘a little bitter, are always welcome in Vinegar; but above all, a fresh Sprig or two in a Glass of Wine’. We might not see eye to eye with that today, but then John Evelyn’s wine was very different from ours, and he was not a man to treat his food and drink without due care and consideration, or to follow a custom because it was a fashionable thing to do. So we must accept that rosemary really did do something for the wine of Evelyn’s day.

In the seventeenth century those pretty and ‘a little bitter’ rosemary flowers were also used, as were violets, carnations, roses, lilies of the valley, lavender, and a dozen other scented garden flowers, to make a kind of sugar candy.

Abridged from
Herbal Review
, Autumn 1980

Herbs, Fresh and Dried

To suppose that all fresh herbs are,
ipso facto
, better than all dried herbs is a sign of misplaced zeal. There are some herbs or part of herb plants which can only be used in dried or some other preserved form. Among obvious examples are angelica, which has a potent scent but no flavour until candied, and wild fennel stalks which must be tinder-dry for storage and for igniting under grilled fish or for scenting pork or pot-roasted chicken. On the other hand, any attempt to dry the leaves of fennel is a waste of time. They are so fragile that they turn to dust. The same can be said for parsley, chives and chervil, although for a few days after they are dried and packed these herbs do give out a faint scent. In Denmark, where chervil soup is a favourite and a very good dish, I have bought frozen chervil which turned out to be a hopeless mush, totally lacking in aroma and flavour.

Rosemary and bay leaves are both plants whose leaves contain a certain amount of essential oil which means that in their fresh state they can easily overpower a sauce or a joint of meat. Dried, they are milder and more subtle. A sprinkling of mint in its dried form is as essential to a great number of Levantine or Middle Eastern vegetable dishes as is fresh mint for English mint sauce. The wild thyme of Provence could be said to be born dried and gnarled on its native hills, so that the sun-dried twigs we buy for scenting our beef and wine stews and for making up our ritual bouquets are as nature made them.

English lemon thyme is another matter. It is at its best fresh, green and tender. Fresh basil and fresh tarragon are among the incomparable luxuries of summer. No dried versions can replace them. In their season they are treats to be savoured in the same way as the rare wild mushrooms of autumn or the first tangerines of Christmas.

Until recently the use of herbs in French cooking was very discreet. In the best French cooking it still is. A tendency to overdo the flavouring has, however, rather sadly to my mind, spread throughout France. Provision shops are crammed with bottles and packets of every herb and spice known; bottles of olive oil and jars of olives are stuffed to the corks with ‘herbes de Provence’, in other words spikes of rosemary and other overpowering herbs
such as sage and
sarriette
or savory. In restaurants, roasts of lamb and veal are smothered in the same mixtures, steaks and ducks are submerged beneath layers of
poivre vert
, the soft green peppercorns which are so delectable when used with discrimination; even the exquisite tarragon is often administered in overdoses. Marjoram is another herb often used in brutalising quantity. It is indeed not easy to learn restraint where these sweet-smelling and potent aromatics are concerned.

The best rule to remember is that it is only when dealing with poor raw materials – battery chickens, characterless vegetables, frozen fish, eggs laid by caged, unhappy hens – that a heavy hand with herbs, spices, salt and pepper is likely to improve matters. So think twice before throwing in the extra spoonful of
arômes de Provence
, the redundant sprinkling of rosemary and chopped garlic, the uncalled for mustard in the mayonnaise, and the over-liberal administration of wild thyme to a beef stew. All these flavourings and aromatics are blessed gifts. We should certainly not neglect them. Nor should we abuse them.

Unpublished, 1970s

Green Pepper Berries

In the thirteenth century a Franciscan friar known as Bartholomew the Englishman wrote a famous encyclopedia called
Concerning the Nature of Things
. In this work he propounded the theory that pepper grew on trees on the south side of a hill in the Caucasus. This wooded hill was infested with serpents. To drive them out, so that they could harvest the pepper, the peasants set fire to the trees. In the resulting conflagration, some of the fruit of the pepper became charred and blackened, while that which escaped the fire remained in its natural white state.

Nowadays we know better. Pepper, we have discovered, doesn’t come from the Caucasus. It comes from the spice merchants who grow both black and white kinds, sometimes in small berries and sometimes in powder form, in small glass jars or cardboard packets. This doesn’t account for green peppercorns, which weren’t known to Bartholomew the Englishman – or to anyone else in Europe – but surely he wouldn’t have been too
hard put to find an explanation of the nature of this kind of pepper and the reason it grows in cans.

Lacking Bartholomew’s ingenious imagination, I will try to set down some bare and relatively sober facts.

All these peppercorns, then, are the fruit of the same climbing plant,
Piper nigrum
, cultivated in the East and West Indies, the Malay peninsula, Ceylon, Brazil and the island of Madagascar. Initially, like most fruit, it is green. As it ripens it turns red, when it is harvested and dried. As the berries dry they shrivel and turn from red to bronze-black. These are black peppercorns, aromatic and of comparatively mild strength. To obtain a stronger pepper, some of the berries are peeled. When dry, these berries are smooth and pale fawn or – well – pepper colour. They have more strength and less aroma than the black corns. Both variations of dried peppercorns, however, retain their properties as long as they remain whole, in so remarkable a way that ever since Roman times pepper has been one of the most valuable and universally used of all spices.

And those green pepper berries? In their soft, unripe state they have for long been used in the local cooking of the pepper-growing regions, going straight from the pepper vine into the pot. But it was not until the nineteen sixties that a French planter on the island of Madagascar started experimenting with methods of preserving the little green berries for export, thus creating fresh export markets for Madagascar pepper, and at the same time offering a virtually new spice to the kitchens of the world.