Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (28 page)

If I have given the impression that Kyriakou was not a very good cook I have done him an injustice; the loving devotion with which he prepared that dish was worth all the professional skill in the world. The flavour of that octopus stew, the rich wine dark sauce and the aroma of mountain herbs was something not easily forgotten.

Later in the war Kyriakou went off to join the Greek Navy, giving me as a parting present a miniature electrical Caffé Espresso machine which made wonderful coffee and which accompanied me throughout the rest of the war. We never saw him again, but to this day I cannot see a row of sponges displayed in a shop window without wondering what became of that Chaplinesque sponge-diver who was so enchantingly not of our world.

Wine and Food
, Autumn 1950

Letter to Jack Andrews and John Flint

November 21st 1973

Dear Jack, dear John

What a wonderful evening – your hospitality is a joy, and I don’t know how to say adequate thanks –

The first time I’ve had partridges this year, and what a treat. Once I had to make that dish, with lentils, for a lunch given by André Simon, for eight people. He had nobody to cook for him in his London flat – and that was the dish he requested – so I had to get it all half ready, and then transport it to his kitchen and finish it there. What a worry
that
was. I thought your artichoke purée was a marvellous idea. And the pomegranates – my beloved Suleiman couldn’t have done them better. I was sad not to be able to eat as much of that dish as I would have liked, for fear of damage to fillings and crowns (had been to the dentist that morning).

I have evolved some new methods with bread and I think they might interest John – maybe you should come round one baking day, and take photographs for the record? I have a whole mass of stuff for my new book, only half-written, so not yet typed, or in any presentable form. Also, have done quite a bit of research re different mixtures of flours, useful when you can’t find supplies of strong plain. Will communicate.

Very much love to you both

Liz

Christmas in France

Dinner on Christmas Eve in a French farmhouse of the pre-1914 era was a succession of homely country dishes for which almost every ingredient would have been produced on the farm itself. A characteristic menu, sustaining and solid, reads as follows:

Poule au riz à la fermière

Jambon cuit au foin

Petits pois jaunes en purée

Dindonneaux farcis aux marrons

Salade de céleris et betteraves

Poires étuvées au vin rouge

Galettes à la boulangère

Fromage de la ferme

Café. Vieux Marc

Vins: Moulin-à-Vent et… eau de puits

Escoffier, recording the dinner in a professional culinary magazine in the year 1912, thought it, in its ‘rustic simplicity’, worthy of inclusion among the festive menus of the Majestics, the Palaces, the Ritz-Carltons, the Excelsiors of Europe. How many of these menus, he asks, would be in such perfect taste? One senses a hint of envy in his words, for any chef who served such a menu in an English restaurant of the period would have been a laughing stock. The Carlton (where Escoffier was then presiding) Christmas menu for that year started with the inevitable caviare and turtle soup, and went on through the fillets of sole with crayfish sauce, the quails and stuffed lettuces, lamb cutlets, out-of-season asparagus, the foie gras and frosted tangerines, to start again with the truffled turkey, celery salad, plum pudding, hot-house peaches,
friandises
. At an elegant Paris restaurant, the Marguery, the Christmas Eve dinner at the same period consisted of one service only. Oysters, consommé with poached eggs, timbale of lobster, truffled chicken or pheasant, green salad, pâté de foie gras (in those days served after the roast rather than as an hors-d’oeuvre), an ice, plum pudding or
bûche de Noël
, fruit. The only concession to the festive season is the inclusion of the plum pudding and Yule log, otherwise it might have been a well chosen dinner for any winter’s evening. For Christmas in France has never been quite the occasion for the prodigious feasts of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon countries. A people for whom food is one of the first considerations every day of the year tend to
regard the English preoccupation with eating for one week only out of the fifty-two, as rather gross.

Alfred Suzanne, whose book on
La Cuisine Anglaise
(he had been chef to the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Wilton) is still the chief source of information to the French about English cooking, referred to the ‘hecatombs of turkeys, geese, game of all sorts, the holocaust of fatted oxen, pigs and sheep… mountains of plum puddings, ovens full of mince-pies’. Philéas Gilbert, another well known contemporary chef, went to some trouble to prove that ‘
le plum pudding n’est pas anglais
’, but graciously conceded that, being already so rich in national dishes, the French could afford to leave the English in possession of their national Christmas pudding.

In most French country households the
réveillon
supper, however elegant the rest of the food, includes ritual dishes of humble origin such as boudins or blood puddings in some form or other, and various kinds of bread, biscuits, and galettes to which some ancient religious significance is attached. In Provence no fewer than thirteen of these desserts are traditional, while the main course is always a fish dish, usually salt cod, accompanied by snails, potatoes and other vegetables, salads and big bowls of the

shining golden aïoli for which the finest olive oil has been reserved. For here the Christmas Eve supper is eaten before the celebration of Midnight Mass, and is therefore a
maigre
meal, shared by all the family, attended by the ceremony of sprinkling the Yule log with wine before setting it upon the fire, and the pronouncement, by the master of the house, of the prayer ‘May God grant us grace to see the next year, and if there should not be more of us, let there not be fewer.’

When, as in Gascony and parts of the Languedoc, the ritual Christmas dish is one of those beef and wine
estoufats
which has been giving out its aromatic scents from the hearth where it has been simmering all day long, it will probably be eaten at one o’clock in the morning after the family comes back from Mass. The recipe for one such dish, from the Albi district, is so beautifully simple that its possibilities during the days of busy preparations for the festivities will be readily appreciated. For the rest, French turkeys, geese, hams and chickens are cooked much like our own, although the stuffings may vary, and the accompaniments are very much simpler – potatoes and a salad, a purée of dried split peas or a dish of rice, rather than the sprouts, the peas, the bread sauces, the gravies and sweet jellies of the English Christmas table.

Vogue
, December 1957

Untraditional Christmas Food

If I had my way – and I shan’t – my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of an omelette and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunch time, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening. This lovely selfish anti-gorging, un-Christmas dream of hospitality, either given or taken, must be shared by thousands of women who know it’s all Lombard Street to a China orange that they’ll spend both Christmas Eve and Christmas morning peeling, chopping, mixing, boiling, roasting, steaming. That they will eat and drink too much, that someone will say the turkey isn’t quite as good as last year, or discover that the rum for the pudding has been forgotten, that by the time lunch has been washed up and put away it’ll be tea-time, not to say drink or dinner time, and tomorrow it’s the weekend and it’s going to start all over again.

Well, I know that any woman who has to provide for a lot of children or a big family has no alternative. The grisly orgy of spending and cooking and anxiety has to be faced. We are so many fathoms deep in custom and tradition and sentiment over Christmas; we have got so far, with our obsessive present-buying and frenzied cooking, from the spirit of a simple Christian festival, that only the most determined of Scrooges can actually turn their faces to the wall and ignore the whole thing when the time comes. All the same, there must be quite a few small families, couples without children and people living alone, who like to celebrate Christmas in a reasonably modest and civilised way: inviting just a friend or two who might otherwise also be alone (well, maybe, like you and me, they’d
rather
be alone, but this is an eccentricity not accepted at Christmas time) – and for such small-scale Christmas meals at least the shopping and cooking marathons can be avoided, the host and hostess can be allowed to enjoy themselves, and the guests needn’t have guilt about the washing-up.

For such a meal, I’d make the main dish something fairly straightforward and conventional, the colour and the festive look being supplied by something bright and beautiful as a garnish. Not inedible decorations, but something simple and unexpected such as a big bowl of crimson sweet-sour cherry sauce with a roast duck; a handsome dish of tomatoes stuffed with savoury rice with a capon; a Madeira and truffle-scented sauce with a piece of plain roast beef; sliced oranges with a pork roast or a ham.

The first course I’d make as painless as possible for the cook: if money were no object, lots of smoked salmon or Parma ham to precede the duck; before the beef, a French duck pâté with truffles and pistachio nuts, avocado pears, or simply a lovely dish of egg or prawn mayonnaise. Or, if you’d cooked a ham or piece of gammon or pickled pork to last over the Christmas holiday, then a few finely carved slices of that, with a bowl of cubed honeydew melon or some pickled peaches – there’s no reason why English cooked ham shouldn’t make just as good a first course as the raw Parma or Bayonne ham.

As for pudding, unless you feel you absolutely have to have at least the traditional mince pies (those who only eat the Christmas pudding because of the brandy or rum butter will find it equally delicious with mince pies), most people will be grateful if you skip straight to the Christmas dessert fruits. Usually one is too full to appreciate the charms of Malaga raisins, Smyrna figs, almonds,
glacé apricots and sugar plums; or you could perhaps finish up with a big bowl of mixed fresh pineapple and sliced oranges.

BAKED FILLET OF BEEF WITH TOMATO FONDUE

Fillet is not a cut I often buy; it is expensive and always has to be ordered in advance because there is such a big demand for it and only a small piece in each animal, and then one gets so sick and tired of the fillet steaks which are often the only safe thing to order in restaurants. But Christmas weekend, when so many families are buying poultry, hams, gammons, spiced beef and legs of pork instead of the usual weekend joint, is a good moment to try for a really fine piece of fillet. It is so easy to cook and carve, and provides such an excellent contrast to cloying Christmas food.

Suppose you have a fillet weighing about 1.2 kg (2½ lb) which should provide two meals for four people, all you have to do is to brush the joint with olive oil or melted beef dripping, stand it on a grid in a baking tin, put it in the centre of a pre-heated moderately hot oven, 190°C/375°F/gas mark 5. There you leave it, without basting or turning it over or paying the slightest attention to it for 45 minutes to an hour, according to whether you want it very underdone or only moderately so. You put it on a long hot serving dish (let it stand a few seconds before carving) with watercress at each end, and, separately, serve the following tomato fondue, which can be made in advance if it’s more convenient and then gently heated up.

In a small saucepan heat 45 g (1½ oz) butter: in this melt 2 finely sliced shallots or 1 very small onion: add 4 large skinned and chopped tomatoes, a seasoning of very little salt, nutmeg and dried basil. Cook gently for a quarter of an hour. Add 1 tablespoon of brandy or Armagnac and simmer slowly another 10 minutes. Finally, add a tablespoon of Madeira, a little chopped parsley, a small lump of butter and the small quantity of meat juices which have come from the meat; the fondue is ready.

But if you feel like an extravagance buy a small tin or jar of black truffles, add the juice from the tin at the same time as the brandy, then the sliced truffles. Serve in a little sauce tureen. And as an alternative choice for a guest with traditional tastes, have either some horseradish sauce as well, or plenty of parsley butter, and potatoes, either plain boiled – or, easier still because they
won’t get overcooked while you aren’t looking – boil the potatoes in advance, keeping them somewhat under-done, cut them in quarters and bake them with butter or beef dripping in a shallow dish in the oven while the beef is cooking.

Either with or after the beef, a very simple salad of Belgian endives sliced into 1-cm (½-in) chunks, with an ordinary dressing of olive oil and wine vinegar or lemon juice to which a pinch of sugar as well as salt and pepper is added, will be very welcome. Then cheese, perhaps a beautiful piece of Lancashire instead of the conventional Stilton, and fruit.