text:
' _The New Yorker_ magazine ran an interview with a cove called Lemuel Benedict – now that _is_ a proper New York name. He took a monster hangover to The Waldorf and ordered hot buttered toast, crisp bacon, two poached eggs and a hooker of hollandaise. The chef was intrigued, substituted English muffin for toast, Canadian bacon (back) for crisp (streaky) and there you are: a legend was born. This is how cooks make food: they see something, taste something, and then tinker with it'

**— A.A. GILL, BREAKFAST AT THE WOLSELEY**

'When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe'

**— JOHN MUIR, MY FIRST SUMMER IN THE SIERRA**
Foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi

Learning to Cook Sideways

Bread

Cornbread, Polenta & Gnocchi

Batter

Roux

Stock, Soup & Stew

Nuts

Cake & Biscuits

Chocolate

Sugar

Custard

Sauce

Pastry

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements
Foreword

There is only a handful of books that end up becoming handbooks in my ideal sense of the word: a bound companion I keep on hand, always ready for use; an undisputed, dependable voice of authority on a subject close to my heart. _The Flavour Thesaurus_ , Niki Segnit's first book, is my handbook for pairing flavours.

I received my copy from a friend in 2010. After a quick run-through and an initial feeling of awe at the chutzpah of the endeavour, I sat down and read. I read it cover-to-cover and could not believe my luck. Someone had just handed me the equivalent of the Rubik's cube solution booklet I had as a child – only this one held the solution for every kitchen puzzle imaginable!

As a chef and a cookery writer, my job is to endlessly test flavour combinations. I do this in my head, I do this in saucepans and roasting trays, I do this in soup bowls and glass tumblers, and I do it on the tip of my tongue. _The Flavour Thesaurus_ is, really, the only tool that allows me to test some of my assumptions without having to turn on the stove. Will aniseed work with pineapple? Let me ask Niki. Should I add parsnip to my fish stew? I'll just flick through my little handbook here.

Yet what I find immensely gratifying is not the few minutes shaved off aimless straying on the way to a dish, but the sense of encouragement and reassurance that I am on the right track, that my thoughts are reasonable and well-grounded. In her writing, Niki Segnit brings together a towering edifice of cooks, food writers and experts to inspire the utmost confidence. And even as she presents their weightier points, she makes absolutely sure no one falls asleep. Chuckling away whilst reading a book about food is not something that happens to me very often; it's a regular occurrence with either of Segnit's books on my lap.

Here's a wonderful example from _Lateral Cooking_ : 'Broth is a stock with benefits – the ingredients that create it are eaten rather than discarded. _Pot au feu_ is a good basic example. It's a "poem of the French soul", according to Daniel Boulud, and one that takes a good while to compose. Marlene Dietrich liked to make it in the lulls between scenes. It doesn't, however, require a lot of attention, so there'll be plenty of time to run your lines and pluck your eyebrows.' Who wouldn't be seduced by the Boulud-Dietrich-Segnit trio?

The point I am making is serious, though. What is so compelling about the world of Niki Segnit is the way she takes her phenomenal body of work – based, no doubt, on long days spent in reading rooms with heaps of scholarly texts – and then deftly weaves in personal stories and anecdotes. Humour is an essential element, as is the sensuality of eating, lest anyone get the wrong impression about _this_ particular thesaurus.

Her distinctively relaxed style, combined with a clever, schematic way of breaking down a vast subject into palatable – though not always bite-size – pieces is carried through with great panache to _Lateral Cooking_. In the same way as our food experiences were deconstructed in her first book, giving us clarity of the crystally kind and lots of 'a-ha' moments, her second book examines our food activities and shows how magically interconnected they all are. By exposing the relatedness of one cooking technique to another, and of one dish to the next, it uncovers the very syntax of cookery.

As a cookery writer, I have to admit, I am pretty jealous of this achievement. It shows a depth of understanding and a degree of insight that I probably couldn't ever master. But what I am far more resentful of is the fact that Segnit has managed to fulfil one of my deepest, nerdiest fantasies. When writing recipes, I find it almost impossible to accept the moment at which I need to stop testing. It simply kills me every time I'm forced to lay to rest all the variations that haven't been tried, the potential masterpieces that will have eluded me if I don't explore one final option. It's the culinary equivalent of FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out that epitomises the angst of our age.

_Lateral Cooking_ is devoid of any such anxieties because it is a cookbook full of open-ended recipes. On top of the official version, Segnit offers a bunch of 'Leeways', to use her term. These keep the recipes alive; they grant us freedom to experiment, given confidence by the rich toolkit Segnit generously equips us with. So a simple loaf of bread, for example, can have a third of the flour in it replaced with the same weight of warm apple purée – which, when baked, fills the room 'with the aroma of apple fritters'. Who on earth would be happy with a boring old standard loaf after reading this? And if apples, why not quinces? Or apricots? Or even courgettes?

It takes a person with a particular kind of knowledge to open up a whole load of roads-not-taken for those of us who are keen on going on a journey of exploration: knowing how to write whimsically, cleverly, confidently and yet modestly; knowing how to cook; knowing how to inform and not bore; knowing how to entertain and tickle; knowing how to enchant and enrapture the imagination. These are the writer's qualities that have brought about another handbook – one for imaginative cooking.

**YOTAM OTTOLENGHI**
Learning to Cook Sideways

My maternal grandmother cooked everything from scratch and by heart – that is, with an assessing eye, an experienced touch and absolutely no recourse to written instruction whatsoever. What would she have made of the shelves in my kitchen? There's Anna, Claudia, Delia, Fuchsia, Madhur, Marcella, Nigel, Nigella and Yotam. There's _The Fruit Book_ , _The Vegetable Book_ , _The Mustard Book_ , _The Yogurt Book_ and _The River Cottage Meat Book_. There's _How to Cook_ , _How to Eat_ , _What to Eat_ and _What to Eat Now_. And yet for years the size of my library was inversely proportional to my confidence in cooking from it. I could cook something a dozen times and still have to dig out the recipe. When I did, I conformed to the image of the Stepford cook: obedient to the point of OCD. If a recipe called for one teaspoon of water, I would lean level with the tap and fill a teaspoon precisely to the brim, discarding it and starting again if the spoon overflowed and left me millimetrically shy of the measure.

In my defence, my grandmother's culinary horizons were narrower than my own. Her repertoire comprised, perhaps, a few dozen classic British dishes, seasonally adapted. What lurked beneath the crust of her crumble depended on what fruit was available: rhubarb stalks from under their upended bucket, or apples from any of the six varieties she grew in her tiny back garden. Over the course of my childhood and adolescence, Indian, Thai and Chinese food were added to the melting pot of British cuisine, or at least British culinary competence, on top of the French, Italian and Spanish classics mastered by my mother's generation. Now keen cooks can buy Japanese nori and sushi rolling mats in their local supermarket. Hawaiian _poke_ is the big thing this year, apparently. Compared to my gran's homely roll-call of toad in the hole, shepherd's pie and jam roly-poly, the vastness of today's international repertoire surely inhibits its committal to memory. And in any case, would it be worth it, when you can look up anything online?

My short answer is yes. My long answer is this book.

_Lateral Cooking_ grew out of the experiments with flavour combinations that informed my first book, _The Flavour Thesaurus_. Simply stated, testing whether one ingredient complemented another often called either for the adaptation of a classic dish or the creation of a new one. Putting these borrowed and original recipes to the service of one flavour combination after another, I began to get a feel for the basic formulae that underpinned them. I put them through, essentially, a process of reverse engineering – adapting or inventing a dish, then stripping it down until I had the starting point for all the other flavour combinations I wanted to try.

As my folder of starting points grew stout, I began to write down quantities for different dishes and portion sizes, and opportunities for leeway – that is, workable substitutions when certain ingredients weren't available, or interesting variations I'd either come across in my reading or thought up myself. Eventually I realised not only that I was referring to my tattered manila folder more than any of the cookbooks on my shelf, but also that I was beginning not to refer to the folder either. I was learning to cook by a combination of memory and instinct, like my grandmother.

Bread, for example. In the old days I'd select a book from my shelf, depending on what sort of instruction suited my mood. Homely yet bracingly strict? Traditionalist? Modernist? Terroir-fixated ethico-sensualist? No wonder I never quite figured out what the common denominators were. I was too busy worrying about the provenance of my sorghum flour, or whether a Gruyère and walnut fougasse hatched in a walled garden in Wales could possibly taste the same baked in a dodgy old oven off the Euston Road. But after identifying a standard starting point for bread – and bread has one of the most standard – I had, within a couple of loaves, weaned myself from reference to the method. A few more, and the proportions of flour, water, yeast, salt and sugar were committed to memory. At the same time, I became accustomed to the feeling of dough on the fingers, its demands for more flour or water, and the point when the gluten has stretched and you feel the consistency change, subtly but unmistakably, like the day summer shades into autumn.

The basis of _Lateral Cooking_ , then, is a set of starting points which, once you're familiar with them, will prove almost infinitely adaptable, according to whatever is in your fridge, in season, on offer at the market, or you feel like making. With any luck, the starting points will help you become the kind of cook I've always wanted to be – the kind that can tug down a bowl and get cracking on a dish whose precise quantities and combination of ingredients might vary each time I made it. An instinctive cook, in short.

With such memorability in mind, I have erred on the side of simplicity in the starting-point recipes. There will be fancier ways to make a loaf, or a stock, or a mayonnaise, and I make no claims that my methods represent any sort of ideal. What they do represent, I hope, is a set of basic preparations that it's up to you to elaborate, to particularise, to make your own. Each of them has been rigorously tested, but part of the point of _Lateral Cooking_ is to encourage experiment, and experiments, as the post-Stepford cook in me is happier to accept, can and will go wrong; all I can say is that an openness to error is a prerequisite of the freer approach to cooking that I hope the book might inspire.

My work on _The Flavour Thesaurus_ has left me with a permanently flavour-orientated cast of mind, which leads to the second major element of _Lateral Cooking_ – a range of flavouring options for each of its starting points. So many classic dishes are, at heart, flavour variations on a common theme that it seemed natural to progress from the basic method to the adjustments in flavour that turn a béchamel, for example, into a Mornay sauce or a soubise. In addition to the classics, I've also grouped more loosely related flavour variations together. For instance, following the starting point for _fesenjan_ , the Persian stew typically made with crushed walnuts and pomegranate molasses, you'll find other nut-based stews like korma, African _mafe_ , Georgian _satsivi_ , and Peruvian _aji de gallina_ , all of which have ingredients in common and similar methods. Try a few of these lovely stews, and you'll soon be squirrelling through your cupboards for nuts to create your own take on them.

Then there are the more obscure, non-traditional and even counter-intuitive suggestions. For these I've trawled the ideas of chefs and food writers, past and present, as well as devising a few of my own. Granted, sometimes only vanilla will do, but no lover of ice cream should rest until they've tried the olive oil variety that I first sampled in Ronda, or the sweet and sour cream-cheese ice cream devised by Alain Ducasse. The Japanese flavour their ice cream with sesame. My current favourite is lemon, made by a method so simple it requires neither a custard base nor any churning.

As to original flavouring ideas, I hope the fun I've had departing from the classics demonstrates how a grounding in the basic principles can free you up to follow your own chains of association. Researching custard, for example, I came across a Greek dish, _galaktoboureko_ , which despite sounding like something from the Death Star canteen turned out to be a very homely hybrid of custard slice and baklava – more specifically, a lemon- (or vanilla-, or cinnamon-) flavoured custard, sandwiched between layers of filo pastry, drizzled with a sugar syrup flavoured with orange, brandy or ouzo, and finished with a shake of icing sugar. I had some filo pastry, and some pastis that could stand in for ouzo. But which flavour to try for the custard? Vanilla was too vanilla. Lemon sounded nice. But then my mind turned to coconut. I have had a thing about coconut tarts since, aged seven, I first read Clement Freud's _Grimble_ ('The tart... was the best thing he had eaten since the corned beef and apricot jam sandwich'), and begged my mother to make me one. The idea of crunchy flakes of filo against a trembling coconut-flavoured custard reawakened that early yearning. What if I set off the creamy sweetness with a sharp lime-flavoured syrup? Or warmed it with cinnamon? Or spiced rum? I was straying a long way from Greece, but not so far from the essence of the original that the results failed simultaneously to honour it and to embody something new. (I went with the coconut and lime. It was out of this world: galaktically good.)

I always find it frustrating when I follow a recipe that sounds terrific on paper, only to find its supposedly dominant flavours smothered by something stronger. Likewise, I've bought far too many flavoured chocolate bars, in snazzy wrappers with prices to match, that amount to little more than chocolate with a curious aftertaste. All the flavouring options in _Lateral Cooking_ have been tried and tested – both for their deliciousness, and, (slightly) less subjectively, to ensure the flavour in question is detectable in the finished dish. Today's cooks have a stupendous variety of inexpensive aromatics at their disposal – so if you're going to use them, I say do it conspicuously.

The idea that the individual starting points might lie on a continuum, linking one with the next, came to me as I started to put the contents of my manila folder into order. Organising the starting points like this, I felt, would make learning to cook by heart that much easier, especially if I could, wherever possible, keep quantities and methods consistent. Take the nuts continuum, for example. Marzipan can be nothing more than a mixture of equal weights of ground almonds and sugar with just enough egg white to bring them together. Macaroons, the next point on the continuum, simply call for more egg white, which is whisked with the sugar before the ground almonds are folded in; as with marzipan, equal weights of sugar and ground almonds are used. Use the whole egg, rather than just the white, and you have the batter for Santiago cake (add whole oranges and baking powder to make Claudia Roden's famous variation on it). Add the same weight of butter as sugar and almonds for frangipane – and so on, through the linked sequence of nut dishes, to end at the Persian nut stew _fesenjan_.

In my steady transformation from recipe-dependent to ingredient-led cook, I've found that I've become less wasteful, since I have more ideas for cooking whatever is to hand. Furthermore, developing an understanding of the _relationship_ between recipes has made me more resourceful in the kitchen. If you're planning a Sunday roast, it makes sense to have American pancakes for breakfast, as the same batter can be loosened with water for Yorkshire puddings. Or with milk to make _crespelle_ , stuffed with ricotta and spinach for a repentantly meat-free Monday supper. If you're whipping up a chocolate tart for a dinner, but have some ganache left over, you could divide it into batches, and flavour one with cardamom, one with _poire_ eau-de-vie, or whatever flavouring strikes your fancy, and roll into truffles. Or add more cream to make a versatile chocolate sauce. It never hurts to have a jug of chocolate sauce in the fridge.

Catch on to the family relationship between dishes, both in terms of ingredients and techniques, and you realise how certain preparations you'd thought were outside your experience are, in fact, reassuringly similar to dishes you've made a dozen times before. How could I have shied from trying my own tortillas when I routinely made chapatis? Once I'd started building on my chapati experience to make my own tortillas, an ancillary benefit of expanded _technique_ became apparent – in this case, getting better at rolling. Soon I could roll fresh tagliatelle for two faster by hand than it took me to locate, dust, assemble, use, dismantle and wash up my pasta machine. It's a question of confidence, ultimately. Nail the daily loaf and brioche feels like less of a challenge.

None of this is to cock a snook at recipes. I still get lost in cookbooks, old and new, and tear recipes out of magazines and paste them in my scrapbook. It's just that now I can't read a recipe without wondering whether, at base, it boils down to one of the starting points collected in this book. If it doesn't, I make a note. I have some exploring to do.

SOME GENERAL ADVICE FOR THE LATERAL COOK

The first thing I would say is: cook. A lot. The internet in its abysmal depths makes it easy, and all too tempting, to subsume yourself in theory. But there's no replacement for practice, and plenty of it. Creating your own version of a dish is a case of trial and error – you'll need to make it several times to get it right. Take notes along the way. Too often I've soldiered on, confident I'll remember the ingredients I used to tweak a dish one way or another, only to find myself racking my brains the following day. Last year, the precise make-up of my improvised and much-lauded Christmas cake went unrecorded, and this year's wasn't half as good, haunted as it was by the Cake of Christmas Past.

The second: practise self-forgiveness. Once in a while your first attempt at a dish will turn out brilliantly, but more often, bracing yourself as you remove your chocolate Genoise from the oven, you'll be faced with the stark reality of human imperfection. And this is as it should be. That first mutant pancake died so its successors could live. Experiencing the process of cooking a dish is an indispensable part of understanding it, and, naturally, you can't adapt something to your own tastes until you know what it is you're adapting.

Third: blame your tools. Variations in cookware, utensils, appliances, room temperature and the side of bed you got out of can all have unpredictable effects on your cooking. Ovens are notoriously capricious. There's a good article on Slate.com called 'Ignore Your Oven Dial' that I recommend you read. The best you can do, it would seem, is to use an oven thermometer to check how accurately the temperature knob accords with reality. Accept that domestic-oven controls are approximate and you'll start to rely more on your senses to judge whether something is cooked.

SOME THOUGHTS ON USING THIS BOOK

The book is divided into twelve chapters, or continuums. Each one begins with a short essay about the dishes the continuum comprises, and how those dishes are connected. The rest of the chapter is divided between 'starting points' – giving a basic recipe for each dish and a 'Leeway' section detailing possible adaptations and substitutions – and 'Flavours & Variations', describing the many directions a dish can be taken in, and hopefully providing some inspiration for your own experiments. Where useful, there's also a pictorial section for further stimulus.

I have tried to make clear distinctions between 'authentic' recipes and various in-the-vein-of approximations, but I fully accept some instances may be arguable. Even for the simplest of dishes there are squabbles, if not to say armed confrontations, over what constitutes the real thing. Note also that the starting-point recipes are not conventionally laid out. For example, oven temperatures and directions for preparing tins are not given at the outset – so it's essential you read the recipes through at least once before starting to cook.

Once you get to know the starting points – or your personalised versions of them – you can use them to 'read' recipes in other cookery books and magazines. For example, with the starting point for custard in mind you can judge pretty accurately whether other versions are likely to be too sweet or too rich for your taste.

Likewise, you might use the tips in the Leeway sections of this book to adapt comparable recipes you find elsewhere. I'm not promising that it will always work; nor should the results be attributed to the originator of the recipe in question. But if you're short of a stipulated egg, or a carton of buttermilk, the wriggle room laid out in the Leeways may prove helpful, if only to save you from the hell of the online cookery forum, where the most innocent, practical question can quickly devolve into a vicious and dogmatic scrap.

Some of the given Flavours & Variations are entirely consistent with the starting points. Others deviate, to a degree, in their ingredients, proportions or methods, and are included more to demonstrate how departures from the starting point can achieve a similar end. Where a starting point is split between two or more preparations, such as flatbreads and crackers, some of the Flavours & Variations will be for one preparation or the other: it will be clear from the context which is which. That said, the vast majority of starting-point flavourings will be applicable to all the preparations. Further, in many of the continuums, flavours categorised under one starting point can be applied pretty freely to the others.

Where, in the name of clarity, I've picked an example flavour for a starting point – strawberry in the case of sorbet, for instance – note that the Flavours & Variations will apply to sorbets in general, rather than strawberry in particular. In most instances the Leeway will likewise apply to the general principle rather than any specified flavour.

Please exercise common sense when it comes to hygiene and the risk of food poisoning. Keep your hands and equipment clean at all times. Familiarise yourself with the ingredients that need to be cooked through before serving. If you're unsure what constitutes 'cooked', a digital thermometer, and the temperature guides they invariably come with, will prove very handy. Learn which ingredients need to be kept refrigerated, and cool cooked foods as quickly as possible, especially in the case of rice, meat, seafood, eggs and dairy.

SOME NOTES ON MEASURES AND INGREDIENTS

VOLUME VERSUS WEIGHT I use American cups wherever they make the process easier – but give metric equivalents too. No doubt you'll stick to one system or the other, but note that in these starting points they are safe to use interchangeably. It's fashionable, in these prescriptive and pernickety days, to weigh everything down to the last milligram – particularly when it comes to baking – but I declare myself a sceptic. Slightly sketchy volume measurements have been used in the US for years, and in my experience there are a lot of reliable, if not to say great baking books that rely on the cup, for all its cheerful imprecision.

WEIGHING LIQUIDS It's also become the done thing to give water measurements in grams. Note that 1ml of water weighs 1g, so you can choose whether to weigh your water on the scales or measure it out in a jug as you prefer. Milk and cream are close enough to 1g per 1ml too.

GLUTEN-FREE I have tried wherever possible to include gluten-free options, although I have to admit to my inexperience in this field, particularly from a dietary-needs perspective. I defer to regular users of gluten-free flour mixes in their understanding of where and how substitutions can be made.

BICARBONATE OF SODA Not interchangeable with baking powder. Bicarbonate of soda needs acidic ingredients (buttermilk, brown sugar, golden syrup) to activate it. Use too much bicarb in a cake or bread and it will create a soapy or metallic taste. Baking powder, for its part, is a mixture of bicarbonate of soda and an acidic activator.

BUTTER Use unsalted so you can salt to taste. Salted is fine if you're only using a few tablespoons in a bread dough or a batter.

COOKING OIL I often call for bland oil, by which I mean groundnut, corn, grapeseed or vegetable. Sunflower too, although I know that for health reasons many people prefer not to heat it.

EGGS Assume either medium or large, unless one or the other is stated. A medium egg in the UK weighs between 53 and 63g, large between 63 and 73g.

MIREPOIX A fancy name for the mixture of diced onion, carrot and celery used as a base in many recipes.

SEASONING For the most part I don't mention when and if to add pepper: that's up to you. As for salt, the levels I recommend are to my taste, which you may find on the low side. This book would be considerably saltier if my husband had written it.

SUGAR If a recipe calls for sugar rather than caster sugar, you can use either caster or standard granulated. The latter will just need longer to cream, whisk or dissolve into a mix.

DEEP-FRYING WITHOUT A DEEP-FRYER

Use a pan no more than a third full of oil: oils with a high smoke point are particularly good for deep-frying, and include groundnut, corn or vegetable oil. Lard is another option. Some cooks prefer to use a wok, but only do this if yours is stable on the hob. If your pan has a handle, keep it pointing towards the centre of the hob, where it's less likely to be knocked. Keep any children or pets well out of the way, and never leave hot oil unattended. Have the lid of the pan close at hand and cover the pan immediately if it catches fire. If not the lid, use a baking tray, fire blanket or fire extinguisher. Never throw water on an oil fire.

Heat the oil over a medium heat, uncovered. Check the temperature with a frying thermometer: you're aiming for 180–190°C. If you don't have a thermometer, use a cube of dry-ish bread, which should turn golden brown in 10–15 seconds. Alternatively, if you're frying battered ingredients, a drop of batter should sink then immediately rise to the surface and start to sizzle and colour. Wet food will make the hot oil splutter, so dry it as best you can before frying. Be careful not to drop ingredients into the oil, as it will splash; use tongs or a strainer to lower them in instead. Fry in batches to avoid crowding the pan and lowering the temperature of the oil. In between batches, bring the oil back to optimum heat and skim off any debris. If the oil starts to smoke at any stage, remove it from the heat straight away and allow it to cool.

Once the ingredients are cooked, remove them to a tray or plate lined with kitchen paper to soak up excess fat. If necessary, keep them warm in a low oven until you're ready to serve. When you're finished with the oil, let it cool, strain it into a jug and funnel it back into the bottle; discard your deep-frying oil if it starts to taste rancid or take on any unwanted flavours.
Bread

Towards the end of a month-long road-trip from Louisiana to Nevada, I started to miss my kitchen. I could be found trailing around vast American grocery stores, deterred from buying steak or fish or vegetables for want of anywhere to cook them, with so few items in my basket that I became convinced the store detective was tailing me. Most often I would end up buying canisters of dried herbs or interesting spice mixes. This, of course, created its own set of problems at the airport. Plump, transparent packets of brownish-green plant-matter are not designed to smooth your passage through security.

My notebooks were as crammed as my suitcase. Scribbled sketches and descriptions, some legible, of ideas collected en route: twenty-layer lasagne, barrel-fermented cocktails, kimchi _croque monsieur_ , a _tres leches_ cake I'd eaten in the Sonoran Desert and was itching to adapt. And what did I do with this spirit of culinary adventurism on my return home to London? Make bread. Not green olive and amaranth seed _dampfnudel_. Just ordinary brown bread, plain and good and familiar.

For I had opened the front door of the flat to find a strange smell. My mind riffled through its olfactory index cards and came up with Essaouira, a windswept, salt-caked city on the Atlantic Coast of Morocco where they make backgammon sets and pen-holders and sundry tourist tat from thuya, a local wood famous for its pungency. Something was clearly wrong. Usually when unoccupied for a few days the flat developed a cold, bland aroma, like refrigerated pastry. Not a street bazaar in North Africa. There had been a leak from the flat above and the smell was coming from water-swollen floorboards. I rolled up my sleeves, fetched down a bowl, and made bread. In this respect, at least, estate agents are right. There is nothing so redolent of warmth, shelter and comfort as the smell of browning flour and yeast. It did so much more than mask the reek of rotting floorboards; it re-established our residence.

I made a lot of bread during the months it took to sort out the insurance, by which time the habit was ingrained to the extent that I've hardly bought a loaf since. A direct result of unforeseeable water damage, my bread-making habit can thus be considered an act of God. Yeast-leavened bread is one of the easiest recipes to learn by heart – four basic ingredients combined in more-or-less standard proportions and by a simple method. It is also highly amenable to experimentation. As to the method, you will within a few loaves have a feel for the right texture and know how to recognise the moment when the dough is sufficiently worked. That's not to say I have it down pat. My hands lack the strength the master baker needs to pull and twist and truly dominate the dough. In my case, it's a pretty even match. Perfect or not, my home-made efforts are consistently good, and far cheaper than the loaves in the local fancy bakery. Of the hundreds I have made, only one tasted terrible (because I used truffle oil – I know, I know). And a few have fallen short of the ideal rise. My father-in-law's six-year-old sachet of instant yeast can take the rap for one of these, but the others were mostly the result of using water that was too warm for the yeast. Nonetheless, toasted and spread generously with smoked salmon pâté, even the dinkiest slices can look rather elegant, and you can always tell your guests you custom-baked the loaf for canapés.

Once you develop the bread-making habit, the experimental phase will soon follow. There are so many ways of adapting the basic recipe: swapping the water for beer, milk, cider, wine or fruit juice; using different combinations of flours; adding nuts, seeds or dried fruit. Starting with small quantities of dough is a good idea when experimenting with more outlandish flavours. Bread proportions are easy to scale, and it can be enjoyable to knead a small amount with one hand – so much so that one day I lost myself and made fourteen small mounds of dough, leaving them to prove on every available surface in the kitchen. Returning an hour later was like walking into a breast-implant showroom.

To make a simple loaf, use 500g strong flour, 300ml warm water, 2 tsp instant yeast and 1 tsp salt. To this you might add oil, or a little butter, and a tablespoon or two of sugar to enrich and develop the flavour. Understand that this is in no way _my_ recipe. It's very much the standard, and is therefore worth committing to memory. It was rather easier to remember in the imperial days, when the equivalent ratio was a pound of flour to a half-pint of water, but the metric version will soon lodge itself immovably in your head. This proportion of flour to liquid applies to all but one of the starting points on the bread continuum, making it easier to gauge the practical differences made by the tweaks and variations in ingredients along the way, and to develop an understanding of what might happen when you make a change. It won't be long before you can make a huge range of breads by heart.

FLATBREADS

And so to the first starting point on the bread continuum: unleavened flatbreads and crackers. Making this sort of dough is a simple matter of adding enough warm water to flour to make a unified mass that feels nice to knead. You don't really need a recipe at all, but it's not a bad idea to follow the basic bread proportions above, leaving out the yeast. It may be that you need to add a little extra liquid to bring all the flour into the dough, especially when using a wholemeal flour, say for chapatis. Brown flour is thirstier than white. Begin with our starting point, adding the liquid in small increments until your dough hits the sweet spot of springy firmness between dry and sticky. A water spritzer will be your friend here. If you overshoot on the liquid, add more flour. Once it feels right, knead for a few minutes, then rest (covered or wrapped) at room temperature for half an hour before rolling out. Seasoned chapati-wallahs can turn a ball of dough into a disc ready for the pan without a rolling pin, using the sort of glancing slaps of the hands with which the rest of us might rid our palms of excess flour.

This most basic of recipes – flour, salt and water – comes in a surprising number of variations. Chapati dough is made with atta, a soft wholemeal flour also used to make flaky parathas and puffed puris. You can try all three of these breads – distinguished by their different finishing techniques – with just one batch of dough (see **here** and **here** ). Made with maida, a soft white flour, the same dough yields a bread called luchi and a sweetened version of the same, which can be rolled extra-thin to make the pancakes served with Chinese crispy duck. Tortillas are made in a similar way, either with wheat flour or a treated cornmeal called masa harina, and sometimes a little lard. It's worth noting that both cornmeal and masa make for a considerably stickier dough.

CRACKERS

Several varieties of cracker share the starting point with flatbreads, but the dough is rolled, cut and then baked, rather than being cooked on the hob. Jewish matzo crackers are made with white flour, and olive oil is added to the dough in such quantities that you'll need to ease up on the water a bit. Like water biscuits, matzo are pricked all over with a fork, to stop them buckling in the dry heat of the oven. You'll also find oatcakes and charcoal crackers in the Flavours & Variations section, alongside the Japanese buckwheat noodles _ni-hachi_ soba. Pasta dough, that is the sort without egg, can be made with an identical mixture of flour, oil and warm water. The difference is in the length of the knead – about 10 minutes, before its 30-minute rest at room temperature.

The addition of a small amount of chemical raising agent – i.e. bicarbonate of soda or baking powder – to the same ingredients can make a disproportionate difference. This extremely versatile starting point is next on the continuum. The finished bread will have a more honeycombed, spongy texture, as in a slightly puffier flatbread, or something more suited to a classic cheese sandwich.

SODA BREAD

If it _is_ a sliceable bread you're after, but time is of the essence, soda bread is hard to beat. As Elizabeth David observes, soda bread calls for a light hand and no patience – the opposite of the qualities demanded by its yeast-risen equivalent. 'Everybody who cooks, in however limited a way, should know how to make a loaf of soda bread,' she says. Apply the general flour-to-liquid ratio, working with 250g flour and 150ml buttermilk (or any of the similarly acidic liquid alternatives listed under Leeway), ½ tsp salt and ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda. As with unleavened and yeasted breads, a little fat and sugar can be added. If I need a loaf in a hurry, I make soda bread with atta, the very fine wholemeal flour used for chapatis, and add an egg. Not quite what you might find on a Donegal farmhouse table, but my favourite of the many versions of soda bread I've tried. In Ireland, the sweetened soda bread called Spotted Dog is made with dried fruit. An Englishman might well be tempted to call it a Bloody Big Scone.

SCONES

Scones are made from the same starting point as soda bread, but here the butter is mandatory. Rub in about 25g per 250g flour. It's standard to add a teaspoon or two of sugar, common to add a modest sprinkling of sultanas. In the US, scones are generally unfruited and known as biscuits. As in the UK, they may be served with butter and jam, but they're more usually found drenched in gravy and served with sausages for breakfast. As an ingénue in Atlanta I kept seeing roadside ads for biscuits and gravy that conjured images of chocolate digestives floating in beefy broth. Each to their own, I thought, until a native Georgian ordered me a plate of biscuits smothered in thick, peppery gravy and I quickly saw the point.

My mother makes her scones with baking powder. When I first tasted the kind made with bicarbonate of soda I wasn't convinced. Soda can have a distinctly unappetising, alkaline, metallic/soapy character. Add too much, and it can give your teatime treat a whiff of a continental food market scrubbed down with bleach at the close of business. Used judiciously, it can lend your scones a crisp clarity of flavour that makes a wonderful contrast to the fatty indulgence of clotted cream or butter. A hint of soda is notably compatible with cured foods, as in the pairing, native to the American South, of biscuits with country ham, or the unbeatable Irish combination of soda bread and smoked salmon.

COBBLER

The same dough is used to make cobbler – a meat stew, or fruit compote, paved with what might be described as shallow scones, and baked in the oven. It's a shortcut to the ample satisfactions of a pie. This starting point not only furnishes a quick bread, but a quick pastry; where shortcrust pastries need to be rested in the fridge before cooking, scone mixture is best used as soon as it is mixed. You don't even need to roll it out. Simply place spoonfuls on top of whatever it is you're cobbling, and bake.

YEAST-RISEN BREAD

A yeasted loaf, on the other hand, is by necessity a slow business. Even made with instant yeast, which only requires one rise, and with a nice warm corner ready for the rise to take place, it will still be a good hour and a half until your bread is baked. And most people would agree it's best left for a few hours after it emerges from the oven. The advantage of making bread regularly, as I have since my ceiling nearly caved in, is that you soon get the hang of how to fit it into your schedule. It might never be quick. But you can make it convenient. Very little of the process is hands-on. Our starting point requires 12–15 minutes of your time, then a break for an hour or so (during which you can wring out your paperbacks and wash down your walls with mould remover), then a few more minutes of activity before the bread has a second rise and then heads into the oven for approximately half an hour.

If it suits you better, you can always slow the process by proving the dough in the fridge. Most seasoned bread-makers concur that a stately rise improves the flavour. One Friday evening, I mixed up a basic dough in between applying layers of eyeliner, then left it to prove while I went to the pub. The next morning, opening the fridge to fetch bacon and butter for breakfast, I found two beautiful loaves plump in their tins and ready for the oven, as if prepped by culinary elves, even if my husband spoiled the magic by reminding me that I'd knocked back the dough and put it in the tins before falling into bed.

I must have had one wine too many, as my original plan had been to make one loaf and use the remaining dough for pizzas and a tray of _fatayer_ , a samosa-like, triangular Arabic pasty filled with lamb, spinach or cheese. This basic bread dough is amazingly versatile. It can be shaped into rings, proved, boiled and then baked to make bagels. Knead in a little extra oil to make focaccia: roll it into a rectangle, prove, pucker it all over like a Chesterfield sofa, add your preferred toppings and bake. Breadsticks (grissini), bread soup bowls and even pies can all be made using the same dough. It's almost always worth making a large amount if you have space to store it. Start with a kilo of flour and work from there.

If you've never made your own croissants, try taking some spare dough and laminating it. Lamination is the process used to turn plain old pastry dough into multi-leaved puff. The process is as simple as laying a rectangle of cold butter over the dough, then rolling and folding it several times. Once the lamination is done, the dough is rolled out before being cut into triangles that can be rolled up into the classic croissant crescent-shape, or rectangles that can be folded into _pains au chocolat_ or _raisin_.

Before moving along the continuum, it's worth noting that there are two important alternative approaches to yeast-risen bread. The first is the sponge method. This involves making a batter using the yeast, warm water and some of the flour, and leaving it, if possible overnight, to bubble into a tasty mulch before the rest of the ingredients are added, and the bread is proved and baked in the usual way. You'll find details of the sponge method **here**. If time is no object, it's definitely the way to go, as the slower fermentation creates a greater depth of flavour.

If time is _really_ no object – if you're prepared to wait the days it takes for natural yeasts to grow – you should consider making a starter, or 'mother', for sourdough bread. Sourdough starter is made by mixing up flour and water. Regularly 'feeding' it with fresh flour and water will, with luck, generate a naturally yeasted, highly flavoured batter that will eventually be strong enough to raise a loaf. Making bread this way is an undertaking, but an enjoyable one, and once you've caught the bread bug it's next to inevitable you'll be tempted to make sourdough. I have had mixed results over the years. More than once I have found my mother too weak to raise a loaf; even when it works, I can find the sourness excessive, as if I've added too much vitamin C powder. In _Tartine Bread_ , surfer-baker Chad Robertson lays out his technique (extending to over twenty-six pages) for a sourdough loaf that is at once highly flavourful and not particularly sour, which is the way I think it should be. So much of the artisanal sourdough you find in hipster bakeries is confrontationally sour, like your woebegone friend who thinks it's a hoot to be negative about everything.

BUNS

A small tweak takes us from yeast-risen bread to buns – currant buns, hot-dog rolls and burger baps. These soft, fluffy breads use mildly enriched dough, made by replacing some or all the water with milk, adding an egg, and a little butter and sugar too. Throw in a handful of dried fruit and mixed spice if you're making teacakes. An unsurprising consequence of adding another liquid ingredient (egg) is that the dough can be quite sticky. You'll be glad of a dough hook attachment for your electric mixer, or at the very least some plastic gloves if you're mixing by hand.

BRIOCHE

In _The Art of French Baking_ , Ginette Mathiot gives a recipe for 'poor man's brioche', which on close inspection differs little from our starting point for buns. Bona-fide brioche dough is nothing but bun dough with a lot more egg and a lot more butter. As you might imagine, the quantities of egg and butter render the usual binding agents, milk or water, mostly redundant. Nonetheless, the quantities are consistent with our starting point for yeast-risen bread. Our brioche calls for 5 eggs. A large egg is about 50ml, so 5 eggs = 250ml. Add to this the 50ml water or milk used to activate the yeast, and there it is again: the standard 300ml liquid to 500g flour. The result is a kneadable dough. To this, however, you need to work in the butter. The standard amount is half the flour weight, as with shortcrust pastry. (Your dough can, in fact, be used as a pastry – roll it out to make a tart case, or wrap it around sausages for _saucisson_ brioche _._ ) So, for a dough containing 500g flour, you'll have to incorporate a whole 250g pack of butter. For this reason, most recipes recommend making brioche in a stand mixer, or failing that, either a hand-held electric mixer fitted with dough hooks or a food processor. Failing _that_ , there'll be nothing for it other than to be Marlon Brando to your dough's Maria Schneider. Roll your sleeves up, put on some mood music, and get to work until the butter becomes one with the dough. Even if you don't enjoy the sensation, you can take heart from the fact that your hands will be soft for a few days.

As any pastry-maker will know, butter prevents the gluten strands in flour from lengthening, which is the desired effect when making shortcrust, and very much not the desired effect when making bread. Furthermore, butter is no friend to yeast, and neither is egg. It's for these reasons that, among breads, brioche is the trickiest. The most common problem is that it fails to rise much, or as much as you expected (even though the generous quantity of egg will have some leavening effect). The most common solution is patience. Making brioche can easily take three times longer than you have been led to expect.

The large amount of egg white in brioche also makes it vulnerable to drying out during the baking process. Some _briochiers_ avoid this by replacing an egg white or two with yolk. Even so, it should be noted that home-made brioche does not enjoy the same shelf-life as the supermarket variety. Make sure there's room in the freezer for any brioche not consumed within 48 hours, or put stale remainders to good use as _pain perdu_ , in bread-and-butter pudding, or sliced and toasted, then drizzled with syrup and served with cream. Use a rum syrup and you'll have something approaching a low-rise rum baba.

BABAS & SAVARINS

Babas and savarins are the next starting point along the continuum. Take a bite before pouring over the syrup and you'll note that the bun is quite dry. Its destiny, however, is to be so soused in rum that it becomes, in effect, an after-dinner drink with a pudding in it. According to Elena Molokhovets, it was traditional to give babas three rises, but most modern recipes stipulate two, and some, as in this book, only one. There are even versions that dispense with yeast in favour of baking powder, like the baba in _The Art of French Baking_. The mixture in our starting point is at the wetter end of the spectrum – instead of replacing most of the water or milk with eggs, as in brioche, I use them in addition: 150ml milk and 3 eggs for 250g flour. The result is closer to a thick batter than a dough.

According to culinary historian Richard Foss, the French flavoured their babas with brandy until 1835, when a Parisian pâtisserie switched allegiance to rum, thereby bringing the idea to the attention of chefs. It was, however, the ring mould, invented in 1844, that won the rum baba its continental fame. Alain Ducasse serves his baba in the alternative classic shape, akin to a stout-stalked, small-capped porcini mushroom, presented on a gleaming silver dish. The waiter splits the baba from cap to foot and offers a choice of six premium rums, giving tasting notes for each, before finishing off the dish with Chantilly cream.

In contrast to the neat rum used by Ducasse, most recipes call for (a more economical) sugar syrup laced with rum. Elena Molokhovets says this should be 'sweet but watery'. I'm not so keen. The classic rum baba is too close to the proverbial cake left out in the rain. I prefer the denser sweetness of gulab jamun and baklava, each bite exuding a sweetness as sticky as a romantic novel. For this reason, I make my rum syrup with a 3:2 sugar-to-water ratio, as opposed to the standard parity. Many recipes recommend cooking the rum with the sugar syrup. Unless you're about to operate heavy machinery or treat a subdural haematoma, this is a terrible idea. To cook the rum is to drive off its flavour molecules, leaving the good stuff tasting cheap and the cheap stuff tasting like bad vanilla essence. If you do want to restrict the amount of alcohol in your syrup, far better to add a teeny amount of raw rum to a sugar syrup flavoured with a vanilla pod. Alcohol content can also be reduced by replacing the rum with liqueur, most of which contain about half the ABV. Crème de cacao and Kahlua are excellent candidates if you plan to garnish your baba with cream. If fruit is involved, try Amaretto. You might alternatively consult a cocktail book like _Death & Co_, or, for non-alcoholic inspiration, the syrup Flavours & Variations section.

In some recipes the baba itself is embellished. Russian babkas are often flavoured with lemon zest or almond. Currants, soaked in more rum, or kirsch, are popular too, and may be augmented with grated citrus zest and candied peel, like a miniaturised panettone. Obviously, whatever cake flavouring you choose should complement the flavour of your syrup, and vice versa.

You may have noted that the mixtures along the continuum have been getting steadily wetter, from unleavened bread, dry enough to roll very thinly, through yeasted bread and tacky bun dough to buttery brioche and batter-like baba. As a rule, they get richer too. At the heart is the same basic idea: 300ml liquid to 500g flour, which makes them pretty easy to commit to memory. Ruined floorboards or no, you'll soon be able to fetch a bowl, grab the ingredients and get on with it. The reward is in the eating, and the sharing. Good fresh bread is irresistible to all but the stoniest-hearted devotee of low carbs.

**Flatbreads & Crackers**

A versatile starting point that can be used to make a dough for all sorts of flatbreads, including chapatis and tortillas. Make a few batches, and you'll see why people in India and Mexico bother to make their own. Don't feel restricted to their cuisine of origin. Fresh flatbreads are excellent with thick soups, bean stews and for quesadilla-style sandwiches. The same dough can be boiled to make noodles (see buckwheat) and baked for crackers.

_For 8 × 17cm round flatbreads, or 16 × 9cm round crackers_

INGREDIENTS

250g flour **A B**

1 tsp salt

150ml warm water **C D**

1–2 tbsp fat – optional

**1** Sift the flour and salt into a bowl, make a well in the centre and add the warm water. Mix to a dough using a spoon, your hand or both. Add a little more flour or water as necessary to create a soft dough that's not too sticky.

The water needs to be warm to make the dough more sticky and cohesive. For a richer, more supple dough, 1–2 tbsp oil, melted butter or lard can be added to the water. Or rub _solid_ fat into the flour until it's all but vanished, then add the water.

**2** Knead the dough for 1–2 minutes until smooth.

**3** Cover the kneaded dough with a clean tea towel and let it rest for 30 minutes. If making crackers, wrap in cling film and leave in the fridge for 30 minutes to firm up, so the dough can be rolled and cut into defined shapes.

FOR FLATBREADS

Divide the dough into 8 evenly sized pieces, then roll into balls. With a rolling pin, roll each ball out to a rough circle, about 2–3mm thick. Cook the breads on a hot, unoiled frying pan or flat-surfaced griddle until brown and spotted on one side. Then flip and aim for the same on the other. Keep the cooked breads wrapped up warm while you finish the rest.

You can use flour when rolling out, but this can make the bread a bit dry. A lightly oiled surface is preferable. Turn the circle like a steering wheel every now and then, and flip it a couple of times too. Keep any unused dough covered to prevent it drying out. To optimise the cooked bread's flavour, you might brush it with a little melted butter or ghee while still hot, and give it a modest sprinkle of salt. The bread is best eaten soon after it's cooked. Raw dough can be stored in the fridge for a few days.

FOR CRACKERS

Roll the chilled dough out to a 2–3mm thickness, then cut into crackers using a knife, pizza wheel or cookie cutter. Transfer to a greased baking tray and prick with a fork, or dock with a docking roller or skewer. Bake at 200°C for 8–10 minutes until the crackers have golden patches. Cool on a rack and keep in an airtight tin.

LEEWAY

**A** Atta or wholemeal flour will make a chapati. Note that wholemeal flours tend to need a little more liquid to make a good soft dough; start with 150ml and add more as necessary. Use plain white flour to make South African roti or Indian luchi. To make puris, which are also made with white flour, proceed as opposite, before deep-frying the rolled-out breads one at a time. The dough will puff up, so be prepared to keep it submerged with tongs.

**B** This dough is hospitable to add-ins like grated carrot or chopped herbs.

**C** Use warm juice in place of the water. Some, like carrot, will give the dough a mild flavour and a vibrant colour. Remember to roll out on a lightly oiled, as opposed to floured, surface. (In the case of my beetroot flatbread, this looked not unlike calamine lotion rubbed on bad sunburn.)

**D** Use cold water, but you might need a little more of it.

Flatbreads & Crackers → Flavours & Variations

BARLEY

How medieval English peasants loathed their brown, coarse barley bread, even more so when supplemented with beans. Imagine the ragged churls, to bed on a heavy stomach, dreaming of soft bread made with wheat. If only they could try a slice of processed white loaf, compressible to a pellet of claggy, dense paste, and see where that desire has left us. As wheat strains became more adaptable to poor climates and capable of returning higher yields of easy-to-harvest grain, barley fell from favour. That said, in some places it remains one of a few viable crops – parts of Scandinavia, for example. In Norway, it's traditional to celebrate a child's baptism with a barley flatbread, some of which is put aside for _their_ grandchild's ceremony. Barley is now enjoying something of a comeback, precisely for the reasons it was once shunned: its strong flavour and lack of gluten, as well as more contemporary desiderata like its notably low glycaemic index. You can make flatbreads with 100 per cent barley flour, but using about 25 per cent wheat flour will make the dough easier to roll and the finished breads more tender. Compared to using wheat flour alone, more warm water may be required to bring the dough together, but start with 150ml and add in small increments until a soft dough forms.

BUCKWHEAT

The flatbreads starting point can be used to make noodles, including Japanese _ni-hachi_ soba. _Ni-hachi_ means 'twice 8': centuries ago a bowl cost 16 mon, the currency of Japan before the yen took over in 1870. As it happens, 2 and 8 also represent the ratio of wheat flour to buckwheat. Artisan soba are made with 100 per cent buckwheat, but for the inexperienced this dough is tricky to fashion into noodles that will cook without breaking up. By contrast, the gluten in wheat flour helps _ni-hachi_ dough cohere. I use hot water to accelerate its activation, although this is not authentic. Use 200g buckwheat flour, 50g white flour (strong or 00, if you have it) and 150ml hot water. Make up a dough as for flatbreads. Note how the instant you add liquid to the flour the fragrance of buckwheat rises like the ghost of the grain: dry, nutty, with a tang that recalls sourdough. Once the dough has come together, knead it for 10 minutes, then roll it out as thinly as possible into a rectangle. Dust very lightly but thoroughly with buckwheat flour, then fold in the short ends so they touch. Dust the surface and fold in again. Cut into noodles about 2–3mm in width. Cook immediately in boiling salted water, green tea or broth for 1–2 minutes. A simple way to eat your practice noodles is with a few dashes of soy sauce, sesame oil and thinly sliced spring onion, though you can use them in any recipe that calls for fresh soba or, according to Shizuo Tsuji, for udon. Noodles can also be made with 100 per cent wheat flour, like pasta, but using semolina flour or cornflour to dust the layers.

CHARCOAL

In a paper published in the _British Medical Journal_ in 1862, Thomas Skinner M.D. noted that the problem with charcoal, 'a most invaluable medicine', was the near-impossibility of administering it. Charcoal biscuits, he said, were one possible solution, if only patients could be encouraged to take more than a nibble. Around this time the Wigmore Street baker J.L. Bragg solved the problem by making a cracker with fine stoneground charcoal. The company bearing his name continues to make them today, using activated charcoal derived from coconut husks. Activated charcoal is still the main treatment for patients who arrive in A & E suffering from poisoning, especially of unknown or mixed origin. Usually administered as a soft drink or slurry, it absorbs toxins and has an emetic effect on most patients. Good to know if your unpasteurised Camembert is a bit on the ripe side. Make your own charcoal biscuits, so long as you don't mind your kitchen looking like you've taken up action painting with blackboard paint. Rub 2 tbsp butter into the flour and salt at step **1**, then mix in 4 tbsp fine activated charcoal (available at www.charcoal.uk.com) before adding the liquid and proceeding from step **2** to finish the crackers.

CHICKPEA, SPINACH & NIGELLA

_Missi_ roti is an unleavened flatbread popular in Rajasthan and the Punjab that combines chickpea and wholemeal flours, and usually something green for flavouring – maybe some spinach, coriander leaves or spring onions, or all three. Pomegranate or ajwain seeds (a thyme-flavoured aromatic native to India and Pakistan) provide an optional sharp or bitter dimension. Ajwain seeds are sometimes labelled lovage on their Indian packaging, but be prepared for them to taste of thyme, with hints of anise and oregano, rather than the distinct celery flavour of European lovage. I like my _missi_ roti with spinach and nigella seeds. The cooked rounds of bread are so fibrous you'd think they were woven rather than kneaded. Use 50/50 chickpea flour and wholemeal flour, then mix with the salt and 2 handfuls of frozen chopped spinach, defrosted and squeezed, and 1 tsp nigella seeds. Bring the dough together using warm water as per the method for flatbreads, but hold some back, as the spinach will yield its own moisture. Cook on a hot non-stick frying pan (or _tawa_ ) until, turning and brushing with ghee or butter once or twice. Brush the just-cooked bread with more ghee or butter and give it a little sprinkle of sea salt to maximise the flavours. Eat your _missi_ roti while it's still warm. I like mine with good-quality cottage cheese and a tickle of lime pickle.

CHINESE PANCAKES

Making your own crispy duck and pancakes is borderline eccentric – like, say, making your own car. If you insist, for the authentic Chinese-restaurant experience, make sure you provide at least one pancake less than each diner would like. James Martin gives a recipe that makes a wetter flatbread dough and requires boiling rather than warm water: 225g strong white flour to 175ml boiling water. No need to rest the dough. Simply divide it into 16 balls of equal size. Roll into rounds as thinly as possible, cook as per the flatbreads method and keep warm until needed. Serve in a bamboo steamer.

CINNAMON

I was relishing a plate of hot aubergine fries at Moro's tiny tapas offspring, Morito, when I spied a piece of flatbread masquerading as a napkin at the bottom of our bread basket. I wrapped it around a faggot of fries and took a bite. The bread was flavoured with cinnamon, just enough to be noticeable. That we flagged down the waitress and ordered another basket with such urgency was only a matter of due diligence; we needed to verify the compatibility of cinnamon flatbread with salt-cod _croquetas_ , harissa and a racy sheep's cheese with honeycomb. The hint of warm spice wreathed the _bacalao_ and cheese like aromatic smoke from a campfire. For something similar, use our starting point to make a dough with a mix of wholemeal and white flours. When cooked, brush the bread with a little butter then shake over some cinnamon. How much? Somewhere between a rumour and a whisper. If you start to hear jingle bells, you've overshot.

COCONUT

_Pol_ roti is a very popular Sri Lankan flatbread made with a mixture of grated coconut and wheat flour. Grating fresh coconut gives juicing passion fruit a run for its money when it comes to Sisyphean kitchen tasks. Live a little by using a food processor, or better still, buy a pouch of frozen grated coconut from your local Indian or Thai supermarket. The rest is a breeze. It's a lovely dough to roll, cooperative and smooth. Savoury _pol_ roti might contain sliced onion, shredded curry leaves, fresh or dried chilli. These usually accompany curries, or are served for breakfast with a piquant onion, fish flake and chilli sambol called _lunu miris_. Plain _pol_ roti are eaten with butter and jam, or _kithul_ treacle, a maple-syrup-like extract of _Caryota urens_ , a tree also known as the toddy, jaggery or wine palm. Mix 125g flour with 125g grated coconut, ½ tsp salt, 60–75ml warm water or coconut water and make as per the method for flatbreads (less liquid is needed to bring the dough together as the grated coconut is so moist).

CORN

A single scoop of masa harina and I understood why in Mexico, unlike so many countries, corn has not been entirely trounced by wheat. A freshly made corn tortilla is sweet, with a yielding texture that makes transcendent sense of your tostada or enchilada. By comparison, shop-bought tortillas have the mouthfeel of wet cardboard. Masa takes a good deal more water than grain: 250g masa harina to 350ml warm water. Make as per the starting point until you reach the finishing directions for flatbreads, then cook your tortillas on a _medium_ heat for about 15 seconds on one side. Flip, and cook for another 30–45 seconds until the tortilla is speckled brown. Flip once more, and cook until the same effect is achieved: cook on too low a heat, and your tortilla will dry out; too high and it'll blister. Collect the finished tortillas in a basket, wrap them in a clean tea towel, and allow to rest for 10 minutes.

MATZO

At Passover Seder it's traditional to refer to matzo as 'the bread of our affliction'. Whatever happened to the seven-layer cake of salvation, wonders Kugel in _Hope: A Tragedy_ , by Shalom Auslander. To make matzo crackers, follow our starting point, using plain white flour. Make the well, as at step **1**, but _before_ adding the water, pour in 3 tbsp olive oil, then add just enough warm water to make the dough soft but not too sticky. Leave to rest, unless you're making your matzo for Passover, in which case the dough must be made and cooked within 18 minutes, to forestall any fermentation. Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces and roll each one out until it's nearly see-through. Sprinkle with salt, prick all over with a fork (or apply a docking roller) then bake on a pre-heated baking tray at 240°C for about 3 minutes; turn, and give it another 1–2 minutes. Leave to cool on a rack while you bake the rest.

MILLET

Waverley Root was a bit dismissive of millet: it was a primitive food for primitive cultures. Although millet is amongst the hardiest of cereal crops, the Romans tossed it aside for barley as soon as they could. According to _The Oxford Companion to Food,_ millet can range from 'thoroughly palatable to bitter and unpleasant'. In India, a species called finger millet, or _ragi_ , is used to make roti _._ Follow the starting point for flatbreads, although note that you may need a little more water to bring the dough together. _Ragi_ has a striking fragrance – the sort of dusty, mingled aroma familiar from the spice aisle of an Indian grocery. When I rolled the pinky-grey dough into a passable flatbread and transferred it to the pan, it looked like Iggy Pop's tongue, circa 1972.

OATCAKES

A Methodist's flapjack. Top a plain oatcake with squeezy-cheese cross-eyes and a lolling tongue made of ham and it would still be dead serious. Oatcakes even _look_ like sackcloth. Still, they are very easy to make, especially if you've committed the starting-point proportions to memory: 250g cereal (in this case, oatmeal) to 150ml hot water (with 1–2 tbsp fat melted into it) and 1 tsp salt. Use medium oatmeal, or a mix of 70 per cent medium oatmeal and 30 per cent coarse or pinhead if you want something more fibrous. It takes all of 2 minutes to mix the dough, warm and heavy in the hands, recalling horse-feeds made up in winter. Once mixed, let the oatmeal expand and cohere for a few minutes, then roll, cut and bake as per the method for crackers. Easy enough to make a big batch of dough, divide it, and try a few flavour variants. Add boldly flavoured whole seeds, like caraway or cumin, to serve with stinky cheese, or mixed peel and mustard to serve with Cheddar. Marcus Wareing makes a pumpkin seed and thyme oatcake, which he suggests pairs well with Camembert or goat's cheese.

POTATO PARATHAS

Carb-coupling – as terrifying to the dieter as double denim is to the fashionista. An English chip butty will do it, as will a Spanish _bocadillo de tortilla_ (potato-omelette sandwich) or an Indian potato paratha, even if the last has the mildly redeeming feature of being made with wholemeal bread. The basis of a potato paratha is the chapati, as outlined at **A** under Leeway, but once the rounds are rolled, about 1 tbsp potato curry is spooned into the middle. The sides of the chapati are then drawn up around the curry, and the whole thing is re-rolled into as flat a circle as can be managed without splitting it. It's now ready to cook on the griddle, as per the method for flatbreads. Some cooks find it easier to place the filling on a roti and then seal it with another on top, which has the advantage of accommodating more filling. To make the potato curry, warm some vegetable oil in a pan. Add 1 tsp cumin seeds and wait until they start to pop before stirring in ½ onion, finely chopped. When the onion has softened a little, add chopped green chilli to taste. Sprinkle in 2 tsp garam masala, stir, then quickly add 250g mashed potato. When it's all well mixed, taste for seasoning, add ¼ tsp amchoor (mango powder) for an optional lick of sourness, and stir in some chopped coriander, if you like. Common alternatives to the potato filling are keema (spiced lamb mince with peas), a thick dal or vegetable curry.

REFRIED BEAN PUPUSAS

In El Salvador and Honduras, they take tortillas a stage further to make _pupusas_. Divide your corn tortilla dough (into portions the size of golf balls. Take one, and press your thumb into it, making an indentation large enough to hold 1 tbsp refried beans. Fill, then work the surrounding dough, gently easing and stretching it to cover the filling. Roll (or press) the ball out until it's about 5mm thick. The filling will be less likely to protrude if the dough is not too dry. Cook your _pupusas_ on a flat griddle, over a medium heat, for 1–2 minutes each side, until they develop brown sunspots. Expect something like a thin quesadilla, but with crisper edges. It's notable how sweet the masa dough tastes next to the salty, cumin-scented beans. Other fillings include grated cheese or _chicharrones_ (meaty pork crackling). A mixture of beans, cheese and crackling is not considered beyond the pale. _Pupusas_ are traditionally accompanied by a spicy, fermented pickle called _crudito_ , made with cabbage, carrot, onion and chilli.

Flatbreads & Crackers → Other Directions

TORTILLA SOUP

QUESADILLAS

MATZO BREI

Torn, moistened matzo mixed with beaten eggs and fried in butter – some add onions, others apple. Syrup is an optional garnish.

TACO SHELLS

Brush freshly cooked corn tortillas with oil, drape over the bars of an oven rack and cook at 200°C for 8–10 minutes.

KACHORI

Make up the starting-point dough with plain white flour. Roll out into circles and fill with thick, spicy dal, then draw up the sides to make a pouch, seal and deep-fry.

HUEVOS RANCHEROS

CURRY ROTI

Warm roti filled with curried goat, chicken, fish or veg.

FATTOUSH

Torn flatbread with cucumber, spring onion, tomato, lettuce, mint and parsley, dressed with olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and sumac.

**Soda Bread, Scones & Cobbler**

A small step on from the starting point for flatbreads and crackers: still calls for 250g flour to 150ml liquid (cold, in this instance), but with the addition of a chemical leavener, meaning the dough can be shaped into a loaf like Irish soda bread. The same dough, slightly enriched with butter, can be used for scones, or to top fruit or stews to make a cobbler. A minor variation on this dough is used for the oyster crackers traditionally served with chowder.

_For 6 scones, 1 small round loaf or enough cobbles for a 23cm dish_

INGREDIENTS

250g plain flour **A B**

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda **C D**

½ tsp salt

25g butter for scones or cobbler – optional for soda bread **E**

1–3 tsp sugar for scones or sweet cobbler – optional for soda bread

150–200ml buttermilk **F G H I J**

**1** Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a bowl. Give it a good mix.

**2** Rub in the butter (if using) until all but vanished. Stir in the sugar (if using). Make a well in the centre and add the buttermilk. Mix to a dough using a spoon, your hand or both. Add a little more flour or water as necessary to create a dough that's soft but not too sticky.

That said, some cooks like their cobbler dough on the sticky side, to be dropped from a spoon onto the fruit or stew before cooking.

**3** Flour your hands and transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface. Gently shape (rather than knead) until you have a cohesive dough.

FOR SODA BREAD

Fashion the dough into a low-ish dome and immediately place on a greased baking tray, prick it all over with a cocktail stick, cut a deep, wide cross into the top and bake at 200°C for 25–30 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Transfer to a rack and leave to cool a little before using.

Eat within a day or two.

FOR SCONES

Roll out the dough to a thickness of 2cm and cut into squares, triangles or rounds. Transfer the scones to a lightly greased baking tray, brushing the tops with egg or yolk for a shiny effect, or sprinkling them with flour for matt. Bake towards the top of a 200°C oven for 15 minutes, checking now and then to ensure they don't brown too much.

The sensible thing to do is cut your rolled-out square into small squares or triangles with a knife – this way you can use all of the dough. Some cooks make their scones by fashioning the dough into a round and then cutting it into wedges. If this offends your sense of tradition, cut the rolled-out dough into 6cm rounds. You'll need to push the scraps together to make the sixth one. Push the cutter straight down. Don't twist, or your scones won't rise as high.

FOR COBBLER

If you intend to drop spoonfuls directly onto whatever is being cobbled, you need only follow the method to step **2**. Otherwise, follow the instructions to the end of step **3**, then roll out the dough to a thickness of 1.5cm. Press out circles of about 5cm and lay them on top of the fruit or stew.

Cobbler topping can be cooked for 30–45 minutes at 160–180°C. If what's underneath needs longer than that, add the topping towards the end of the cooking time.

LEEWAY

**A** Use at least half wholemeal flour for soda bread. Strong flour can be used, but plain is better. Atta (fine wholemeal chapati flour) makes an excellent soda bread, although it's less rustic than the traditional Irish loaf.

**B** It's not recommended to replace all the wheat flour with flour made from gluten-free grains, but you can use up to 50 per cent of the weight. It's traditional to add about 50g porridge oats to the flour for soda bread, in which case you'll probably need to up the amount of buttermilk a little.

**C** If you like to taste the soda, use ¾ tsp bicarbonate of soda.

**D** Use 2 tsp baking powder in place of the ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda. In this case you won't need the acidity provided by buttermilk – use ordinary milk instead.

**E** James Villas, author of an entire book dedicated to scones (or 'biscuits', since he's American), says that you can substitute double cream for the butter.

**F** If you need a bit more than 200ml buttermilk, it's fine to top it up with milk or water.

**G** Make your own buttermilk substitute with milk and lemon juice. Pour 1 tbsp lemon juice into a measuring jug, top it up with milk to 150ml and leave for 10 minutes to curdle. Alternatively, whisk 1 tsp cream of tartar into 150ml milk. Again, leave for 10–15 minutes for the magic to happen.

**H** Use natural yogurt thinned with water instead of the buttermilk.

**I** Some cooks make their soda bread with water and vinegar (150ml water to 2 tsp vinegar), in place of the buttermilk. It's a shade rougher in texture, but still good.

**J** Some recipes for soda bread call for the addition of an egg, whisked into the buttermilk. The finished loaf will be bigger than its eggless counterpart, the crumb less dense and the crust chewier.

Soda Bread, Scones & Cobbler → Flavours & Variations

ANCHOVY & THYME

A mid-nineteenth-century recipe for cobbler, recounted by Mark McWilliams in _The Story Behind the Dish_ , suggests lining the sides of a pot-pie dish with pastry, before adding the fruit and fitting a pastry lid. Once cooked, the cobbler was inverted on a dish to create a deep, rather homely tart. An elaborate way of avoiding a soggy bottom (a gag so popular on _The Great British Bake Off_ that it had its own dressing room). Contemporary cobblers use scone dough rather than pastry, and dispense with lining the dish, in favour of a simple topping on a savoury stew or baked fruit: the quickest pie there is. In one variant, the cook need only space out spoonfuls of a rather wet dough over the surface, like dumplings. Anchovy and thyme is an apt flavour variation for beef and carrot casserole. Finely chop 8–10 anchovies, and stir them into the flour with the liquid and 1 tsp dried or 2 tsp chopped fresh thyme. Reduce the salt to ¼ tsp.

CELERY, ONION & HERB

Michel Roux Jnr's highly aromatic take on soda bread includes chopped onion and celery and celery seed, sweated in butter, then added to the flour and bicarbonate of soda, once some butter has been rubbed into them. An improvised buttermilk of milk and lemon juice is used to start to bring the dough together, before plenty of chopped mint, parsley and lovage or celery leaves are stirred in. The dough is made with double our starting-point quantities and is baked in a 900g (2 lb) loaf tin for 40–50 minutes. It tastes deliciously savoury, strangely like a Cornish pasty, by which I mean the proper beef-and-turnip sort, not chicken and chorizo or squid rogan josh.

CORN CHOC CHIP

One wintry afternoon, I made up a batch of scones using a mixture of cornmeal and wheat flour, and added dark chocolate chips. When the scones had cooled sufficiently, I sat at the kitchen table and tried one with my eyes closed. It reminded me of something. I couldn't think what. Then it hit me. I'd reinvented the 'chocolate cornflake wheel', the slender discs of chocolate-covered cereal, cut into six segments and sold in the supermarkets of my youth, until higher-margin chocolate treats like brownies and cupcakes displaced them. Follow the method for scones, substituting fine cornmeal for half of the plain flour and adding as many choc chips as fancy or frugality dictates. Tend towards the top end of the sugar quantity suggested in our starting point.

ONION

If, writes the restaurateur Stephen Bull, he were to be 'forever denied, as retribution for some imaginary transgression', a single favourite thing to eat, it would have to be the scone. 'Never mind... a grey-legged partridge or a caramelized scallop, the removal of the humble scone from my diet would be a dreadful punishment. I'm not sure why this should be; the scone is, in baking terms, one of the lower invertebrates – hardly a sophisticated confection.' Bull gives a recipe for a dough made with cheese and sun-dried tomato – ideal, he suggests, for a cobbler or scone to serve with scrambled eggs and bacon. I also like his onion scone recipe, especially because he suggests serving it with poached eggs and an onion sauce, which would make an excellent vegetarian brunch if you replaced the animal drippings with butter. Cook ½ large Spanish onion, finely chopped, in 2 tbsp duck or bacon fat until lightly browned. Set aside, and then, in the same pan, cook 2 tbsp thinly sliced leeks for about 5 minutes. Rub 50g butter into 225g plain flour, sifted with ½ tsp each of bicarbonate of soda and salt. Stir in the onion, leek and 20g grated Parmesan. Mix in as much of 200g yogurt as is needed to make a dough that's sticky but not wet. Transfer to a floured surface and knead for a few seconds. Roll out to a thickness of 2cm, and cut out 5cm rounds. Bake on a lightly greased baking tray at 200°C for about 15 minutes. Serve the scones cut in half with a poached egg on top, and an onion purée made with 150g thinly sliced onions, cooked in a lidded saucepan over a medium heat with 25g butter and a pinch of salt until meltingly soft. Blend the onion with 130ml hot milk, adding double cream if, in Bull's words, 'you're reckless'.

PARSNIP, PARMESAN & SAGE

Parsnip and Parmesan is a signature Delia Smith combination. Her roast parsnips in Parmesan have become such a Christmas staple that she has since created a parsnip and Parmesan roulade with sage and onion stuffing, and a quick-to-make loaf in the soda-bread vein. Smith suggests serving the latter with tomato soup, or alongside a plate of washed-rind cheese with apple and celery, but I like it with a cooked breakfast. Grate the parsnip and dice the cheese the night before, then all that remains is to mix the dough and slip it in the oven before digging out the frying pan. The following adapts Smith's flavours to our starting point for soda bread. Use plain flour, sifting it into a bowl with ½ tsp salt and 2 tsp baking powder. Add 175g grated parsnip and stir to coat it evenly with flour. Add 50g Parmesan, cut into 5mm dice, and a generous 1 tbsp finely chopped fresh sage. Mix to a dough with 75ml milk and 1 large beaten egg. (Less liquid is used than in our starting point, due to the wetness of the grated parsnip, and the egg.) Bank on 35–40 minutes of cooking time, about 10 minutes longer than the unflavoured bread, using the skewer test to check: when it's ready, a skewer inserted in the centre should come out clean.

PESTO

Supermarket pesto has a cut-grass quality that isn't altogether pleasant on pasta. It's a cut above, however, when eked out in scone dough. Add 2 tbsp pesto to our starting point for scones, and use only 125ml buttermilk. Opt for square or triangular scones, rather than fussing over rounds, and you can be eating them inside 20 minutes, split in half, still warm, and with a finger's depth of cold, white, creamy goat's cheese.

RAISIN

This lightly sweetened, fruity version of Irish soda bread – known as Spotted Dog – is a good alternative to cake if you're watching your sugar consumption. Butter a slice, and if you're pining for jam, try crushing a few ripe raspberries on top. Neither soda bread nor scones keep too well, but they'll still be good for toasting after a few days, and will last longer if you include some sugar and fat in the dough. Add 1 tbsp sugar and a handful of raisins to the flour mix in our starting point. Beat in an egg with the liquid if you want softer, cakier results. Caraway seeds are a common addition to Irish-American soda bread: throw in 1–2 tbsp seeds, along with the sugar and raisins.

SEMOLINA

_Harcha_ are Moroccan flatbreads-cum-cakes, a bit like English muffins. They're made with semolina, a little sugar, warm milk and butter, and cooked like griddle pancakes. In a bowl, mix 250g fine semolina, 1–3 tbsp sugar, ¼ tsp salt and ½ tsp baking powder. Melt 100g butter with 100ml milk, and mix into the dry ingredients. Give the dry ingredients a minute or two to absorb the milk and butter, then knead into a smooth (and notably greasy) dough. Roll out to a thickness of roughly 5mm, press out circles and cook on a medium – hot griddle until browned on the underside, then flip and brown the other side. Eat warm, split in half and spread with honey and cream cheese. In place of milk, some cooks use buttermilk or leftover mint tea; I once tried using freshly brewed mint tea, but it wasn't apparent in the finished _harcha_.

SWEET POTATO & PECAN

Thomas Jefferson was a gourmet. He was the first man in America to grow fennel, and he adored the fine wines of Burgundy. His recipe for sweet potato 'biscuits' has been adopted and adapted by The City Tavern, a historical re-enactment restaurant in Philadelphia, where they bake them every day. ('Biscuits' are what we in the UK call scones.) They are rich, nutty and fruity, with hints of spice and creaminess. If a scone could be _premier cru_ , these would make the grade. The following is a slight adaptation of their adaptation. Rub 100g butter into 250g flour, then stir in 100g light brown sugar, ½ tsp each of ground ginger, allspice and cinnamon, and 1 tbsp baking powder. Make a well and rub in 250g cold mashed sweet potato with 125ml double cream and 4 tbsp chopped pecans. Roll out the dough to a thickness of 3cm and cut out 5cm rounds. Bake 2cm apart on a lightly greased baking tray at 180°C for 25–30 minutes (i.e. in a slightly cooler oven and for a longer time than in our starting point for scones).

TREACLE

If beer is liquid bread, then bitter, malted Irish treacle loaf is sliceable Guinness. Give it a generous head of ivory whipped butter, deep enough to leave a blob on your nose. Follow the starting point for soda bread, adding 1 tbsp sugar to the 250g white flour. Add just 125ml buttermilk, with 3 tbsp treacle stirred into it, at step **2**.

YOGURT & NIGELLA SEED

Naan is the classic scapegoat for curry-gluttony. Clutching at their stomach after a tableful of poppadoms, bhajis _and_ pakoras, dal (for health purposes), tikkas, thalis and bhunas, someone is bound to say, 'We shouldn't have ordered the naan.' But who can resist that characteristic fragrance of nigella seeds? You can make a very decent, quick approximation using our starting point for soda bread, even if classic naan is usually yeast-leavened. Use a 50/50 mix of warmed yogurt and milk for the liquid, 2 tsp baking powder rather than bicarbonate of soda, and ¼ tsp nigella seeds per 250g white flour. If you have time, give it a 5-minute knead and a 15-minute rest at room temperature. Roll the dough out to the shape of a very old man's ear and sprinkle a few seeds over the top before cooking on a flat griddle, or, so the bread develops a charred edge, on the barbecue – the rolled-out dough can be laid directly on the grill. Flip once. Just remember not to leave any rolled-out uncooked dough near the heat, or it will turn to goo. For something akin to a Peshwari naan, blend 50g grated or desiccated coconut, 50g sultanas and 50g flaked almonds or pistachios to a rough paste, and spread a small amount between two rolled-out rounds of dough. Seal the edges, then roll out again, trying not to break the surface, and cook.

Soda Bread, Scones & Cobbler → Other Directions

**BOSTON BAKED BEANS ON TOAST**

See here

**DUBLIN CODDLE WITH SODA BREAD**

Bacon, sausages, onion and potatoes, very slowly simmered in water or cider, garnished with parsley, and with a big hunk of soda bread on the side.

**SODA BREAD, OYSTERS & A PINT OF GUINNESS**

**CRUMBS USED FOR BROWN-BREAD ICE CREAM**

See here

**SAVOURY BREAD & BUTTER PUDDING**

(Detectable soda flavour is not so nice in a sweet version.)

**CROUTONS**

Break stale bread into pieces, toss in oil and toast in a 200°C oven until crisp, then use on soups and salads.

**CRACKERS FOR CHEESE**

Slice old soda bread thinly, brush with oil and bake at 200°C for 10 minutes.

**SODA BREAD**

... for smoked salmon, or eaten warm with butter and jam.

IRISH STEW WITH SODA-BREAD COBBLES

**Yeast- risen Bread**

This starting point involves the same ratio of liquid to flour as the previous two, but yeast is used in place of the chemical leavener in soda bread. A yeasted dough is extremely versatile. It can be used to make loaves, rolls, pizza bases, flatbreads, grissini, bagels, pies and, with the addition of extra fat, focaccia and croissants. Make a kilo's worth and you'll have a cooling rack like a harvest festival. If you're not in a hurry, the sponge method outlined below at **I** under Leeway will result in a better flavour.

_For a medium-size round loaf, or 12–14 bread rolls_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

500g strong white flour **B**

2 tsp instant yeast **C D**

1 tsp salt **E**

1–2 tbsp sugar – optional **F**

1–2 tbsp butter or oil – optional **G**

300ml warm water **H**

Milk or beaten egg for brushing – optional

**1** Weigh out the flour into a large bowl. Stir in the yeast, salt and (if using) sugar. If using fat, either rub 1–2 tbsp diced butter into the flour until it's all but vanished, or add a few tablespoons of oil to the warm water poured in at the next step.

Fat helps the bread keep. Even in such small amounts, butter also improves the flavour.

**2** Make a well in the centre and add the warm water. Mix it all to a dough using a spoon, your hand or both. Add more flour or water as necessary to create a dough that's soft but not sticky.

**3** Knead the dough for 8–10 minutes until smooth.

Add any chopped nuts, dried fruit or mixed peel towards the end of kneading. Some cooks might add these at step **5**, briefly kneading them in to distribute them evenly.

**4** Transfer the dough to a large, lightly oiled bowl and find a nice warm spot for it. Cover the bowl with a clean tea towel, or an oiled shower cap or piece of cling film, and leave the dough to double in size. How long this takes will depend on the warmth of its environment. Start checking on it after 40 minutes.

**5** When it has risen, deflate the puffed dough with your fingers.

At this point you can put the dough in a large freezer bag (it will slowly expand) and leave it in the fridge for later use – it will last 7 days.

**6** Fashion the dough into the desired shape(s) and transfer to a lightly greased baking tray.

**7** Give the dough its second rise in a warm place, covered. Again, you are waiting for it _almost_ to double in size. Start checking at 30 minutes for a round loaf, 20 minutes for rolls.

Clean plastic carrier bags make ideal covers. Don't let the bread rise too much, or it will deflate in the oven. It's better to under- than over-rise.

**8** Dust with flour. Or gently brush with milk or beaten egg. The latter will give you glossiness, and can act as an adhesive for seeds. Slash the top of your loaf, if you like.

The slash could be a cross, a leaf-like stalk and veins, or whatever takes your fancy. The effect is not only decorative, but gives the bread the freedom to expand. Use a razor blade unless you have a very sharp knife.

**9** Bake a loaf for 20 minutes at 220°C, then lower the oven temperature to 180°C and bake for a further 10–20 minutes. Rolls will need just 12–15 minutes at 220°C. The finished bread should sound hollow when tapped.

If you're baking the bread in a tin, you may want to de-tin it after its 30–40 minutes are up, and give it a further 5 minutes in the oven, placed directly on the rack, for a crisper crust.

**10** Transfer the bread to a wire rack to cool.

LEEWAY

**A** These amounts will also make 4–6 pizza bases. To make 2–3 bread rolls – a good quantity for flavour testing – use 125g flour, ¼ tsp salt, ½ tsp instant yeast and 75ml water. For a 900g (2lb) loaf tin, use 400g flour, ¾ tsp salt, 1½ tsp instant yeast and 240ml water. The dough should reach about rim-height at step **7**.

**B** Wholemeal and spelt flour will yield well-raised yeast bread. Some of the wheat flour can be replaced with the same weight in rye or buckwheat flour, or fine cornmeal, but only up to about 30 per cent, as their lower gluten levels make for less raise.

**C** Bread made with instant yeast (also called fast or easy-blend) can be baked after only one rise, so you can skip steps **4** and **5** if you're in a hurry. However, two rises, as outlined here, gives a better flavour.

**D** For yeasts that need activating, add 15g fresh or 1 tbsp dried to 150ml warm water with 1 tsp sugar. Allow 15 minutes for it to froth up, then add at step **2** with the remaining 150ml warm water.

**E** This amount of salt is on the modest side. Many recipes call for 2 tsp.

**F** Add a little sugar to the dough, if you like – say 1–2 tbsp for taste. Use maple syrup, honey, or any other sugar that takes your fancy. Molasses and malt syrup are often used in wholemeal breads.

**G** Fat is both optional and exchangeable. Use butter, lard, olive or sunflower oil, or the flavoured oil left over from a jar of sun-dried tomatoes.

**H** Keep your liquid options open: use apple juice, beer, cider. Milk gives a soft, very white-crumbed bread; the water used to boil potatoes gives a moreishly crisp texture to the crust.

**I** The sponge method inarguably makes finer-tasting bread. To apply it to our starting point, mix 1½ tsp instant yeast with half (250g) of the flour and 200ml of the warm water. Cover and leave for at least 4 hours, and up to 24. Then add the rest of the flour – with butter rubbed in, if you like – and salt. Mix to a dough. You may need more than the remaining 100ml warm water. Then pick up the method from step **3**. Note that because the bread is given a longer rise, it needs less yeast.

Yeast-risen Bread → Flavours & Variations

APPLE

Nestled amongst the half-timbered houses of Beuvron-en-Auge, Normandy, there's a bakery called Au Bon Pain – no relation to the American chain – that sells a _pain au cidre_ made with the local staples of apple chunks and cider. In its recipe for apple bread _The Modern Practical Bread Baker_ suggests replacing one third of the weight of flour with the same of warm apple purée, and using only enough warm water to bring the dough together. I gave it a whirl. Once it had proved, I baked the dough into rolls, which filled the room with the aroma of apple fritters when I opened the oven door. Sadly, they didn't taste much like apple fritters, but they did have a mildly sweet, bun-like crumb inside a delicious crunchy crust.

BAGELS

Hive off a bit of your yeast-risen dough to see how simple it is to make bagels. I say simple. The hard bit is making them look round and seamless, more like a bangle than a bike lock. If you're using the sponge method for the dough (see opposite), so much the better for flavour, but don't worry if not. After all, the bagel is foremost a textural matter, a workout for the jaw. My New Yorker cousin always has one for breakfast, and he can talk all day. When the dough has risen once, deflate and divide into 14 – about 65g per piece. Roll into balls, make a hole in each one and spin on your finger to make a ring. Or roll each piece into an 18cm snake and join the ends firmly to make a ring. Poach in plenty of boiling salted water, no more than 2 or 3 at a time, for a minute on each side. Remove and drain on clean tea towels. Transfer to a lightly greased baking tray, brush with beaten egg, sprinkle with seeds if you like, then bake at 200°C for 20–25 minutes.

BATH OLIVERS

'The biscuits are particularly nice, but so simple that they seem as if they were made only with flour, butter and water; but that there is some secret connected with the making has been proved by the attempts to produce them made by the uninitiated, that have only resulted in unworthy imitations of the real article. The Oliver is peculiarly crisp, and is good for either dessert or with cheese, it is stated to be the only biscuit that is fermented, and on that account is good for invalids suffering from acidity on the stomach, for which yeast is a corrective.' Pause before you bin your antacids. Dr William Oliver, Bath-based inventor of the eponymous biscuit, also believed that the city's water could cure infertility, epilepsy and piles. The entry above, from an 1874 edition of _The Food Journal_ , goes on to explain that Bath Olivers are always gratefully received as a gift by aristocrats _._ In _Brideshead Revisited_ , Sebastian and Charles learn to appreciate wine ('It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle'/'Like a flute by still water') by working their way steadily through the cellars at Brideshead, cleansing their palates between swigs of fifty-year-old vintages with Bath Olivers. The following is adapted from _The Domestic Dictionary_ of 1842. Melt 75g butter in 225ml warm milk, then stir it into 500g strong white flour, 2 tsp instant yeast and ½ tsp salt. Knead only until the dough is smooth, then wrap it in a clean tea towel (or cling film) and leave it somewhere warm for 15 minutes. Roll and fold the dough several times, as if making rough puff pastry, then roll out to the thickness of a penny. Dock the dough (i.e. poke it all over with a skewer or a knitting needle) and cut out large circles. Bake the biscuits on a lightly greased baking tray in a 140°C oven for 20 minutes. The results will not be as level as the manufactured kind, but will taste better, as the current versions are made with palm oil (the Flytes would _not_ have approved). If you've never tried a Bath Oliver, imagine a sugar-free Rich Tea.

CHERRY & HAZELNUT

Fruit and nut is a classic combination in breads destined for the cheeseboard. Raisin and walnut is the first among equals. The upscale bakery chain Maison Kayser sells a pretty pistachio and dried apricot variation. Hazelnut and dried cherry is equally happy with a goat's cheese, a sprightly Gorgonzola or a fruity Comté. A mid-brown dough is ideal (50/50 white and wholemeal flour), but you may take it a few notches darker or lighter as you see fit. Consider adding a tablespoon or two of malt extract or treacle, particularly if you're partial to fruit cake with cheese. Add the toasted nuts and dried fruit towards the end of kneading at step **3**, aiming to distribute them evenly; 50g nuts and 25g dried cherries is a good place to start for 500g flour.

CHESTNUT

Chestnut bread is a taste you might possibly acquire if you lived two hundred miles from the nearest village and had just polished off the last of the scrawny goats that eke out an existence on your barren mountain. Alexandre Dumas wrote that bread made with chestnut flour 'is always of bad quality, heavy and difficult to digest'. Xenophon of Athens, historian and student of Socrates, described it as 'headachey'. Mixing chestnut flour with flour from another grain is the best way to try it for the first time. In his focaccia recipe, Giorgio Locatelli suggests that 50g of the recommended 500g strong white flour might be replaced with chestnut flour (or chickpea flour, or toasted rice flour). Before chestnut trees were all but wiped out in the US by sweet chestnut blight, the Cherokees made bread with a mix of chestnut purée and cornmeal. The chestnuts were dried and smoked over fires in little stone structures that would look rustic and cute to anyone who hadn't seen _The Blair Witch Project_.

CORIANDER SEED & FENNEL

Much as I enjoy twirling with my arms stretched out, whenever I'm halfway up a mountainside and it's been four hours since breakfast, I feel less like Julie Andrews, and more like Alfred Wainwright with a stone in his boot. By the time I'd hobbled into the Punch Bowl Inn at Crosthwaite, in the Lake District, I was too hungry for an aperitif. Too hungry to speak. Too hungry to read the menu. Salvation came in the form of a bread basket, filled with slices of a darkish loaf riddled with coriander seed and fennel. Hunger is not only the best sauce. It makes a damn fine butter, too. Intent on making something similar at home, I mixed 250g each of rye and strong wholemeal flour with the yeast and salt, plus 1 tbsp cocoa, also stirring in 1 tbsp each of lightly crushed fennel and coriander seeds. Then, with the warm water, I added 1 tbsp treacle. I'd only had a stroll up Primrose Hill, but it tasted pretty good.

CROISSANTS

Make croissants at least once, if only to relish the smell of them baking. They're almost as good on the nose as in the mouth. Almost. The intense, salty butteriness is so much more noticeable in home-made. Croissants are the lobsters of the bread basket: the crack of the claw-like end piece and the soft flesh inside. Abjure jam and serve them with a little paper dipping cup of melted butter. It's worth noting here that there's really no need to get up at 5a.m. to prove your croissants before baking them. Simply cook them a day or two before you plan to serve them, then allow to cool, wrap well and keep in something airtight at room temperature. When you're ready to serve, unwrap and reheat them at 180°C for about 5–10 minutes. They'll still taste (and smell) heavenly. Make a yeast-risen bread dough with 500g flour, following the method to the end of step **5**. Leave the dough in the fridge while you roll out a 250g pack of butter into a rectangle about 1cm in depth. Retrieve the dough, and roll it out into a rectangle just big enough to encase the butter. Lay the butter in the centre of the dough, and fold the dough around until the butter is entirely enclosed. Flip your butter-dough parcel over, roll it out into as big a rectangle as possible, then fold and turn as you would rough puff pastry, giving the dough a short spell in the fridge or freezer whenever it's getting too warm, and again once all four turns are complete. When the folded and turned dough has chilled for at least 30 minutes, remove and divide it into two roughly equal pieces. Roll each into a rectangle about 25cm wide and as long as possible. Cut the dough into isosceles triangles, about 10cm at their base and 25cm high. This amount will yield 20–24 triangles, depending on how thick or thin you've rolled it out. In each case, snip a 1cm nick into the dough halfway along the base, and pull the base points apart slightly as you roll the dough up towards the pointy end of the triangle. Curl the two ends towards each other to form a crescent. Transfer to a parchment-lined baking tray, glaze with beaten egg and give a final rise. Bake for 20–25 minutes at 200°C.

CUMIN OR CARAWAY

Elizabeth David writes that cumin is 'particularly successful' in rye bread, although caraway and the seldom-seen dill seed meet with her approval too. Cumin-flavoured breads are found in northern Europe and the Middle East, and French _pain au cumin_ is a lovely counterpoint to Munster, Époisses or Vacherin cheese. The cumin in _pain au cumin_ may actually be cumin or caraway: either way, the cheese pairings work wonderfully. Munster, from the Vosges region, is sticky, often itself described as spicy, and seems to bring out the best in both seeds, even more so when accompanied by a glass of spicy Gewürztraminer.

FOCACCIA

For a picnic lunch in Rome, hit one of the bakeries in the Trastevere to buy mattresses of focaccia (artichoke leaf and Parmesan, or courgette flower with mozzarella and anchovy, or just plain sea salt). Buy a bag of fresh peaches or figs from a market stall and, stopping at the _enoteca_ for a bottle of something light and white, head for the Villa Doria Pamphili, taking in the fabulous views of the city as you labour uphill. Eat your lunch by the lake, watching the turtles basking in the shallow water like stepping stones. Take a postprandial nap on any leftover bread. Focaccia might look like more effort than an ordinary loaf, but it isn't. Make as per the starting point, using half strong white flour and half 00 if your larder allows. At step **2**, knead 3 tbsp olive oil into the dough. Continue to knead on an oiled, not floured, surface. At this stage you may pine for a mixer with a dough hook, but after its rise the dough will be a pleasure to touch – silky and elastic. Continue as per the method. At step **6**, fashion the dough into a rectangle of roughly 30cm × 20cm. Transfer it to a lightly oiled baking sheet, slip into a plastic-bag tent and leave to prove until it's puffed up nicely. Finally, poke it all over with your index finger, as if you were a rather insistent person making a point, then brush with a mix of 2 tbsp olive oil and 1 tbsp water. Sprinkle with sea salt and bake at 200°C for 20–25 minutes. Additional ingredients like rosemary, sun-dried tomatoes, olives or sliced onion can be scattered over the top before baking.

LEMON

When, after you've made the lemonade, life continues to give you lemons, make lemon bread. Richard Bertinet suggests serving lemon rolls in summer with salad or smoked salmon. Adapt our starting point by adding the grated zest of 2 lemons towards the end of kneading.

PAIN AU VIN & AUX HERBES

Red wine and thyme cures all ills. Adapt the starting point by using 300ml warm wine (red, white or rosé) instead of the water at step **2**. Add 4 tsp sugar, and either pick the leaves off a couple of bushy sprigs of thyme, or use about 1 heaped tsp dried. A grated small red onion added to the dough at its second knead will make it even tastier.

POTATO

The discovery that potato has a miraculous effect on bread dough can be credited to a grain shortage, according to Elizabeth David. She notes that potato bread makes particularly good toast, and I agree. It's worth slicing fairly thickly, as the sweet, springy bread takes on a crumpet-like character by the time it pops up. Use mashed potato and its cooking water for the best result. As with potato gnocchi, it's wise to use floury potatoes, boiling them in their skins before drying, peeling and mashing. Adapt our starting point by rubbing 150g mash into 350g strong white flour, as you would butter into flour. Sprinkle in the salt, noting that if the potato water was salted, you'll need to reduce the salt to ½– ¾ tsp. Make a well, and add 2 tsp instant yeast and _up to_ 250ml warm potato-cooking water. The Grain Store in King's Cross makes a potato and rye bread using 300g mash, 150g strong white flour and 75g rye flour, restricting the warm water to 60ml to allow for the moisture in the potatoes. You'll have to add flour as you knead, as the dough will get wetter the more it is worked. The bread is served toasted, spread with seaweed butter and scattered with borage and oyster leaves.

RYE

I asked Karl Ove Knausgård for his crispbread recipe, but by the twenty-sixth page he still hadn't got around to weighing the flour, and I needed to get on. Surprisingly, crispbread dough is not dissimilar to our yeast-risen dough, but since it's rye you're using, you'll need more water. Try 500g rye flour, about 400ml warm water (or whatever it takes to make a workable dough), half the quantity of yeast (whichever sort you use) and 2 tsp salt. No need for any embellishment, although you might add a little molasses to the mix, and a few pinches of caraway seeds or aniseed sprinkled over the dough as you roll it out. Give the dough an hour to ferment (or put it in the fridge overnight or while you're at work). Don't expect much of a rise. Roll it out thinly. It's up to you whether your crispbreads are big or small, round or rectangular, but if you're aiming for large and round, press a 1cm hole out of the centre, to help keep them fairly flat as they cook. For the same reason, no matter what shape and size you're making, dock the dough with a docking roller, skewer or knitting needle before it goes in the oven. Bake on a lightly floured baking tray for about 15 minutes at 200°C until crisp and dry. The finished crispbread will keep for at least a fortnight in a tight-lidded tin. For an easier-to-roll dough, or if you're after a rye sandwich loaf, mix the rye flour with wholemeal wheat flour. Best to use no more than 50 per cent rye flour; the closer you approach that limit, the more your bread will take on the darkness and complexity of a mid-period Ingmar Bergman movie. Andrew Whitley warns that if you simply substitute rye for wheat in a recipe using baker's yeast, you can 'expect a brick'. For all its textural difficulties, rye is hospitable to several interesting flavour blends. Nigel Slater adds grated Parmesan and chopped walnuts during the second knead of a loaf made with rye, wholemeal spelt and white wheat flours. Dan Lepard gives a recipe for black-pepper rye bread brought together with warm black coffee.

SAUERKRAUT

Add vinegar to a yeasted bread dough for a faux-sourdough effect. A similar tang can be achieved with citric acid, sour cream or sauerkraut. This sauerkraut bread makes a great pastrami sandwich, or anything Reubenesque for that matter. Mix half an 800g jar of well-squeezed sauerkraut with 250g strong white flour, 1 tbsp sugar, 1½ tsp salt, 60ml natural yogurt, 1 tbsp caraway seeds, 1½ tsp instant yeast and 175ml hand-hot water, followed by as much spelt flour as you need to make the dough kneadable – about 175–200g. Then follow the method from step **3** onwards, giving the dough its first rise in a bowl, and a second in a 900g (2lb) loaf tin, before baking for 15 minutes at 200°C, and then 40 minutes at 180°C.

SPELT

Spelt was once the most commonly used grain in Europe, and the kind available today is biologically identical to the variety that was eaten in Roman times. It's a member of the _Triticum_ family, which also includes newer additions like _Triticum aestivum_ , bread wheat, and _Triticum turgidum_ var _. durum_ , the primary pasta and couscous cultivar. Spelt contains more protein, minerals and vitamins than its younger relatives, and its fans are convinced it has a better flavour, too. But its nutritious double hull, hard as a centurion's helmet, caused its fall from favour in the nineteenth century: it's tough work to harvest and mill spelt. Possibly one of the grain's greatest fans, the twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (canonised, not before time, in 2012) ate spelt toast or spelt porridge as the first meal of the day, sometimes with a cup of spelt coffee. (She also advocated beer, wine and a nap at midday, and should by rights have a chain of holistic health spas named after her.) Spelt can be straight-swapped for strong white flour, but the resulting dough may rise more quickly.

WHOLEMEAL

In _A Little Dinner Before the Play_ , Agnes Jekyll, sister-in-law of the more famous Gertrude, recalls a 'certain _maigre_ luncheon on a sunny Friday of an early summer'. Her small party ate newly laid eggs scrambled with young asparagus and pink-fleshed trout with tiny potatoes and crisp lettuce. 'A wholemeal loaf and milk scones were there, with home-made cream cheese; the first fruits of the bee-hive also, tasting of the scent of lime trees in blossom, and the last fruits of the dairy in golden butter. Woodland strawberries, harbingers of the summer, in leaf-lined baskets, gave out their fugitive aroma, and finally a brown jug of coffee freshly roasted and ground, hot and fragrant beyond all previous experience, brought its valedictory blessing to a perfect meal.' And you went to Greggs for a cheese and onion pasty. For a wholemeal loaf like Jekyll's, substitute strong wholemeal flour for the white flour in our starting point, and be prepared to use more warm water than 300ml.

Yeast-risen Bread → Other Directions

CALZONE

Roll and stretch dough into a rough circle, place filling on one half, fold over the other half and seal with water. Bake at 220°C for 10–15 minutes.

FATAYER

Roll out 5mm-thick circles and fill with lamb, spinach or cheese. Fold in dough on three sides, seal with water and bake at 220°C for 10–15 minutes.

AS A BOWL FOR SOUP

STEAMED CORIANDER BUNS (YUTANGZA)

Roll out circles of dough, brush with melted butter and spoon on chopped coriander. Fold edges to centre and roll into a bun. Brush with melted butter, prove and then steam, half-covered, for 20 minutes.

BREAD IN SOUPS

... for ribollita (a large crouton), pappa al pomodoro (torn into pieces), pancotto (cooked to a soft mash) and gazpacho (ground into crumbs).

SUMMER PUDDING

Bread is used to line a pudding basin before it's filled with berries.

PRETZELS

BREAD SAUCE

Bread is also used in sauces like tarator and in some nut stews, such as _aji de gallina_ and _romesco de peix._

MIGAS DE PASTOR

'Shepherd's breadcrumbs' – mixed with garlic, paprika, chopped serrano ham and olive oil. Many other variations, including sweet versions.

**Buns**

The optional butter and sugar in our yeast-risen bread are standard for buns. The dough is further enriched with milk, in place of water, plus an egg. This starting point covers burger buns, hot-dog rolls, teacakes and fruit loaves.

_For 8–10 buns or hot-dog rolls, or a medium-size round fruit loaf_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

50g (3 tbsp) butter

500g strong white flour **B**

2 tsp instant yeast **C D**

1–4 tbsp sugar **E**

½ tsp salt **F**

300ml warm milk

1 egg **G**

For teacakes or fruit loaf: 2 tsp mixed spice and 75g currants

**1** In a large bowl, rub the butter into the flour until it has all but vanished, then stir in the yeast, sugar, salt and (if using) mixed spice.

**2** Make a well in the centre and pour in the warm milk and the beaten egg. Mix it all to a dough using a spoon, your hand or both. It'll be stickier than plain bread dough.

**3** Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and knead for about 8–10 minutes until smooth. Add currants (if using) towards the end.

If you don't like handling sticky dough, use a mixer with a dough hook.

**4** Transfer the kneaded dough to a large, lightly oiled bowl and find a warm spot for it. Cover the bowl with a clean tea towel, or an oiled shower cap or piece of cling film, and leave to double in size. Start checking after 40 minutes.

**5** When it has doubled in size, deflate the dough with your fingers.

At this point you can put it in a large freezer bag and leave it in the fridge for later use – it will last for a week.

**6** Fashion into rounds for teacakes or burger buns, banger shapes for hot-dog rolls, or a round loaf. Transfer to a lightly greased baking tray.

**7** Give the dough its second rise, covered. Start to check after 20 minutes for buns, 30 for a loaf. You're after an approximate doubling in size.

A tented plastic carrier bag can be used for a cover.

**8** Bake at 200°C. Buns will need 12–18 minutes, a loaf about 35 minutes.

Brush burger buns or hot-dog rolls with beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame seeds before baking, if you like.

**9** Remove from the tins and transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Warm teacakes or fruit loaves can be brushed with heated, sieved apricot jam to glaze them.

LEEWAY

**A** For a loaf baked in a 900g (2 lb) loaf tin, use 400g flour, 2 tbsp butter, 1½ tsp yeast, 2 tbsp sugar, 240ml warm milk, 1 egg minus 2 tsp of the white, plus mixed spice and currants as required.

**B** Replace some or all of the white flour in teacakes or fruit loaves with wholemeal or rye flour. You may need a little extra milk to bring the dough together. (Such substitutions might not be appropriate in burger buns or hot-dog rolls.)

**C** Bread made with instant yeast (also called fast or easy-blend) can be baked after one rise, so you can skip steps **4** and **5** if you're in a hurry. Two rises give a better flavour.

**D** For yeasts that need activating, add 15g fresh or 1 tbsp dried to 100ml warm milk with 1 tsp sugar. Allow 15 minutes for it to froth up, then add at step **2**, with the remaining 200ml warm milk.

**E** Use any sort of sugar.

**F** The amount of salt stipulated here will be okay for any buns, but you may wish to add another ½ tsp to the mix if you're not after particularly sweet results.

**G** The egg can be omitted. Or use 1 or 2 yolks in place of a whole egg for a softer texture (whites have a drying effect).

Buns → Flavours & Variations

CHALLAH

The plaited, enriched Jewish bread called challah is a godsend for the dairy-intolerant. It's made with water rather than milk, and oil rather than butter. A little more egg is required than in our starting point, and honey often takes the place of sugar. It's often said that challah is the very best bread for French toast or bread-and-butter pudding. Maybe so, but that presupposes the existence of leftovers, an unlikely state of affairs if you've ever tried challah toasted. My first loaf was gone before the day was out. Make as per the starting point, omitting the butter and sugar, and using 2 tbsp honey dissolved in 250ml warm water in place of the milk. Add an extra yolk with the egg. At step **6**, divide the dough into three equal portions and roll into snakes (you may need to shake a veil of flour over the portions to make this manageable). Transfer to a lightly oiled baking tray and plait, starting in the middle and working your way out to the ends. Give it another rise, then brush with beaten egg, sprinkle with poppy or sesame seeds and bake at 180°C for about 40 minutes. Leave on a wire rack to cool. In Jewish tradition, the Sabbath meal usually begins with two loaves of challah, representing the double portions of manna that fell from heaven during the Israelites' forty years in the desert.

DILL & COTTAGE CHEESE

In the 1960 Pillsbury Bake-Off, a Mrs Leona Schnuelle of Nebraska won the rather handsome first prize of $25,000 for her 'dilly bread'. Schnuelle used cottage cheese in place of the whey her mother had used to make bread on the family farm, the dill seed because a previous winner had used sesame seeds in her entry; grated onion also found its way into the dough. She was onto a winner, she realised, when she caught the first whiff of the bread in the oven. As an alternative to dill, M.F.K. Fisher suggests making this enriched bread with chives, parsley (fresh or dried) or tarragon, which she says would go well with cold roast chicken on a picnic. The following is a slight adaptation of the original. Make up half of our starting-point quantity with 1½ tbsp butter, 250g strong white flour, 1 tsp instant yeast, 2 tbsp sugar and ½ tsp salt. When you come to add the 150ml warm milk and egg, follow it with 225g cottage cheese, 1 tbsp grated onion, 2 tsp dill seeds and ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda. Give the mixture its second rise in a lightly greased 20cm springform tin and bake at 175°C for 40 minutes. Brush the finished bread with melted butter and scatter with sea salt.

GINGER

Ginger buns: not a saucy gangster's moll, but a fixture of Jewish bakeries in Amsterdam. The recipe adapts our starting point by including the egg in the 300ml liquid, so only 250ml milk is needed. (This is crucial, as the dough must be rolled out, and it would otherwise be too wet.) Make the dough as per the method, omitting the sugar if you prefer. After the first rise, roll it into 2 rectangles of about 30cm × 18cm, then cut each of these into 6 smaller rectangles of 18cm × 5cm. Mix together finely diced preserved ginger (about 6 pieces), 3 tbsp melted butter and 4 tbsp caster sugar. Spread lengthways along the middle of each rectangle, then roll into a long tube and seal with a little water and some pinching. Using your hands, roll the tubes over some caster sugar, deploying the same technique you once used to make plasticine snakes. Once they're about 22cm long, roll each one into a coil and transfer to a lightly greased baking tray. Paint with ginger syrup (from the preserved-ginger jar), give them a second rise until they're doubled in size, then bake at 180°C for 15–20 minutes.

LARDY CAKE

Lardy cake may have a reputation as an indulgence, but in fact most recipes call for a lot less sugar and fat than the average biscuit or fairy cake. There are many regional variations, but most involve laminating a yeast-risen dough with lard, sugar and dried fruit: as Charles Campion notes, lardy cake is the cousin of croissant. (Incidentally, in his recipe, Campion swaps lard for butter.) Some recipes stipulate a plain dough, as per the starting point for yeast-risen bread, but I prefer bun dough in my loose adaptation of Elizabeth David's recipe for Northumberland lardy cake. Follow the starting point for buns, making up half the given quantity, using an egg yolk in place of the egg, and no butter. Once you have deflated the dough at step **5**, roll it out into a rectangle, mentally dividing it lengthways into thirds: scatter two of the thirds with 25g lard, cut into pea-size pieces, 25g currants and 25g sugar, patting down lightly. Fold the unadorned third over the middle adorned third, then fold the remaining adorned third over that, so you have a three-storey stack. Roll the stack out into a rectangle again, and repeat with the same quantities of lard, currants and sugar, this time aiming for a square to fit into a greased 20cm tin. Leave to prove for about an hour, then bake at 200°C for 30–35 minutes.

PUMPKIN

The Brazilians eat a bun-like pumpkin bread called _pão de abóbora_ or _pão de jerimum._ Follow the starting point, increasing the sugar to 100g and using 60ml vegetable oil in place of the butter. For a conventionally sweet bun, add 1 tbsp mixed spice to the flour; for a savoury version, leave out the sugar altogether and use a little chopped sage. Mix the yeast and salt into the flour, incorporate the oil and half the warm milk and 250ml pumpkin or butternut squash purée. Then add as much of the remaining warm milk as needed to produce a dough that's soft but not sticky. Continue from step **3** of the method.

ROSEMARY

Easter aesthetes may prefer to shun the chocolate egg full of M&Ms for the sweet Tuscan bread known as _pan di ramerino_. It's a bun-like bread made with water and oil rather than milk and butter. At step **2**, soften a rosemary stalk and 100g currants in 4 tbsp olive oil, remove from the heat, then discard the rosemary and stir in 50g caster sugar. Leave to one side while you measure out 300ml warm water and add it to the flour, yeast and salt. Scrape in the currants with their oil, add the beaten egg and mix to a dough. Pick up the method from step **3**, to make 10 buns. If you're wondering what the Easter connection might be, rosemary is for remembrance.

SESAME

_Tahinov gata_ are tahini-flavoured Armenian rolls that deserve a place alongside _pain au chocolat_ or almond croissants. Make up a dough as per our starting point for buns, but use double the amount of butter – melted, rather than softened – and add it with the milk and egg. After the first rise, divide the dough into 8 balls, roll out each one to make a 20cm round, spread with 1–2 tbsp tahini and sprinkle over 4 tsp light brown sugar. A further sprinkle of ground cinnamon is optional. Roll them up like tiny Armenian carpets, then simultaneously stretch and twist them like a piece of rope. Coil each into the shape of a snail shell, and tuck the ends in. Transfer to a lightly greased baking tray, and let them rise for 30 minutes, before gently brushing the tops with egg yolk and baking them at 190°C for 35 minutes. I have also made these with yeast-risen bread (i.e. non-enriched) dough, and they are still fabulous. The tahini is luscious and rich, and the sugar elevates it to special-treat status, demanding an accompanying cup of your favourite coffee. Nutella, peanut butter or marzipan can be used in place of tahini. Or take a cue from the snail shape, and use moss-green snail butter – that is, butter mashed with parsley and garlic (hold the sugar).

SPIRAL BUNS

Chelsea buns, glazed spirals of dough containing lemon zest, currants, sugar and butter, were invented at the Bun House in Pimlico Road, London, in the early eighteenth century. They were an immediate craze. Some prefer to split and butter their buns, as you would a teacake, but I think that misses the point: a Chelsea bun must be unwound, length by edible length, like a liquorice wheel. The dough contains brioche-like levels of butter, and is rolled into rectangles before being folded a few times, like puff pastry, then rolled up. Or you can adapt our starting point for a simpler, sparer sort of spiral bun. Once the dough has had its first rise, deflate it and roll it out to a 45cm × 30cm rectangle. Excepting a 2cm margin, dot the dough with 75g unsalted butter cut into pea-size pieces, and 75g currants, then sprinkle over 75g brown sugar. Roll the dough up from the long edge, so it looks like a draught excluder, then trim off the ends and cut into 12 equal slices. Transfer these to a greased baking tray, spacing them about 2.5cm apart, then leave in a plastic-bag tent to prove until roughly doubled in size. As the buns expand during proving and baking (15–20 minutes at 220°C), they should join up, creating the desired square-ish shape. Remove from the oven and immediately glaze with a mixture of 2 tbsp sugar dissolved in 1 tbsp hot milk. Leave for 5 minutes, then separate the buns. The painter Arthur Lett-Haines felt the standard-size Chelsea bun was 'rather large and bucolic', so made his petit-four-size, decorated with Angostura-flavoured royal icing and poppy seeds.

STOLLEN

The shape of this classic German Christmas cake is supposed to suggest the swaddled baby Jesus, at least if it's the sort of stollen with marzipan in the middle. Commercial bakers have taken to selling it at Christmas in the UK, but are invariably Scrooge-like with the marzipan, whereas home bakers can control the crucial almond-paste-to-bun-dough ratio. When sliced, my first attempt at stollen looked like a fried egg. Not bad, but too much marzipan in one place. Andrew Whitley gets around the problem by laying a sheet of marzipan over the dough and rolling it up, roulade-style, so the marzipan is more evenly distributed. Classic stollen is made as per our starting point. Here I use half the quantities, i.e. 250g flour and, rather than ½ egg, just the yolk. Add raisins (brandy-or rum-soaked, if you like), mixed peel, grated citrus zest and baking spices to taste – a little cardamom is good. After the first rise, knock the dough back and roll it out into a rectangle of about 25cm × 15cm. Lay a 23cm cylinder of approximately 150g marzipan along the length of the dough, placing it in the centre. Fold the extra centimetre of dough at each end up and over the marzipan, then fold over the lengths, allowing a decent overlap. Transfer to a lightly greased baking sheet, seam-side down, and leave to rise. Once it's about twice its original size, bake at 190°C for 20 minutes. Remove and sprinkle with icing sugar, or top with an icing-sugar glaze made with lemon juice. Delia Smith likes her stollen toasted.

**Brioche**

Brioche is a mildly sweet, golden bread often eaten for breakfast with milky coffee or hot chocolate. Most of the milk used to make the buns in the previous starting point is replaced by beaten egg. This makes for a pretty sticky dough – and then you start adding the butter. Lots of it. It's both an ordeal and an experience to make by hand, so a food-mixer alternative is given at **A** under Leeway.

_For 2 × 450g (1 lb) loaf tins, or a 9-bun 'flower' in a 25cm round tin_ **B**

INGREDIENTS

1 tbsp instant yeast **C**

500g strong white flour **D**

1 tsp salt

2–4 tbsp sugar

50ml warm milk or water

5 eggs **E**

250g unsalted butter, softened **F G**

**1** Measure the yeast, flour, salt and sugar into a large bowl. Give it a mix.

**2** Make a well in the centre, pour in the milk or water and beaten eggs, then mix to a dough. Transfer the mixture to a lightly floured surface and knead for 8–10 minutes until smooth.

**3** Divide the butter into four equal portions and knead it into the dough, portion by portion. With each addition of butter, you'll go through a sticky phase, but fear not: keep going and the dough will become smooth and stretchy again. The whole process might take as long as 30 minutes.

**4** Find a nice warm spot and cover the bowl with lightly oiled cling film. Leave for 1–2 hours. Don't expect it to rise like bread dough – it contains too much butter for that. **H**

**5** Deflate the puffed dough with your fingers. Knead for a minute then cover and leave in the fridge for 4–16 hours to rise again.

If the dough hasn't quite doubled in size, take it out and let it complete its rise somewhere cosier. If you're planning to shape your brioche into balls or plaits, it may ultimately need a further short stint in the fridge to firm up.

**6** Shape the dough, transfer to its baking tin and give it a third rise, covered, somewhere warm. Again, you're aiming for it to double in size.

**7** Glaze the top of the brioche with egg yolk, and bake at 190°C for 20–25 minutes. Buns should be checked after 12 minutes.

**8** Wrap the finished brioche tightly in foil, or a plastic food bag, and use within 2–3 days. If you doubt you'll get through it in that time, wrap and freeze it.

LEEWAY

**A** The process is pretty much the same using an electric mixer. Mix up the dough and knead with a dough hook for 7 minutes until smooth and elastic, then add the butter 2 tbsp at a time, allowing it to become incorporated before adding more. When all the butter is mixed in, and the dough is shiny and smooth, pick up from step **4**.

**B** Half this quantity will do for a classic 23cm brioche tin. At step **6**, tear off roughly a fifth of the dough. Roll both the large and small pieces into balls, and make a depression in the larger piece in which the smaller can nestle. Give the dough its third rise and continue. Glaze with egg yolk and bake for 30–35 minutes.

**C** Use 14g dried active yeast or 20g fresh in place of instant; some recipes call for them in preference. Activate either in the warm milk or water with 1 tsp sugar, leaving it for 15 minutes to froth, and add at step **2** with the eggs.

**D** Some cooks use plain white flour, or 00, in place of strong white flour.

**E** If you only have 4 eggs, use 100ml warm milk.

**F** Regrettably, melting the butter and adding it from the outset doesn't work. Many have tried and failed.

**G** Halve the butter amount for a lean brioche. For a rich brioche use equal weights of flour and butter, although this is not advisable if you're making the dough by hand – it will be too sticky to manage.

**H** Brioche is quite a fussy dough, and doesn't always rise as fast as the recipe suggests. Patience will be your friend here. Note that some people are uncomfortable leaving a butter-and-egg-enriched dough sitting around at room temperature for 4 or maybe 5 hours. I'm not, but it's your call.

Brioche → Flavours & Variations

BRIE

Who put the Brie in brioche? Alexandre Dumas, in his _Dictionary of Cuisine_ (1873), claims that it was once common to make brioche with the cheese, although the food scholar Darra Goldstein dismisses this as 'fakelore'. Which is not to say that it's a bad idea: several cooks have experimented with it. Cheesemaker-turned-baker Peter Reinhart notes that while adding grated cheese to a dough might add some flavour and softness, it has a tendency to disappear in the finished article. His recommendation is to roll the dough around the cheese. Try encasing small triangles of Brie into _fatayer_-like dough shapes. _Pane al formaggio_ is an Italian cheese brioche, not unlike a panettone enriched with grated Parmesan and studded with pieces of pecorino in place of the raisins, or in addition to them.

CHOCOLATE & SICHUAN PEPPER

Brioche rolls with chocolate chips are so popular that even discount supermarkets sell them. Should a surfeit of them have dulled your palate, try the chocolate and Sichuan pepper brioche devised by the Parisian pâtissier Gontran Cherrier. If buttery bread, chocolate and the lemony, sub-Novocaine tingle of the pepper aren't stimulation enough, Cherrier recommends trying it with foie gras or strawberry jam (sod the 'or' – I'll have both). The addition of cocoa powder makes the dough even trickier than that for regular brioche, so making this by hand is not advised. In place of bread flour, Cherrier uses French all-purpose flour, which has a protein content somewhere between plain flour and strong flour. Use dried active yeast and activate it in the warm milk with 1 tsp of sugar. Put 4 tbsp sugar in a bowl with the flour, 4 tbsp sifted cocoa powder, 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp crushed Sichuan pepper and 8 tbsp chocolate chips. Add the yeast mixture and stir it in, followed by 6 eggs. Then work in 225g butter in four instalments, as per our starting point. Give the dough two room-temperature rises, the first of about an hour, the second about 45 minutes, before transferring it to 2 × 450g (1 lb) loaf tins, giving it a final rise and then baking your brioche loaves for about 35 minutes at 180°C.

ORANGE FLOWER WATER

A very common flavouring in brioche-type cakes. In his fascinating book _The Taste of Bread_ , Raymond Calvel describes the Provençal Christmas bread, _pompe des rois_ , the ring-shaped _fouace de Rodez_ from Aveyron, and _mouna_. Indigenous to Algeria, but now found in southern France and beyond, _mouna_ is a gorgeous, orange-flower-scented boule of brioche, studded with sugar nibs and often enhanced with candied orange peel and Cointreau; in Oran, one of four Christian dioceses in the country, it's traditionally eaten at Easter. To make a simple floral-scented brioche, replace 1 of the eggs with 3 tbsp orange flower water, beating it into the other 4 eggs.

PANETTONE

The French look down on Milanese panettone, considering it the perfumed poseur of the brioche family. The fussy essences get in the way of the natural flavourings: eggs, butter and fermentation. Lord knows what they'd make of one flashy recipe for panettone I came across, which adds ground coriander, fennel and pine nuts to the mix. (I'd often wondered what you might eat off those Versace tea plates you see in Bloomingdale's, and now I know.) According to _Fenaroli's Handbook of Flavor Ingredients_ , authentic Milanese panettone is made with wheat flour, natural yeast, butter, sugar, whole eggs, yolks, raisins, citron, orange peel, candied fruit, salt, milk and powdered dry malt, enhanced with a blended aromatic essence, concentrated so as not to interfere with the leavening process. Fenaroli suggests equal parts orange, citron and mandarin oil, with a lesser amount of bergamot and vanilla. You can make something not dissimilar at home, and given the splendour of the results, the whole process is delightfully simple. The basic principle is to cross-breed a cake mix with a yeasted-dough sponge. Measure out 100g currants. Transfer a quarter of them to a small pan, then cover with Marsala and warm them. Stir in the grated zest of 1 orange, 1 lemon and 2 mandarins, and leave to soak. Mix the rest of the currants with 50g chopped mixed peel and toss in a little flour. Set aside. Make a yeast sponge with 150g strong white flour, 1½ tsp instant yeast, 1 tsp sugar and 120ml warm water. Leave to double in size. Once it's getting close, cream 150g room-temperature butter with 75g sugar. Add 2 eggs and 4 yolks (again at room temperature), continuing to mix. The eggs may curdle if you're mixing by hand, but don't worry – it won't affect the finished product. Add 100ml hand-hot milk, 2 tbsp Marsala, 1 tsp orange extract, ½ tsp salt and the yeast sponge and mix thoroughly. Add 250g flour and mix, followed by as much of 200–225g more flour as needed to make a soft dough. Pick up from step **4** of the method, noting that the dough will probably need at least 2 hours to double in size. Deflate the dough, then knead in your soaked and floured fruits for only as long as it takes to distribute them evenly. Transfer to a 20cm springform tin, fitted with a tall collar of baking parchment, and leave to rise until it has attained proper panettone height: this might take 2½ hours, it might take 4. Brush with egg white and, if you like, sprinkle with pearl sugar. Bake at 220°C for 10 minutes, then 180°C for 30–40 minutes. You may want to tent the top with foil after the first 15–20 minutes to arrest the browning. If you're not fussed about currants and mixed peel, note that the Lombardy pasticceria Scarpato make a panettone that replaces them with pieces of marrons glacés. Pandoro is another option. It has no other bits in it, and although it contains a hint of citron oil, the dominant flavour is butter. A slice with Marsala ice cream and a few dots of good balsamic is a winning alternative to Christmas pud.

PRALINE

The name Pralus, from Roanne near Lyon, will be familiar to anyone with expensive tastes in confectionery, but before they made their name in chocolate, the brand was famous for the sublime 'Praluline' brioche invented by Auguste Pralus himself. The bun is flavoured with Valencian almonds and Piedmont hazelnuts cooked in pink rose sugar, cracked, then added to the dough and sprinkled over the top of the brioche. The result looks like something Mariah Carey might feed to her unicorns for tea. (Pink pralines can be bought from specialist delis or online.) Add 75g roughly crushed pralines to the dough just before you shape it. A hand-fashioned round will be perfectly authentic, but you can aim for a neater brioche shape if you prefer. Give it an egg wash, and sprinkle over a further 25g of the crushed pralines. Rise and bake as described in the starting point.

SAUSAGE

Baking _saucisson_ into brioche is pretty popular in France. Definitely a cut above sausage rolls, especially in Lyon, where a local variant contains a quantity of truffles and garlic. In Majorca, _ensaïmada_ is made with a brioche-like dough, but with lard in place of butter ( _saïm_ is Mallorquín for lard). The results are quite visually distinct: rather than a taut up-do like a Picasso bust of Marie-Thérèse Walter, _ensaïmada_ dough is folded and rolled into a loose coil like a fire hose. Most _ensaïmadas_ are liberally dusted with icing sugar, but some are taken in a savoury direction with pieces of _sobrassada_ , the soft, spreadable Balearic cousin of chorizo. Thanks to Spanish colonisation, the bread has a second home in the Philippines. _Ensaymada_ is a bit chubbier than its Old World antecedent, and might be covered with grated cheese, or filled with _ube_ (purple yam) or _monggo_ (mung-bean paste).

SWEETCORN

As eaten at The Grain Store in London's King's Cross. A slice of fermented sweetcorn brioche, toasted and served with tapioca cooked in squid ink to look like caviar and sour cream with dill. I couldn't detect much of a fermented tang from the sweetcorn, but corn and butter are such happy bedfellows, who cares? Keep the amount of salt very low and you could pass this off as a cake. Simmer the kernels from 1 sweetcorn cob in 100ml milk for 2 minutes. Drain, retaining 25ml of the milk to use in the dough. Follow our starting point, halving the quantities – in the case of egg, use 2 whole eggs plus 1 yolk. Add the cooked sweetcorn kernels to the dough towards the end of kneading. The rises will take a good deal longer than usual. Transfer the dough to a 450g (1 lb) loaf tin for its second rise.

Brioche → Other Directions

BURGER BUNS

TARTE TROPÉZIENNE

A sandwich cake made with rum or orange flower water brioche, filled with whipped cream, pastry cream and/or buttercream.

BRIOCHE FRUIT TART

Use like puff pastry in a tarte Tatin: cook fruit in butter and sugar on the hob until caramelised, cover with a circle of brioche dough and bake at 180°C for 30 minutes.

PAN DE MUERTO

A lean brioche flavoured with aniseed and orange zest or orange flower water, decorated with bones or skulls, and baked for the Day of the Dead in Mexico.

SWEET BREAD & BUTTER PUDDING

BRIOCHE TOAST

... with pâté, chutney and cornichons.

YAKI-SOBA PAN-BRIOCHE

Or hot-dog rolls, filled with hot noodles.

BEIGNETS

Pieces of brioche dough deep-fried and sprinkled with sugar.

**Babas & Savarins**

Where dough becomes a batter: babas are made with the same liquid-to-flour ratio as all the other bun and bread mixes on the continuum, plus plenty of egg and melted butter. The same batter is used for savarins, which are baked in a ring-shaped mould – either in individual moulds or a single, large one.

_For 6 individual babas, or 1 large savarin_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

1½ tsp instant yeast **B**

250g strong white flour **C**

¼ tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar **D**

150ml milk **E F**

3 eggs **G**

65g unsalted butter, melted and cooled **H**

FOR THE RUM SYRUP **I J**

200ml boiling water

300g sugar

1–5 tbsp rum, according to taste

**1** Measure the yeast, flour, salt and sugar into a large bowl with enough room for the final batter to double during its rise. Make a well in the centre.

**2** Warm the milk (not too hot or it will scramble the eggs) and pour into the flour with the beaten eggs. Mix, add the melted butter and stir to make a homogenous batter.

**3** Scrape the batter into thoroughly buttered moulds or tins. Fill them roughly halfway up, and no further.

**4** Once the batter has almost reached the top of its containers it's ready to be baked. Glaze with beaten egg or yolk, if you like.

The rise takes about 45 minutes in my warmish kitchen. Do keep an eye out, however. You don't want dough erupting all over your surfaces.

**5** Bake in a 190°C oven: individual babas will need 15–20 minutes; for a savarin, allow 20–25 minutes.

**6** While the babas bake, make the syrup. Pour the boiling water over the sugar and stir until dissolved, then stir in the rum.

**7** Remove the cooked babas from the oven, allow to cool a little, then turn out onto a dish suitable for their drenching in syrup.

**8** Pour about half of the syrup over the babas and leave them to absorb it for about 10 minutes. Turn the babas upside-down and drizzle over the rest of the syrup. Serve as they are, or with whipped cream and fruit. **K**

LEEWAY

**A** This makes a good quantity for 6 × 150ml dishes (deep muffin tins, ramekins and dariole moulds can all be used) or a 24cm savarin tin.

**B** If you're using yeast that needs to be activated first, mix 8g fresh or 1½ tsp dried yeast in the warm milk with 1 tsp of the sugar, and leave to froth for 15 minutes. Add it at step **2** and proceed as usual, but give the mix two rises, the first in the mixing bowl. Once it has doubled, stir it and pour into the baking dishes for its second rise. Bake when the mix almost reaches the rim.

**C** Many baba recipes call for plain rather than strong white flour. A photo finish, as far as I'm concerned.

**D** A sweeter batter can be made with up to 3 tbsp sugar.

**E** Replace the milk with water. As with choux pastry, it will give a crisper result.

**F** Make a non-dairy version with coconut milk and groundnut oil in place of the milk and butter.

**G** Use 2 eggs and 1 yolk, reserving the other white for glazing the tops before baking.

**H** A richer batter can be made with as much as 100g butter per 250g flour. Note, however, that fat has a retarding effect on yeast, so the rise will be slower.

**I** The version here is thicker than the classic syrup, which is made with 400g sugar to 400ml water.

**J** You can, of course, flavour the syrup otherwise – see **here**.

**K** Elizabeth David only adds the syrup when serving, reheating the babas in the oven before pouring it over. I prefer chilled and rum-logged.

Babas & Savarins → Flavours & Variations

BANANA & SPICE

Any attempt to flavour a rum baba must be made in the expectation that the rum will do its damnedest to drown it out. I found this out the hard way, making a spiced banana variant, whose distinct ingredients were blindsided by the bold intervention of El Dorado rum. That said, the buns I hadn't soused tasted great, toasted and spread with a tangy cultured butter from Normandy. Adapt our starting point, using 250g flour plus 1 tsp each of ground cinnamon and clove. Reduce the warm milk to 100ml and use brown sugar. Add 60ml puréed very ripe banana and 1 tsp vanilla extract to the mix along with the butter. If you find the banana more appealing than the booze, try it with a plain sugar syrup and no rum.

COCONUT & BROWN SUGAR

Of all the flavourings in my baba line-up, this was the one my tasters picked out. But I must confess to a shortcoming in my data collection: there may have been a bias towards the coconut-brown-sugar babas, caused by their preparation in individual savarin tins, which made them look like exceptionally cute doughnuts, all the more so for their coconut fur. As I dressed them with rum and cream, I was reminded of a dessert from the Formica-tabled cafés of my youth, the sort of places that smelled of vinegar, fried bacon and cigarette smoke. The 'brown derby' was a doughnut with a scoop of ice cream in its hole, topped with whipped cream, chocolate sauce and chopped nuts. Consider this an alternative way to serve your baba if you dislike booze or the texture of drenched sponge. For the coconut babas, mix 8 tbsp desiccated coconut into the 250g flour with 2 tbsp dark brown sugar. Coconut milk can be used in place of cow's milk.

CORNMEAL & BUTTERMILK

An idea inspired by a recipe for an eggy, yeasted Croatian cornbread that was tantalisingly close to our starting point. I mixed up 50/50 strong white flour and fine cornmeal and used warmed buttermilk – if you want to make your own buttermilk substitute, see **here**. The yellow batter rose pretty vigorously. The buttermilk gave the finished buns a distinct tang. As for the corn, it made them a little more robust than the classic baba. Don't be tempted to use all cornmeal, however, unless you want to exfoliate your tongue.

LIME

Many chefs prefer to keep their babas plain, for fear of interfering with the rum's flavour, but will make an exception for orange or lemon zest, or a combination of the two. Or lime, which has a special affinity for rum, as you'll know if you've ever ended up dancing on the table after a glass or two of rum punch. Come to think of it, once you've zested the limes for the babas, you'll have the juice to spare, so you might as well go ahead and make the punch. The classic mnemonic is 'one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak,' the sour being lime juice; the sweet being sugar syrup; the strong, rum; and the weak, fruit juice (a mix of orange, mango and passion fruit just tastes _right_ ). Decant it into glasses over ice and add a dash of Angostura bitters and a grating of nutmeg. The syrup is made with equal volumes of sugar and hot water.

RYE & TOKAJI

Marie Leszczynska, the Polish wife of Louis XV, is often credited with introducing the baba to the French. Marie-Antoine Carême recalls gargantuan babas in the royal dining room, accompanied by a large sauceboat containing a mixture of sweet Malaga wine and _eau de tanaisie_ (tansy, a herbaceous perennial, has bright yellow flowers, and tastes of rosemary or ginger, depending on who you ask). Leszczynska claimed they should be made with rye flour and flavoured with Hungarian wine. Rye has its merits, but can't match white wheat flour when it comes to the sort of light, open-textured bun that's receptive to a dousing in syrup. Mind you, if the syrup were flavoured with Tokaji, one might be persuaded otherwise.

SAFFRON & RAISIN

According to Louis-Eustache Ude, chef during the 1930s at Crockford's, the gaming club in St James's, the classic flavouring for baba was an aromatic mixture of saffron, currants, raisins and Madeira. _The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets_ confirms the saffron and currants, noting that references to rum syrup began to appear only in the 1840s, by which time the baba had been around for centuries. Add a few pinches of powdered saffron to the warming milk at step **2** and stir in a handful of raisins just after the melted butter. A similar combination of saffron and dried fruit is used to flavour the yeasted dough for Cornish saffron loaves and buns. If only a Penzance pirate had been a little clumsier with his ration of grog, Cornwall might have had another feather in its catering hairnet.
Cornbread, Polenta & Gnocchi

This continuum takes as its common theme the transformation of grain and liquid into hearty staples. By its end, my hope is that you will be delving into your cupboards for long-neglected grains on the brink of staleness or annexation by weevils. Making cornbread, polenta or gnocchi can be immensely satisfying and, as you'll see, there's endless room for experimentation.

CORNBREAD

The cornbread at the start of the continuum is closer to the bouncier variety eaten in the north of the US than the sparer Southern sort. It's soda bread's first cousin once removed. Both are mixed up hastily, so they can make it into the oven while the leavener still has some oomph. Both call for similar quantities of grain and bicarbonate of soda, with optional, modest additions of fat and sweetness. Cornbread requires a bit more buttermilk, but the one remove really lies in the addition of egg. Recipes for cornbread tend to stipulate two or three. Soda bread is usually eggless, meaning that it comes together as a kneadable dough. Cornbread could only conceivably be kneaded in a world where its preparation formed the basis of the penal system. The eggs give it a batter consistency and, when baked, a moist, cake-like texture more suited to cutting into chunks or wedges than thin slices. Unadorned by savoury ingredients like bacon or cheese, the corn's natural sweetness makes cornbread taste pretty cake-like, too.

Cornmeal is available in several colours and grades. The colour makes little difference to the eating quality of the finished bread – but the grind size really does. Plain cornbread made with coarse meal will be sandy in texture, with a distinctively farmyardy flavour. Aficionados recommend stoneground corn, which includes some of the hull and germ, preserving more of the fat and therefore the flavour. The higher fat content also shortens its shelf-life, which means you're unlikely to find it in a mainstream supermarket.

Another alternative is Mexican masa harina, the fine flour made with nixtamal – corn that has been cooked, washed in a lime solution and (usually) hulled – which yields a winning combination of wheaty softness and the sweetness of corn. Whichever corn you're using, you'll find the best results come from baking the cornbread batter in a cast-iron pan, having heated your fat (preferably lard or bacon dripping) beforehand.

DHOKLA

American visitors to Gujarat in north-west India might feel homesick at the sight of khaman dhokla, whose spongy depths and division into substantial cubes give it a distinct look of cornbread. The batter, however, is made with chickpea flour, and on closer inspection the crumb is more earth-toned, like a Rajasthani palace; maize is the Technicolor yellow of Oz's brick road. Like cornbread, dhokla consists of flour, a binding liquid, a leavener, and small amounts of salt, fat and sugar. It owes its springier texture to being steamed, rather than baked; its mouthfeel is moist, bordering on creamy.

Some versions of dhokla have chopped vegetables mixed into the batter, although you may feel its traditionally extravagant garnish renders this unnecessary. First, mustard seeds and cumin seeds are briskly fried in ghee or oil, to release their flavours, then poured over the dhokla while it's still hot from the steamer. The scented oil seeps into the pores, all the more so if you've taken the trouble (as per a lemon drizzle cake) to prick the surface beforehand. Finally, the top is sprinkled with a vibrant mix of chopped coriander, shredded coconut and finely sliced rings of fresh red chilli. The finished dish looks like a game of quoits abandoned after an unexpected spring snowfall.

The comparison with drizzle cake is extended by the addition of a lemony element to the batter – citric acid or lemon juice, or both. In India, the citric acid normally comes in the form of a branded product called Eno, a 'fruit salt' sold as a stomach settler. In the absence of Eno, you might make an ersatz version by mixing equal quantities of bicarbonate of soda and citric acid. Eno lends the sarcastic edge you get with tamarind; you might find the sharpness a little unnerving to begin with. And yet, for me, the first bite led to another, and another, and before I knew it I was off to the Indian mini-mart to stock up on chickpea flour.

Instead of pharmaceutical fruit salts, traditional dhokla derives its rise and tang from the slow fermentation of ground, soaked raw pulses and/or rice in yogurt. Many classic Indian recipes depend on this technique, including idli (small, steamed white cakes), dosas (large, thin pancakes), uttapam (smaller and thicker pancakes with ingredients like tomato or coconut mixed into the batter, **here** ), and vadai (a sort of deep-fried, filled doughnut). As with sourdough bread and _beghrir_ (Moroccan semolina pancakes), it's fair to say that the more time-consuming method has the edge when it comes to flavour. Nonetheless, the cheat method yields perfectly delicious results, and has the advantage that you're more likely to get on and make your dhokla, as opposed to sit around intending to do it the hard way. If, however, you do have the time and inclination to make a proper fermented dhokla, using chana dal, check that your blender is capable of turning soaked pulses into a batter. The first time I tried, the blades of my dear old Moulinex chased the pulses round and round, fruitlessly, like Sylvester pursuing Tweety Pie.

HALVA

It's possible to vary the dhokla by following the starting point but using different grains. Corn is used, but rarely. A more popular variant, sooji or rava dhokla, is made with semolina, although I find it a bit plain. Like many products of the British educational system, my attitude to semolina was formed by repellent, porridge-like semolina pudding, scraped untouched into the bin by school dinner ladies the country over. Halva changed all that. Specifically, irmik halva, the sweet semolina pudding from Turkey that furnishes our starting point. The semolina is first toasted in butter or oil, then warmed sweetened milk is added, and the mixture is gently simmered and stirred until the desired texture is achieved. The toasting produces a popcorn-like aroma of the sort that has propped up the movie industry for a century. It's gorgeous. It's worth noting that halva (the word is derived from the Arabic for 'sweet') can be made with any one of a wide range of ingredients besides grain, including fruit, vegetables or cheese. An especially popular type is made with tahini – although had I included it in this book, it would have sat on the sugar continuum, as a variant of fudge. Cereal-based halvas are simpler to make than the fudgey tahini variety, but don't expect them to be much less sweet if you stick to authentic levels of sugar.

The volume of liquid to grain in halva is the reverse of cornbread and dhokla – i.e. 2:1, rather than 1:2. This reflects the difference in cooking method; halva is made on the hob, and thus exposed to fiercer heat, even when the burners are turned down low. The grain thus absorbs the liquid more quickly and thoroughly, although the precise rate and degree of absorption can be controlled by the cook. For irmik halva, the pan can be taken off the heat while its contents are still a damp mass, somewhere between the wetness of porridge and the firmer consistency of mashed potato – although it's more common to continue cooking until the halva takes on the consistency of wet dough, with an elasticity that will eventually see it pull away from the sides of the pan. Once it has attained this texture, you can be sure that the mixture will set, and can pour it, as is traditional, into an elaborately shaped mould.

Prettifying halva can be a challenge. Toasted nuts are sometimes used, or you could take inspiration from dhokla's gorgeous garnish and scatter your halva with rose petals, pomegranate seeds and chopped pistachios. Either that, or accept the fact that, at base, irmik halva looks like government-issue pudding, as frumpy and functional as a dome of masticated manila folders. Its beauty is all on the inside. Nuts or dried fruit are sometimes toasted with the grain, or the cooking liquid sweetened with something other than sugar, say a rich honey, or fruity _pekmez_ , a syrup made from condensed grape, fig or mulberry juice. In India, where halva probably arrived with the Mughals, the pudding is primped with spices like cardamom or cinnamon. Greek semolina halva is juicy with citrus- and cinnamon-flavoured syrup.

That said, halva is too various in its incarnations to be written off after a single try. Made with a coarser semolina, halva takes on a crumb texture that, soaked in sweet syrup, rather reminds me of the steamed puddings I made in home economics. Likewise, this sort of halva could happily be served warm with custard, although my local Turkish restaurant opts for vanilla ice cream. At the other end of the grain-grade spectrum, cornflour mixed with milk yields the halva better known as blancmange, number three on the FBI's list of the ten most egregious offenders against international cuisine, after bubble tea and those pizzas with mini-burgers in the crust.

POLENTA

The savoury equivalent of irmik halva is polenta. Historically, polenta was a generic term for any mushy, cooked grain. These days it is usually made with cornmeal, but before Columbus brought his boatload of fancy foreign foodstuffs to Europe, it was variously made with spelt, millet, barley, chestnut or chickpea flours. Corn soon wiped out its competitors, although buckwheat held firm in some northern regions, where _taragna_ , or 'black polenta', can still be found to this day. If you've ever cooked with buckwheat, you'll know that 'black' in this case isn't terribly black, or even brownish-black, to borrow from mascara terminology. If it's boot-black polenta you're after, best to dye your cornmeal with squid ink.

As a rule of thumb, for polenta the ratio of liquid to grain is 3 :1 or 4 :1. Some cooks opt for a far longer dilution, in the belief that a very slow simmer gives the best result. Bill Buford describes the three stages of his polenta over its three-hour cooking period as: 'soupy but thirsty', then 'shiny and cakey and coming off the sides', and finally elastic and modestly caramelised from 'being baked in its own liquid lava'. You could, however, labour over a corn polenta for a week and still fail to convince some people of its merits. My husband says it has a subtlety he can't be bothered to appreciate. Goethe blamed it both for the sickly appearance of Italian peasants in the Tyrol and – sparing the reader no detail – his own constipation. In _Between the Woods and the Water_ , the second of three books chronicling his journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes eating polenta for the first time, in Transylvania, where it was known as _mamaliga_. 'I had been warned against it,' he writes. For a man facing foot-blisters the size of jellyfish, diseased and unscrupulous prostitutes and the looming prospect of war, you might think the mouthfeel of Romanian corn porridge the least of his troubles. In the event, he 'perversely found it rather good'. Whoever warned him off it plainly hadn't taken his nationality and class into consideration. If there's anything that binds the English upper-middle classes and the hazel-eyed shepherds of the Carpathians, it's negligibly flavourful stodge.

GNOCCHI ALLA ROMANA

Cold polenta sets, meaning that it can be cut into slices. Stuff these into a soft bread roll with something piquant and uplifting, say mortadella and mostarda di cremona, in the same way you might cut the starch-overdose of a chip butty with ketchup. Or bake the pieces and serve them with butter and cheese, in the manner of gnocchi alla Romana – which are, after all, made by the same method as both polenta and halva _._ For the gnocchi, semolina and milk are simmered together, then a little egg is beaten in, along with some butter and cheese. The batter is spread out in a shallow tin and left to cool and firm up so it can be cut into pieces, ready to bake and serve.

Like spaghetti carbonara, gnocchi alla Romana makes a lunch hearty enough to induce an afternoon nap, potentially right there on the gingham tablecloth. (It's a wonder Rome was built at all, let alone in a day.) By the time you wake up, a filament of drool attaching you to the placemat, it'll be time for an aperitivo. In Rome, gnocchi are traditionally eaten on Thursdays, a tradition whose origins Claudia Roden admits she was unable to unearth. Some say the heartiness of the dish sets you up for Friday's fast. I wonder if the mixture of semolina, milk, egg and butter might have been a cheap, filling dish to make on the day before payday. Few recipes call for much else, although one of Elizabeth David's variations includes some finely diced cooked ham. Follow the starting point, adding about 150g ham and stirring it in with the egg. Adding egg to the soft semolina mixture might remind you of making choux pastry. The same faith in providence is called for, to pass through the jumbo-curdle stage to the hard-won, lustrous smoothness of the finished batter.

CHOUX

Choux, as it happens, is the next starting point on the continuum, where it also goes by its alias, gnocchi Parisienne. If gnocchi alla Romana is a meal to build an empire on, gnocchi Parisienne are altogether lighter and more elegant, but are still served in much the same ways as other gnocchi: with heaps of grated Parmesan, baked or simmered in a sauce, or pan-fried with butter and sage. Alternatively, the choux can be piped into lengths or little balls and baked to make éclairs or profiteroles. Deep-fry spoonfuls of the same dough and you have beignets: shake over some icing sugar and eat while still warm, with a café au lait and a resolution to eat more healthily just as soon as you've polished off the batch.

POTATO GNOCCHI

Potato gnocchi, also called gnocchi Piedmontese, consist of warm, starchy potato mixed with flour, and in some cases egg, to form a dough that is then rolled into small dumplings. Potato gnocchi are gnocchi-come-lately: so much so that the recipe did not appear in Italian cookery books until the early twentieth century, when it specified a whopping 500g flour to 250g potato. Modern recipes vary a great deal, although 50g flour for 250g potato is fairly typical, and most recommend using as little flour as the dough's coherence will allow.

There is little I can add to the reams written on the subject of potato gnocchi – other than, ditch reading the blow-by-blow instructions and make them a few times. If there was ever a place where experience trumps theory, potato gnocchi occupy it. Sidle a potato or two into the oven while you're baking, scrape out the flesh, and have a go while it's still warm. The first lesson in the gnocchi-maker's handbook is to test one – a gnocco, I suppose – before you make the rest. If it holds together in the pan, and hits the right balance between softness and resistance to the teeth, proceed. If your gnocco disappears in a puff of murky flour-water, keep adjusting the mixture, adding flour in patient increments – you're looking for the elusive sweet spot between cohesion and lightness.

RICOTTA GNOCCHI

The same applies to ricotta gnocchi, in which drained ricotta takes the place of potato. The cheese is lightly mixed with a little flour and egg, plus some Parmesan for flavour, then rolled into small dumplings, ready to cook. As the mixture is more of a wet paste than a dough, ricotta gnocchi are shaped singly, rather than rolling the mixture into a snake and then chopping it into pieces, as you would for potato gnocchi. As ever, it's a wise precaution to test-cook a couple of your gnocchi before you invest time in shaping and cooking the rest.

The starting point given here has never failed me, and the mixture is also highly amenable to the addition of other ingredients. Think of these as gardener's gnocchi: this is a recipe that should be shared with anyone in possession of a vegetable patch. Ricotta gnocchi sit happily next to all sorts of lightly cooked produce, and not only the obvious accompaniment of tomato, garlic and basil. In summer, try serving them with broad beans and leeks, with a little tarragon butter. In the autumn, roasted butternut squash with pears and sage makes a warming treat with spinach and ricotta gnocchi. Come winter, in the interests of heartiness, you may want to up the quantity of gnocchi per serving, and consider giving them a turn around the frying pan with shaved Brussels sprouts, chestnuts and cranberries. Any excess dumplings can be served in a broth, as is typical in Italy, or in a more substantial mushroom or pea soup.

**Cornbread**

This is the style of cornbread made in the northern states of the US, where cornmeal is mixed with wheat flour and a little sugar. Serve it on the side of bacon and eggs, with pulled pork, or simply sliced in half and filled with cream cheese and chopped pickled jalapeños. Leftover cornbread is put to similar uses as yeast-risen bread: French toast, stuffing and bread-and-butter pudding. Note that the ingredients are the same as for griddle pancakes, with a cup of cornmeal and an extra egg thrown in.

_For a deep 20cm square or 23cm round pan, or a 12-hole muffin tin_

INGREDIENTS

1 cup (150g) fine cornmeal **A B**

1 cup (125g) plain flour **A B**

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda **C**

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar **D E**

1 cup (240ml) buttermilk **F**

2 eggs

1–2 tbsp melted fat or oil **G**

**1** Put the cornmeal, flour, bicarbonate of soda, salt and sugar in a bowl. Whisk them together and make a well in the centre.

**2** Beat the wet ingredients together, add to the dry ingredients and mix quickly.

No need to be _too_ thorough.

**3** Pour the batter into a greased pan (cast-iron, for preference) or tin and bake in a 180°C oven for 25–30 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. **H**

Ideally the greased pan or tin should be put in the oven to heat before the batter is added, as for Yorkshire pudding.

**4** Leave to cool slightly, then cut into squares or slices.

Eat on the day or wrap tightly and freeze for up to 3 months.

LEEWAY

**A** Coarse cornmeal can be substituted for fine – you'll need 1 cup (175g).

**B** Adjust the cornmeal-to-flour ratio – anything between 3:1 and 1:3. Some cornbreads, such as caraway and raisin and orange, are made with cornmeal only; these tend to be drier and more rustic.

**C** Some cooks use 1 tsp baking powder in addition to the soda. Or use 2 tsp baking powder and no soda (but see under **F** below). Soda gives a more tender bread.

**D** Use any sort of sugar – white, brown, maple syrup, molasses. Or leave it out entirely, if you prefer.

**E** Some recipes suggest as much as 150g sugar (though I found even 60g a bit too cake-sweet for my tastes).

**F** Replace the buttermilk with sour cream or natural yogurt made pourable with a little water or milk. Or make your own by mixing 225ml milk and 1 tbsp lemon juice. Leave to stand for 5 minutes before using. Alternatively, replacing the buttermilk with pineapple juice will give a lovely brown crust and a mild pineapple flavour. There's no need to use an acidic liquid if you're using baking powder instead of soda – milk or even water will do.

**G** Use any oil (not your posh stuff). Lard, bacon fat or butter all lend an excellent flavour.

**H** Some cooks bake their cornbread at a lower temperature for longer – e.g. 160°C for 40–45 minutes.

Cornbread → Flavours & Variations

BACON

Everything's bigger in America. Except for bacon. After triple-decker burgers, sandwiches requiring the temporary dislocation of your jaw and burritos as brawny as a Mexican wrestler's forearm, it can be a surprise to find that American bacon comes in narrow, streaky strips as thin and floppy as the ribbon in Pollyanna's bonnet. Admittedly, they're served with omelettes stuffed with blue cheese and buffalo wings and stacks of pancakes drenched in butter and syrup, but still. As a Brit, accustomed to a more substantial rasher, I can only assume that Americans like thin, streaky bacon because its fat can be rendered very quickly. Southerners in particular hold bacon fat in high regard, and cornbread is one of the many ways they put it to use. The salty, smoky savouriness of bacon fat turns the cornmeal, which has a sweetness that can make it cakey, into a more natural partner for eggs. About 4–6 British streaky rashers will suffice: cook in a single layer over a low–medium heat until the fat renders. If you end up with more fat than you need, add it anyway. Crumble the bacon into your cornbread batter.

BUTTERNUT SQUASH **,** FETA & CHILLI

In Moldova and Greece, cubes of feta-like cheese are commonly added to cornbreads. Feta and butternut squash is a classic combination, and makes a bread so bright it could be a cut-out by Henri Matisse. For the cornbread, make as per our starting point, but along with the wet ingredients stir in 200g butternut squash cut into 1cm dice (no need to pre-cook), 50–100g diced feta and chilli flakes to taste. You might also add cumin and oregano – lovely served with a stack of barbecued lamb chops. While the coals are whitening, stir up the cornbread batter and put it in the oven. Rinse a tin or two of black beans and mix with finely chopped tomato, red onion and coriander leaves. Dress with a vinaigrette of lime juice and mild olive oil. Slip off your shoes, open a beer and waggle your toes while the cornbread cooks, the flavours in your salad mingle, and drips of lamb fat vaporise on the coals. A simple, colourful, delicious dinner quick enough to make after work.

CARAWAY

This all-corn, no-wheat variation is based on Maria Kaneva-Johnson's recipe for a Serbian quick bread called _proja_. Sticklers for authenticity will want to use lard as the fat component, and eat the bread for breakfast with scrambled eggs or a sharp white cheese, or as an appetiser with clotted cream and _ajvar_ , a sticky combination of charred red peppers and garlic originating in Serbia. Reminiscent of the cornbread muffins I once ate in Arizona, with thick, cold cream cheese and nose-tingling chilli jelly. A cowboy's cream tea. Most cornbreads contain a combination of sour liquid and leavener, to lend lightness, but Kaneva-Johnson's doesn't, and has a denser texture despite its higher liquid-to-cornmeal ratio. More fat is brushed over the bread halfway through the baking time, which guards against dryness. Make as per the starting point, except use only 1 cup (175g) coarse cornmeal and no plain flour, ¼ tsp salt, 1 tsp caraway seeds, 400ml milk mixed with 1 egg and 1 tbsp oil. Pour into a well-greased 20cm round tin. After 25 minutes in the oven, when it should be just set, remove and brush over ½ tbsp melted butter mixed with ½ tbsp sunflower oil. Return to the oven for up to 20 minutes, keeping your eye on it after the first 10; you're looking for a light golden brown.

CHEESE

Another kind of _proja_ (see caraway, above) is made with cottage cheese stirred into the batter. In the US, grated hard cheeses like Cheddar or Monterey Jack – about 100g for our starting-point quantity – are often stirred into cornbread batter just before baking. An alternative is to put half of the plain batter in the greased tin, then sprinkle over a generous helping of cheese and not-too-wet tomato salsa, spread over the rest of the batter and bake. A distantly related dish, native to Paraguay and north-eastern Argentina, is _sopa Paraguaya_ , a bread that thinks it's a soup. Some say it owes its name to the notable wetness of the batter. It's traditional to eat _sopa Paraguaya_ at weddings, where it's served with beer or whisky. Dice 1 large onion and simmer in 125ml water with 1 tsp salt for 10 minutes, then set aside. Cream 75g butter, then add 4 egg yolks, one at a time, reserving the whites for later. Add 125g diced _queso fresco_ or paneer, 1 cup (175g, or 1 cob's worth) roughly chopped sweetcorn kernels and the onion with its cooking water. Mix together. Slowly add 1½ cups (225g) fine cornmeal and 1 cup (240ml) buttermilk, in alternating increments. Whisk the egg whites to soft peaks and fold into the batter. Pour into a greased deep 20cm square tin and bake in the centre of a 200°C oven for 30–35 minutes until golden brown.

CUSTARD

An unusual variation on cornbread that, if the moon is in the right phase, will have an integral layer of custard. It's a little sweeter than cornbread made to our starting point, and a great deal wetter, calling for a 3: 2 ratio of liquid to grain. The following recipe comes from _The Farmer's Bulletin No. 1236: Corn and Its Uses as Food_ , issued by the US Department of Agriculture in 1923. Grease a deep 20cm square tin with no less than 2 tbsp butter and place in a 180°C oven to heat. Vigorously whisk 2 eggs and 50g sugar together. In another bowl, sift ½ cup (65g) plain flour, 1 scant tsp bicarbonate of soda and 1 tsp salt into 1⅔ cups (250g) fine cornmeal. Add 1 cup (240ml) each of milk and buttermilk to the egg-sugar mixture and stir into the dry ingredients. Pour into the hot tin and spread out evenly. Pour over 1 cup (240ml) double cream, without stirring, then bake at 180°C for 30 minutes. Use double the amount of sugar and add 1 tsp vanilla extract to the liquid for a more conventionally custardy, cake-like confection, but the unadorned version is more interesting.

ONION

Anyone who finds the vegetable content of British fish and chips too high should familiarise themselves with hush puppies, the walnut-size balls of cornmeal and onion batter that are served in the American South as a classic side order for fried fish or shrimp. The batter is very similar to our starting point for cornbread, except for the higher ratio of cornmeal to wheat flour, and the addition of onion. Mix ¾ cup (110g) fine cornmeal, ¼ cup (30g) plain flour, ½ cup (120ml) buttermilk, ½ tsp baking powder, ½ tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, 1 finely chopped small onion and 1 egg. Deep-fry 4 or 5 baubles of batter at a time in oil heated to 180°C, using two wetted dessertspoons to scoop up the batter and push it into the oil. If, after a minute or two, the baubles don't flip over of their own accord, give them a nudge with a slotted spoon. Leave for a minute longer, then remove with a slotted spoon and drain briefly on kitchen paper. Keep the cooked hush puppies hot in a 100°C oven until the entire batch is done.

RAISIN & ORANGE

As one of the few comestibles available during the German/Italian occupation of Greece in the Second World War, cornbread, or _bobota_ , gained a bad rep, and to this day it's considered an inferior food by the older generation. _Bobota_ is, in fact, something of a catch-all term that can, depending on where in Greece you find yourself, mean a plain bread, a mush, or something more like a cake containing raisins and orange juice, glazed with honey. On the Ionian island of Zakynthos, a version is made with chopped walnuts, cinnamon, clove and aniseed. Six thousand miles away, in the Dominican Republic, a sweet cornbread is baked with raisin, cinnamon and evaporated milk. It's called _pan de mais_ , which is what poor Blanche DuBois mutters over and over as she twists her tea towel at the end of _A Streetcar Named Desire_. This recipe differs from our starting point in calling exclusively for cornmeal – no wheat, no eggs. The result is a coarser, crumblier texture, so you might want to add the egg back in if you're planning to cut your (non-authentic) version into neat-ish pieces. Mix 200g fine cornmeal, 100g sugar, 1 tsp baking powder, ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda, a pinch of salt and 50g raisins. Add 240ml orange juice, 60ml water and 2 tbsp olive oil. Stir, pour the mixture into an oiled 18cm square tin, then transfer, quickly, to a 180°C oven and cook for 25–30 minutes. If you like, you can paint the warm finished cake with a honey syrup. Allow to cool in the tin before cutting into pieces.

RED PEPPER **,** SWEETCORN & CORIANDER

The first and still the most memorable cornbread I ever tasted was at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill in New York, made with a mixture of blue and yellow corn. Flay claims the blue corn has more flavour, because it's grown organically in small quantities. Others say the difference in flavour is undetectable. But who cares? It's blue! Truly, madly, properly blue. (Blue, according to Buxton in _Dougal and the Blue Cat_ , is beautiful and best. And you don't argue with Buxton.) Use blue corn, or a mixture of blue and yellow, for these muffins, which are similar to Flay's but adapted to our starting point. Cook ½ small onion, diced, with a crushed clove of garlic, in 1 tbsp oil and 2 tbsp butter until soft. Mix into the dry ingredients, along with the buttermilk and egg, plus a handful of finely diced red pepper, 1–2 tbsp chopped coriander leaves and 3–4 tbsp fresh or frozen sweetcorn kernels. Add chilli flakes or chopped fresh jalapeño for a mischievous whisper of heat.

RYE

As old-school American as succotash. The combination of rye and corn is known as 'rye and injun' in New England (cornmeal is sometimes known as 'Indian meal' – hence 'injun'). In _Walden_ , his hymn to self-sufficiency, Henry David Thoreau names rye and corn as his preferred combination of flours for hoe cakes, made with the same batter as our starting point for cornbread, then fried in bacon fat or vegetable oil a few tablespoons at a time, like pancakes. Thoreau recalls turning the cakes 'as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths.' Ever the experimenter, Thoreau tries other breads without leaveners, wishing 'to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture.' Make up the batter for your own rye and injun hoe cakes by following the starting point, using a 50/50 mix of rye flour and fine cornmeal and, in place of the buttermilk, plain milk with 2 tbsp molasses added. Cook over a medium heat in a hot buttered frying pan, as you would griddle pancakes, flipping them when the underside is golden brown.

**Dhokla: Khaman Dhokla**

A snack so pretty it could sit happily in a pâtisserie. Under its red, white and green decoration, khaman dhokla resembles a Victoria sandwich, but is made with chickpea flour and tastes distinctly savoury. It is steamed, like a syrup sponge, resulting in a dreamily moist texture. There are other types of batter for dhokla – the traditional kind is made with a fermented mix of pulses and rice – but this sort is the simplest to make and extremely good to eat. As with cornbread, here we use a liquid-to-flour ratio of 1:2, plus a little salt, sugar, fat and leavener.

_For a 20cm round tin_

INGREDIENTS

1½ cups (150g) chickpea flour **A**

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

¾ cup (180ml) water **B**

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp Eno **C**

TO FINISH

1–2 tsp each of mustard seeds and cumin seeds **D**

2–3 tbsp vegetable oil

Sliced fresh chilli, desiccated coconut and coriander leaves, to garnish – optional

**1** Configure your steamer. You'll need a lidded pan that will accommodate your dhokla tin, and something to elevate the tin above the water level. Add some water to the pan and bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer.

I do this in the bottom part of my pressure cooker, using the veg steaming basket, inverted, as a stand for the dhokla tin.

**2** Mix the chickpea flour, salt and sugar with the water and vegetable oil to make a smooth batter.

**3** Once the water in the pan is simmering, add the Eno to the batter and stir it in thoroughly. Pour the batter into a greased 20cm round tin.

**4** Lower the tin onto the stand above the water and steam, covered, for 15–25 minutes. Check it's cooked with a skewer – which should come out clean – then remove from the steamer.

**5** Fry the mustard seeds and cumin seeds in 2–3 tbsp vegetable oil until they pop.

You will need a splatter guard over the pan to stop the seeds flying everywhere.

**6** Pour the seeds and oil over the warm dhokla, then sprinkle with other garnishes, if using.

**7** Cut into squares to serve. It is traditional to accompany this with a chutney made by pounding together coriander leaves, mint leaves, green chilli, ginger, lemon juice and salt.

LEEWAY

**A** Chickpea flour is also called besan or gram flour.

**B** Some cooks prefer yogurt or a mix of yogurt and water.

**C** A similar concoction to Eno can be made by thoroughly combining equal amounts of bicarbonate of soda and citric acid. If you dislike the sharp taste of citric acid, use 2 tsp baking powder in place of the Eno.

**D** Make the flavoured oil with other spices (whole or ground), curry leaves, chilli flakes or a mixture. If you're using ground spices, take care that the pan isn't too dry, and don't fry them for too long, as they're apt to burn.

Dhokla → Flavours & Variations

BURNT ONION

Time was a gentleman might take a stroll through Soho and find himself propositioned by a prostitute. Or offered an origami envelope of cocaine. Or have his pocket picked by a mascara-smudged transvestite with holes in her stockings. These days you might as well be in an airport retail development for all the edge in the air. Until midnight strikes, that is, and the duty managers of the pintxos bars and East Asian BBQ concepts and informal dim-sum lounges punch in the codes on their security systems. No one knows where the carts come from; they must rise from backstreet manholes or emerge from the stage doors of dark theatres. Then the frying begins. Londoners with otherwise impeccable gastronomic credentials, men and women about town who know their natives from their Pacifics and their _yudofu_ from their _agedashi_ tofu, are suddenly overcome by unspeakable urges. Oh, the remorse the next morning! Had it not been for the irresistible aroma of browning onion they might never have bitten into that unspeakable frankfurter, the ingredients of which bear little thinking about, crammed into a pappy bun of carcinogenic whiteness and squirted with a zigzag of unbranded ketchup. Fried onions deserve better. They get it in India, where they're used freely in vegetarian dishes, and as part of the tarka in dal. I tried some on top of a dhokla, pissaladière-style, and, even better, cooked into the batter. Dice or thinly slice 1 medium-size onion. Fry until nicely brown and stir into a dhokla batter made as per the starting point, but using only ½ cup (120ml) water and leaving out the oil – the onions will yield moisture of their own, and the oil used to fry them will contribute flavour. Instead of cumin, add a few pinches of nigella seeds to the mustard seeds and spread over the top of the cooked dhokla, along with a scattering of coriander leaves.

CHANA DAL

Our starting point, using chickpea flour, is a lot quicker than the traditional recipe for dhokla, where the batter is made with dried split chickpeas, soaked, blended until smooth and left to ferment overnight. Similar batters are used for idli and dosas, pancakes made with a combination of pulses and rice, but for these you'll need a blender capable of turning the soaked pulses into a smooth batter. For the plain chana (no-rice) version, rinse then soak 1 cup (200g) chana dal for about 6 hours or overnight. Drain and grind all but 4 tbsp of the soaked dal with 1 chopped green chilli, 1 tbsp grated ginger and up to 1 cup (240ml) water until you have a thick-ish batter. Add the reserved dal and stir in 2 tbsp yogurt, 1 tsp lemon juice, ½ tsp ground turmeric and ½ tsp salt. Set aside to ferment for another 6 hours or overnight. Before cooking, stir in 1 tsp Eno or ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda. Steam the batter in a 20cm round tin for 15–20 minutes or until an inserted skewer comes out clean. Fry spices in oil to pour over the top, then garnish.

COCONUT

Finding that I only had 100g chickpea flour left, rather than schlep to the Indian supermarket, I topped up my supply of chickpea flour with 50g desiccated coconut, replaced the water with coconut milk, and used 2 tsp baking powder instead of Eno. It worked a treat. The savoury flavour of chickpea still dominated, but was complemented by the sweetness of coconut. Next time I added the same ground spices Mark Hix uses in his chickpea and coconut curry to the batter – clove, cinnamon, cardamom, coriander, fennel, garam masala and turmeric – and for the garnish, I piled on more coconut and sliced green chilli.

GARLIC, ROSEMARY & BLACK PEPPER

Given the Italian fondness for chickpeas, it isn't much of a leap to apply Italian principles to a dhokla – in this instance, the flavours used to make _farinata_ , the chickpea flatbread from Liguria. The sharp taste of Eno would be incongruous, so use the 2 tsp baking powder suggested under Leeway instead. Towards the end of the steaming time, cook a few crushed garlic cloves in a little olive oil, then remove them and gently heat some finely chopped needles of rosemary in the garlic-infused oil. Pour over the warm chickpea 'dhokla', give it a good grind of coarse black pepper, then cut it into squares.

RED PEPPER & CHORIZO

This re-working of the dhokla idea makes for perfect picnic food. Make up the batter as per the method, but use 2 tsp baking powder rather than Eno. As you're stirring all the ingredients together, add 4 tbsp finely diced roasted red pepper and 100g sliced charcuterie chorizo that you've cut into tiny pieces with kitchen scissors (besides the question of whether it will heat through properly, cooking chorizo would be too coarse). Pour the batter into an oiled, deep 20cm foil dish and steam for 15 minutes. Remove, wrap in more foil and carry in one hand, with a half-bottle of chilly fino sherry in the other. Set a friend the task of bringing glasses (because it _has_ to be glass for sherry) and the best green olives they can find. Meet under a fig tree if remotely possible.

SEMOLINA

If you're used to the more assertively flavoured chickpea flour, dhokla made with _rava_ , or semolina, can lack the fine, creamy texture lent by besan, and be comparatively bland, like a khaman dhokla after a couple of cycles in the washing machine. The blandness can work in your favour, however, if you're working with subtly flavoured ingredients that might be disrupted by the beaniness of chickpea.

**Halva: Irmik Halva**

The term 'halva' means sweet, and covers a broad range of sugary treats. Irmik halva belongs to the grain branch of the halva family, and is a simple, well-loved Turkish dessert. It was once a fixture of Ottoman-era picnics, served after barbecued lamb, and today you might find it served for breakfast in Ankara tripe restaurants, or prepared in domestic kitchens for a wake. The toasted semolina gives it a wonderful flavour, reminiscent of popcorn or, if you add a pinch of salt, digestive biscuits.

_For 1 × 15cm dome-shaped cereal bowl, or 6 small moulds_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

100g unsalted butter

1 cup (175g) coarse semolina **B**

2½ cups (600ml) milk **C D E**

1 cup (200g) sugar **E F**

2–3 tbsp toasted pine nuts – optional

**1** Melt half of the butter in a medium-size saucepan over a medium heat, then add the semolina and cook it, stirring frequently, until golden.

Take care lest its entrancing fragrance lull you into leaving it too long – you don't want it to pass from golden to dark brown.

**2** Put the milk in another saucepan over a medium heat. Add the sugar and the remaining butter, letting them dissolve and melt before slowly stirring into the semolina.

**3** Cook over a low heat, stirring now and then, until the mixture starts to thicken and come away from the sides of the pan. Toasted pine nuts can be added at this point.

If you prefer to serve the halva loose and fluffy, stop cooking when the mixture is like mashed potato and spoon onto plates.

**4** Scrape into a bowl or individual moulds and pat down. Leave at room temperature to set.

You'll know it has when you press the edges and it comes away from the mould cleanly. How long this takes will depend on the size of the bowl, and how wet the semolina was when you stopped cooking it. Small individual dishes can take as little as 15 minutes, but bank on a couple of hours for the larger version.

LEEWAY

**A** Some halva-makers wait until the mixture has cooled a bit, then hand-form it into shapes.

**B** Fine semolina can be used for halva, but for irmik halva it needs to be coarse.

**C** Authentic irmik halva recipes often call for a 2:1 ratio of milk to semolina, but I find that quantity of liquid tends to evaporate very quickly. The more generous 2½ cups (600ml) milk here gives the semolina time to cook a little.

**D** Similar Greek recipes call for a spiced sugar syrup in place of the milk. This will mean braving much spitting and cracking as it's stirred into the hot pan of toasted semolina. (See for syrup-flavouring ideas.)

**E** Some recipes call for a 50/50 mix of water and milk rather than all milk; others call for tinned condensed milk and omit the sugar.

**F** Feel free to reduce the sugar – ½ cup (100g) is plenty to my tooth.

Halva → Flavours & Variations

CHICKPEA

Some describe _Mysore pak_ as a fudge, others as a type of shortbread, but for the purposes of this book, it sits with halva. It's as rich and sweet as the eponymous palace where the dish was first prepared is extravagant. ( _Pak_ , incidentally, means sweet.) It departs from the other halvas in this section in that the water and sugar are cooked to thread stage – see **here** – before the grain is added. Cook 2 cups (400g) sugar in ½ cup (120ml) water to 106–112°C, or the thread stage, then gradually, to avoid lumps, stir in 1 cup (100g) sifted chickpea flour. Toasting the flour first is optional, as is adding some ground cardamom or saffron for flavour. Gradually beat in 1 cup (240ml) hot melted ghee. After the mixture froths it should start to pull away from the sides of the pan. When it does, pour into an 18–20cm dish and leave to set before cutting into pieces.

CORNMEAL & MOLASSES

'Indian pudding' is a sweet cornmeal mush that's especially popular in New England. It's made with milk and molasses and is served like halva. The grain – cornmeal, a.k.a. Indian meal – is baked in the oven, or cooked slowly over heat until a spoon can stand up in it. Food historians believe Indian pudding may be an American descendant of hasty pudding, as mentioned in 'Yankee Doodle': _And there we saw the men and boys/As thick as hasty pudding_. Hasty pudding, made with oat or wheat meal, was popular in Britain in the seventeenth century, but had largely disappeared from cookbooks by the nineteenth. Like Yorkshire pudding, both Indian and hasty were often served before a meat course, with the intention of suppressing the appetite, in case the ensuing measly portions proved disappointing. Over time Indian pudding has become sweeter and is now more commonly served as a dessert. Start by pouring ½ cup (90g) coarse cornmeal into 4 cups (960ml) warm milk, bringing it to the boil over a medium heat and then reducing to as low a simmer as possible. Stir for 20 minutes before adding ½ cup (120ml) molasses, 50g butter, ¼ tsp salt and ½ tsp ground ginger and/or cinnamon. Pour the mixture into a 20cm round, buttered ovenproof dish. Bake at 130°C for about 2½ hours, by which time it should resemble a perfectly baked custard – set, but slightly wobbly in the centre. Nowadays Indian pudding is usually served with ice cream, but in the eighteenth century Tobias Smollett noted that it was typically spread out on a platter, before a cavity was made in the middle and a knob of butter and generous spoonful of sugar (or molasses) put into it, there to be transformed into a caramel sauce by the heat of the pudding. You ate from the outside in, dipping your spoon into the central reservoir of sauce as you went. In the Veneto, a comparable dish was made with crumbled leftover polenta, stirred up with molasses, milk, dried fruit, candied citrus peel and pine nuts – a jazzy hybrid of porridge and muesli.

DATE & VANILLA

Fly to Oman. Buy a dish-dash in a souk. Fly back and spend the next six months making halva sweetened with date syrup. You'll find the flattering cut of your new garment very handy. Date syrup tastes like maple syrup that's migrated south for the simpler life. Make the halva as per the starting point, but use 1 cup (240ml) date syrup in place of the sugar, add 2 tsp vanilla extract and a pinch of salt, and leave out the pine nuts. Finish with salted candied walnuts or pecans.

POMEGRANATE & ORANGE

Silky white rice flour makes for a silky halva, I've discovered. First I cooked 1 cup (150g) rice flour in a mixture of 1 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp groundnut oil until lightly browned. Next I added 2½ cups (600ml) freshly squeezed orange juice, with bits, and 2 tbsp pomegranate molasses. Then I added sugar, tablespoon by tablespoon, until the mixture was sweet, but not so much that it undermined the enlivening sourness of orange and pomegranate. I left my fruity halva to set, then diced and scattered it over Greek yogurt with chopped pistachios. When my husband tasted it, he said he'd happily eat it with cheese, as it tasted the way he wished _membrillo_ (quince paste) or damson cheese tasted – less sweet, with more pronounced fruity flavours. He was onto something. It proved terrific with mature English Cheddar, and a more than acceptable replacement for the jelly in a peanut butter sandwich.

SAFFRON **,** ROSE, CINNAMON & ALMOND

This _zerde_ from Azerbaijan could be a relative of irmik halva. _Zerde_ normally refers to a saffron-scented rice pudding served at weddings in Turkey, but this recipe contains no rice – just ground almonds and a little semolina. Anya von Bremzen describes it as silky and refreshing. In a medium saucepan, combine 1¼ cups (125g) ground almonds with 5 cups (1.2 litres) milk and ¼– ½ cup (50–100g) sugar. Bring to the boil, then remove from the heat and add a pinch of powdered saffron. In a separate pan, cook ¼ cup (45g) coarse semolina in 1 tbsp butter until brown, stirring constantly, then pour in the sweet almond-milk mixture and bring to the boil. Simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally until it thickens – this should take 15–20 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in ¼ cup (30g) slivered almonds, 2 tsp rosewater and ½ tsp ground cinnamon. Pour into 8 individual moulds, chill then serve with a little more cinnamon sprinkled over.

**Polenta**

Polenta is made either by cooking cornmeal to the consistency of mashed potato, and serving as is; or cooking cornmeal the same way, leaving it to set and then cutting it into pieces before it's fried or grilled. The mash-textured 'wet' sort is usually mixed with lots of butter and cheese, unless it's intended as a side dish to a hearty, sticky stew, in which case its blandness comes as a relief and it needs less embellishment. Polenta fanatics avoid using metal implements or cutlery, which are said to affect the flavour, preferring wooden stirrers and cutting the finished polenta with string. Saves on washing-up.

_For enough polenta to serve 3–4 as a side_

INGREDIENTS

3 cups (720ml) water **A B**

1 tsp salt

1 cup (175g) coarse cornmeal **C**

¼ tsp white pepper

Butter, olive oil, cream, cheese – optional

**1** Put the water and salt in a saucepan over a medium heat. **D**

**2** Once it has come to the boil, swirl the water, then pour in the cornmeal in a steady stream, whisking all the while to minimise lumps.

Some cooks avoid lumps by first mixing the cornmeal with some of the water.

**3** Keep cooking over a low heat, stirring constantly, or at least enough to prevent the mixture sticking to the bottom of the pan, until it has the texture you're after.

**4** Add the pepper and taste for seasoning, adding any butter, olive oil, cream or cheese as desired. **E**

FOR WET POLENTA

Simply judge when it reaches the right texture.

Starting with a longer dilution will help keep the polenta in a mush state – start with 6 cups (1.4 litres) liquid to 1 cup (175g) cornmeal – as will additions of butter, olive oil, cream and cheese. Note that the polenta will naturally firm up if left.

FOR SET POLENTA

When the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan, scrape it into a buttered or oiled dish and leave at room temperature to firm up.

Set polenta can be cut into pieces and grilled, fried or used like gnocchi.

LEEWAY

**A** As little as 2 cups (480ml) water will do, and is preferable if you want the polenta to set quickly and have a dry-ish texture. Some cooks use as many as 8 cups (1.9 litres) water. It really depends on how long you want to cook and stir your polenta for. Remember you can always add more hot water as you go.

**B** Stock in place of some or all of the water will give a richer flavour. Milk will give a creamier texture.

**C** Polenta was originally made with all sorts of grains and meals – spelt, farro, buckwheat, teff, chestnut.

**D** For extra texture and flavour, first cook onion and garlic or a mirepoix (diced onion, carrot and celery) in oil, then add the water and proceed as opposite.

**E** Whole sweetcorn kernels can be added to polenta for extra bite. Clearly, canned kernels will need draining first, but otherwise the sweetcorn need only be stirred in towards the end of cooking.

Polenta → Flavours & Variations

CAULIFLOWER, CAPER & RAISIN

Plain wet polenta can be bland, but don't write it off until you've tried it as a foil or base for other ingredients. Just as mashed potato mixed with cabbage and onion makes champ, try combining wet polenta with kale and beans to make Tuscan _polenta incatenata_ ('polenta in chains'), or break set polenta into pieces and serve it with the very Sicilian mixture of cauliflower, caper buds and garlic. Think of it as a stuffing in search of a cavity. Cook ¾ cup (130g) coarse cornmeal in 1½ cups (360ml) water as per the starting point, until it pulls away from the sides of the pan, then scrape it onto a plate to set. Resist the temptation to smooth it. While it cools, cut a small cauliflower into bite-size florets, toss in olive oil and roast for 30 minutes at 200°C, until soft and a little charred, then set aside. Reduce the oven temperature to 180°C and toast a few tablespoons of pine nuts until golden. Break the polenta into penny-size pieces. Heat some olive oil in a frying pan over a medium heat and cook 2 finely chopped garlic cloves until just golden. Add 2 tbsp salted capers, rinsed and dried, and 2 tbsp raisins. After a few minutes add the cauliflower and polenta, give it a few more minutes, then add 1 tbsp anchovy paste, 1 tsp wine vinegar and 1 tbsp water. Stir and remove from the heat, add the toasted pine nuts and a big handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley, season and toss well, then serve.

CHEESE GRITS

I'd assumed that cheese grits are to _polenta al formaggio_ as pasta parcels are to tortelloni. Not so. Grits call for hominy, a stoneground, alkalised cornmeal that's white, rather than yellow, and more flavourful. That said, grits from the American South are made with non-hominy white corn. Not that it matters a great deal either way, when the subtle notes of corn will be shouted into submission by strident cheese. Use 2 cups (480ml) each of water and milk to 1 cup (175g) coarse cornmeal. Follow the method up to step **3**, then cover the pan and cook over a low–medium heat for 20–30 minutes, until the texture resembles very creamy mashed potato. Off the heat, stir in 50g butter and anything between 100g and 450g cheese. Whereas Cheddar, or a mixture of Cheddar and Monterey Jack, is typical for grits, polenta is open to all types of Italian cheese – Parmesan, fontina, Gorgonzola, mozzarella... _o tutte e quattro_.

CHESTNUT & RED WINE

In November it's traditional for Tuscans to sit around the fire enjoying freshly roasted chestnuts with a glass of new red wine _._ Andrea Pieroni notes that chestnut-meal polenta made with new red wine was once a common cough remedy in northern Tuscany. Sounds better than a synthetic lemon and honey boiled sweet. Try 250g chestnut flour simmered in 500ml water and 500ml red wine. Aim to develop your chest infection around the third Thursday in November, to coincide with the arrival of the Beaujolais Nouveau (even if the cure doesn't work, you'll have 250ml left over to dampen your sorrows). Chestnut polenta can also be made by stirring unsweetened chestnut purée into just-cooked cornmeal polenta.

FONDUE

When you see the words 'delicious' and 'polenta' in close proximity, you know the phrases 'plenty of cheese' or 'lashings of butter' can't be far away. Ferran Adrià cuts to the chase and makes polenta _gratin_. In addition to unctuous fontina, from the mountainous Valle d'Aosta, many cheeses are used to enrich polenta. Forced to share a steak _tagliata_ I had planned to eat alone, I made a fondue-inspired polenta, _polenta alla fonduta_ , cooking ½ cup (90g) coarse cornmeal in 1½ cups (360ml) lightly salted water and 4 tbsp Picpoul de Pinet – a wine rarely spotted, I imagine, at fondue parties, but the only kind in my rack with the requisite tartness. I finished the polenta over a low heat, stirring in a handful each of grated Gruyère and Emmental until melted, then a teaspoon of kirsch, a squeeze of lemon and a hint of white pepper. Keeping the polenta warm, I flick-flacked the steak in a hot pan, gave it a few minutes to relax, then sliced it over rocket leaves dressed with a few tears of lemon juice. I served the polenta in miniature Le Creuset pots, on the basis that pale yellow grain edged with steak blood is not a good look. This fondue polenta is a bit like _aligot_ , the cheese-enriched mashed potato from the Auvergne region of France.

MILLET

Ken Albala regrets the obsolescence of millet as a European food source, given its rich, nutty flavour, and passes on the Renaissance chef Bartolomeo Scappi's suggestion to simmer it in milk or meat broth, with a piece of salted pork jowl or cervelat sausage. Once the grain is cooked, Scappi adds grated cheese, egg, cinnamon, pepper and saffron. But millet is making a comeback. Maria Speck gives the following outline for cooking millet polenta. Soften some spring onion with bay leaf in olive oil, add the millet, cook for a few minutes then add twice the millet's volume in water. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer, stirring, for 15–20 minutes. Add the same volume of natural yogurt as millet, along with plenty of chopped fresh herbs, then sprinkle with Parmesan. Simon Rogan made a millet risotto with blue cheese and pear at Roganic, his pop-up in Marylebone. Sandor Katz relates a method for fermented millet porridge, in which the grain is soaked in salted water in a covered jar for 24–48 hours before being strained, rinsed and simmered in fresh water, with the optional additions of oregano, paprika, turmeric and cumin. Olive oil and lemon juice are added, and when it has thickened the porridge is poured into a dish, allowed to set and served in slices, as they are or toasted.

OKRA

Flying back from Antigua, we had a longish, Friday-night layover in Barbados. Rather than hang around the airport browsing patchwork handbags and vast watches with titanium bezels and integral heat-seeking harpoon guns, we wanted a beer and some proper Bajan seafood. The lady at information suggested Oistins. In the taxi, I fell to imagining a breezy, beachside restaurant with an open kitchen and a smart-casual clientele of very thin people in expensive off-white linenwear. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Oistins is not even a restaurant. It's a village – or was – now entirely given over, by all appearances, to the preparation and consumption of seafood. It might bear comparison to boisterous, bargain-basement resort towns like Magaluf or Juan les Pins were it not for its odd atmosphere of unforced, ungarish authenticity. Friday night is 'fish fry', when you're likely to eat flying fish and _coucou,_ cornmeal cooked with okra, served with a portion of plantain on the side. The queues for the dozens of food stalls reflect the Caribbean attitude to urgency, so grab a cold Banks and enjoy the wait. The next challenge is to find a spare seat at one of about a thousand communal tables before your food goes cold. We chose to stand, sipping our beers and watching couples of varying ability try out their moves on the perilously sprung dancefloor. It was worth the trip, especially by comparison with a lifetime of layover panini and clammy wraps _._ For the _coucou_ , simmer chopped okra (100g per cup of cornmeal – 175g coarse or 150g fine) until just cooked. Drain, reserving the water and using it, plus however much extra you need, to cook your cornmeal, together with ½ tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar and 1–2 tbsp butter. Stir in the okra when the cornmeal is done. Swap some of the water for coconut milk for an extra Antillean lilt.

PANELLE

The batter for _panelle_ , the street-snack from Palermo, is made by simmering chickpea flour and salt in hot water until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan. At this point the batter is spread out on an oiled surface or baking tray, to a depth of about 1cm, and left to cool until it takes on a dense yet flexible consistency, not unlike top-of-the-range carpet underlay. The rubbery dough is then cut into pieces and either deep-fried or grilled. They taste like egg, chips _and_ peas in one soft mouthful. Utter bliss, in other words. _Panelle_ are also made in Provence, and may be served for dessert, sprinkled with sugar. The Niçoise term is _panisso_ , a cognate of the Italian word _panissa_ , which is a generic term – as was 'polenta' – for any mushy, cooked grain.

PORCINI & BLUEBERRY

Cooking polenta in stock is one way to infuse it with flavour. Soak 2 handfuls of dried porcini in 500ml warm water, with a few pinches each of salt and sugar, and leave to infuse overnight. Fine-strain it the next day and your porcini stock is ready. Use this stock to cook 100g coarse cornmeal, adding a little extra hot water if needed. Throw in a handful of blueberries at the end, and the chopped-up rehydrated porcini if you don't have any other plans for them. Serve the polenta on the side of wild boar stew, roast guinea fowl or venison sausages and enjoy the intermittent bursts of fresh berry.

PORK

Scrapple found its way to Pennsylvania from northern Germany. Scraps of pork are cooked with cereal in stock, then left to set in a loaf tin. It's thought to be descended from a dish made with blood and buckwheat. In the US, however, blood albumin was used in the sugar-refining process, which kept the price of animal blood high, so pork was used instead, combined with inexpensive cornmeal. Scrapple is most commonly served for breakfast, with eggs or syrup and maybe apples on the side. Variations include goetta, made with oats and popular in Cincinnati, while in the Carolinas, 'liver mush' is often eaten in a sandwich with grape jelly. The method for scrapple is straightforward. The meat scraps – or fancy modern cuts – are boiled with aromatics, yielding a broth. The cooked meat is then set aside, the stock strained and skimmed, and enough of the latter set aside to cook the cornmeal (using the same ratio as our starting point, 3:1). Meanwhile, any skin is removed from the meat, which is then taken off the bone, and cut or pulled into pieces. When the polenta is as thick as mashed potato, the meat is stirred in and the mixture transferred to a loaf tin. Finally, the scrapple is left to solidify for a few hours, until it's ready to be sliced and fried. And boy, does it need that pan-tan. Uncooked scrapple looks like the Dish of the Day at the Ministry of Plenty. Old recipes call for about 1 cup (150g) fine cornmeal per 500g meat, but you'll find a good deal of elasticity in the ratios.

SQUID INK

Shiny-black and squeaky as a rubber onesie: pervert's polenta. For 1 cup (175g) coarse cornmeal, add 2 sachets squid ink while the polenta is still wet enough to be easily stirred. Serve with pan-fried fish – a fillet of red mullet with crispy skin would be ideal.

**Gnocchi alla Romana**

In effect, gnocchi alla Romana are rounds of set polenta made with semolina and milk, and enriched with egg. No need to make a sauce. Simply arrange your gnocchi in an ovenproof dish, dot generously with butter and sprinkle over plenty of Parmesan. In the oven, the little dumplings will puff up and crisp, and the cheese and butter melt. Serve with tartly dressed, bitter leaves. The single most important tip with gnocchi alla Romana is to be good and hungry when you sit down to them.

_For a main course for 4, or a starter for 6_

INGREDIENTS

6 cups (1.4 litres) milk **A B**

½ tsp salt

1½ cups (225g) fine semolina **C D**

125g butter **E**

250g Parmesan, grated **E**

1 egg **F**

**1** Heat the milk in a saucepan with the salt until warm.

Infuse the milk with a flavour at this point, if you fancy it.

**2** Off the heat, gradually sprinkle in the semolina, while whisking, then return to a low heat, continuing to whisk.

**3** Cook, stirring continuously with a wooden or silicone spoon, for 5–8 minutes, until the mixture is thick, elastic and pulling away from the sides of the pan.

**4** Still over the heat, stir in 50g of the butter and 150g of the cheese, along with any other seasonings, then remove from the heat and allow to cool a little.

**5** Beat in the egg.

It can look a bit curdled and unpromising to start with. Persevere until everything is integrated.

**6** Scrape the mixture into a moistened shallow tin or silicone mould, and use a wet offset palette knife to smooth the surface. You're aiming for a depth of about 1cm. **G**

**7** Leave to cool and set.

This will take about 1 hour in the fridge, longer at room temperature.

**8** Cut into rounds or squares, overlap a little in a greased baking dish, then dot with the remaining butter and sprinkle with the rest of the cheese. Bake at 200°C for 15–20 minutes.

LEEWAY

**A** Use any whole, semi-skimmed or skimmed milk. Add some water if you're a bit short.

**B** Freshly grated nutmeg is a traditional, if optional, addition to the milk at step **1**.

**C** Some recipes call for 1½ cups (210g) semolina _flour_ , milled very fine like cake flour. Or use 1½ cups (265g) coarse semolina instead if you don't mind a more knobbly texture.

**D** Make the gnocchi with cornmeal instead of semolina; coarse or fine, whichever you prefer – you'll need 1½ cups of either (so 265g coarse, or 225g fine).

**E** Reduce the butter and/or cheese, but remember these ingredients create the flavour.

**F** Some recipes omit the egg, which works just fine, but the gnocchi will be a little looser and have less puff when baked. You can also use 2 yolks rather than 1 whole egg.

**G** For a less rustic look, spoon into silicone moulds and turn out once the mixture has had a chance to set in the fridge. Quenelles are another option.

**Gnocchi Parisienne / Choux Pastry**

The versatile batter can be boiled for gnocchi, fried for beignets, or baked to make any number of choux pastries like éclairs, gougères and profiteroles. To account for these variations, the method splits after step **4**. The gnocchi and beignets are pretty simple. Choux pastry is marginally more challenging; the egg must be added judiciously to achieve the right consistency. Some churro-makers use choux as their dough, as it amounts to an enriched version of the more common recipe **here**.

_For enough gnocchi to serve 4, 20–24 profiteroles or beignets, or 12 choux buns or éclairs_

INGREDIENTS

1 cup (125g) plain flour **A B**

1 cup (240ml) water **C**

Pinch of salt

60g butter

4 medium or 3 large eggs **D**

Freshly grated nutmeg – optional **E**

**1** Sift the flour. Put the water and salt into a saucepan over a medium heat, and melt the butter in it. Bring to the boil, then remove from the heat. Stir and keep on stirring...

**2**... and stirring, while you tip in the sifted flour. Mix to a paste consistency, then return to a low-ish heat and cook, still stirring, for a minute or two. The mixture should start to pull away from the sides of the pan. Set aside for about 5 minutes to cool – you want to add the eggs without scrambling them.

**3** Beat in the eggs with a whisk or wooden spoon, one by one and thoroughly, adding plenty of air. Aim for a batter that's shiny and smooth, but still shapeable.

For gnocchi and beignets, there's no need to be too precise about the texture, but for choux, according to Nancy Birtwhistle, when you lift the whisk or spoon out of the mix, a 'V' shape should be hanging from it – a bit thicker than dropping consistency.

**4** Some cooks rest gnocchi and beignet batter for 30 minutes before cooking; it will keep in the fridge for 12 hours. Once mixed, choux needs to be piped and then baked or frozen.

If the batter has been in the fridge, bring it to room temperature before starting to cook.

FOR GNOCCHI PARISIENNE

Test-cook 1 tsp of your batter in boiling water, to make sure it holds together, then spoon into a piping bag with a 2cm nozzle. Pipe the batter directly into a large pan of salted boiling water, using wetted scissors to cut 3–4cm lengths. Don't cook too many gnocchi at a time. Leave to simmer for 3–4 minutes, by which time they will be floating on the surface, then use a slotted spoon to lift them out onto kitchen paper to drain.

The cooked gnocchi can be sautéed, or put on a baking tray and heated with butter and cheese, or mixed with a sauce.

FOR BEIGNETS

Deep-fry 1–2 tsp scoops of the batter, a few at a time, at 190°C for about 4 minutes (cut into one of the first batch to check it's cooked through). Drain on kitchen paper and sprinkle with icing sugar, or serve with a fruit purée.

If you're new to deep-frying, see here.

FOR ÉCLAIRS, PROFITEROLES, CHOUX BUNS OR GOUGÈRES

Pipe or spoon the batter onto a slightly wetted baking tray in fingers, balls, a ring of balls, etc. For éclairs or small choux puffs, bake at 200°C for 20 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 180°C and cook for another 10 minutes (or 15–20 minutes for larger choux buns). Remove and immediately slit the bottom or side to allow the steam to escape.

LEEWAY

**A** For choux pastry, some cooks prefer strong white flour for its extra gluten, which helps choux stretch.

**B** For extra-crisp choux pastry, replace 10 per cent of the flour with rice flour.

**C** When making choux pastry or beignets, use half water and half milk, as Michel Roux Jnr does. Milk gives a better flavour, water a crisper texture. The combination of milk and water is also said to yield the best Yorkshire pudding – choux pastry's bluff English cousin.

**D** A Hungarian gnocchi recipe calls for 2/3 cup each of flour and milk (85g flour, 160ml milk), plus 75g butter and 6 egg yolks.

**E** For gnocchi, stir in some freshly grated nutmeg at the end of step **3**, if you like.

Gnocchi Parisienne / Choux Pastry → Flavours & Variations

CHEESE

The world's best canapé. Gougères are native to Burgundy, although the cheese most often stipulated is Swiss Gruyère. As the French are not known for their embrace of foreign ingredients, this can be taken as a serious endorsement. Choux pastry is so-named for the cabbage-like striations on its surface when cooked, but it has been known by various names, including _pâte royale_. Which makes a gougère, _pace_ Vincent Vega, a royale with cheese. Use about 75g grated cheese, stirring most of it in after all the egg has been incorporated. Pipe into small buns and sprinkle the rest of the Gruyère over the top. You might choose to add ½ tsp dried thyme to the batter, or ½ small onion, grated – but as with cheese soufflé and straws, the unsurpassable flavour enhancer is mustard. I have made choux with mustard and no cheese whatsoever and found it had a surprisingly cheesy tang: add 1 tsp mustard powder or 1 tbsp coarse grain mustard to your batter. In Brazil, sour tapioca flour, made from cassava, is used for a variation on choux called _pão de queijo_. These little cheese puffs are eaten at breakfast or as a snack.

COCOA

Chocolate pastry is so often a disappointment, but it works very well in choux. Ice chocolate-pastry éclairs with a pale coffee glaze and they look like the pâtisserie classic in negative – both familiar and strange. Like a good simile. Sift 1 heaped tbsp cocoa powder with the flour – this gives a dark and distinct chocolate flavour. Add 2 tbsp caster sugar at step **1** if it's a cake-like effect you're after. Cocoa without sugar works in savoury variations. Chad Robertson of the Tartine Bakery in San Francisco mixes cocoa with rye flour as a base for gougères (see cheese above), using about 15 per cent of the flour weight in rye.

FENNEL

A surefire way to avoid the disappointment of unpuffed choux is to hang the baking and deep-fry the paste instead. The Italian chef Bartolomeo Scappi was making fritters with choux batter in the sixteenth century. Around Lent, in Spain, a similar treat is made with a slightly sweetened choux pastry flavoured with ground fennel seeds: try 1 tsp per 1 cup (125g) flour. _Buñuelos de viento_ , commonly eaten on All Saints' Day and sometimes charmingly translated as 'nun's farts', are also choux-based. The pastry is made with milk, rather than water, and might be flavoured with a little lemon zest and brandy, before being fried in olive oil. In the 1830s, Thomas Roscoe described the night he visited a festival in Triana by crossing the lamp-lit bridge of boats that connected the district with Seville, on the other side of the Guadalquivir, recalling the 'innumerable flickering lights of the gipsies vending their buñuelos', fried in pots over charcoal fires.

HAZELNUT

Swings and roundabouts. What you gain in flavour you lose in texture. Add 50g ground toasted hazelnuts along with the flour and you'll have a choux with a thicker, coarser texture than its wheat-flour equivalent. Unlike ordinary choux, however, which can seem a little plain unfilled or un-iced, this hazelnut version works well as a stand-alone bun, served with coffee, or on the side of a raspberry cream Chantilly (cream whipped with a little icing sugar, vanilla and crushed raspberries). If your guests complain that they prefer their choux filled, hand them the piping bag and tell them to get on with it.

LARD

In Naples, the choux paste used for gnocchi is made with lard. Told you it was dangerous there. When I mixed up a batch, simply substituting the butter with the same weight of lard, the texture and fragrance of hot water, flour and lard reminded me of the pastry for pork pies (fortunately, the pigginess was lost in the baked choux). The main difference was the colour of the finished buns, paler than those made with butter or oil. Neapolitan bakers source their lard from the city's best salumerie and use it for their sfogliatella, the many-layered, clam-shaped, ricotta-filled pastry known by Italian-Americans, and _Sopranos_ fans, as 'shfooyadell'. Thumb its leaves like a flip-book and you'll see the image of your waistband expanding to mobster proportions. Filled with a mere dollop of whipped cream, lard choux buns are positively healthy by comparison.

OLIVE OIL

Olive oil works perfectly well in choux batter in place of butter, and can be substituted weight for weight. Some say they can taste it. I can't. For me, the flavour of baked flour dominates. Sampled side by side, the flavour difference between butter, lard and olive oil was minor, which, if cost is a consideration, makes a pretty convincing case for lard. Still, olive oil has its devotees, and cheaper oils could undoubtedly be used in its place. Dan Lepard makes his black olive gougères with olive oil choux. I made some for a dairy-averse friend by leaving out the cheese, but keeping the chopped black olives and finely chopped thyme, added to the water and oil before the flour went in.

ORANGE FLOWER WATER & ALMOND

Marie-Antoine Carême used orange flower water to flavour his choux batter. He made the batter into little buns, decorating them with finely chopped almonds mixed with sugar, using egg white as a fixative.

They were then returned to the cooling oven to set. Orange flower water is a common flavouring for pancakes – and choux batter could be seen as a pancake mix with lots of egg. Orange flower waters vary in strength, so start with 1 tsp per 1 cup (125g) flour, added after half of the eggs have been incorporated.

POTATO

_Pommes Dauphines_. Missing, presumed extinct. Why? A French fry crossed with a doughnut in the form of a crispy, golden gobstopper. Back in the day they might be presented in a nest of _pommes allumettes_ , as a double-potato side dish for simply cooked poultry. André Simon notes that _pommes Elizabeth_ are _Dauphines_ stuffed with creamed spinach. Combine 500g mashed potatoes with a choux batter made to our starting point. Scoop the mixture with a melon baller and deep-fry in batches at 180°C.

PROSCIUTTO & PECORINO

Giorgio Locatelli describes a choux-type fritter available from snack bars on Sicilian beaches. Grated cheese and diced _prosciutto crudo_ are added to the mixture after the eggs, along with parsley and garlic. Salami is another authentic addition, according to _The Silver Spoon_. Add 50g diced prosciutto and 2 handfuls of grated pecorino to your choux batter, once you've finished adding the egg.

Gnocchi Parisienne / Choux Pastry → Other Directions

RELIGIEUSE

A sort of choux snowman filled with pastry cream and decorated with ganache.

PARIS-BREST

Choux ring filled with praline cream and garnished with flaked almonds and icing sugar.

DAN LEPARD'S BAKED BRIE IN CHOUX

Butter individual ramekins, half-fill with choux and bake, then slice off the top, fill with diced Brie and return to the oven until the cheese melts.

MINI CHOUX BUNS AS A SOUP GARNISH

ZEPPOLE

See here

LE PONT-NEUF

Puff pastry case containing choux & pastry cream.

ÉCLAIR AU SÉSAME NOIR

... at pâtisserie Sadaharu Aoki in Paris.

TULUMBA

A deep-fried, syrup-saturated choux pastry that's popular in Turkey, Albania, Macedonia and other countries of the former Ottoman Empire.

CROQUEMBOUCHE

A tower of choux buns filled with pastry cream and bound with strands of spun sugar.

**Potato Gnocchi**

A simple mixture of warm riced potato, mixed to a dough with flour (and maybe egg), shaped into little dumplings and boiled. When potato gnocchi are good, they're very, very good. When they're bad, they're boring. Floury potatoes are a _sine qua non_ , but note that they should have some strength of flavour, too.

_For enough gnocchi to serve 4 as a main course, or 6 as a starter_

INGREDIENTS

1kg floury potatoes **A**

150–250g plain flour **B C D E**

1 tsp salt

½ tsp black pepper

Freshly grated nutmeg – optional **F**

2 egg yolks **G**

**1** Steam, bake or boil the potatoes in their skins until just cooked. Remove the skins when the potatoes are cool enough to handle, but still hot.

The warmth will help gluten development in the flour. Many cooks prefer steaming or baking, to minimise the wetness in the potato.

**2** Push the potatoes through a ricer, mouli or sieve.

Mash made with a hand-held masher will do, as long as it's very smooth.

**3** Spread the potato out on a work surface evenly scattered with 75g flour. Sprinkle over another 75g flour, then season with salt and pepper and, if you like, freshly grated nutmeg. Add the lightly beaten egg yolks, distributing them evenly across the floured potato.

**4** Using your fingers, quickly and lightly form the mixture into a dough.

**5** Take a tennis-ball-size quantity and roll it into a sausage on a lightly floured surface.

Now is a good time to cook a few and check that the dough is cohesive. If it isn't, more flour is needed. You can always hive off a piece of dough and see what it takes to make it work; sometimes nothing does, in which case I suggest you cut your losses and make bubble and squeak or ham hash. The flour in the dough will make it nice and crispy.

**6** Make your gnocchi square, or indent rounds with your thumb, or make ridged logs by rolling short lengths off a fork or a gnocchi paddle. Keep the size regular so they cook at the same speed. Once made, transfer each piece to a floured tray.

If you're not cooking your gnocchi immediately, shake a thin veil of flour over them. This will help keep them intact for a short time.

**7** Cook, in batches, in a large pan of boiling salted water. They'll need about a minute or two to bob to the surface. Leave for a further 30 seconds or so, then remove with a slotted spoon.

Don't keep your gnocchi uncooked for longer than a few hours, as they will start to get sticky and lose their form. But you can cook them ahead: as soon as they're done, drop them into iced water, then drain thoroughly, pat dry and keep in the fridge for up to 2 days. Reheat in a pan or in the oven with butter or a sauce. Or freeze the uncooked gnocchi on trays, then transfer to a freezer bag. Gnocchi can be cooked from frozen, but in small batches (maybe in multiple pans), as adding too many at once will bring down the water temperature so much that the gnocchi will dissolve before they cook through. For the same reason, keep any gnocchi destined for the freezer on the small side.

LEEWAY

**A** Floury potatoes include Maris Piper, King Edward, Desiree, Rooster and Marfona. According to Giorgio Locatelli, Desiree is the best British option, while Piacentine or Spunto are the ideal Italian varieties.

**B** Strong white flour or 00 flour can be used.

**C** Some cooks add baking powder to the flour for lightness; try 1 tsp for this quantity, or use self-raising flour.

**D** The guidelines here will serve you well. However, some recipes call for as little as 25g flour per 1kg potato.

**E** Add some grated Parmesan along with the flour – about 25g for this quantity.

**F** Nutmeg is particularly welcome with less flavourful potatoes, which might otherwise fail to mask the flavour of lightly cooked flour. A grating of Parmesan or a splash of grappa can also be used as flavour enhancers.

**G** Egg is contentious. It helps the dough cohere, but some say it makes the finished gnocchi heavy. Some recipes omit egg entirely, at the cost of its cohesiveness; others recommend using just whites, or a whole egg. Play around. They're only gnocchi.

Potato Gnocchi → Flavours & Variations

BEETROOT

Hands-down, the pinkest gnocchi. Not the easiest to make, however, as beetroot vary considerably in their water content. If yours are too wet, you'll end up using so much flour to make a cohesive dough that the lightness essential to good gnocchi will be lost. Many chefs suggest roasting or steaming the beets first, thereby dehydrating them, rather than boiling them; others do boil their beetroot, then dry it in the oven. At the Tribeca Grill in Manhattan, they boil 5 large Idaho potatoes and 2 beetroot for 20 minutes, rice them, then spread them out on a baking tray and leave them to dry in a low oven (70°C) for about 20 minutes. The mixture is then combined with 2 eggs, ½ cup (50g) finely grated Parmesan, 2 cups (250g) plain flour, 1 tsp salt and ½ tsp white pepper, kneaded, wrapped in cling film and stored in the fridge for a few hours, after which it's ready to roll and cut into gnocchi.

CHOCOLATE

Chocolate gnocchi come from Friuli in north-eastern Italy. They are sugarless, and served as a _primo_ , not a pud. Follow our starting point, using 200g flour and 100g cocoa powder to 500g potato and 1 egg yolk. Typical sauces might include tomato and courgette cooked with garlic, a venison ragù, or a mixture of tuna _bottarga_ and _lampascioni_. _Lampascioni_ score about an 8 in the game of obscure ingredients; in looks, and taste, they resemble small alliums, but are in fact a variety of _muscari_ , or grape hyacinth. Demand for them has grown to the extent that they are now cultivated in Puglia, to supplement the wild kind harvested across southern Italy. They are notably bitter, and need cooking in order for their natural sugars to express themselves: most often they are simply boiled or roasted, then served with oil and vinegar, although some cook them with wine or tomatoes, or reduce them down to a jam-like consistency to spread on toast.

PARSNIP

Kate Colquhoun suggests mixing parsnips with potato for gnocchi; the parsnips should be peeled, diced and roasted at 200°C until tender, but not crisp on the outside, then mashed. For a 500g mix of mashed potato and parsnip, add 50g finely grated Parmesan and a grating of fresh nutmeg to half the standard amount of the flour, also halving the quantities of egg and seasoning.

POTATO FARLS

Irish potato farls use a similar dough to gnocchi, but they're a good deal easier to make. Peel 1kg potatoes and cut into chunks, then simmer until soft. Mash or rice with 100g butter. Season, then stir in 100g flour and ½ tsp baking powder. Shape the dough into two equal-size balls. Roll each out to the dimensions of a tea plate, and cut into quarters – 'farl' means fourth. Melt a knob of butter in a frying pan over a medium heat, and fry the farls until golden brown on both sides. Farls are not as rule-bound as gnocchi: you can make them with leftover mash. Eat with a little more butter, or on the side of a fry-up.

PUMPKIN

M.F.K. Fisher enjoyed no gnocchi so much as the pumpkin variety – _gnocchi di zucca_ – she tried in Lugano. Note that her recipe allows for the use of tinned pumpkin. Mix 500ml unsweetened puréed pumpkin with 2 lightly beaten eggs, 1–2 tbsp plain flour, ½ tsp baking powder, nutmeg, salt and a little crushed garlic. Once you've mixed up the dough, follow the method from step **5**. Fisher suggests serving _gnocchi di zucca_ with poultry, game, pork or as a meal on their own. I toss them in butter, Parmesan and crushed amaretti biscuits.

RICE

In Emilia Romagna, gnocchi are made with rice. Simmer 200g short-grain rice until tender. Drain, transfer to a bowl with 2 lightly beaten eggs and enough breadcrumbs to make a dough, then season. As with most gnocchi, you can add a little butter, grated cheese or nutmeg at this stage. Form the mixture into small balls, and cook in good stock, a few at a time, for a few minutes. Serve with butter and cheese.

SZILVÁS GOMBÓC

A Hungarian dumpling made with gnocchi dough. In Germany they are known as _Zwetschgenknödel_. The stones are removed from plums or damsons and replaced with sugar lumps. The gnocchi dough is then fashioned around the fruit, and the dumplings simmered for about 10 minutes, drained, and tossed in a pan of buttery breadcrumbs. Cut one in half and it looks a bit like a lychee.

WALNUT

Monica Galetti's gluten-free variation on potato gnocchi calls for grated walnuts. You'd better grate them carefully. No fingernails, please. (Okay, whizz them in a grinder or food processor, but not too finely.) Stir 75g each of grated Parmesan and walnuts into 500g mashed potato with 1 whole egg, plus 1 yolk. Make as per the starting point, but once boiled, refresh the gnocchi in iced water, drain, then shallow-fry in a mix of oil and butter. Galetti serves these with venison in a chocolate sauce. Or try them with rocket leaves lightly dressed in olive oil and lemon juice and dotted with Gorgonzola.

**Ricotta Gnocchi**

The lightest of all gnocchi, and the easiest to make well. Relatively quick, too, once the ricotta has been drained. As with potato gnocchi, the flour – again, used in the smallest quantity possible – helps the main ingredient cohere. Ricotta gnocchi are excellent with summer vegetables and leaves, or floated in a light broth.

_For about 32 cork-shaped gnocchi, enough to serve 2 as a small main course or 4 as a starter_

INGREDIENTS

250g ricotta (not the light sort)

40g plain flour **A B**

50g finely grated Parmesan **B**

1 egg, beaten **A C**

Grating of nutmeg

Fine semolina or rice flour for dusting

**1** Drain the ricotta for at least 30 minutes or, preferably, overnight in the fridge.

**2** Spread out the ricotta on a plate, then evenly sprinkle over the flour, Parmesan, egg and nutmeg, and quickly form into a soft, wet dough.

As for potato gnocchi, you want to handle the dough as little as possible.

**3** Flour your hands. Roll about 2 tsp of the mixture into a cork shape or a ball, drop it onto a plate of semolina or rice flour and dust it with a fine veil of the semolina or rice flour.

If the mixture seems too wet to roll, try dropping a dollop of mixture onto your lightly floured plate, and using a fork rather than your hands to fashion it into a shape.

**4** Bring some salted water to the boil in a large saucepan and submerge your first gnocco. It should hold together and bob up to the surface after about a minute. Leave it to simmer for a minute more, before lifting it out with a strainer or slotted spoon and testing it for texture. If it passes, form the rest of the mix into your chosen shapes. If it falls apart, add a little more flour and test again.

The idea is to get the ricotta mix to cohere with as little flour as possible. This achieved, you can freeze the uncooked gnocchi. Place on a lightly floured tray, spaced apart and in a single layer; once frozen, transfer to a freezer bag. Cook from frozen, but not too many at a time.

**5** Cook your gnocchi in batches. If you're not serving them immediately, or tossing them straight into a pan of sauce, keep the cooked and drained gnocchi warm in a covered dish in the oven at 100°C.

You may find that having two pans of simmering water on the go makes this less laborious.

LEEWAY

**A** If you don't drain the ricotta overnight, it may need more flour. Some cooks use equal weights of ricotta and flour, and a yolk rather than a whole egg, without bothering to drain the ricotta at all. It's an economical way of making the ricotta go further.

**B** Jacob Kenedy uses 40g home-made breadcrumbs instead of flour, and pecorino rather than Parmesan.

**C** Elizabeth David's recipe calls for 2 eggs, 60g soft butter and 25g each of flour and Parmesan to 250g ricotta, mixed up, then rested in the fridge overnight.

Ricotta Gnocchi → Flavours & Variations

BUTTERNUT SQUASH

Mixed with ricotta, the flesh of the squash, ochre as a Roman house-front in late afternoon, takes on a pale, chalky quality recalling the pastel-coloured, crumbly confectionery known as Edinburgh rock. And the gnocchi are pretty sweet themselves, even mixed with some Parmesan and salt. Simply add 200g dry, mashed butternut squash to the ricotta mix at step **2**. You can use roasted, mashed pumpkin the same way, so jot a note on the calendar to serve ricotta-pumpkin gnocchi around the time you're making jack-o'-lanterns.

GOAT'S OR SHEEP **'** S CHEESE

Italian cookbooks often stipulate sheep's ricotta for ricotta gnocchi, though you'll be lucky to find a supplier. Keep a couple of Sardinian ewes on your Juliet balcony – but be warned, they'll nibble holes in your peg bag. Alternatively, add some hairy-beast charisma to your blander cow's ricotta by replacing the Parmesan in our starting point with a strong, hard sheep's cheese like Berkswell, a mature pecorino, or a goat's cheese like Woolsery. Replacing some of the ricotta with a full-fat, soft goat's cheese yields a less striking difference in flavour, but the texture is out of this world.

LEMON

The Zuni Cafe in San Francisco base their ricotta gnocchi on the Elizabeth David recipe, and might flavour the batter with freshly grated nutmeg, or sage cooked in butter, or plain chopped lemon zest. Judy Rodgers, the late chef-proprietor, noted that ricotta gnocchi lend themselves to many partners, as long as they are 'tender and delicate'. Flageolet beans, for example, with extra virgin olive oil and black pepper, or courgette matchsticks. Bank on 1–2 tbsp lemon zest to each 250g ricotta, mixing it in with the flour, cheese etc. As Rodgers specifies chopped, as opposed to grated lemon zest, assume that means very finely chopped.

SPINACH

The Italians have a commendable habit of giving even the heaviest-handed cooks their due. There's a kind of lumpy almond-flavoured macaroon called _brutti ma buoni_ – 'ugly but good' ( **here** ). Spinach and ricotta gnocchi are called _malfatti_ – 'badly made'. (They are also known as spinach _nudi_ , as they are, in essence, pasta-less spinach and ricotta pasta parcels.) _Malfatti_ are more reliable than potato gnocchi, with a dreamy texture. The spinach can be swapped for other greens like chard, nettles or herbs. Opinions vary quite widely on the proportion of greens to cheese. _The Silver Spoon_ , for example, calls for a kilo of uncooked spinach to 350g ricotta, 2 egg yolks, rather than a whole egg, and flour only for dusting – but I use 200g spinach, a more common amount for 250g ricotta. The spinach is wilted in nothing other than the water that clings to its leaves after washing and shaking. When cool, squeeze dry. You should have 2 handfuls. Chop quite finely. (Mix with a few tablespoons of finely chopped parsley and a crushed garlic clove, if you like.) Add to the ricotta with the flour, Parmesan and egg, and form the dough into walnut-size balls _._ Chill on a tray in the fridge for 30 minutes. Cook the gnocchi in the usual way, but remove them from the water as soon as they have surfaced.

VANILLA

Mixing up the dough for plain gnocchi with ricotta, egg and a little flour, I was put in mind of cheesecake, and wondered whether sweet ricotta gnocchi might be any good. They weren't. Poaching didn't agree with them. There is, however, an entirely successful deep-fried, more floury Italian variant that's just one of many Italian confections that go by the name of _zeppole_. Mix 1 cup (125g) flour with 1 cup (250g) ricotta, 2 eggs, 2 tsp baking powder and ¼ tsp vanilla extract. Leave for about 10 minutes while the gluten expands, then form into walnut-size balls. Deep-fry until golden, a few at a time, and serve hot with an extra shake of sugar – as is, or with added cinnamon. Or a mix of cinnamon and aniseed. Sweet gnocchi aren't unheard of, incidentally. The Bentley Restaurant and Bar in Sydney serves orange ricotta dumplings with strawberry purée and cinnamon sugar.
Batter

The reason why Americans eat stacks of pancakes for breakfast, and the British don't, must surely be the different ways we measure ingredients. To make batter to a metric or imperial recipe involves setting up your scales, weighing your flour, finding the measuring jug (it's in the dishwasher) and measuring out your milk – far too complex at a time of day when you're still trying to remember what your name is. In America, you dig out your measuring cup and fill it with flour, adding a teaspoon each of sugar and baking powder. Mix in an egg, a cup of milk and salt to taste. Easy as New Orleans.

The one-of-everything recipe will make enough pancakes for two or three people. If you want more, you can double, quadruple or even duodecuple the mix with no problem. Enrich the batter with extra egg, a little sugar or melted butter if desired. But, as any six-year-old knows, the best way to supercharge your pancakes is to interleave the stack with butter and syrup, so that the last one is cast adrift on a maple-flavoured golden pond.

CRÊPES

But I am getting ahead of myself. The batter continuum starts with crêpes, the 10-denier stocking to the griddle pancake's woolly tights. Crêpe batter must be thin enough to cover the surface of the pan with a single tilt of the wrist, so it needs to be more dilute. As noted above, the ratio of liquid to flour in griddle-pancake batter is 1:1. In crêpe batter it's closer to 3:2. Its looser consistency belies the strength that allows the cooked pancakes to be so thin without falling apart. I tend to make my crêpe batter with a cup each of flour and liquid, rest it, then stir in between an extra quarter of a cup and half a cup of liquid, just before cooking, to achieve the ideal consistency. Never worry about the first crêpe in a batch, incidentally; its sole job is to soak up excess fat in the pan, and to train your hand, like your first attempt at the windmill hole in crazy golf.

I have forgotten the birthdays of close family members and my own wedding anniversary, but never Shrove Tuesday. And yet inherent to this sacred pancake ritual, it seems, is its suppression for the other 364 days of the year: compiling a list of ideas for the illustrations **here** persuaded me that every Tuesday should be Mardi Gras. I have become particularly obsessive about the kind of _crespelle_ I used to eat in cheap Italian restaurants in Soho – three pale pancakes stuffed with ricotta and spinach, snugly nestled in their white oval dish under a bedspread of béchamel – a dish so gentle it makes other comfort food seem like a kick in the teeth. Grate over some Parmesan, if you like, but black pepper would be as unwelcome as a profanity in church.

The Breton-style galettes served at Asterix on the King's Road were bolder in flavour: thin buckwheat pancakes, generously filled, then folded into neat brown parcels ready for delivery to your stomach. Ratatouille and Gruyère was my stuffing of choice, and is now. Galettes are made with the same proportions of flour and liquid as crêpes, but water is often substituted for the milk, lending a crisper texture. In fact, if crispness is your thing, replacing a third of the milk in the starting point for crêpes with water will yield good results.

The very same mixture, cooked in hot fat in the oven, will make Yorkshire pudding with a brown, crunchy crust. An all-milk batter makes softer, paler Yorkshire pud – more Harrogate than Barnsley.

YORKSHIRE PUDDING

The late food broadcaster Derek Cooper considered Yorkshire pudding 'a triumphant opening batsman', recalling the days when it was served with gravy in advance of the Sunday roast. The idea was to blunt the appetite, lest one's meagre portion of pricey joint-meat disappoint. It's a cunning trick. The lightness of the pudding in the mouth belies the share of stomach space it will shortly occupy. This is worth bearing in mind if you're ever in the States and presented with a pre-meal basket of warm popovers.

POPOVERS

Popovers are made with a very similar batter to crêpes and Yorkshire pudding, but tend to be eggier. It's the extra rise afforded by the egg that gave them their name: they pop over the brim of their tins, which are shaped like upturned Pilgrim Fathers' capotains. It's dangerously easy to eat too many. As Dr Seuss advises in 'My Uncle Terwilliger on the Art of Eating Popovers', best to eat the solid parts, but spit out the air.

Popover batter is often flavoured with herbs, spices, cheese or a combination, and the finished product stuffed with scrambled eggs or sandwich fillings, or served on the side of soup. Such mucking about might receive short shrift up north, but even there it's not unknown for a slice of cold Yorkshire pudding to be smothered with golden syrup or jam. And it was once common practice to pour the batter over fruit to make a dessert not unlike the French clafoutis.

Were clafoutis to have a fully-fledged place in _Lateral Cooking_ , it could sit on either the batter or custard continuums. It's equally legitimate to think of clafoutis as a batter, or a baked custard stabilised with a little flour. Whichever definition you prefer, clafoutis is usually sweetened and poured over cherries.

In France, the great clafoutis debate is not over its status as batter or custard, but whether it should be considered a flan or a cake. The Académie Française reckons on the former; the residents of its native region, Limousin, the latter. Respectfully, I offer another question for their consideration. Is it nice? No matter how many recipes I try, I've always found clafoutis either rubbery or stodgy, with a deadening effect on the freshness of the fruit. Given the same ingredients, I'd opt for a delicate crêpe served with a compote; hot, crisp fritters; or, if time is not of the essence, warm blinis with home-made jam.

BLINIS

In its native Russia, the test of a great blini is its ability to absorb perilous quantities of butter. Hence the frequent use of both yeast and whisked egg in the batter, the aim being to achieve maximum sponginess. This is the approach I've taken in the starting point. Nonetheless, blinis are just as likely to be yeastless, relying solely on eggs for their lift. Modern blinis may also be made in the same way as griddle pancakes, using a chemical leavener like baking powder. Both alternatives are notably quicker, but at the expense of the tang of yeast. Some of the traditional flavour can be reinstated by replacing up to half of the wheat flour with buckwheat or rye flour.

As with griddle pancakes, yeasted blinis can be made with equal volumes of flour and milk. Put 1 cup (125g) flour, 1 tsp sugar and ½ tsp instant yeast in a jug big enough to allow the batter to rise, and add 1 cup (240ml) milk. If you mean to cook your pancakes as soon as possible, first warm the milk until hand-hot, so as to activate the yeast immediately. If you're leaving it overnight in the fridge, cold milk is fine. Once the batter has risen, add the eggs and salt, and ready your pan.

Blinis have become a New Year's Day tradition in the Segnit household, partly because of the convenience of that overnight rise. I find bouncy blinis and bright smoked salmon, with the zing and tickle of lemon and dill, a more propitious start to the year than the burp of the full English breakfast. By all means cook your pancakes one by one in a dedicated blini pan, but note that the novelty of its dinky diameter will wear off quickly when there's a crowd to feed. And you'll miss out on the satisfaction of achieving the spot-on size and circularity by virtue of your pouring skills. Alan Davidson says the ideal blini should be 10cm across. I reckon that, like Marie Antoinette's breasts, they should be the same diameter as a Champagne saucer. Either way, flip your pancakes with one hand while dandling the glass – filled with last night's leftovers – between two fingers of the other. Serve wearing a long satin nightdress and kohl smudged around your eyes. The mood you're after is mid-period Katharine Hepburn, putting on a good domestic show while exchanging leisurely wisecracks with your husband.

GRIDDLE PANCAKES

It's not unheard-of to flavour blinis: caraway seeds or some grated vegetables, such as potato or courgette, are the traditional options, stirred into the blini batter before cooking. Griddle pancakes are more commonly enhanced with sweet ingredients, such as sliced banana, blueberries and chocolate chips. Pancake houses offer wild variations on the theme: pineapple upside-down pancakes, red velvet pancakes with a sour cream topping, cinnamon-roll-flavoured pancakes. For me, however, plain wins every time. As with popcorn, the contrast between salty butter and simple sweetness makes a virtue of the subtly toasted taste of cooked batter. Griddle pancake enthusiasts frequently cite buttermilk and cornmeal pancakes – a twist on plain, if you like – as unimprovable when it comes to flavour.

In my worn old _Reader's Digest Complete Guide to Cookery_ , there's a recipe for fried-onion-ring batter that's almost interchangeable with our starting point for griddle pancakes. I prefer a thinner, crisper batter for fritters, the sort made with water, rather than dairy, and no egg.

TEMPURA

Shizuo Tsuji describes the ideal tempura batter as having 'a lacy, golden effect... not a thick armour-like pancake casing'. Water, rather than milk, is used for the last three starting points on the batter continuum, but as with blinis and griddle pancakes, the 1:1 ratio of liquid to flour remains constant. Most tempura batters call for 1 cup (125g) flour, 1 cup (240ml) cold water and 1 egg, or just the yolk or white.

There are also recipes that do without the egg altogether, relying on the gluten content of wetted white wheat flour to make the batter cohere. By contrast, making tempura the traditional way is more a matter of _avoiding_ gluten formation. In many recipes, this is achieved by replacing some of the wheat flour with gluten-free cornflour or white rice flour. For the same reason, the batter should be mixed up only when you're ready to use it. As beating encourages the formation of gluten, the batter-maker's quest for smoothness ends here: tempura embraces the lump. Enjoy this moment of abandon while you can, as, like most Japanese cooking, tempura is a precise art.

At dedicated restaurants, or _tempura-ya_ , the appropriate cooking oil is carefully selected for each ingredient, sometimes blended with several others to create the perfect medium, then discarded after a single use. Likewise, the batter's consistency is adjusted to suit each ingredient. An experienced tempura chef will let the batter drip from a chopstick to check the consistency is exactly right, whether it be for lotus root (the unpromising-looking vegetable that resembles a slice of loofah), prawn head, wagyu beef, julienned carrot, quail's egg, chestnut or _shirako_ (cod's sperm sac, if you're wondering) – all of which will have been painstakingly sourced. You'll find the starting point more relaxed in its approach.

The Italian equivalent of tempura is _fritto misto_. Depending on the region, you might be served lightly battered artichoke hearts, courgette flowers, sweetbreads, calf's liver, sage leaves, anchovies, thin slices of lemon or wedges of custard – sufficiently _misto_ , in other words, to keep things interesting. Waverley Root thought the fine local olive oil made Liguria an excellent place to sample _fritto misto_ , noting that _magro_ and _grasso_ versions existed, for fasting and non-fasting days respectively. Root lists wisteria petals, salsify stalks, mushrooms and hairy borage leaves as possible ingredients; some of the more delicate items, he writes, are used more for the flavour they impart to the batter than for their own sake. Of course, the special joy of a good restaurant _fritto misto_ is having someone else stand over the deep-fryer, so you can enjoy it without smelling like you've just finished a shift at the chippy.

FRITTERS

Deep-frying at home: it isn't only the lingering fragrance of dirty oil that puts me off. Second only, in its ability to induce cold insomniac sweats, to the public-information film about the boy reaching for a frisbee in an electricity substation ('JIMMYYYYY!'), was the one about chip-pan fires. Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on which way you look at it – my mother was far too busy deep-frying fritters of apple and tinned pineapple rings to watch the TV and discover what mortal danger she was putting us in. At school, fritters appeared on the menu under the exotic alias 'kromeskies'. The name comes from Poland via France. To please his Polish consort, Marie Leszczynska, Louis XV had his chefs devise dishes that reminded her of home, like the dessert that would become rum baba, and the kromeski – a generic term, fairly interchangeable with croquette, and similarly amenable to all sorts of fillings, seafood, meat or vegetable. I suspect Queen Marie would not have found my school catering very regal. Our kromeskies were made from leftover minced meat, wrapped in bacon and fried in batter.

I'd completely forgotten about kromeskies until they cropped up at the swanky Ledbury in Notting Hill. Theirs are made of Middle White pork, with celeriac baked in ash, hazelnuts and wood sorrel. Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten makes crabmeat kromeski, topped with tropical fruits and served on mustard cress. From a greasy staple of the school dinner, the kromeski has returned to its aristocratic origins: a fritter with airs. The British chef Sally Clarke calls a fritter a fritter. Years ago, at her restaurant on Kensington Church Street, I ate apple fritters. They came dusted with cinnamon icing sugar. The fact that I can't remember whether or not they were served with ice cream is a testament to their deliciousness – the batter perfectly crisp and dry on the outside, and the apple ring sliced to the ideal thickness so that it was fluffy and soft. Between the two lay a millimetre of exquisite goo made by the mingling of batter and fruit juice.

Although they tend towards the unsophisticated, there is still plenty of variation in fritter batters. For the fritter batter here, however, I've decided to keep things simple, not only to furnish a practicable starting point, but because the batter is an excellent all-rounder. Again, it calls for 1 cup (125g) flour and 1 cup (240ml) cold water, but no egg. A touch of baking powder will lend the required lightness – or, as with tempura, swap the water for a carbonated drink like soda water or beer, which will do the same job as the chemical leavener.

CHURROS

Churros are the final starting point on the batter continuum. Like everything other than crêpes, churro batter calls for equal volumes of flour and liquid, but in this case the liquid is boiling water. A pinch of salt is added but no egg. It's as brutally direct as the Spanish sun. The heat of the water encourages gluten to form instantaneously, with a result something between a batter and a dough, thick enough to be pushed through the churro extruder.

In Jerez I queued outside a churrería while the paving slabs were still wet from their early-morning hose-down. It was 9a.m. on a Saturday and the queue already described two sides of the plaza. Time moves slowly in Andalusia, never more so than when you're shuffling towards a man piping a metre-long coil of batter into a cauldron of hot oil from a cross between a fire hose and a hypodermic needle. When cooked, the coil, ridged to increase its surface area, is removed from the oil with tongs and scissored into lengths.

I was virtually having a hypoglycaemic episode by the time I reached the front of the queue. With shaking hand I exchanged my euro for a white paper bag of hot dough sticks and a fistful of sugar sachets and retreated to a table in the centre of the square. It was only by casting an eye on my neighbours that I realised my mistake – I had no hot chocolate to dip my churros in. The queue was now making inroads on a third side. So I ate a hot sugar-crusted dough stick on its own, then half of a second, which was as much as I could manage. A churro without a rich, milky accompaniment is no more edible than chips without salt and vinegar. I relocated to the non-churro café on the other side of the plaza, and bought a milky coffee, the kind you find in continental Europe that tastes like the cheap fondant creams in Christmas selections, and a vanilla ice cream. Taking frequent sips of coffee I pushed my last, barely warm churro into my bauble of ice cream and demolished the lot. The flake should fret: 99 + churro = 100.

**Crêpes, Yorkshire Pudding & Popovers**

The same mixture used to make delicate crêpes, nibbled by chic Parisians _à pied_ , is used to make Yorkshire pudding, stout stalwart of the British roast dinner. The culinary _entente cordiale_ breaks down, however, when it comes to the cooking technique, so if you're making Yorkshires, note how the method differs. Popovers are an American version of Yorkshire puddings, but they use more egg. Popover batter is often flavoured, and the finished items might be filled in the manner of a choux bun.

_For 8 × 20cm crêpes, 8–12 individual or 1 × 22cm square Yorkshire pudding, or 6 popovers_

INGREDIENTS

1 cup (125g) plain flour **A B C D**

A few pinches of salt

1–2 eggs **D E**

1½ cups (360ml) milk **F**

Butter, lard or bland oil **G**

**1** Put the flour in a bowl and whisk in the salt.

The quick whisk takes the place of sifting the flour.

**2** Make a well in the centre and whisk in the egg as far as possible, then slowly pour in 1 cup (240ml) of the milk, whisking and drawing the flour into the liquid to make a smooth batter. Gradually whisk in the remaining ½ cup (120ml) milk, holding some back if you think it will make the batter too runny.

**3** Ideally, let the batter rest for 30 minutes.

This will give the flour a chance to absorb the liquid fully, and for the gluten to relax. If you're planning to leave the mixture for longer than a few hours, put it in the fridge, where it will last for at least 24 hours.

FOR CRÊPES

Heat a little butter in a frying pan and swirl it around. Pour off the excess into a small heatproof bowl and use it to grease the pan lightly as you go. Turn the heat to medium–high, and once the pan is good and hot, give the batter a stir and pour just enough into the pan to cover the bottom. Allow the pancake to brown on its underside – this will take 30–90 seconds. Flip and cook until golden on the other side.

I think the heat, rather than the quantity of egg or fat in the batter, is what matters most when making crêpes. Keep the cooked pancakes warm in a 120°C oven. Cooled crêpes can be wrapped in a freezer bag (interleaved with parchment) and kept in the fridge for up to 3 days, or frozen for 1 month. Either way, they'll need to be brought to room temperature before being reheated.

FOR YORKSHIRE PUDDING OR POPOVERS

Pour the batter into greased, pre-heated tin(s). Popovers should be cooked in tall freestanding tins – metal dariole moulds will do. For individual Yorkshires, bake at 220°C for 20 minutes; for a large Yorkshire pudding or popovers, reduce the heat to 190°C (after the initial 20 minutes at 220°C) and continue to cook for another 10–20 minutes.

Popovers need longer to cook than individual Yorkshires, as the mixture is deeper in the tins.

LEEWAY

**A** Plain flour is best for crêpes, as you want them to be thin, but I've sometimes resorted to self-raising out of necessity, and the results weren't unacceptably puffy.

**B** The higher gluten content of strong white or 00 flour can give a better rise to Yorkshire pudding and popovers than plain flour.

**C** Gluten-free flours will work for crêpes, but not for puddings or popovers.

**D** For spongier Yorkshire puddings, double the flour and use as many as 4 eggs.

**E** Using 2 eggs will give crêpes an eggier flavour and spongier texture, and will make your Yorkshire puddings puff up high. Yorkshire pudding recipes vary in the quantity of eggs they use: 1 is standard, but use as many as 4 if you prefer a deep, soft pudding to the crisp variety. Popovers will need at least 2 eggs.

**F** Use all milk, or thin the mixture with water at step **2** for a slightly crisper pancake. For crispy Yorkshire puddings, use 1 cup (240ml) milk and ½ cup (120ml) water.

**G** A few tablespoons of melted butter (or bland oil) may be added to crêpe batter, to help prevent the mixture sticking to the pan. Butter will also enrich the batter's flavour. Lard, butter or oil can be used to grease the tins for Yorkshire puddings and popovers.

Crêpes, Yorkshire Pudding & Popovers → Flavours & Variations

BUCKWHEAT

In medieval Europe 'Saracen' was a catch-all term for anything vaguely from the East. Where buckwheat actually originated is a matter for debate, but the clue persists in its Italian and French names, _grano saraceno_ and _sarrasin_. Buckwheat pancakes, a speciality of Normandy, are known as _galettes de sarrasin_. The inclusion of wheat flour in modern versions of the recipe makes for a more negotiable batter and a softer pancake: _galettes de sarrasin_ can be a little medieval made with buckwheat _tout seul_. They often have their curved edges folded over the filling, making a square with a window in the centre that begs for the bulging eye of an egg yolk. It's traditional to serve savoury ingredients with (or in) _galettes de sarrasin_ , sweet with wheat-flour crêpes. Taste a _sarrasin_ on its own, however, and you may find its distinct cocoa-malt flavour a harmonious match for Nutella. Substitute the same quantity of buckwheat flour for the wheat flour.

CHEESE

Are the Yanks and Brits divided by a common pudding? Popovers, according to James Beard, are more than just an American version of Yorkshire pudding, but there's little to tell between the recipes. The difference is in their appearance. Popovers are always made in individual portions, and their exuberant puff is to the modest Yorkshire what the Macy's Parade is to the ploughing demonstration at the Otley Agricultural Show. Popovers also differ in that they're served in a bread basket, rather than on a plate under a blanket of gravy. At BLT Steak, the US restaurant chain, they serve Gruyère popovers so revered they come with a postcard detailing chef Brian Moyers' recipe. Moyers uses warmed milk in his batter, which accelerates the gluten development in the flour, ensuring maximum pop in his overs. Eaten warm from the oven, with sweet butter and good salt, they're like big, boisterous gougères – which makes sense, when you consider how similar the ingredients are for choux pastry. In Burgundy, gougères are served as hors d'oeuvres with a glass of wine, whereas a Cheddar popover would make a perfect accompaniment to a decent pint of ale. See for yourself by using 2 eggs in our starting point, and stirring 75–100g grated cheese into the made batter. Sprinkle over a little extra cheese before the popovers go into the oven. In the absence of popover tins, use dariole moulds or deep muffin tins.

CHESTNUT

Noting the affinity of chestnut for orange, the nature writer Richard Mabey suggests using chestnut flour for _crêpes Suzette_. Chestnut flour has a strong fragrance of cocoa, with a tang of sharp dairy, rather like Green & Black's dark milk chocolate. Replace up to half of the wheat flour in our starting point with chestnut flour. The forager John Wright singles out birch sap as a fitting accompaniment to chestnut pancakes. Birch syrup contains a mixture of glucose and fructose, and when cooked down it takes on a more caramel, less vanilla character than maple syrup, which is mostly sucrose. If you are, as you read this, on your way to the woods to start tapping the birch trees, note that it takes a hundred litres of sap to make one of syrup.

COCONUT & TURMERIC

Next time you're in Brittany, order a crêpe and a side salad. Dress the salad, then tip it over the crêpe. Fold, and tuck in as you watch the locals cough cider into their serviettes. The idea is inspired by the Vietnamese street-food pancake, _bánh xèo_. Made with rice flour, coconut milk and turmeric, 'sizzling cake' is thin, like a crêpe, and is eaten folded over a mixture of shredded vegetables, lots of herbs, chillies and maybe some meat or seafood, and served with a dipping sauce like _nuoc cham_. Malaysian _roti jala_ is made with a similar mixture, scribbled over the base of the pan to make a net pancake served as a side to curry. For _bánh xèo_ , follow the crêpe method, using 1 cup (150g) rice flour and a 50/50 mix of water and coconut milk, and adding a pinch of ground turmeric. The turmeric will turn the pancake decidedly yellow. The batter needs its 30-minute rest. Pour into a lightly oiled wok and swirl to make a thin pancake about 20cm in diameter. (My first attempt turned out a bit thick, which, added to its yellowness, gave it the appearance and eating quality of a washing-up sponge.) Arrange some washed, drained beansprouts, chopped coriander and spring onion in a line slightly off-centre. Many recipes call for a mixture of stir-fried pork belly and prawns to be added with the beansprouts. Allow the batter to cook for a few minutes (some chefs cover the wok for a short spell) then decant onto a plate, using a spatula to fold the pancake over the filling as you do so. Serve with lettuce leaves, plenty of fresh mint and maybe some dill and basil too. _Nuoc cham_ is the usual dipping sauce – crush 1 garlic clove with 1 tbsp sugar, then mix in 2 tbsp each of fish sauce and lime juice. Add some finely chopped red chilli if you like it hot.

CREAM & SHERRY

Hannah Glasse calls for sack (Falstaff's favourite fortified wine), cream and a great deal of eggs to make a thin pancake. The following recipe scales down Glasse's 1747 original, and keeps a similar proportion of liquid to flour as our starting point for crêpes. At step **2**, beat ⅔ cup (160ml) each of sherry and cream with 9 eggs, a pinch of salt and ½ cup (100g) sugar. Season with a sneeze of cinnamon, nutmeg and mace. Mix into your flour. Single cream is ideal here, but double cream thinned with milk is also fine. Glasse notes that the pancakes will not be crisp – you need water to make a pancake crisp – but will be very good. The sack-spice combination lends a subtle fruit-cakiness that it would be a shame to mask with a strong syrup or sauce. A little melted butter and caster sugar is all that's needed. Don't worry, by the way, if you can't find sack – that bottle of sweet cream sherry you failed to offload on the vicar or village tombola will do just fine.

FINES HERBES

Next time you're bedbound with 'flu and your husband / butler / unexpectedly soft-hearted prison guard offers you Lemsip or cream of tomato soup, wave it away and suggest, in your most emotionally manipulative croak, that a _consommé Celestine_ might just stand an outside chance of forestalling your death, not that anyone could _possibly_ spare the time to make you one... Cough, consumptively, as your carer makes his way to the kitchen, there to prepare a rich, meaty broth and clarify it to pinging translucency, before adding a _crêpe aux fines herbes_ sliced into delicate ribbons. Some chefs interpret 'fines herbes' as nothing more than chives, but what would be really – _cough_ – marvellous is a combination of chives, parsley, chervil and tarragon. As long as it's no trouble.

GINGER

In what is said to be the first recorded recipe for Yorkshire pudding, in her _Art of Cookery_ (1747), Hannah Glasse suggests using ground ginger or nutmeg in the batter. Fifty years later, John Perkins included grated ginger in the batter for his 'common pancake', which he recommends frying in lard. Try adding 2 tsp ground ginger (or 4 tsp finely grated ginger), along with 2 tsp sugar and ½ tsp vanilla extract, to your crêpe batter. Ginger was still a standard batter flavouring in the 1850s, going by _The Household Encyclopedia_ , which also suggests making pancakes with weak beer or 'clean snow' when eggs are scarce. Beer can be used for its leavening effect on batter, and the use of snow to the same purpose is corroborated by a letter from 'a young housekeeper' to _The Atlantic_ in 1865: 'When snow falls every day for four months, as it does in New England, eggs get exceedingly cheap in the prudent household. Then one can smile to think how she circumvents the grocer, and pray the clouds to lay a good nestful every week.'

LEMON

Coming home hungry from school one day I was gripped by a very rare desire to cook. What I wanted to make was a stack of crêpes, cemented with a mixture of tuna and Branston Pickle. The recipe is omitted from this book on grounds of taste. It hit the spot at the time, though. I ate the whole thing, cut into wedges. For a while I believed I was the inventor of the pancake cake. Not so. A torte made of layered crêpes is popular in Hungary, the layers sandwiched together with chocolate ganache or fruit compote. In Michel Roux Jnr's version, the crêpes are made with a mix of wholemeal and white flour, flavoured with lemon zest and sandwiched with lemon curd. Lemon is the pancake's natural chaperone, even more so than tuna and pickle. Bump up the lemoniness by using buttermilk in place of the milk in out starting point. Allow for 2 zested lemons per 1 cup (125g) flour.

ORANGE

Karl Uhlemann fills orange-flavoured crêpes with a cooled sabayon made with orange juice and white wine. Add 2 tsp finely grated orange zest per 1 cup (125g) flour. This dish, called _crêpes Bohemian,_ sounds a deal less stressful to make than its infamous cousin _Suzette_ – a dish that owes its unfashionability both to overexposure and the need to prepare it to order. When _crêpes Suzette_ are good, they're delicate as lace handkerchiefs, and will have been flambéed in just the right proportions of butter, orange and Cointreau or Grand Marnier. When they're bad, it's as if the handkerchief has been sneezed in and dropped in a puddle of cheap whisky marmalade. Legend has it that _crêpes Suzette_ was invented accidentally, in 1895, by Henri Charpentier, a sixteen-year-old chef at the Café de Paris in Monte Carlo. By his account, Charpentier was making a batch of crêpes in cordial when the sugary syrup caught alight. As he was cooking for – and in front of – no less a voluptuary than the Prince of Wales, he felt unable to admit his mistake, and carried on regardless. Luckily Bertie loved the results so much he asked for it to be named after his dining companion. Later, Charpentier worked with Escoffier at the Savoy, before making his way to New York, where he cooked at Delmonico's. After the failure of an ambitious project at the Rockefeller Center and a stint in Chicago, Charpentier moved to the West Coast, where he ran a fourteen-cover BYOB restaurant in the living room of his Redondo Beach house, serving classic French cuisine to gourmands who may have waited for up to a year for their table. Never say the pop-up is a recent invention.

PANDAN

According to Wendy Hutton, the Indonesian pancake _bujan dalam selimut_ translates as 'bachelor in a blanket'. Insofar as they are crêpe-like and rolled around a sticky coconut stuffing, they're not unlike the coconut and turmeric pancakes **here** , apart from the addition of pandan flavouring essence and a good deal of vivid green colouring. Which may account for their relationship status – you wouldn't want to share your blanket with anyone that colour. Pandan tastes so much like basmati rice that it's often used to make the cheap, non-basmati kind seem more expensive. Its aromatic, toasty quality is a natural match for the coconut, although you might consider adding a sour or bitter ingredient like dried fruit, tropical fruit or chai spices to offset the intense sweetness. Fresh pandan leaves can be used in place of essence – infuse 1 cup (240ml) coconut milk by warming it with 4 leaves scratched with a fork, then strain. Stuff the cooked crêpes with grated fresh or desiccated coconut simmered for about 15 minutes with palm or brown sugar and enough water to keep it just moist, like the inside of a Bounty bar. Equal weights of coconut and sugar are typical, but I prefer half that amount of sugar, plus a few pinches of salt. You'll need about 2–3 tbsp in each pancake, rolled up and tucked in as neatly as you can. Serve at room temperature.

VANILLA

Joël Robuchon flavours the milk for his crêpes with a vanilla bean and seeds. In the US, vanilla extract is sometimes used in the German pancake also known as a Dutch baby (less of an identity crisis than it sounds, Dutch being a corruption of Deutsch). Most recipes call for equal volumes of milk and flour, although some omit milk entirely, relying on the egg to bind the flour and ultimately making for a much softer texture, recalling omelette. Heat the oven to 220°C. Put 2 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp bland oil into a 20cm round tin and slide into the oven to heat. Mix the following, as per our starting point: 5 tbsp flour, a few pinches of salt, 1 large egg, 1 tsp vanilla extract and 5 tbsp milk. No rest is required. Remove the hot tin from the oven and carefully swirl the fat around it, then pour in the batter. Return to the oven for 10–12 minutes. Serve with sugar and lemon, or crème fraîche and honey.

Crêpes, Yorkshire Pudding & Popovers → Other Directions

**CRESPELLE**

Crêpes made with a batter containing grated nutmeg and Parmesan. More nutmeg and Parmesan are sprinkled over the cooked pancakes, which are rolled up and served in a light broth.

**QUIRE OF PAPER**

A stack of very thin crêpes, fashionable in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

**BREADED AND DEEP-FRIED STUFFED CRÊPES**

**TOAD IN THE HOLE**

Sausages embedded in thick Yorkshire pudding batter.

**MINI YORKSHIRE PUDDING**

... with rare roast beef and horseradish cream.

**GUNDEL PALACSINTA**

Crêpes filled with ground walnuts, raisins, sugar, lemon zest and brandy or rum, served with chocolate sauce – from Restaurant Gundel in Budapest.

**BANANA PANCAKE**

**Blinis & Yeasted Pancakes**

This starting point calls for both yeast and egg, yielding the lightest, spongiest pancakes, equally happy doused in butter or under the more conventional sour cream and smoked salmon or caviar. The batter can be ready to use in an hour, but if you're making blinis for breakfast or brunch, it's easier to mix up the batter and let it rise slowly in the fridge overnight. As with bread, a slower rise means more flavour. Blinis can also be made without yeast – see **E** under Leeway.

_For about 18 blinis_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

1 cup (125g) flour **B C**

1 tsp sugar

1 tsp instant yeast **D E**

1 cup (240ml) milk

A few pinches of salt

1 egg

1–2 tbsp melted butter or bland oil – optional

**1** Put the flour, sugar and yeast in a bowl or jug large enough for the batter to rise.

**2** Warm the milk to hand-hot and whisk into the dry ingredients.

If you're leaving the batter to rise all day or overnight, the milk does not have to be warmed.

**3** Cover and set aside to rise for an hour or two.

Or place in the fridge for a longer, or overnight, rise.

**4** When you're ready to cook, whisk in the salt, then the egg – and the butter or oil, if using.

For thicker, bouncier pancakes, try stirring the yolk into the batter, then whisking the white to soft peaks and folding it in.

**5** Heat your blini pan or frying pan over a medium heat. Put a little butter in it and swirl it around, then pour any excess into a small heatproof bowl. Use this to lubricate the pan, sparingly, as needed. Add 1 tbsp batter, which should spread to a diameter of about 8cm. You'll probably be able to cook 3 or 4 at a time. Cook until small holes appear on the surface of the pancake, about 1–2 minutes, then flip and cook until coloured underneath.

Keep your cooked pancakes warm in a foil-covered dish in a 120°C oven.

**6** Blini batter will last for 3 days in the fridge (although don't expect any air whisked into the egg to last that long). Cooked blinis can be kept in an airtight container for a few days, or frozen for up to a month.

LEEWAY

**A** The given quantity makes 18 blinis about 8cm across. If you want 12 blinis 10cm in diameter, use about 1½ tbsp batter for each one.

**B** Use 50/50 buckwheat and wheat flour for classic buckwheat blinis. You could also use fine cornmeal or rye flour in place of the buckwheat. A little more milk may be needed to achieve the right pouring consistency.

**C** You can use wholemeal flour, but add about ¼ cup (60ml) more milk.

**D** If you're using the sort of yeast that needs to be activated, add the sugar and either 10g fresh or 1 tsp dried yeast to the warmed milk. Allow 15 minutes for it to froth up, then mix into the flour and proceed from step **3**.

**E** If you lack yeast or time, it's not unthinkable to make blinis using the same method as for griddle pancakes, but do use some buckwheat or rye flour to restore a measure of blini-ness.

Blinis & Yeasted Pancakes → Flavours & Variations

BARLEY

It was once common in Russia to make blinis with barley flour. For something so simple to make, there was a surprising amount of dissent about the _exact_ method. Where should the batter for barley blini be mixed? Was it best made on the riverbank, the lakeshore or the fringes of the forest? The aim being to capture beneficial airborne yeasts, much as the more evangelical modern bread-maker might take his sourdough mother for a walk in the hills. It was also traditional to put the first blini of the batch on the windowsill, as a gift to an impoverished passer-by. This would cause nothing short of war between the squirrels and magpies that hang out in my urban garden. Elizabeth David described barley flour as an acquired taste – 'earthy and rather primitive' and thought that barley meal, yeast-risen pancakes were particularly delicious. Make them to our starting point, using 50/50 strong white and barley flours. Or follow David's recipe in _English Bread and Yeast Cookery_ , by adding an extra egg and diluting the batter to a more crêpe-like consistency – add ¼ cup (60ml) more milk. Use this to make large, thin pancakes, and serve them in a stack, layered with cheese.

CRUMPETS & PIKELETS

A few weeks into a six-month secondment to America, a colleague asked me what I was homesick for. Crumpets, I said, after a pause whose brevity surprised us both. Describe, she said. 'They're like pancakes,' I said, 'except they're thick. And have lots of holes on the top. And if you pull them apart they have _fronds_. Not unlike a sea sponge, I suppose. If you eat them untoasted, they're almost jelly-like.' 'Okay,' said my new colleague. 'I'm pretty sure we don't have those here. Could you make one?' I demurred. Nobody actually _made_ crumpets. They grew in the packet, like hydrogenated corn snacks. The batter for crumpets is, in fact, very easy to make. They're just a little tricky to cook. Follow the starting point, but instead of adding an egg before you cook the batter, thoroughly stir in 1 tsp baking powder and set aside for 10 minutes. Place a greased ring, about 10cm in diameter, in a greased frying pan over a low–medium heat, and pour a crumpet's worth of batter into the ring. Cook for a few minutes before removing the ring, then keep cooking as holes begin to appear and the surface gradually dries out. Check the underside to make sure it's not burning. After 10 minutes, the crumpet should be ready to flip for a quick brown on the top. The difficulty is in getting the centre cooked. Best, at least to start with, to restrict them to a depth of 1–1.5cm, and see if they cook through.

If they don't, or you don't have the appropriate rings, go for pikelets instead. Pour the batter into a hot frying pan until the blob is roughly the size of a griddle pancake. Likewise, cook them as you would a pancake, flipping when the underside is cooked and the top has begun to develop holes. I've found that the texture of crumpets and pikelets is better if you allow them to cool before toasting.

LENTIL & RICE

Uttapam, a kind of pancake commonly eaten for breakfast in India, is made with a mixture of rice and lentils that has been allowed to soak overnight and, via fermentation, develop a mild tanginess. While an uttapam is often the same size as a blini, a thinner version of the batter might be used for the more crêpe-size dosa. Orese Fahey advises that different types of rice and lentils can be used to create variations on dosa batter, as long as you stick to a 2:1 ratio of rice to lentils. She also makes the case for the dessert dosa, wherein the pancake is wrapped around fresh fruit, apple sauce and whipped cream; the sour pancake makes a delicious contrast to the sweet filling. Sandor Katz notes how fenugreek seeds are often added to these batters, not only for flavour but also for their microbial content, which assists in the fermentation process. As well as for uttapam and dosas _,_ the batter is used both for spongy little steamed cakes called idli, and larger cakes such as dhokla. All of which is to say, the batter is highly adaptable. Rather than syrup, Indian pancakes are served with a sweet chutney – a mixture of freshly grated coconut, coriander leaves and green chilli is typical. To make the batter, rinse ⅔ cup (125g) white rice and ⅓ cup (65g) urad dal, then cover with cold water and leave to soak overnight. The next morning, drain, transfer to a powerful blender and blitz, with a little water, to make a smooth batter. Then add ½ tsp salt and enough water to make a thick pouring consistency – you can add more water later if you think the batter needs it. Set aside for around 8 hours at warm room temperature to allow the batter to ferment. Prepare some ingredients to sprinkle over the pancake as it cooks, if you like – say, tomato, grated coconut, onion and coriander leaves, chopped fresh chilli, mustard and/or fenugreek seeds. Cook the pancakes on a heated, oiled (or non-stick) flat griddle or _tawa_ , over a medium heat, pouring about 3 tbsp batter from a ladle for each one and sprinkling over any toppings while the surface is still wet and sticky. Oil the perimeter of the pancake as its first side cooks, then flip and cook until it starts to colour, peeping underneath to check. For dosas, the batter is diluted with water to single-cream consistency and cooked like a crêpe in a large, flat, lightly oiled frying pan.

OAT

You could be forgiven for thinking a Staffordshire oatcake was a form of cracker. It is, in fact, a yeasted pancake made with oatmeal, once popular among that county's vast army of pottery workers – and still, now our mugs come from China, sold by the stackload from cafés in Stoke-on-Trent. They tend to be served on the side of a full English breakfast – or around one, in the manner of that dismal, clammy new staple of the high street: the wrap. They're a little more bready in flavour than other yeasted pancakes; hot, rolled with grated, melting Cheddar, they make a comforting alternative to a toastie. Simon Majumdar speculates that the Staffordshire oatcake will likely have disappeared within a generation, only to be found in history books and 'demonstrations at a Potteries folk museum'. I propose we all do our bit by whipping up a batch now and then. Make as per blinis, except with 1 cup (240ml) milk _and_ 1 cup (240ml) water, and no egg. As to the flour, use a 50/50 mix of oatmeal and wheat flour. Most recipes call for fine oatmeal, but medium is okay too. Choose a wide, light frying pan or crêpe pan – you should be aiming for a thin pancake roughly 22cm across, more like a crêpe than a blini.

RYE

As Nordic as Seasonal Affective Disorder. The grain is hardy and thirsty, with an appetising sourness and an unappetisingly mousy colour. The texture of rye pancakes tends to be drier and rougher than other varieties; the taste is bracingly savoury, and lends itself exceptionally well to smoked fish. Follow our starting point, using 50/50 rye and strong white flour. For a consistency loose enough to pour, the batter will need 1½ cups (360ml) milk for each 1 cup (125g) combined flours – possibly a little more. Eat on a crag, cursing the pointlessness of human existence.

SEMOLINA

_Beghrir_ are Moroccan yeasted pancakes made with semolina and a mixture of milk and water. This makes for quite a thin batter – but that's as it should be, since the idea is to pour it onto the griddle or pan to a depth shallow enough that the _beghrir_ can be cooked on one side only, but still cooked through. If the prospect of tossing pancakes gives you performance anxiety, _beghrir_ are for you. Most griddle pancakes develop small holes on their surface as they cook; examine them closely, and you'll see that they're so smooth-edged and perfectly round that they look like the results of an immemorial process of erosion. In _beghrir_ the holes appear so quickly, and in such profusion, that it's as if you were watching them develop in time-lapse. According to Moroccan legend, each _beghrir_ should have a thousand holes, but only the sort of fool who had been out in the sun without his hat would bother to count them, in case his pancake gets cold. _Beghrir_ must be eaten hot, with butter and honey, grabbed from a vendor and eaten in the street, one hand cupped to stop the butter-drips from staining your camel-leather _babouches_. _Beghrir_ -eaters outside the Maghreb will note the compromise they strike between the crumpet and the crêpe – they combine the bouncy, honeycomb structure of the former, so receptive to melting butter, with the tender lightness of the latter. Some like to supplement the honey and butter with a little orange flower water, or replace them with a shake of icing sugar. _Amlou_ , another authentic accompaniment, is harder to come by, but worth seeking out. A mixture of almond butter, honey and argan oil, it's a dreamily exotic alternative to peanut butter: what Scheherazade would have on toast, with her feet up watching _Ski Sunday_. To make _beghrir_ , follow the method for blinis, but use ¾ cup (100g) semolina flour and ¼ cup (30g) plain flour, and ¾ cup (180ml) water mixed with ¼ cup (60ml) milk. At step **4**, whisk in 1 tsp baking powder and ¼ tsp salt with the egg. Remember, there's no need to flip. You can make _beghrir_ whatever size you like – I make them with 4–5 tbsp batter each, i.e. roughly the size of a tea plate. You can use ¾ cup (110g) fine semolina instead of the semolina flour, but the texture of the pancakes will be inferior, and the batter will need to be loosened with a few extra tablespoons of milk.

SOURDOUGH

If your sourdough 'mother' (or starter) overfloweth, suffer not to throw her away. Decant her by the spoonful onto a low–medium hot griddle and make blinis. She is, after all, a batter of flour, yeast and water. Add egg and/or oil in similar proportions to our starting point for a more traditional pancake texture, and a little baking powder for extra lift. The sourdough flavour will be strong, but the resulting blinis are excellent eaten warm with thin slices of mature Cheddar and chutney. Cut the starter with extra flour for a less insistent tang. In Alaska, sourdough pancakes are commonly eaten for breakfast, served with reindeer sausage or rosehip jelly. Elderberries are sometimes mixed into the dough. Alaskan miners were highly dependent on their starter cultures, which supplied them with precious bread and pancakes – and on cold nights they would take them to bed, clutching them to their chests to keep them warm and alive. These men slept with their mothers, in other words, which makes them lucky they were nicknamed 'sourdoughs', and not something far nastier.

**Griddle Pancakes**

A.k.a. drop scones, or pikelets, as they're called in Australia. I tend to call them American pancakes because that's how I envisage them, served by a gum-chewing waitress in a remote diner with a fizzing neon sign. Also, because an American measuring cup makes them so quick to make and commit to memory: 1 cup each of flour and milk, 1 egg, and 1 tsp each of sugar and baking powder. If you can count to one, you can make griddle pancakes. This batter can also be used for waffles.

_For about 18 pancakes_

INGREDIENTS

1 cup (125g) plain flour **A B**

1 tsp baking powder **B C**

1 tsp sugar **D**

1–2 pinches of salt

1 egg **E**

1 cup (240ml) milk **F**

1–2 tbsp melted butter or bland oil – optional

**1** Put the flour and baking powder into a bowl then whisk in the sugar and salt. Make a well in the centre.

It's best to cook the pancakes soon after the wet ingredients are added.

**2** Beat in the egg as far as possible, then pour the milk in gradually, whisking and drawing the flour into the liquid to make a smooth batter. Add the melted butter or oil, if using.

**3** Over a medium heat, wipe a heavy-based frying pan or flat griddle with a little bland oil, butter, or a mixture of the two. Pour on a generous tablespoon of batter per pancake. The mix should spread, then abruptly stop. Thin it a little, if necessary. When the pancakes begin to look bubbly, flip them and cook until their undersides are golden brown.

Keep your cooked pancakes warm in a foil-covered dish in a 120°C oven.

**4** Unused batter can be kept in the fridge for a few days. Any uneaten pancakes can be frozen then reheated in the toaster straight from the freezer.

LEEWAY

**A** The pancakes can be made with a mix of flours. Cornmeal is always a winner. A very good gluten-free pancake can be made with fine cornmeal and buttermilk, using double the quantity of egg.

**B** Self-raising flour can be used instead of plain flour and baking powder.

**C** Use ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda instead of the 1 tsp baking powder, but you'll need an activating, acidic ingredient too, say buttermilk – or a home-made substitute, see **here** – in place of the milk.

**D** Go heavier on the sugar, if you prefer, e.g. 2 tbsp instead of 1 tsp.

**E** For a fluffier pancake, mix just the egg yolk into the milk at step **2**, then whisk the white to soft peaks and fold into the batter just before you cook it. The results are so light as to remove the need for baking powder.

**F** Use only ½ cup (120ml) milk, and you'll have a pretty standard recipe for Scotch pancakes.

Griddle Pancakes → Flavours & Variations

BLOOD

_Veriohukaiset_ is a Finnish pancake made with pig's blood. The blood is first whisked until light, then mixed with beer, rye and wheat flours, egg and fried onion. The batter is seasoned, and sometimes a little dried marjoram is added. _Veriohukaiset_ are often served with lingonberry jam. If you've ever eaten blood sausage with apples, or with mixed peel in _sanguinaccio_ , the Italian blood-pudding dessert, you'll know how agreeably fruit flavours contrast with the iron-richness of cooked blood. Blood is very thick (thicker than water, anyway), so these pancakes call for a higher ratio of liquid to flour than typical griddle pancakes. No egg is needed, I suppose because blood supplies its own coagulants, but add one if you like. For 1 cup (125g) flour, use 1 cup (240ml) strained blood and ½ cup (120ml) beer instead of the milk. Sweeten with 1–2 tbsp golden syrup. Note that fresh blood is highly perishable, and you need to take advice on storage from your supplier.

BUTTERMILK

Buttermilk sounds more luxurious than it is. The word always puts me in mind of Jersey milk, with its high butter-fat content and golden tint. Buttermilk, in fact, is the thin, milky by-product of butter and cheese production. Flavour-wise it's not dissimilar to yogurt. It owes its prevalence in the US to Dutch settlers, who brought with them their national habit of drinking it by the glass with a meal. It owes its popularity, however, to the fluffiness it lends to pancake batter made with chemical leaveners. You can make ersatz buttermilk by adding a squeeze of lemon juice to milk and letting it stand at room temperature for a few minutes, or by mixing equal amounts of milk and natural yogurt. Use it in place of milk in our starting point and, if you have it, use ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda instead of the baking powder – you'll need to cook the batter fairly soon after it's mixed. Chef Tom Kerridge makes very enriched buttermilk pancakes to serve with gin-cured salmon, adding about 3 tbsp sugar and 50g melted butter to a batter made with 1 cup (125g) flour.

CHOCOLATE

Chef Marcus Samuelsson makes real chocolate pancakes using a fair amount of butter in the batter, cooking them in clarified butter and sprinkling over a few grains of _fleur de sel_ to bring out the flavour. By all means try it, but first ask yourself this. Doesn't the pleasure of eating a Nutella-spread crêpe, or drizzling a dark, hot chocolate sauce on a waffle, come from the contrast of intense chocolate and bland, mildly salty batter? The contrast is only increased if you enhance your chocolate sauce with Cognac and vanilla, as James Beard liked to. Mixing chocolate into your pancakes can compromise its intensity. I gave it three chances: I made one batch with a shop-bought chocolate milk, one with cocoa, and one with good bar chocolate. Despite tasting richly chocolatey out of the bottle, the chocolate milk yielded a dun-brown pancake not immediately identifiable as chocolate-flavoured, although it did have a pleasant maltiness that worked well with the addition of choc chips. Cocoa had the edge on bar chocolate when it came to depth of flavour; the cocoa pancakes were like very thin, satisfyingly dark chocolate cakes. Furthermore, cocoa is unadulterated chocolate, which leaves you plenty of scope to add sugar, fat and vanilla to taste. For cocoa pancakes, make a paste from 4 tbsp cocoa powder with a little of the milk, warmed, and whisk it into the batter at the end of step **2**, once the rest of the milk has been whisked in.

CHRISTMAS PUDDING

A flavour variation for Scotch pancake, given by Gary Rhodes. His hope that these festive pancakes might achieve Christmas-tradition status, on the basis that they're lighter than steamed pudding has, after twenty years, proved forlorn. This may be down to his serving suggestion: a stack of the things, drenched in a vanilla and rum syrup, rum custard and extra-thick cream. Lighter than steamed pudding? I'd say it was a close call. And, in any case, Christmas lunch has to be heavy. How else to justify the sofa and _Moonraker_ for the seventh time? Also, Christmas pudding looks better set on fire. Light a stack of pancakes and it will look like an arson attack on a multi-storey car park. Come to think of it, forget Christmas. Treat these as fruit-cake-flavoured pancakes. I have tinkered with Rhodes' recipe to conform with our starting-point quantities: for each 1 cup (125g) flour, add ½ tsp ground mixed spice, 40g raisins or sultanas, 20g chopped glacé cherries, 10g mixed peel and 2 tbsp sugar.

CREAM

A crêpe is like a desert island – the best part is the coast. And this is where the waffle comes into its own. All those toasty, crispy ridges, delimiting cuboid rockpools of melted butter or ice cream: the best bits of crêpe geo-mapped on a grid. Using a blini batter will lend extra puff and an appetising whiff of yeast, but a griddle pancake batter is a quicker and easier option when your family members are sat, cutlery upright in fists, impatient at the breakfast bar. The best waffle batter M.F.K. Fisher ever tried, she says, was made with equal volumes of double cream and flour. For 1 cup (240ml) cream and 1 cup (125g) plain flour, add 2 eggs and 2 tbsp melted butter. No chemical leavener is needed, although you'll be in for a fair amount of whisking. Separate the eggs. Whisk the whites (Fisher doesn't say, but I'm guessing to soft peaks). Whisk the yolks for 5 minutes, then gradually and alternately add the flour and cream to the yolks, continuing to whisk. Then whisk in the butter, and fold in the egg whites. Before you reach for a sugary accompaniment, consider the great American soul-food combination of fried chicken and waffles. This was a dish served to hungry jazz bands and their danced-out audiences in the early hours of the morning, in the indeterminate space between late dinner and early breakfast, when the palate might fancy a bit of both.

MAC **'** N **'** CHEESE

Data recently published by the US Census Bureau indicate that population growth has slowed to its lowest level since the Depression. I attribute this to the number of things Americans find better than sex. For Garrison Keillor, it's sweetcorn (see opposite). For restaurant owner Kenny Shopsin, it's pancakes. For me, it's the imminent worldwide ban on the phrase 'better than sex'. Still, check out Kenny's mac 'n' cheese pancakes. They're better than sex! They came about when a customer at Kenny's NYC diner couldn't choose between his two favourite dishes. Naturally, Kenny's response was to abolish the distinction. Now he can't make enough of them, even if they're pretty strange to behold. The ivory tubes of macaroni poke out of the pancakes, like unspeakable valve-ends in a particularly visceral cut of offal. Other flavours on his pancake menu include pear and pine nut, and granola and _charoset._ Once your griddle pancake is nice and bubbly, spoon over about 1 tbsp cooked macaroni, followed by 1 tbsp grated cheese.

POTATO

Not all blinis are made with yeast. Some rely on whisked egg white alone for the rise. In Eastern Europe, egg-leavened potato blinis might be made simply by adding grated potato to the batter. But there are other ways to make a potato pancake. In the US, chef Thomas Keller uses mash – specifically, mashed Yukon Gold potatoes, which have yellow flesh and a buttery flavour to match. Keller prizes them for their ability to absorb the cream he uses in the batter, mixing roughly 250g mashed potato with 2 tbsp plain flour, 2 whole eggs and 1 yolk, and 2–3 tbsp crème fraîche. Lindsey Bareham's recipe calls for 175g potato flour in place of fresh potato flesh, mixed with 315ml cold water, a pinch of salt and no fewer than 6 eggs. Give the eggs a good beating, she says, before adding the potato flour, salt and enough of the water to give the batter a double-cream consistency. Rest for about half an hour before whisking again and cooking the potato pancakes on a greased griddle. Serve with the typical accompaniments for pancakes – syrup, lemon juice, sugar.

RICOTTA

Ricotta pancakes are for the sun-tousled, loose-linened, bare-footed occupants of oatmeal-interior penthouses or villas by the sea. Their pancakes are made on spotless, _very_ expensive skillets and drizzled with maple syrup from a bottle whose neck remains perpetually crustless. Their children do not smear blueberry compote on their faces. These people browse through Donna Hay cookbooks without noticing how spotless and white everything looks. After an early breakfast they jog beside the ocean accompanied by a dog that neither sheds nor farts. Your life is not like theirs. But you can, at least, try the pancakes. The ricotta is usually added to the pancake batter over and above the standard ingredients – so follow the starting point, but whisk in about 125g ricotta with the milk. It's common to add the finely grated zest of a lemon, too.

SWEETCORN

Sweetcorn, writes Garrison Keillor, was the family weakness. 'We were prepared to resist atheistic communism, immoral Hollywood, hard liquor, gambling and dancing, smoking, fornication, but if Satan had come around with sweet corn we at least would have listened.' I, on the other hand, bought some sweetcorn the other day that had the sole advantage of keeping me on the path of virtue, its flavour having taken on the bleakness of the 90,000-hectare field it was grown in. When sweetcorn is good, however – when its kernels are plump little pouches of savoury sweetness – you can see Keillor's point. The high sugar content of both sweetcorn and cornmeal makes for a batter that needs no additional sweetening. Venezuelan _cachapas_ are a type of sweetcorn pancake made by grinding fresh kernels with salt, egg and butter. The variety of corn used in Venezuela is so starchy – the kernels release a pearly liquid when pulverised – that no flour or milk is needed to create a luxuriously thick batter, stippled with nibs of whole corn. Once cooked, the pancake is folded over a generous helping of _queso blanco_ , the mild, white, Latin American cheese you might replace with some mozzarella or halloumi. The finished result is closer to an omelette than a pancake, rather like the Japanese sweet omelette known as _tamagoyaki_ that sits atop egg nigiri. Peruvian _humitas_ are made with a similar mixture, which is packed into dried corn husks and steamed. I once inadvertently left a batch of _cachapa_ batter out overnight – either because I was tired, or because I wanted accidentally to stumble on something incredible, can't remember which – and discovered the next morning that it had fermented slightly. The resulting pancakes sacrificed a little of the _cachapas'_ sweetness for a pleasing tang, reminiscent of Indian dhokla or idli. This recipe works for the sort of sweetcorn widely available in the UK, but without the authentic starchiness, you do have to rely on the egg and a small amount of flour to make the batter cohere. Blend 4 ears' worth of corn kernels with 1 egg, ½ tsp salt and 6 tbsp flour. Leave to rest for 20 minutes. Before cooking, drip a few tablespoons of batter on the griddle to check for cohesiveness and add more flour (or more egg) if it doesn't hold together. Cook over a low–medium heat, and watch like an overprotective parent, as the corn's natural sugars make these pancakes prone to burn; they should be about 16–20cm in diameter.

**Tempura**

Japanese tempura consists of assorted vegetables or seafood held in a fine, lacy batter. The batter is so light and crisp you might describe it as short (as in shortcrust). As with shortcrust pastry, the aim is to minimise gluten formation, so very cold water is used and the ingredients are mixed only briefly. To the same end, this version calls for a combination of wheat and gluten-free flours. Taking gluten-suppression a step further, some cooks mix up batches of batter as they fry, ensuring minimal gluten is formed in the time between preparation and cooking.

_For 32 bite-size pieces, a starter for 4_

INGREDIENTS

½ cup (65g) plain flour **A**

½ cup (65g) cornflour **A**

¼ tsp salt

1 egg yolk **B**

1 cup (240ml) ice-cold water **C**

Vegetable oil for deep-frying **D**

Vegetables and/or seafood **E**

FOR THE DIPPING SAUCE

½ cup (120ml) dashi

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp mirin

2 tsp sugar

**1** Sift the flours with the salt, then set aside. Mix the dipping sauce ingredients together in a small saucepan and warm to dissolve the sugar, then leave to cool.

This is all you can do in advance. The rest happens when you're ready to eat – although cooked tempura can be spread out on a baking tray and kept warm in a 100°C oven with the door ajar for at least half an hour.

**2** In a bowl or jug big enough to accommodate the flour, lightly beat the egg yolk, then mix in the iced water with a few strokes of a chopstick or fork.

**3** Add the flour, all at once, and mix very roughly with another few strokes.

If it looks lumpy, you're doing it right.

**4** Heat the oil in a deep-fryer or large pan to 180°C.

Never fill a pan more than a third full of oil. Test the temperature of the oil with a drop of batter. It should sink, then quickly resurface. If it sinks and stays sunk, the oil is too cold. If it floats instantaneously, and starts to colour, the oil is too hot. If you are new to deep-frying, see here.

**5** Dip _dry_ tempura ingredients in the batter and carefully lower into the hot oil.

Don't try to cook too many pieces of tempura at once, as this will lower the temperature of the oil and result in sub-optimal crispness. Give the oil a chance to reheat between batches. Root veg will take about 4 minutes to cook, soft veg and seafood 2–3 minutes.

LEEWAY

**A** Use 100 per cent plain flour. You can also substitute the cornflour with ½ cup (75g) rice flour.

**B** Some recipes call for a whole egg, others just the white. You can also do without egg completely; in which case, use 1 cup (125g) plain flour (rather than a mix of plain – i.e. wheat – and cornflour or rice flour), as the gluten in the wheat flour helps the batter cohere.

**C** Use chilled fizzy water in place of still – the carbonation will give the batter extra lightness. Achieve a similar effect with still water by mixing a few pinches of bicarbonate of soda into the flour at step **1**.

**D** In tempura houses, chefs use a blend of sesame, rapeseed and soybean oils for frying, lending a distinct fragrance to the food; sesame seeds can also be added to the batter.

**E** I aim for cork-size pieces of pepper, aubergine, sweet potato, carrot, cauliflower, broccoli, shiitake caps, lotus root and white fish, or whole sugar snap peas and prawns.

**Fritters**

A word to cover a multitude of sins. Our starting-point fritter batter is the sort that encases pieces of meat, fish, fruit, vegetables – or even chocolate bars – but the term could cover the previous starting point, tempura, and the following, churros. Many recipes for batter include an egg, or just an egg white whisked to soft peaks and folded in just before the frying starts, in which case the quantity of water should be reduced by a couple of tablespoons. According to Leiths Cookery School, groundnut, sunflower and vegetable are the best oils for deep-frying.

_For 4 fish fillets, or 4 apples or 2 aubergines cut into rings_

INGREDIENTS

1 cup (125g) plain flour **A**

½ tsp salt

½ tsp baking powder **A B**

1 cup (240ml) water **C**

Vegetable oil for deep-frying

**1** Put the flour, salt and baking powder into a bowl, then whisk together. Make a well in the centre.

**2** Just before you're ready to heat the oil, gradually pour the water into the well, and whisk, drawing the flour into the liquid to make a batter.

You're aiming for a consistency that coats the back of the spoon – you may not need all the water. If you prefer to make the batter in advance, omit the baking powder and stir it in when you're ready to fry.

**3** Heat the oil in a deep-fryer or large pan to 180°C.

Never fill a pan more than a third full of oil. To test the temperature of the oil, drop in a little batter: it should sink for a few seconds, then float to the surface. If the oil is not hot enough, the batter will stay sunk; too hot and the batter will float immediately and start to colour. If you are new to deep-frying, see here.

**4** Make sure whatever you're battering is as dry as possible, then coat it in a little flour. Dip into the batter, allow any excess to drip off, then carefully put into the hot oil. Turn once, halfway through the cooking time: an apple ring or aubergine slice should take 3–5 minutes, a fish fillet 6–8 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper.

LEEWAY

**A** Self-raising flour can be used, in which case the baking powder can be reduced to ¼ tsp or done without altogether.

**B** If you don't have baking powder, add ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda instead. Alternatively, use fizzy water or another fizzy liquid like beer in place of the water.

**C** Some cooks prefer to use milk. Note that it will make the batter less crisp.

Fritters → Flavours & Variations

BEER

Specifying the beer in a batter has become the prevailing chain-pub means of distinguishing fish and chips from, well, fish and chips. Anyone who claims they can tell their Stella from their Peroni once it's been mixed with flour and fried in boiling oil needs to ask the barman how much lager they've actually drunk. For fruit fritters, Fiona Beckett suggests 'bog-standard lager'. Nathan Myhrvold and W. Wayt Gibbs, writing in _Scientific American_ , say that the chief advantage of beer over other liquids is that some of its carbon dioxide is preserved during the making of the batter. This means that when your fritter or piece of fish is immersed in hot oil, the bubbles froth, expanding the batter and giving it a light texture. Beer also contains foaming agents, to create a head, which give its bubbles extra staying power. Follow our starting point, substituting beer for the water.

BUCKWHEAT & GRAPPA

There's a batter-based snack from the Italian Alps known as _sciatt_ , a Valtellinese dialect word for toad. The name is a frank admission: they're ugly as hell, nuggets of deep-fried thick batter with cubes of cheese in the middle. Use a ratio of 3:1 plain to buckwheat flour and start with ¾ cup (180ml) fizzy water with a dash of grappa in it, then thin further if necessary. Serve on a lily pad of green leaves.

CHICKPEA

Vegan cheese is without doubt the most repulsive thing I have ever put in my mouth – and I say that having been taken to hospital, aged three, after taking a bite of a frog I had caught in the cup of my Thermos flask. Vegan cheese tastes like wet dogs smell. For complex reasons, I was at a vegan food festival when I first encountered it, and urgently needed something to mask the taste. Thankfully, on the outskirts of the festival, I found a quiet stand selling Indian food, made with real, identifiable ingredients. I bought a paper bag of warm _batata vada_ – palm-size, frittered balls of mashed potato mixed with green chilli, herbs and spices that not only banished the taste of dog from my palate, but actually seemed to cleanse it, perhaps because of the reputed mouth-freshening qualities of fenugreek. Like pakoras and onion bhajis, _batata vada_ balls are cooked in a spiced chickpea batter, which lends them a deliciously savoury sulphurousness. Make as per the starting point, but using 1 cup (100g) chickpea flour, and go gently with the water – you may need as little as ½ cup (120ml). At step **1**, add to the flour ½ tsp ground fenugreek and ¼ tsp salt, plus ½ tsp each of ground coriander and cumin if you fancy something more elaborately spicy. For the interior, heat 2 tbsp bland oil and fry 1 tbsp finely chopped ginger with 1–2 finely chopped green chillies, 2 tsp mustard seeds, 1 tsp cumin seeds and, if you have it, ¼ tsp asafoetida. Mix into 500g salted mashed potatoes with 1 tbsp chopped coriander and ¼ tsp ground turmeric. Form the mixture into balls, dip into the batter and deep-fry.

COLA

Defiantly unhealthy. It was a cola batter that helped Abel Gonzales Jnr win one of his many fried-food awards at the Texas State Fair. His dish consisted of fried strands of cola batter, topped with a cola syrup, whipped cream, cinnamon sugar and a cherry for good luck. For the batter, replace the water and baking powder with cola. Make it for Morgan Spurlock next time he drops round for dinner.

CORNMEAL

Cornmeal lends a satisfying sweet-savouriness to breads and batters – and corndogs. I was living in Minneapolis when the movie _Seven_ came out. It left me so traumatised that my companion took me straight to the bar for a stiff drink and a stabilising snack. Corndogs are frankfurters dipped in a thick, sugared cornmeal batter, deep-fried and impaled on a lolly stick: hand-held depravity. I've seen the movie since and wasn't so disturbed second time around, but I still have nightmares about the corndogs. More appetising to try shrimp fried in cornmeal batter, or catfish, or green chillies stuffed with cheese. This is a thick, soft batter, so milk is used instead of the water in our starting point. Some might even add an egg, which would make it the same as the starting point for griddle pancakes. Mix ½ cup (75g) cornmeal with ½ cup (65g) plain flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp sugar, 1 cup (240ml) milk and ½ tsp salt. If you're curious about corndogs, dab some frankfurters dry, impale them on sticks, then dip them in the batter (poured into a tall receptacle, so you can immerse the long sausages). Deep-fry a few at a time, with sticks pointing up, in oil heated to 180°C for 3–4 minutes.

CURRY

Tom Norrington-Davies recommends adding a 'smidgeon' of curry powder to the batter for fish and chips. If you live in London, as I do, the curry-chip combination is an odd one, but in the north of England curry sauce and chips is as unremarkable as a cup of tea with your evening meal. In Wales, it's almost as common to put curry sauce on your chips as it is salt and vinegar. I used a bit more than a smidgeon, and it was excellent: 1–2 tsp supermarket curry powder added to the flour will do nicely.

EGG NOG

Medieval batters were made with wine or ale, cream, and far greater quantities of egg than is customary today. They were a little like a stabilised custard, similar to the cream and sherry pancake batter. Many were made with ale barm, the froth that collects on the surface of beer as it ferments. The practice was common until the eighteenth century, when barm was replaced with egg whites to give a greater lightness of texture. Still, if you happen to live near a brewery, flutter your eyelashes at the yeasty chap on reception. If he gives you some barm in return, try it in batter, and use the rest to make some barm bread, or barm cakes, the Lancashire buns traditionally stuffed with chips or black pudding. The word 'barm', incidentally, gives us 'barmy', as in 'frothy of temperament' – an etymological tidbit you can feed the guy at the brewery as his eyes glaze over. For an egg-nog batter, whisk 1 tbsp sherry and 1 egg into ⅔ cup (160ml) water before adding it to the flour, then grate in some nutmeg at the end of step **2**.

SAFFRON

Elizabeth David notes that yeasted pancake mixture can be diluted to make a good fritter batter, passing on, while she's at it, a fifteenth-century recipe for an apple-fritter batter made with beer yeast, wheat flour, saffron and salt. Jane Grigson cites a saffron batter for apple fritters that includes black pepper, lamenting the fact that modern batter recipes omit such spices, which have a 'ginger-like' if less assertive quality. Oyster and salt-cod fritters are often made with saffron batter. Janet Mendel makes the batter for salt-cod fritters using the water the fish was simmered in, mixing it with saffron, parsley, garlic and an egg yolk, then stirring in flour and baking powder. She stirs through the cooked, flaked salt cod, then whisks the egg white until stiff and folds that in. The finished fritters are served with molasses, and are rather reminiscent of Vietnamese caramelised fish dishes. A similar batter, Mendel explains, is used for the Spanish equivalent of tempura, _rebozados_. The great Renaissance gastronome Bartolomeo Platina (1421–1481) gives a recipe for sage leaves fried in a sweetened saffron and cinnamon batter. Using a pestle and mortar, grind a couple of pinches of saffron strands to a powder and add to the flour at step **1**. This will give a pronounced saffron flavour, and a batter the colour of a maple leaf in autumn.

SHELLFISH

Traditionally the batter for shellfish fritters was made with milk, or a combination of milk and the liquor from inside oyster or clam shells, with the optional supplements of anchovy essence, cream and/or cayenne. Recently chefs have found ways to make more of the briny flavour of oyster juice. Heston Blumenthal mixes it with passion-fruit juice to make a jelly, then sets a raw oyster in it. Nathan Outlaw discovered, by chance, that the juice was particularly good for curing raw mackerel, which gave him the idea of mixing it with cucumber juice. A recipe for oyster fritters in _The White House Cookbook_ (1887) calls for 1 cup (240ml) each of oyster liquor and milk, some salt, 4 eggs and enough flour to 'make a batter like griddle cakes'. The oysters are then dipped in the batter and fried in a mixture of butter and lard.

Fritters → Other Directions

BAKWAN SAYER

Indonesian fritters made with strips of cabbage, carrot and spring onion, served with green chillies.

FRUTTO MISTO

Mixed fruit fritters – apple, banana, pineapple, orange, mango and not-quite-ripe apricots or plums – served with a sauce.

BREAD PAKORA

Popular Indian snack of plain bread or sandwiches cooked in besan batter.

FALAFEL IN PITTA

SWEETCORN, PEA & BLACK BEAN FRITTERS

... made with a thick, binding batter – use ¼ –½ the amount of liquid in the starting point.

CALAMARI STUFFED IN A BUN

... with lots of herbs and tartare sauce **(here)**.

ELDERFLOWER

Also consider apple blossom, acacia blossom and locust flowers.

**Churros**

Think of them as bottom-of-the-range doughnuts, or simply batter fritters, but plain old churros have held their own where lighter, prettier or trendier treats have been forgotten. Impressive, given how high-maintenance they are. They must be eaten fresh from the fryer. And you'll need a piping bag, or plastic extruding machine, to pipe the batter through the star nozzle that gives churros their characteristic ridged surface – which has a sugar-catching ability unmatched by the cylinder or ball. Serve your churros with a dipping cup of rich hot chocolate, a milky coffee, or, inauthentically, a milky chai.

_For 12 sticks about 12cm in length_

INGREDIENTS

1 cup (125g) plain flour **A**

¼ tsp salt

1 cup (240ml) boiling water **B C**

Sunflower or vegetable oil for deep-frying

Icing or caster sugar for sprinkling **D**

**1** Put the flour into a bowl, then stir in the salt. Make a well in the centre.

**2** Add the boiling water to the flour and mix with a wooden spoon until smooth. The dough will be pretty stiff. Let it rest for about 10 minutes.

**3** Heat the oil in a deep-fryer or large pan to 190°C.

Never fill a pan more than a third full of oil. To test the temperature of the oil, drop in a teaspoonful of batter: it should turn golden in about 30 seconds. If you are new to deep-frying, see here.

**4** Pipe the mixture directly into the hot oil through a star-shaped nozzle, using scissors to snip off a length every 12cm or so. Cook in small batches, for 2–4 minutes, before draining on kitchen paper.

**5** Serve hot, sprinkled with icing or caster sugar.

LEEWAY

**A** For a lighter texture, use self-raising flour, or add 1 tsp baking powder to the plain flour. For sweeter churros, add a few tablespoons of sugar to the flour.

**B** For softer churros, try a combination of milk and water.

**C** Some cooks add a little vanilla extract to the water.

**D** Some mix the sugar with ground cinnamon – a ratio of 4:1 is good.
Roux

The legendary Marie-Antoine Carême once said that roux – the simple, cooked mixture of flour and fat – was as indispensable to chefs as ink is to writers. These days, excepting a handful of romantic contrarians, chef-defenders of the roux are about as common as writers who choose the pen over the PowerBook.

It was in 1973 that Henri Gault and Christian Millau, of the eponymous French restaurant guide, published their manifesto for a radical _nouvelle cuisine_. Their intention was to liberate chefs from the suffocating rules of _la grande cuisine_ – the tradition of elaborate French cooking established and codified by Auguste Escoffier, and Carême before him. They laid out ten rules for a freer, more imaginative way of cooking, encouraging the _nouvelle cuisinier_ to serve rarer meat and fish, shorten his menus, experiment with unusual flavour combinations, keep an eye on the healthiness of his dishes, use fresher ingredients and generally take a more open-minded approach to his craft. It was the sort of paradox in which francophone culture exults: a set of rules for being less rule-bound. Nonetheless, the gist was clear: freedom from a systematised approach to cooking, with the strict adherence to recipes it entailed.

Of all the aristocratic pillars of the _ancien régime_ , pompous old roux was the first to be dragged to the guillotine. All those heavy, rich espagnoles and béchamels: how mediocre, thought Gault and Millau – how pretentious, how _inane_ they were. Off with their heads, along with Madeira, red wine, flour, cheese, veal stock and meat glaze – although cream, butter, pure _jus_ and truffles were (somewhat arbitrarily) spared the chop.

In large part, the precepts of _la grande cuisine_ grew out of the emergence, in the late nineteenth century, of the large luxury hotels where so many of the finest restaurants were located. Here, in his vast kitchen, the chef was kept at a remove from buying ingredients, and was expected to put whatever produce was acquired for him at the service of classic, documented recipes. A century on, many early practitioners of _nouvelle cuisine_ were chef-proprietors of their own modest establishments, often outside Paris. They would shop daily in local markets, consciously fondling, weighing, _feeling_ the ingredients. The old guard sniffed at a practice they saw as scarcely more sophisticated than the efforts of housewives, but the writing was on the kitchen whiteboard. Today, even if the single-pea-on-a-plate excesses of _nouvelle cuisine_ seem as outdated as the blowsy over-elaboration it displaced, many of the principles laid out in Gault and Millau's manifesto, like the adherence to local, seasonal produce, are as orthodox to contemporary cooking as Nike-swooshes of balsamic reduction and visible kitchen staff.

Poor old roux has never recovered. Consult your _Larousse_ and you can begin to see why. Classic sauce cookery is founded on five basic recipes – the 'mother' sauces, three of which were roux-based: espagnole, velouté and béchamel (the other two were hollandaise and sauce tomate, in case you were wondering). Each 'mother' went on to have as many offspring as a devout nineteenth-century fishwife practising the rhythm method. In older editions of _Larousse_ these variations were laid out in a perversely user-unfriendly way. If you've never seen a copy, imagine trying to navigate your way through a medieval French hill town, without a map, along streets named after members of an interbred local aristocracy while simultaneously trying to commit to memory the groceries in a pre-war Fortnum & Mason catalogue: lobster roe, truffle shavings, smoked oysters, blanched brain, chopped capers, gilded aspic. Young chefs were expected not only to learn all the variations, but which dishes they were meant to accompany. It's easy to see why many kitchens started to cut corners, while a creative new wave sought a fresher, less fussy alternative.

Four years after the publication of the _nouvelle_ manifesto, Julia Child wrote an essay for _New York_ magazine covering her recent travels in France and her frank assessment of _nouvelle cuisine_. Child sides neither with the traditionalists nor the _enfants terribles_ , suggesting instead that good cooking might do well to borrow from both camps, and is itself more important than strict adherence to either orthodoxy. For her, the banishment of roux was an act of needless vandalism, especially in light of the _nouvelle_ sauces 'like liquefied bouillon cubes' that she encountered – one memorably bad example completely drowning her _magret de canard._ She held out for the revival of the traditional demi-glace, not least because its thickening with flour stopped it from becoming oppressively dark brown in flavour.

More than forty years after Child's plea, the roux is still waiting for its comeback. Especially in cheffy circles it remains the preparation _non grata_ , notable by its omission from all but a few contemporary chefs' cookbooks. Simon Hopkinson is a fan. Why spurn a delicious, well-made béchamel, he asks, for a 'modish over-reduced, flour-free' sauce. Clifford A. Wright is likewise baffled by the snobbish attitude of modern restaurants to roux-based sauces and soups, recommending that home cooks redress the balance as we 'seek good food, not fashion'. After all, a roux, according to Michael Ruhlman, is 'potentially the most elegant and refined way of thickening a sauce'.

I refer so liberally to the roux camp for a simple reason: you're nuts if you don't add it to your repertoire. It's so easy to master, yet so transformative of the humblest dish. Even if you don't find yourself making a velouté or a béchamel very often, to become a proficient roux-maker is to possess the secret of good gravy, which is basically a roux made from the wonderfully sticky semi-burnt bits stuck to your roasting tin. Once you've taken out a chicken, for instance, and put it aside to rest, remove all but 2–3 tbsp of the fat, stir in the same amount of flour and cook for a few minutes before gradually adding about 600ml stock, water and/or wine. Whisk, or stir vigorously, taking care to see off any lumps, as you try to scrape up as much as possible of the sticky bits and incorporate them into the gravy. Once that's done, let it simmer while the meat continues to rest. The only problem with this method of gravy preparation is the danger of not having enough. Good gravy is always hugely appreciated – I've certainly never heard it described as mediocre, pretentious or inane, but that might be the benefit of it being called gravy, as opposed to Sauce Duc Marquisat de la Mothe-Houdancourt.

The demise of roux might also be attributed to the internationalisation of home cooking. Now that the most unambitious domestic cook's repertoire often extends to self-saucing dishes like tagines and curries, tomato-based pastas and soy-based Asian dishes, roux-based sauces can struggle to find a place. But an espagnole, made with beef stock and a few aromatics, or a velouté, its paler equivalent made with veal, chicken or fish stock, can bring together a plate of plainly cooked meat (or fish) and veg as little else can – say over sausages and mash, or as a sauce for the sort of lean ingredient that doesn't yield much juice. There are few better ways of elevating your cooking than learning to make your own sauces from home-made stock.

Growing up in the 1970s, I ate a lot of roux-based meals. The dinner ladies of Hampshire County Council did not hold with _fumet_ or _jus_. They served chicken supreme, or cod or eggs Mornay – grand cuisine for little people – which we ate with a knife and fork off china plates, as opposed to the indented prison-style plastic trays by which today's schoolchildren are taught to associate eating food with punishment. Admittedly the vegetables of my youth could have done with being a shade more _nouvelle_ , but the sauce was so nice it almost made up for them. There were curries, too, made with a roux flavoured with curry powder – essentially a mildly spicy variant on gravy. I consumed that gloopy school curry under duress, and years later was speechless with wonder at my first proper curry-house korma, sweet and dreamily aromatic with cashews, coriander and saffron. But how I love the smell of old-fashioned school curry now. When I caught a whiff of it the other day, on the concourse of Waterloo Station, I wheeled on one heel, half-expecting to see Mrs Pearce the dinner lady wielding a dripping ladle. The smell, to my obscure disappointment, was coming from the Japanese food concession.

The Japanese call school curry 'navy curry', having picked up the partiality from British sailors and adapted it to local tastes, in a culinary take on Chinese (Japanese?) whispers. It's a long way from rogan josh. Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat give a recipe for pork shoulder curry that calls for cheese, honey, ketchup and coffee, and is served with salad, a boiled egg and a glass of milk. Many Japanese eat curry at least once a week, and while it's often served with rice, south-Asian style, _karē_ flavour has spread like knotweed to national favourites like ramen and potato croquettes. Several brands of instant curry roux are available in bar form, like slabs of chunky chocolate. The 'Vermont' version contains apple, honey, Gouda and Cheddar: a British bastardisation of Indian food reimagined by the Japanese with an American-Dutch flavour profile. Serve it with blini and toast the authenticity police with a glass of ouzo. What the hell.

GUMBO

Given its roots in French culture, it's less surprising that Louisianan cuisine should have adopted the roux, albeit riffing on it as they might on a jazz standard to produce something peculiarly their own. Dark roux is to a classic French roux as _True Detective_ is to _Inspector Maigret_ – swampy, occult and deliciously degenerate. It plays a crucial role in Cajun and creole dishes, flavouring and thickening gumbos and sauce piquante, which is a bit like gumbo plus tomatoes. Dark roux usually exchanges butter for oil, or a hard fat like lard or margarine, because it needs to cook without burning for at least an hour, if not two, until it's somewhere between the colour of an old penny and midnight on the bayou. It is, for this reason, sometimes known as 'chocolate roux'. In flavour terms, while you could argue that it shares some of chocolate's deep, empyreumatic qualities, it's more reminiscent of well-fried chicken, and imparts a lugubrious, heavy-lidded drawl of silty savouriness to soups and stews.

A couple of blocks from the northern terminus of the Canal Street trolley in New Orleans, there's a famous restaurant called Liuzza's by the Track, whose clapboard exterior and creaky sign turned me starry-(and stripey-) eyed with Americophilia the first time I visited. Billy Gruber, the proprietor, tells the story of one of his customers, who took a sip of the house gumbo and declared that 'Billy must have stepped in it'. In time, Gruber realised that this was high praise. Make your own dark roux, and by the time it's ready your hair will smell as if you've been up all night worshipping some unspeakable deity in the form of a crayfish. For the sake of convenience, and your hair, you might consider making a large quantity and keeping batches in the fridge or freezer. While others on the continuum don't take anything like as long to pull together, any roux can be made ahead and stored in the fridge or freezer, ready to deploy whenever you have a soup or stew that needs thickening.

The price paid for darkening the roux for so long is that it loses some of its thickening power. There's no consensus about quite how much it loses, so it's probably better to assume that a dark roux made with 125g each of oil and flour will thicken about 2 litres liquid to a gumbo-like consistency, i.e. closer to a hearty soup than a stew. If that's not thick enough for your purposes, make up a small amount of golden roux ( **here** ) and add it to the mix. Two other thickening options for gumbo involve the addition of filé or okra. Note that the frogspawn-like mucilaginousness of filé is harder to control than that of okra. Heat your stew too fast once the filé is added and it'll only be good for hanging wallpaper. That aside, filé has the most wonderful, exotic flavour. The powdered leaf of the sassafras tree, a member of the laurel family, it shares a eucalyptus note with its relation, the bay leaf, and has a similar leaden-green colour when dried. Its distinct sour-fruitiness comes as a refreshing contrast to the richness of dark roux and the sweetness of the 'holy trinity', the diced mixture of onion, green pepper and celery that forms the basis of so much Louisianan cooking. Filé may also remind you of lemon tea or tamarind. Don't worry, however, if neither filé nor okra are to your taste; the roux will suffice.

With this in mind, let us turn our attention to the roux continuum, from the darkest and thinnest to the lightest and thickest. Starting with the dark, thin roux used for gumbo, we move through brown, then golden, to the white roux that's used for béchamel, and further still to the thickest versions of white roux used to make soufflés and croquettes. There are almost as many recommended roux-to-liquid ratios as there are cookbooks that contain them, but leaving aside the slightly anomalous dark roux, the following rules of thumb are all you need to remember.

**1** 50g each of fat and flour to 1 litre stock for espagnole or velouté

**2** 50–100g each of fat and flour to 1 litre milk for béchamel or white sauce

**3** 100–200g each of fat and flour to 1 litre milk for a soufflé base

**4** 150–250g each of fat and flour to 1 litre milk and/or stock for croquettes

ESPAGNOLE

In colour, brown roux is essentially indistinguishable from the lighter shades of dark roux, but as it's generally made in smaller quantities than its Cajun cousin, it doesn't involve quite so much standing around and stirring. Its classic application is in espagnole sauce. Espagnole is made with a brown roux mixed with a mirepoix of finely diced onion, carrot and celery, some bacon and a good dark stock, usually beef. Tomatoes and other aromatic ingredients might be added to bump up the flavour. Then it's simmered, skimmed and strained to a thick, shiny consistency ready to use or flavour further, say with bitter orange to serve with duck, or with Madeira and mushrooms for steak.

According to Anne Willan, espagnoles were 'once the glory of the French kitchen', where these days chefs prefer to make their sauces by thickening beef or brown veal stock with slurries of cornflour or potato starch, or by reducing a good bone stock. All very well if you have gallons of beef stock sloshing about, or easy access to a prehistoric cave full of bones. Failing this, I recommend making a fairly basic beef stew, using a mix of stewing steak and something on the bone, like oxtail or short ribs. Add chunks of carrot, onion and celery, a squeeze of tomato purée, some red wine, a bouquet garni and a bit more liquid than you might normally use, then slow-cook it – see **here** for more guidance. With the beef, vegetables and just a little of the liquid, make delicious pot pies topped with rough puff pastry. Strain, cool and de-fat the balance of the liquid and you'll have an excellent beef 'stock' that can form the basis of an espagnole.

Traditional French cooking tends to match its roux to the ingredients used to turn them into sauces – dark roux with dark stock, light with light, white with milk – but there's no good reason not to mix things up a little. In the American South, a dark roux is made by cooking flour in pan drippings from fried chicken, steak or bacon. Milk is then added and the mixture stirred to create 'country' or 'pan' gravy. Add Cheddar to make a sauce for macaroni cheese embellished with the toasty flavour of dark roux – a kind of mac 'n' rarebit.

VELOUTÉ

That's not to pooh-pooh the classic approach. A golden roux with a light stock is the basis for a velouté sauce – think of it as espagnole's blonde sister – or a main course like _blanquette de veau_ , which regularly tops the polls for France's favourite dish. Veal is cooked in a mixture of golden roux, light stock, cream, small white onions and button mushrooms. Elizabeth David considered the dish insipid, but only in comparison to stews that combined veal and tomatoes, which she reckoned have a special affinity for each other. It's worth noting that David was writing at a time when _blanquettes_ were more common than tomato-based dishes, whereas today the situation is very much the reverse, and the restraint of a _blanquette_ can be a pleasurably plain departure from such strong flavours. My husband makes a _blanquette de dinde_ a few days after Christmas, with leftover turkey and stock made from the carcass. After a week of roast potatoes, buttered sprouts with chestnuts, clods of cold stuffing, smoked salmon pâté, gammon and chutney sandwiches, mince pies, Pedro Ximénez sherry and Rococo geranium creams, its calm creaminess is like switching off the TV.

BÉCHAMEL

Next stop on the roux continuum is béchamel, the thick, flavoured white sauce under which ingredients unwind when they're in the mood for a box set. Conceived in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth béchamel was all the rage among the French upper classes. Today it is most at home in comfort food like mac 'n' cheese, fish pie, or chicken pot pie. It puts the _aah_ in lasagne and moussaka. Enriched with cheese, to make Mornay sauce, it's poured over cauliflower or mixed with chopped parsley to accompany gammon. While Nigella Lawson says that béarnaise is her favourite sauce, she admits that béchamel is the most essential.

SOUFFLÉ

A soufflé is a thick white sauce that's had a big intake of breath. If I'm planning one, I generally make a starting-point quantity of thick white sauce as a base, reserving enough for the soufflé and keeping the rest in the fridge to dilute with wine or stock for whatever sauce I fancy later in the week. For the soufflé, I'll flavour the roux with a vegetable purée, or some cheese, then add the egg yolks before whisking the whites and folding them in. The indispensable quality of the soufflé-maker, says James Beard, is nonchalance. Soufflés are like horses: never let them sense that you're nervous. By all accounts, Beard himself was the Robert Mitchum of soufflé-making nonchalance. All the sacred rules, he believed, such as chilling the uncooked soufflé in the fridge, and not opening the oven door during cooking, could safely be flouted – as long as a) you kept your cool, in case any anxious vibes be communicated to the soufflé, and b) you whisked your egg whites to soft peaks, the kind that _start_ to fold over when you take out the whisk, but never quite get there.

A successful soufflé is also, I suspect, a fair bit to do with knowing your oven and cookware. To achieve a perfectly cooked centre is a matter of trial and error, so it's wise to try and isolate one variable – whether that be the dish used, the temperature of the oven, or the temperature of the uncooked mixture when it went into the oven – and keep the other conditions constant until you hit the jackpot. It's impossible to tell by eye if the centre of a soufflé is cooked through or still wet; it's perfectly safe to open the oven door and, with suitably Beardean nonchalance, dip in a strand of dried spaghetti to see if it comes out clean. Or, if you're making individual, ramekin-size soufflés, make a few spare, taking them out at intervals and noting which cooking time works best. A few standardised trials will be of more use to you than any guidelines in a recipe book, plus you'll get an idea of how long the soufflé stays _soufflé_. The roux-based variety will stand tall longer than any made with pastry cream, ganache or a simple purée, but not so long that you can afford to dally once it's out of the oven. There are few gastronomic sights more melancholy than a soufflé collapsing like a risqué joke in a roomful of puritans.

CROQUETTES

Croquettes get a bad press in the UK, where they're associated with school meals, but in Spain they come studded with _jamón_ or fibrous with _bacalao_ , and are heaven with a dipping pot of allioli and a cold _caña_ of draught beer. Take a bite of _croqueta_ and the breadcrumbed crust gives way to thick, creamy roux. In Belgium, _garnaalkroketten_ are a national delicacy, made with tiny brown shrimps suspended in a hot, soupy centre, like a hand-held chowder. In the Netherlands, dedicated outlets like Van Dobben sell _kroketten_ and their smaller, rounder cousins _bitterballen_ in classic flavours like beef, veal and chicken and, more exotically, satay and goulash. _Bitterballen_ , incidentally, are so-called not because they're bitter themselves but because they were traditionally served with a shot of _jenever_ , a gin-like form of aromatic bitters.

I once had a lunchtime meeting in Amsterdam after staying up too late the night before, drinking too much and too variously, and spending a sleepless, dehydrated night on the houseboat we had rented. Lunch was being served in the office. We sat in plumply upholstered, and, crucially, reclinable executive chairs around a conference table, at the centre of which was a cardboard box full of hot _kroketten_ so golden and crispy-looking you could almost hear them nestling against each other. The idea was to pick up a bread roll – the very sweet, very white sort the Dutch really dig – smear it with yellow mustard, cram in a croquette and sink your teeth into it. Soft, crunch, soft. Bliss.

A hangover loves carbs, all the more so if they yield a rich, beefy roux when you bite into them. The life-saving qualities of no-frills fast food. That said, it's no longer beyond possibility for croquettes to crop up on swankier menus, albeit with fancier fillings. The Catalan chef Sergi Arola makes his with Gorgonzola, while the Scot Martin Wishart uses smoked haddock; Ernesto Iaccarino, chef at Don Alfonso 1890, near Naples, shapes his croquettes into cubes, in a manner reminiscent of sliced _crema fritta_ , or _panelle_ , the irresistible Sicilian chickpea-flour fritters. Iaccarino makes a pair of olive oil roux – one with wheat flour, the other with tapioca flour – and combines them with horseradish-infused milk. Once set, the mixture is cut into cubes and coated with turmeric-spiked breadcrumbs, then fried and served with jasmine-scented yogurt. One example serves to show all the different methods you can use to flavour a croquette.

And so chefs creep back roux-wards, not via the venerable sauces of _la grande cuisine_ , but with a new spirit of thrift, of spinning out leftovers in a delicious and accessible way, with plenty of scope for creative interpretation. That is, the kind of _nouvelle cuisine ancienne_ that might take hold if someone came up with a ten-point manifesto for it.

**Gumbo**

The earliest published recipes for gumbo didn't include a roux; now most do. The finished dish is usually served as a main-course stew, with long-grain rice and a garnish of chopped parsley and thin green slices of spring onion. Other than that, what goes into the gumbo and its seasoning varies wildly. Keith Floyd makes the inevitable jazz analogy: know the tune, and you can improvise the rest, 'with plenty of heart and soul'.

_For a stew for 6, or soup for 8_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

125g (135ml) vegetable oil **B C**

125g plain flour **C**

Fat or oil for frying

1kg chicken joints **D**

500g spicy smoked sausage, sliced **D**

1 large onion, diced

1 green pepper, diced

2–3 celery sticks, diced

3–4 garlic cloves, finely chopped

3 bay leaves **E**

¼ tsp cayenne **E**

1½ tsp salt

2 litres warm chicken stock **F**

5–6 tbsp chopped parsley

4–8 spring onions, green parts only, finely sliced

Long-grain rice, to serve

**1** First make your roux. Heat the oil in a cast-iron frying pan or heavy-based saucepan over a medium heat. Slowly stir in the flour. Cook for 30–45 minutes over a low heat, stirring intermittently, until the roux is dark brown.

Making a dark roux in the oven is an easier option: stir the flour into the hot fat in an ovenproof pan on the hob, then transfer to a 180°C oven and cook for 1½– 2 hours, stirring every 15 minutes.

**2** When you're ready to make the gumbo, heat some fat or oil in a frying pan and brown the meat one type at a time, then transfer to a stockpot (or large saucepan). Add the onion, green pepper, celery and garlic to the frying pan, and cook until softened, then transfer them to the stockpot too.

**3** Put the stockpot on a medium heat and add the roux, bay leaves, cayenne and salt, then stir in the warm stock. **G**

**4** Bring to the boil, then simmer slowly, uncovered, for as long as your ingredients need to cook through – in the case of chicken joints and sausage, about 1 hour.

You may need to top up the cooking liquid if it falls below the level of the ingredients.

**5** Skim off any fat, then stir in the parsley and spring onion. **G H**

**6** Ladle the gumbo into deep soup plates, preferably with a mound of cooked rice in the centre.

A crusty baguette, a judicious sprinkling of Tabasco and a cold beer would be welcome too.

LEEWAY

**A** Extend your gumbo by using more stock, roux and rice.

**B** Use a solid fat like lard or bacon dripping instead of oil.

**C** It's worth making a double batch of roux, as the excess will keep for months in the fridge and up to a year in the freezer.

**D** Many ingredients make it into gumbo – fish, shellfish, game or poultry – although red meat is less common. In the case of seafood, the roux, aromatics and stock (preferably home-made) are simmered for an hour or so, for the flavours to develop and combine, before the fish or shellfish is added for the brief period it needs to cook through. See Flavours & Variations for examples.

**E** Typical additional seasonings include dried or fresh thyme, dried oregano, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, paprika and white pepper.

**F** Replace 250ml of the stock with a 400g tin of chopped tomatoes or 250ml white wine to enhance it further.

**G** Thicken your gumbo with okra – more common with seafood than with meat. Cut the fingers into 1cm slices and either stir them in at step **3**, if you like them soft and stewed; or, for a bit of bite, fry them in vegetable oil for a few minutes and then stir in at step **5**.

**H** Filé powder is an alternative thickener that's mostly used with meat. Be warned, it will become horribly stringy if the gumbo is brought back to a high heat after it's been added. For this reason, some people prefer to stir ½ tsp or so into their own bowl at the table. Alternatively, add 1 tbsp filé powder per 1 litre stock, off the heat, at step **5**.

Gumbo → Flavours & Variations

BLACK PUDDING **,** SPICY SAUSAGE & SMOKED HAM

Looking for cheap, flavourful ingredients for my gumbo, I returned from my butchers in Islington with pretty much the same things I might have bought in Baton Rouge – a ham hock, half a kilo of spicy sausage and a 250g pyramidal block of black pudding. Blood sausage _can_ be found in Louisiana, but the federal hygiene people get a little nervy about it, so, for an easy life, the local restaurants tend to give it a miss. It's always worth tracking some down if you can, as it lends the same brooding depth to gumbo as it does to the Asturian bean stew _fabada._ Follow our starting point, using the ham hock in place of the chicken. As with any broth or stew, let the cooking time be guided by your ingredients, i.e., how long it takes to cook them through while retaining a good texture. In this case, at step **4** the hock will need a slow simmering for 2–3 hours. Both sausage and black pudding can be sliced and added an hour before the cooking time is up. Remove the ham hock, cut the meat into bite-size pieces and return them to the pan to reheat before serving your gumbo with rice and garnish.

CRAYFISH

'Cajun' is a corruption of Acadian, Acadia being a historical French colony roughly corresponding to present-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. After the British invaded in the eighteenth century, many of the inhabitants were deported, a good proportion ending up in francophone Louisiana. The story goes that so close was the Acadians' relationship with the Canadian lobster that it followed them south, losing so much body weight during its two-thousand-mile swim that it was transformed into crayfish. Aesop need lose no sleep, but a small crustacean that teems in sluggish creeks and is otherwise known as the mudbug needs all the mythologising it can get. Much of the crayfish consumed in Louisiana is raised locally, in vast natural wetlands, farmed in rotation with rice. Louisiana _is_ a bowl of gumbo, the bayou a rich brown as if made with a dark roux. One way to make a crayfish gumbo is to follow the starting point, leaving out the chicken joints and adding 1kg cleaned, whole, shell-on crayfish about 45 minutes into step **4**. If the crayfish are in their shells, as they should be, you can use water rather than stock. Most recipes for crayfish gumbo call for tomatoes and Creole seasoning. If you don't have a tub of the branded stuff (e.g. Tony Chachere, Paul Prudhomme or Emeril Lagasse) in your larder, make some by thoroughly mixing 3 tbsp paprika, 2 tbsp garlic powder, 1 tbsp onion powder, 1 tbsp dried thyme, 1 tbsp dried oregano, 2 tsp black pepper, 2 tsp salt and 1 tsp cayenne. Use 1–2 tbsp in a gumbo made according to our starting point.

GAME

Fat rendered from duck, goose or chicken can all be used to make an excellent roux for a game gumbo. At Prejean's Cajun restaurant in Lafayette, they use lard in the pheasant and quail gumbo that sells in vast quantities every year at the New Orleans Jazz Festival. For something similar, adapting our starting point, use 2 boned pheasant, 2 boned quail, 500g _andouille_ (a coarse, smoked pork sausage you might approximate with Polish kabanos), 250g finer-ground smoked fresh sausage (hard to get in the UK, so I use a spiced sausage). With the bay leaf, add 2 tbsp paprika, ¼ tsp white pepper and ¼ tsp black pepper. Once the meat is cooked through, add a few dashes of Tabasco with the parsley and spring onions and, if you can find it, a teaspoon or two of the liquid flavouring/browning product called Kitchen Bouquet. Simmer for another 5 minutes before serving with rice.

SEAFOOD

Some say gumbo has its roots in another soup/stew from the Francophonie – bouillabaisse. The _Times Picayune_ columnist Lolis Eric Ellie disagrees. He claims the dish has African heritage. If gumbo _could_ trace its origins to a European dish, you might say it was closest to paella, which is made with the distinctly gumboesque combination of rice (albeit short-, not long-grain), peppers, onion, spices and, usually, sausage and shellfish. What gumbo and bouillabaisse do share, however, is the addition, sometimes, of a wisp of emulsified sauce in the broth. In gumbo's case, this will be mayonnaise, from the potato salad some cooks add to the bowl in place of rice. (Grits and potatoes were once common alternatives to rice in gumbo, and the tradition persists in the domestic kitchens of the South, if less so in its restaurants.) In bouillabaisse, the sauce will be _rouille_ , and the fish used is generally of the finned kind, whereas in gumbo shellfish predominates, especially in the touristy versions involving shrimp, oysters and a shellfish stock. Put down your camera and piña colada and make a shellfish gumbo by following our starting point, omitting the chicken and using fish or shellfish stock. Simmer at step **4** for 45 minutes before adding between 500g and 1kg prawns, shucked oysters, crabmeat or crayfish in any combination you choose. Simmer for 10 minutes and serve with rice.

SMOKED HADDOCK, MUSSEL & OKRA

More Lossiemouth than Louisiana, admittedly, but a combination of mussels and smoked haddock is appropriately intense and unpretentious. You don't even have to use a stock: water will suffice with such pungent ingredients. Follow the starting point, without using chicken or sausage, as far as step **4**. When the broth has simmered for 30 minutes, cut 250g okra into 1cm slices. For those who haven't tried it, okra is like a cross between a courgette and a shooting star. Throw the okra into a frying pan with some vegetable oil, and you'll note the tiny white strands that ping and snap like elastic. Pretty entertaining, as vegetables go. Add the okra to the broth, along with 250g smoked haddock fillet, skinned and cut into chunks, and 1kg mussels in their shells, scrubbed. Simmer gently for 5–7 minutes, then serve with rice, parsley and spring onion. Like a rice-y chowder, but rowdier.

SQUIRREL & OYSTER

This surf-and-turf gumbo variation comes from _Housekeeping in Old Virginia_ (1879) by Marion Cabell Tyree, and is seasoned with cloves, allspice, black and red pepper, parsley and thyme. It's thickened with filé. Newcomers to squirrel might heed the journalist Vincent Graff: it's as fiddly to eat as quail, he advises, 'without the reward at the end of it.' André Simon is more enthusiastic. Grey squirrel, he notes, is 'the fatter and the best to eat, resembling very closely the warren rabbit in texture of flesh and flavour'. Others have compared the taste to wild boar, or a cross between duck and lamb, especially if the squirrel had lived on nuts and berries. Like many animals, the flavour of squirrel meat is influenced by its diet, which is why squirrels that live in pine forests, and whose flesh thus tastes of turpentine, are best left in peace. Whereas the squirrels that live in the park across the street from my house, who subsist on KFC and discarded picnic eggs, are absolutely delectable. A typical grey squirrel weighs about 500g, bones included, so you'll need to allow half a squirrel, plus 4–6 oysters, per person.

SWEET POTATO, LEEK **,** BUTTER BEAN & FIL **É**

The dark roux used in gumbo is made with oil rather than butter, and so can be used as the basis of a vegan stew. The authenticity of a gumbo without crayfish eyes or alligator wattle might be called into question, yet the toasty richness of dark roux is so characteristic that it can make a soup made with nothing more than vegetables taste like the real deal. Cooking flour for an extended period, as in a dark roux, creates flavour molecules similar to those produced when bones are roasted for stock. If you cook a lot of meat-free dishes, dark roux is a very handy preparation to have at your disposal – it will keep for a few months in the fridge and even longer in the freezer. For my vegan gumbo, I use sweet potato, because I love it, and butter beans because their cooking water can be used as the stock. Leeks pull off the allium trick of adding depth of flavour and a textural contrast to the other two veg. Some people may find them a bit slimy, though sliminess is not a demerit in gumbo – both of the typical thickening agents, okra and filé, contribute sliminess to a degree. Soak 250g dried butter beans for at least 5 hours or overnight, then cook until soft (about 30–40 minutes); drain and reserve the cooking water. Follow the starting point, but brown 4 leeks, cut into chunks, instead of the meat, then add the onion, green pepper and celery to the frying pan. When the vegetables are soft, transfer to the stockpot with the cooked beans and their cooking water, topping up with tap water to make 1.5 litres. Add 500g sweet potato cut into chunks and a little fresh thyme, along with the bay and cayenne. A gentle simmer for 35–40 minutes should be plenty. Add the parsley and spring onion, remove the pan from the heat, give it a few minutes, then stir in 1 tbsp filé powder.

Z'HERBES

_Z'herbes_ is a soupier sort of gumbo made with bundles of greens, traditionally served by Catholics on Maundy Thursday. These days the version made by Leah Chase at the New Orleans restaurant Dooky Chase attracts diners of every denomination. _Z'herbes_ is often referred to as the vegetarian gumbo, but other than at Lent, when it is served meat-free, usually fits the description only in the French sense – i.e. it contains meat. Ham bones, sausage and bone broth are common inclusions; some even make use of beef or veal. Sara Roahen describes _z'herbes_ as 'mulchy, bitter, strangely sweet, zinging with cayenne pepper, meatier than an NFL locker room, and inordinately refreshing'. The best time of year to make _z'herbes_ is not Easter, but the second week in January, when the greens you optimistically bought for your New Year juicing drive have begun to wilt in the fridge. Any greens will do, but a wide selection is preferable – collards, spring greens, spinach, mustard, turnip, cabbage, carrot tops, chard, parsley, watercress, dandelion, rocket, lettuce, tarragon, thyme. Some _z'herbiers_ use twelve, in honour of the apostles, but most (including Leah Chase) stipulate any odd number, other than unlucky thirteen. Legend has it that for every different green you add, you make a friend; a bit of a faff nowadays, when you can make several thousand by posting a photo of a kitten in a tank-top. Whether you blend the gumbo is up to you, but if you choose not to, expect tangles of greens to hang down your chin like Spanish moss from a tree. Mine reminded me of Portuguese _caldo verde_ , a broth made with greens and sausage and thickened with floury potato as opposed to a roux. For a _z'herbes_ in line with our starting point, leave out the chicken and use double the quantity of sausage, then add ham stock and 1 tsp Tabasco with the bay, cayenne and 1.25–1.5kg cleaned, chopped greens. Simmer for an hour, then remove from the heat and stir in 1 tbsp filé powder.

**Espagnole**

Espagnole is made with a brown roux, a few aromatics and some good brown stock. Properly prepared, espagnole is glossy and rich enough to be used sparingly, most often in bringing together a plate of simply cooked meat and vegetables. It also makes a superior gravy for sausages and mash, in which case you needn't be sparing in the least.

_For 500–900ml, depending on the level of reduction and whether wine is used_

INGREDIENTS

6 tbsp (90ml) vegetable (corn, sunflower, groundnut) oil

3 tbsp (30g) finely diced bacon (or ham) **A**

1 small onion or 1 large shallot, finely diced

1 carrot, finely diced

1 celery stick, finely diced

5 tbsp (50g) plain flour **B**

1 litre good-quality brown veal or beef stock

1 bouquet garni of fresh herbs

2–3 tbsp tomato purée **C**

200ml wine – optional **D**

Salt

**1** Heat 1 tbsp of the oil in a small frying pan and cook the bacon over a medium heat until its fat runs. Add the onion, carrot and celery and cook until they start to turn golden, then set aside. Warm the stock while you're doing this.

**2** Heat the remaining 5 tbsp oil in a heavy-based saucepan. Stir or whisk in the flour. Cook over a low – medium heat, stirring constantly, for about 5 minutes, or until the mixture turns a pecan shade of brown.

**3** Off the heat, gradually add the warm stock to the roux, whisking vigorously to see off any lumps. **E**

**4** Return the pan to the hob on a medium–high heat. Add the cooked bacon and vegetables, plus the bouquet garni, tomato purée and wine, if using. Bring to the boil, stirring regularly, then turn down to a simmer.

**5** Continue simmering, slowly, to reduce the sauce by about a quarter to a half, skimming as necessary and stirring regularly. The end result should be glossy and concentrated. Check the seasoning, then strain the sauce.

Reducing by half might take 35–40 minutes for this quantity. **F**

**6** If you're not serving the sauce immediately, keep it warm in a heatproof jug sitting in a pan of barely simmering water. Or allow it to cool, then refrigerate for a few days or freeze for up to a year.

Espagnole reheats very well, and welcomes the addition of other ingredients.

LEEWAY

**A** Many recipes also call for a few tablespoons of chopped mushrooms to be cooked with the bacon and vegetables.

**B** Some cooks use pre-browned flour, spreading it out on a baking tray and cooking it at 180°C, turning it over every few minutes until much of it is a biscuit colour.

**C** A de-seeded, skinned tomato can be added instead of tomato purée. Take care not to overdo the tomato, which can give the sauce a shop-bought tang.

**D** White wine was once quite commonly added to beef sauces. Madeira famously makes a delicious sauce.

**E** It's often said that cold liquid should be added to hot roux and vice versa, but I find lumps far easier to avoid by adding warm liquid to the hot roux.

**F** The long simmer is important. For a more refined sauce, keep 200ml of the stock back while you warm the rest at step **1**. Then add 100ml cold stock to the simmering sauce 10 minutes into step **5**; this will coax any scum and fat to the surface, making it easier to skim off. Repeat with the second 100ml about 10 minutes later.

Espagnole → Flavours & Variations

BITTER ORANGE

Bigarade sauce is reason enough to prepare an espagnole. It's what makes duck ' _à l'orange_ ', although Jane Grigson recommends it (made with venison or beef stock) for venison, and for salt pork glazed with mustard, orange juice, brown sugar and marmalade. Seeing as bigarade sits next to Big Mac in my rigorously indexed cook's journal, I let my mind waddle to the notion of a duck burger, served in a robust bun with an orange sauce and half a chalk stream of watercress. A Bigarade Mac. A duck burger is not an original idea. Comptoir Gascon in London serves a burger made with a mix of raw and confit duck, topped with a slice of foie gras and a little chutney. Michel Roux Jnr minces a mixture of fat and skin with the duck meat, to guard against excessive leanness, then stuffs Vacherin cheese into the middle, just to be sure. I served my duck burger, a simple patty of minced, seasoned meat, to my husband with a bit of a fanfare, knowing that the bitter orange sauce was excellent – luscious, piquant and fruity. Two bites in, he leaned over, placed a hand on my shoulder, and whispered: 'Don't make this again.' To him it tasted like a duckpond smells, and I had to agree. There are many planets for the gastronaut to explore, but not all of them are friendly. Next time I'll stick with simply fried duck breasts. For the sauce, julienne (very finely) the zest of 3 Seville oranges, or 2 sweet oranges plus 1 lemon, then juice the fruit. Boil the zest in the juice until the liquid has reduced by half, then add 500ml made espagnole sauce and simmer for 5 minutes, skimming if necessary. Remove from the heat, check the seasoning and stir in 1 tbsp butter and an optional dash of Cointreau or Grand Marnier.

CHESTNUT & GAME

'An extremely rich roux can be made using chestnut flour,' according to John Wright, in his _River Cottage Hedgerow Handbook_. He suggests a game pie, made with as many woodland creatures as you can bag with your blunderbuss. I'd mix one part chestnut flour to three of wheat, for a hint of that rich flavour. Chestnut flour is gluten-free and will work fine in a roux: it can be straight-swapped for wheat flour. That said, I'd still be inclined to cut the chestnut flour with something less strident – wheat flour, as mentioned, or a gluten-free mix if you're a gluten-avoider.

DEMI **-** GLACE

One of those culinary terms whose meaning I forget no sooner than I've looked it up. Commit the sauce to memory by focusing on the demi and ignoring the glace. The clue is in the name: it's made of half espagnole and half beef, veal or brown chicken stock. Bring them to the boil together, then reduce by half. Once cooled, it's ready to freeze in small portions, especially useful if you're a restaurateur with cooked-to-order dishes like Steak Diane on the menu. Steak Diane is a flambéed dish from New York that was fashionable in the 1970s. It was decades later that I first tried it, but then I'm as square as a _nouvelle cuisine_ plate. It was a Friday night in early summer, and my sister and I were the only customers at a cliff-side pub near Land's End. The proprietor, who also turned out to be the waiter, sommelier, chef, cloakroom assistant and barman, perhaps because the original occupants of these roles had all thrown themselves off the cliff, took our orders then disregarded them entirely. You're having the Steak Diane, he said, and disappeared into the kitchen to fetch meat, some matches, and the first of many bottles of red wine. While he fried the flattened steaks on the guéridon next to our table he explained how he'd moved to Cornwall to escape the pressures of life in London, where he'd worked 'in the theatre'. He set the steaks aside to rest, softened some finely chopped shallot and garlic in butter, then added Cognac, which he lit with a match. Once the flame had subsided, he added a small wine glass of demi-glace and a teaspoon each of Dijon mustard and Worcestershire sauce, reminiscing, as he did so, about his initial unpopularity among the villagers. Not only did they stay away from the pub, but swerved him in the street and refused to make eye contact in the post office. The steaks were returned to the pan. Gradually he came to be accepted, to the extent that he had recently been invited to join the Women's Institute. Then disaster had struck. He won first prize in the raffle at the summer fête. The moment he held the Yardley talc and bath-cube set in his hands, he felt the August air crackle with frost, and his bookings dried up. My sister and I adored him. He told us tall tales of London in the 1960s as he made us _crêpes Suzette_ , one after another until the pancake mixture was all used up. It was quite clear that his specialities were table-side dishes because the kitchen was too lonely. We returned the next summer, looking forward to more tales of alcoholic fist-fights in the West End, but he'd gone. The pub had the same layout, the same furniture and the same horse brasses, but the food was frozen stuff from a national catering supplier. Every table was packed.

DIABLE

A devil to define. French bourgeois recipes for sauce diable amount to espagnole tickled up with cayenne, mustard or both. The chef Daniel Boulud, meanwhile, maintains that anything named diable in French cooking is coated in mustard, breadcrumbed and grilled. He gives a recipe for chicken served with a 'diable' sauce made from 2 tbsp Dijon mustard, 1 tbsp each of tomato ketchup and A1 steak sauce, 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce and a few drops of Tabasco. Rather like the aggressive brother of Marie Rose, the pale-pink sauce in a classic prawn cocktail. I mixed up some Bouludian sauce diable, substituting HP for A1, and dolloped it on the side of bubble and squeak with fried egg. Rachel Khoo serves the classic French version of the sauce with similarly unassuming bangers and mash. Follow the starting point for espagnole, adding ¼ tsp cayenne at the end.

FRUIT & NUT

Sauce romaine is unusual among variations on espagnole, being sweet and sour, with additions of fruit and nut, and thus more redolent of medieval cookery than French bourgeois cuisine. Assuming you've already made your espagnole, start by making a _gastrique_ – a caramel with vinegar added, i.e. not unlike the knock-off balsamic that smooth-talking market trader in Modena flogged you for 45 euros. To a simple dish of steak and wilted spinach, sauce romaine adds the kind of exclamation marks that punctuate punch-ups in _Batman_ (the TV show, not the po-faced movies). Caramelise 2 tbsp sugar, add 125ml red or white wine vinegar and cook until it starts to caramelise again. Pour in 250ml espagnole and bring to the boil. Then simmer with half a handful of raisins. Check the seasoning, stir in 1–2 tbsp toasted pine nuts and serve immediately.

MUSTARD, VINEGAR & ONION **(** ROBERT **)**

At Dinner, Heston Blumenthal's restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Knightsbridge, I ate pork with sauce Robert, a preparation allegedly described by Rabelais as 'so salubrious and so essential'. Which version of sauce Robert he was referring to is hard to pin down. The recipe has (probably) been around for more than six hundred years. In essence it consists of onions cooked in butter with meat stock (or espagnole), mustard and vinegar. Blumenthal's version is unusual in that he adds reduced pork stock, heated to 80°C, to butter-softened shallots, garlic and bacon, lets them infuse for 20 minutes, then adds thyme and sage and lets them infuse for a further 5 minutes. According to Blumenthal, this keeps the sauce fresh-flavoured. In place of vinegar, lemon juice is whisked into the strained sauce with coarse grain mustard until everything emulsifies. For the old-school version, cook 2 finely chopped onions in 25g butter until soft, add 20ml white wine and 10ml wine vinegar and reduce to almost nothing. Add 500ml espagnole or demi-glace and heat through, then strain. Whisk a little of the warm sauce into 1 tbsp Dijon mustard, then stir this mixture back into the sauce.

TOMATO, MUSHROOM & WHITE WINE **(** CHASSEUR)

Sauce chasseur might seem oddly named, given that its defining ingredient puts one more in mind of a retiree pottering about in his greenhouse than a sinewy survivalist fording a stream with his rifle cocked. Still, you have to hand it to this sauce for outliving the decline of French bourgeois cookery. Arguably it has done so by reinventing itself as an all-in-one dish. Chicken is the usual meat but rabbit was once popular, and the companionability of the other ingredients is such that pretty much any meat will do. In the late nineteenth century, during the Paris siege, when the zoo could no longer afford to feed the animals, Chef Choron of Voisins made his chasseur with elephant trunk. Soften 2 tbsp finely chopped shallots or onion in 2 tbsp butter, then add 100g sliced mushrooms and allow them to turn golden and release their juices. Pour in half a glass of white wine with 1–2 tbsp brandy and cook off the alcohol for a few minutes before adding 250ml espagnole and 125ml tomato purée. Bring to the boil, then simmer for a few minutes, adding chopped parsley and a little more butter. Or you can replace the espagnole with chicken stock and make chicken chasseur, following the starting point for stew **here**. The sauce won't match the intensity of a classic espagnole made with beef stock, but the one-pot method using skin-on, bone-in poultry will yield excellent results, and is far quicker, giving you time to flick through your _guide culinaire_ in search of other sauces to turn into casseroles.

**Velouté**

Espagnole's fair sister, made in the same way but with a paler roux and lighter stock – chicken, fish or white veal. Think of velouté as a more formal way of making gravy for roast chicken. It is crucial to use a pronounced-tasting stock for velouté, so do taste it before you proceed.

_For about 1 litre, 6–8 servings_

INGREDIENTS

1 litre good-quality chicken, fish or veal stock **A**

200ml dry white wine

50g butter

50g plain flour

A squeeze of lemon juice – optional **B**

Salt

**1** Warm the stock with the wine.

**2** In another, heavy-based saucepan, melt the butter over a low – medium heat, then whisk in the flour. Cook for a few minutes, stirring constantly, until the mixture turns pale beige. **A**

**3** Off the heat, gradually add the warmed stock, whisking vigorously to see off any lumps. **C**

**4** Simmer the sauce for 30–45 minutes, stirring occasionally and skimming when the need arises.

This will be long enough for any starchiness yielded by the flour to subside.

**5** Strain the sauce, add a few drops of lemon juice if you like, and season to taste. **D E**

**6** If you're not serving your velouté sauce immediately, keep it warm in a heatproof jug sitting in a pan of barely simmering water. Or allow it to cool, then refrigerate for a few days or freeze for up to a year.

Velouté reheats very well, and welcomes the addition of other ingredients.

LEEWAY

**A** As with espagnole, some recipes for velouté recommend flavouring the sauce further with a mirepoix. Finely dice 1 small onion, 1 carrot and 1 celery stick, then cook them in the butter until soft, but not brown, before adding the flour. Other cooks simply add 1–2 tbsp finely chopped mushrooms after the stock at step **3**.

**B** The lemon juice is optional, but a few drops will brighten the sauce.

**C** A more assiduous way to make this is to add about three-quarters of the stock, warmed, at step **3**, then add the rest, cold, in a few increments, to the simmering pot. This helps bring impurities to the surface, where they can be carefully skimmed off.

**D** For a richer, softer flavour, add double cream or crème fraîche (anything between 2 and 6 tbsp) at the end and return the pan to the heat to warm through gently.

**E** Or whisk in a little flavoured butter, such as the anchovy and seaweed options given under seafood.

Velouté → Flavours & Variations

BERCY

A wine sauce named after a neighbourhood in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. Pleasurable, at least after a few glasses, to imagine vines clinging to the shiny metal facets of the Opéra Bastille, or giraffes puckering their lips to pluck a bunch of grapes hanging off that artificial crag at the Zoo de Vincennes. Bercy, sad to say, owes its wine association not to its terroir, but to the warehouses that lined its section of the Seine. In its eighteenth-century heyday, the neighbourhood was so awash with wine that local restaurants dispensed with their wine lists; their customers would no more have considered paying for a glass of Pomerol than we would a glass of tap water. Now, in common with once-industrial areas the world over, the warehouses have been converted into swanky shops and bars. Soften 4 tbsp finely chopped shallots or onion in 4 tbsp butter, moisten with white wine and reduce until it's all but disappeared, then add 500ml velouté made with fish stock. Bring to the boil, then simmer for 5–10 minutes. Finish with 1–2 tbsp butter and some chopped parsley. Serve with fried, poached or grilled fish of any sort. A variation on Bercy to serve with meat replaces the fish velouté with demi-glace, and the butter with bone marrow.

CURRY

If you've ever made the curry base given in Kris Dhillon's excellent _The Curry Secret: Indian Restaurant Cookery at Home_ , a pungent gloop of blended onion, garlic and ginger, you'll have wondered how anything so sulphurous-smelling could have remained a secret long enough for Dhillon to write about it. Once cooked and spiced, however, the super-alliaceous base undergoes a tasty transformation. Nonetheless, the sensitive of nose may prefer to make a roux-based curry sauce: a _blanquette_ , basically, with curry flavours added. This approach is popular both with the Japanese, and with the British school dinner ladies of my childhood, who stirred shreds of leftover chicken into it. Pub curry is conceived along much the same lines, and is roughly the colour of a very old ginger cat with a distinct flavour of fenugreek. Escoffier's velouté-based curry sauce was predictably ritzier. He created _Poularde Edward VII_ for the king's coronation: chicken stuffed with truffles and foie gras, on a bed of more truffles, served with a curry sauce in lip service to the jewel in Bertie's crown. For school/pub curry, simply add 2 tsp bought curry powder to the flour when making your roux.

LEMON

In _Unmentionable Cuisine_ , Calvin W. Schwabe gives a Russian recipe for brains in lemon sauce. (A little like my brains feel after a night on the Stolichnaya.) The sauce here is, in fact, a velouté made with veal stock and flavoured with plenty of grated lemon zest and 'a little' lemon juice and sugar. Once it's simmered for a while, add parboiled brains and some chopped dill. Bring to the boil and serve. Allemande sauce is the more common choice for brains – an enriched velouté finished, like Schwabe's sauce, with a brisk spritz of lemon juice.

MUSHROOM & CHERVIL

Velouté means 'velvety': a plush coating for the throat. In its incarnation as a soup, historically the texture of velouté would have been down to a roux and a finishing liaison of egg yolks and cream. But since the advent of the blender, thick, soft soups are available at the touch of a button, and a velouté might be made with nothing more than stock and some vegetables. The following recipe of Marco Pierre White's calls for a roux and a blender; it's flavoured with a combination of mushroom and chervil. Sweat 1 small onion and 1 small leek, both finely chopped, in 50g butter, then stir in 25g flour to make a light roux. Add 1kg sliced mushrooms, then 750ml chicken stock, and bring to the boil, stirring regularly. Add 500ml each of milk and cream and bring back to the boil, then season and simmer for about 8 minutes. Purée, sieve, check for seasoning and froth to cappuccino-top consistency with a stick blender. Finish with chervil leaves. The common ground shared by soups and roux-based sauces was also spotted by Campbell's, whose condensed 'cream of' soups are widely used to make mac 'n' cheese, sauces for pot pie fillings, or the green-bean casserole that graces twenty million American tables every Thanksgiving.

PEANUT BUTTER

An Ambrose Heath recipe. Lightly brown 2 tbsp butter and add 2 tbsp peanut butter. When well mixed, stir in 2 tbsp flour and cook until brown. Add 450ml chicken stock and, over a medium heat, stir while it thickens. Season to taste. 'Interesting' with boiled ham or roast chicken, says Heath.

SAFFRON **,** PASTIS & TOMATO

A sort of bouillabaisse sauce. This is excellent with shellfish, and with the shellfish-flavoured red mullet, but I'm most likely to make this vibrant, aniseedy sauce for a tranche of bright white cod, fresh from the North Sea in winter. As your litre of fish stock is warming, add a good pinch of saffron to it, along with 1 tbsp pastis. Once the stock has been mixed into the roux, add 3–4 peeled, de-seeded chopped tomatoes. Be sure to give your sauce the recommended minimum 30-minute simmer, so the tomato mellows. In summer, a little torn basil would be a welcome finishing touch.

SEAFOOD

The crayfish shells, oyster juice and lobster corals used to make the classic seafood veloutés in _Larousse_ are all very well if you fancy an extended marine-themed treasure hunt before you've even got your apron on, but shellfish butter, anchovy butter and seaweed butter offer delicious and pragmatic substitutes. To make shellfish butter is quite an involved process, so we'll leave it aside here. For anchovy butter, blend half a dozen anchovies with 100g unsalted butter, 1 finely chopped garlic clove, a pinch of cayenne and a few drops of lemon juice. And a simple seaweed butter can be made by grinding 2 sheets of toasted nori to a powder and mixing it into 125g unsalted butter. Expect it to be a dark sea-green. Potted shrimps could be considered as another form of seafood butter, and can be bought from fishmongers and fancier supermarkets. For a seafood sauce to go with fried, poached or grilled fish, soften 2 tbsp finely chopped shallot or onion in 2 tbsp butter. Add a glass of dry white wine or vermouth and reduce by half, then add 250ml velouté and simmer to reduce by half again. Finish by whisking in any of the butters above, checking for flavour and salinity as you go.

TARRAGON

As with so many sauces, tarragon can turn a velouté into something very beautiful. You can make a quick version of tarragon velouté in the pan you've used to sear a chicken breast or a portion of seafood. Set the protein aside somewhere warm, then add no more than 1–2 tsp fat to the still-warm pan. Whisk in 1–2 tsp flour, then, after a minute or two, add 250ml stock and simmer for 5 minutes. Finish with a teaspoon of chopped tarragon – and a little double cream or crème fraîche, if you like. Modern versions of this classic tend to dispense with the flour and stock in favour of loads of cream, reduced to an unctuous thickness, but both my arteries and my palate prefer it the old-fashioned way. If fresh tarragon is hard to come by, note that freeze-dried is good.

VEAL

Anthony Bourdain is quite clear on the matter. _Blanquette de veau_ should be pale. The rice should be white. The plate too. The temptation to add vegetables should be resisted at all costs. It's a _blanquette_ , for Pete's sake. See if you dare serve this without reaching for a handful of chopped parsley – it's as hard as eating a sugary doughnut without licking your lips. I wonder what Bourdain would make of Philippe Delacourcelle's version. Delacourcelle adds star anise to the veal during cooking, and a little ground cardamom to the butter used for the roux. Still as pale as porridge, but far more exotically flavoured than a classic _blanquette_. Bourdain simmers cubed veal neck or shoulder in water with a mirepoix and bouquet garni until tender. To a blonde roux, he adds the liquid the veal was cooked in, followed by the veal, some boiled pearl onions, white mushrooms, white pepper and salt. Bourdain finishes his _blanquette_ with some egg yolk and a little lemon juice, as in an allemande – see below.

YOLK & BUTTER OR CREAM **(** ALLEMANDE)

Sauce allemande was one of Carême's original mother sauces, but was demoted by absorption into velouté. It is, after all, simply a velouté enriched with egg yolks and butter or cream. Many maintain that the stock used should be veal, but Escoffier was open to any white stock, and Philippe Legendre at Taillevent opts for snail stock in his celebrated allemande. The name, incidentally, verges on racist: the allemande is teutonically pale, where espagnole is a swarthier brown. Some chefs still use the alternative name of sauce Parisienne, a result of wartime anti-German sentiment, much as the British royal family ditched Saxe-Coburg-Gotha for Windsor. For a velouté made with 500ml stock, use 2 yolks mixed with 75g melted, unsalted butter or 100ml double cream. Temper the egg mixture (i.e. whisk in a little warm sauce), then add to the remaining velouté and gently warm through, finishing with a squeeze of lemon juice. Sauce allemande is often served with simply cooked fish or chicken, or as an alternative to béchamel as the unifying medium in a pie.

**Béchamel & White Sauce**

Béchamel is made with an even paler roux than velouté and is diluted with infused milk rather than stock. It's a fast, simple, versatile sauce that's made with ingredients you're likely to have to hand. Minus the aromatics it's called white sauce, which is sometimes a better choice for the savoury flavour variations (and always for the sweet).

_For about 1 litre, 6–8 servings_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

1 litre milk **B**

½ onion, with a bay leaf nailed to it with a clove or two – a.k.a. a _clouté_

75g butter or other fat **C**

75g plain flour **C**

Salt and white pepper

Nutmeg – optional **D**

**1** First flavour the milk by scalding it with the onion _clouté_. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse before straining.

Scalding means bringing just to the boil. The infusing will take at least 10 minutes. The onion, bay and clove are what distinguish béchamel from white sauce. They can provide a fragrant backdrop for other flavours, but if they're likely to clash with them, or risk being overpowered, leave them out.

**2** In another, heavy-based saucepan, melt the butter over a medium heat, then whisk in the flour. Cook over a low–medium heat, stirring constantly, without allowing the roux to darken beyond a pale sand colour. **E**

**3** Off the heat, gradually add the warm milk, whisking vigorously to see off any lumps. Turn up the heat to medium–high and bring to the boil, stirring constantly.

**4** Lower the heat and simmer gently for anything between 8 and 40 minutes, stirring frequently. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. **F**

Often 15 minutes is called for, but the longer simmer is recommended for a finer flavour and texture. Do stay close to it, stirring occasionally so the sauce doesn't stick to the pan and burn.

**5** Strain into a heatproof jug and cover with cling film or lightly buttered baking parchment. Sit the jug in a pan of barely simmering water to keep warm, if serving imminently. Or leave to cool and store in the fridge for up to 5 days, or freeze for up to 3 months.

The sauce reheats well, although it will have thickened further and you may need to add a little extra milk to loosen it. Reheat it gently and whisk as you do.

LEEWAY

**A** The finished quantity will be smaller if you opt for a longer simmer at step **4**.

**B** Use any sort of milk, or a mixture of milk and cream if you're after something richer. Michel Roux makes a coconut-milk béchamel flavoured with soy sauce and crushed garlic. These quantities are for a thick but pourable sauce.

**C** For a thin, more pourable sauce, use 50g each of butter and flour.

**D** Nutmeg is optional, but recommended; do try to use freshly grated.

**E** A finely chopped shallot, softened in the butter before the flour is added, can give many savoury sauces a stronger-flavoured backbone.

**F** The sauce can be enriched by whisking in some double cream or crème fraîche. For this quantity, use about 100ml and add it to the sauce at the end of its simmer, giving it another 5 minutes over a gentle heat.

Béchamel & White Sauce → Flavours & Variations

ANCHOVY

I used to frequent a brasserie in Chelsea primarily because I had a crush on the barman. This was nothing unusual: everyone had a crush on all the staff, who were beautiful to a (wo)man. My barman was distinguished by his imperfections: he had a slightly brutish nose and an insufficiently defined chin, which, in the manner of these things, oddly intensified his beauty by reducing it. Since the brasserie had table service, I never got to speak to him, but would sit in his eyeline, drinking black coffee or citron pressé in an effort to seem blasé and Parisian and unconcerned about anything so bourgeois, banal and figure-compromising as food. Casting him smoky glances over my copy of _The Second Sex_ , I would suppress the agonising hunger pangs brought on when a waiter passed by with a _croque monsieur_ or steak sandwich and _frites_. One morning I showed up and he wasn't there. I sulked into my _café filtre_ until I realised his absence meant I could actually eat something. The brasserie made their _croques monsieurs_ the proper way – slim, with not too much ham or Gruyère, modestly topped with béchamel speckled brown under the grill, and served with a little facial tickler of frisée. I had just taken my last, slightly too large bite of _croque_ , chasing it with what remained of the frisée, when my barman walked in. He looked over and didn't avert his gaze. 'Excuse me,' he said. Unable, as I was, to open my mouth, I thought the most blasé and Parisian thing would be to raise an eyebrow. 'You have salad on your chin.' I learned to make my _croques monsieurs_ at home after that. I think they work best with anchovy béchamel, and fish breath is of no concern when you're slumped date-less on your sofa in your pyjamas. Jane Grigson recommends pounding 6 anchovy fillets in 3 tbsp butter, then adding to a béchamel made with a pint (about 575ml) milk.

AUBERGINE & CHEESE

In Turkey a dish called _hunkar begendi_ ('sultan's delight') consists of lamb braised with tomatoes, served on a creamy, smoky aubergine béchamel enriched with _kasseri_ – a sheep's or goat's cheese – and seasoned with freshly grated nutmeg. Jeremy Round won the 1982 _Guardian_ /Mouton Cadet cooking competition with his version; he thought that Cheddar worked better than the _kasseri_. Char 1.4kg aubergines on a griddle or in a 200°C oven until collapsed and soft, then scoop out the flesh and soak in lightly salted water for 30 minutes. Before you dump the results in the bin and head for the chippy, note that Round warns that they will look like 'grubby rags'. Squeeze out any excess moisture, then mash, or whizz in a food processor. Make a roux with 60g each of butter and flour, then add 450ml warm milk. Cook for 3 minutes before adding the aubergine purée and 60g grated Cheddar. Stir off the heat, mixing in the cheese as it melts, and season. Serve with lamb braised in onion, tomato, garlic and herbs.

BACON & CORNMEAL

My husband's comeback of choice when I have a go at him for not washing up the pan after a Saturday-morning fry-up: _I was saving it for white gravy_. The gravy in question, a speciality of the American South, is a white sauce made with bacon, sausage or pork drippings, served with fried chicken, sliced ham or steak, and mopped up with the kind of savoury scone-a-like the Americans call biscuits. Some cooks use wheat flour for the roux, but cornmeal is also common, in which case the result is called 'sawmill gravy', on account of its rougher texture. Retain 2 tbsp bacon/banger fat in your frying pan, then stir in 3 tbsp flour to make the roux, followed by 400ml warm milk and plenty of seasoning. Keep simmering until you have a thick sauce consistency, making sure to loosen as much as possible of the sticky residue left in the pan by the meat. Some will come off as you stir in the flour, and the harder bits should dissolve in the warming milk with a bit of encouragement from your spoon.

BRANDY

Brandy butter, the dense, wincingly sweet and strongly flavoured sauce traditionally served with Christmas pudding and mince pies, is essentially sozzled cake frosting. Delia Smith's boozy sauce is a very different proposition: Denis Thatcher to brandy butter's Maggie. Which is to say it's pleasantly, bumblingly bland – but rather wonderful served with a strident classic like plum pudding. (The comforting blanket of béchamel in a lasagne or moussaka works on much the same principle.) For something similar, make a white sauce according to the starting point, omitting the _clouté_ and the salt and pepper. Once it has simmered for 15 minutes at step **4**, add 125g sugar and stir for a couple of minutes. Turn the heat down to its lowest setting and add 175ml brandy and 300ml double cream. Gently warm through and taste for brandy levels. Remove from the heat and cover the surface of the sauce with cling film or buttered baking parchment until you're ready to serve. This quantity of brandy is about double what Smith uses, but I've had guests who like it even punchier. You can swap the brandy for the same amount of rum, Calvados, whisky or sweet–medium golden fortified wine.

CHEESE **(** MORNAY **)**

The roux-based sauce that would not die. There might be more _au courant_ ways to make a similar sauce, but who wants fashion-forward cauliflower cheese? Or directional eggs Mornay? Insistent seekers after novelty would do better to make their cheese sauce in the time-honoured manner, and use it in ways less familiar to British palates. The French classic, _endives au jambon_ , is made with whole heads of chicory, simmered (10 minutes should be enough) and then rolled in ham that's been spread with mustard so the apex of each one sticks out like a trotter in pink flares. Next they're lined up in an ovenproof dish, covered in Mornay sauce, scattered with some extra grated cheese and baked at 180°C until bubbling – about 20 minutes. Or consider Anna Del Conte's aubergine chips fried in garlic and parsley, mixed with ziti pasta tossed in a bay-scented Mornay: mac 'n' cheese meets Ottolenghi. For a classic Mornay, stir 75–150g grated cheese into a just-finished 500ml béchamel, off the heat, until melted – too much heat and your sauce is liable to split. Traditionally a Mornay calls for 50/50 Gruyère and Parmesan; even the stronger varieties of Cheddar don't impart flavour quite so efficiently. Taste for seasoning after adding the cheese, as its saltiness will vary. Add a teaspoon or two of mustard if you like, and/or a few tablespoons of butter and an egg yolk or two for richness (but not the last if you intend to _gratinée_ your Mornay). Other common additions include cayenne, shallots, nutmeg, a dash of Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco or kirsch. Cumin and caraway are worth considering too.

ONION **(** SOUBISE)

Onions were once boiled with honey and the strained liquid used as a cough syrup. I reckon I'd prefer a zigzag of Benadryl on my hot dog. Onion water is put to more appetising use in the thick béchamel known as soubise. This sauce is one of the many casualties of the roux's general unfashionability, and while it still makes an occasional appearance with its classic partner, lamb, back in the day it was served with rabbit, duck, chicken and even fish. Vegetarians should note that the balance soubise strikes between sweet and sulphurous makes it an equally fitting match for robust mushroom dishes, boiled eggs or mixed roast vegetables, and it makes a good filling for an omelette. Simmer 2 large chopped onions in 500ml salted water, then strain when soft, retaining the water as well as the onion. Mix the onion-cooking water with 500ml milk and use to make a béchamel as per our starting point. Return the cooked onion (puréed, if you prefer) to the finished sauce, together with a little freshly grated nutmeg. Check for seasoning, then heat gently to warm the onion. For a more elaborate version, finish with Calvados and crème fraîche.

PARSLEY

As in a couple of slices of frank, pink ham, draped in white sauce speckled green, with some carrot rounds and yellow boiled potatoes on the side. Thankfully, this dish is still served at St John. Fergus Henderson advises adding the milk when your roux smells of 'biscuit' to prevent it from overcooking. He makes a thick sauce – 100g each of flour and butter to 600ml milk – then suggests thinning it to your liking with the ham's cooking water. He specifies a big bunch of curly parsley, chopped. Served with white fish, the same sauce will benefit from an additional half a handful of chopped chives or dill.

SHERRY & CREAM

We were in New York. 'Let's go to the 21 Club,' I said. 'Nah,' said my friend. 'It's so touristy.' I pointed out that I was a tourist. My friend wanted to take me to some new place in Brooklyn. Bolivian dim sum served by unicyclists with plaid shirts and waxed moustaches. 'I can get that in London,' I said. To me, the 21 Club was foreign: old-fashioned America at its most eccentric. Wrought-iron gates guarded by life-size ornamental jockeys. Inside it was like a toy shop that went out in a hurricane and got blown into a speakeasy. And it was in _All About Eve_. My friend relented and joined me for lunch. I had the famous chicken hash. Back home, I found the recipe in my father-in-law's copy of Molly O'Neill's _New York Cookbook_. The method for the white sauce is unusual in that it involves a long cook in the oven, as opposed to on the hob. It's made with 2 tbsp each of butter and flour and 500ml milk, then simmered for a couple of minutes. Add ¼ tsp white pepper and a dash each of Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce. Cover and cook in a 150°C oven for 1½ hours. When the time is up, strain the sauce, then return it to the pan with 250g diced poached chicken breast, 4 tbsp sherry and 120ml single cream. Warm, gently, for 5 minutes. Temper 2 egg yolks (i.e. whisk in a little warm sauce), then add to the remaining sauce and cook on a low heat until the sauce thickens. Serve on wild rice and spinach, or with waffles or toast. Sprinkle with grated Gruyère and run under a hot grill until golden and bubbling, if you like.

VANILLA

Custard powder is a mixture of cornflour, vanilla flavouring and yellow colouring. It makes for a slightly less silky custard than the type thickened only by egg yolks. Egg-avoiders might find that a vanilla-flavoured white sauce has the edge over a custard made with powder, not only because cooked plain flour lends a less blowsy texture than cornflour, but because you can let the roux darken more than is usual for a white sauce, introducing a hint of shortbread flavour. Infuse 500ml milk with 1 split vanilla pod, then stir in 4 tbsp sugar (or more to taste) when the heat is reduced to a simmer at step **4**.

**Soufflé: Cheese Soufflé**

The basis of savoury soufflés is a thick, flavoured white sauce, enriched with egg yolks before the whites are folded in. In the oven, the mixture creeps up the side of the dish, and eventually beyond it. The theory is that simple. The rest is practice.

_For a 20cm soufflé, or 6 × 150ml individual soufflés_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

For the dish(es): 15g butter, melted, and 4 tbsp finely grated Parmesan or fine breadcrumbs **B**

500ml milk

50g butter

50g plain flour

4 egg yolks **C**

150g grated cheese, plus a little extra to sprinkle over the top **D**

Salt and white pepper

5 egg whites, at room temperature **C E**

Pinch of cream of tartar or ½ tsp lemon juice

**1** Thoroughly brush the dish(es) with melted butter. Sprinkle over the Parmesan or breadcrumbs, then tilt in all directions until entirely covered. Tip out any remaining cheese or crumbs.

There's no need to tie a paper collar around your dish(es), unless you plan to add a good deal more egg white than here.

**2** Warm the milk in a saucepan.

You can infuse the milk, as you would for béchamel, for an extra flavour dimension.

**3** In another, heavy-based saucepan, melt the butter over a medium heat, then whisk in the flour. Cook, stirring constantly, over a low–medium heat for 2 minutes, without allowing the roux to darken beyond a pale sand colour.

**4** Off the heat, gradually add the warm milk, whisking or stirring vigorously to see off any lumps. Turn up the heat to medium–high and bring to the boil, stirring all the time.

**5** Reduce the heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat, and allow to cool a little before stirring in the egg yolks.

Once the yolks have been added, the soufflé base can be cooled, covered and refrigerated for up to 2 days. When you're ready to use the base, you'll need to reheat it gently, so it's hot enough to melt the cheese.

**6** Add the grated cheese, letting it melt for a few minutes before mixing it in. Season, noting that the air in the soufflé will tamp the flavour somewhat. Transfer to a large mixing bowl.

**7** In a clean glass or metal bowl, whisk the egg whites until frothy, then add the cream of tartar and keep whisking to soft peaks.

Peaks are defined as soft when you lift out the whisk and the peaks begin to droop, but stop short of folding over completely.

**8** Fold a third of the egg whites into your soufflé base, then carefully fold in the rest, aiming to retain as much of the air you've whisked into them as possible.

Adding a small amount first loosens the mixture, making it easier to incorporate the rest.

**9** Pour into your buttered, dusted soufflé dish(es), smooth the surface, and then run a knife around the edge to discourage it from clinging. Sprinkle the extra grated cheese over the top.

**10** Place on a pre-heated baking tray, on a low shelf, in a 180°C oven, and bake for 20–35 minutes for a large soufflé, depending on whether you like your soufflé wet and wobbly, or cakey. Individual soufflés will need about 15 minutes.

**11** Serve immediately.

Nothing deflates the mood like a subsiding soufflé.

LEEWAY

**A** Use a 35cm × 25cm Swiss roll tin to make a soufflé roulade. Bake it for between 15–25 minutes, until firm yet springy.

**B** For sweet soufflés, use caster sugar or fine cake crumbs. Sweet soufflés – e.g. chocolate or coffee – can be made with white sauce as a base, although pastry cream or ganache are more conventional.

**C** Chilled eggs can be brought to room temperature by leaving them (unbroken, naturally) in warm tap water for a few minutes.

**D** Gruyère is the classic soufflé cheese, but Comté and aged Gouda, or a mix of any one of these with Parmesan, are worthy substitutes. Even strong varieties of Cheddar are likely to be disappointing.

**E** The extra egg white will give your soufflés a boost. Most soufflé recipes call for one more white than yolk.

Soufflé → Flavours & Variations

CAULIFLOWER, CHEESE & CUMIN

Craig Claiborne writes that all main-course soufflés are essentially made the same way, and so can be varied 'at will' once the basic principle is learned. Soufflé recipes are as rare in modern cookbooks as tips on how to spread an avocado on toast are rife, and what instances there are tend to be classics. So there's plenty of scope for some experimentation. I find the Middle Eastern combination of cauliflower and cumin strangely satisfying in soufflé form, at once airy and dense, like walking through an edible cloud in a souk. Steam half a large cauliflower's worth of florets until soft, then blitz to a rough purée. Make up the starting-point soufflé base, using half the quantities of butter, flour and milk and adding 2 tsp ground cumin at the outset of step **5**, then stirring in only 2 egg yolks at the end of this step. After the 150g cheese has melted at step **6**, stir in about 250ml of the cauliflower purée and proceed from step **7**, using only 3 egg whites. The replacement of some of the white sauce with purée means that the soufflé will need a longer cooking time: about 30–45 minutes for a large soufflé, or 20–22 minutes for individual ones.

CHOCOLATE

There are many different starting points for a sweet soufflé. In the case of chocolate, you might fold your whisked egg whites into a ganache, a chocolate pastry cream, a mixture of melted chocolate and egg yolks (in which case you will essentially be baking a chocolate mousse), or even a puréed, chocolate-flavoured rice pudding. Hubert Keller makes a white-sauce-based chocolate soufflé flavoured with vanilla and rum. Naturally you'll want to try all five approaches to see which you like best. Without wishing to be tendentious, I should add that the flour in a roux makes for a very light, cake-like soufflé – quite wonderful. Follow our starting point, adding 100g grated dark chocolate, 50g sugar, 1 tbsp rum and 1 tsp vanilla extract at step **6**, in place of the cheese, stirring after a few minutes to make sure the sugar dissolves completely and the chocolate is evenly distributed.

EGG & DILL

Egg soufflé – an edible tautology? While researching roux variations, I came across a recipe for egg croquettes in _The Constance Spry Cookery Book_. In comparison to the salty, punchily flavoured ingredients of your standard croquette, boiled egg seemed rather demure. But the idea stuck around, and I found myself curious about how egg-flecked soufflé might work. Early one morning, I cooked the first few and sat down, napkin tucked into pyjamas, facing a brimming ramekin and some buttered toast soldiers of Special Forces sturdiness. I loved the little pieces of boiled egg, held in frothy suspension and gently seasoned with dill. I switched off the _Today_ programme and sat watching the birds hopping around the garden while I twiddled my toes in my fluffy slippers. This must be mindfulness, I thought, as I reached for my second helping. The next batch came out of the oven just as my husband had roused himself, his face crumpled like the first draft of this page. I silently passed him his soufflé and waited for the praise. 'Some of the egg has gone lumpy,' he grouched. Remember that the soufflé base can be made, and the ramekins prepared, in advance, then you just need to spend a few minutes whisking the egg whites and folding them into the mixture while the oven heats. Follow the starting point, stirring in 3–4 fairly well-chopped boiled eggs, 1 tbsp chopped fresh dill and ½ tsp white pepper at step **6**, instead of the cheese.

GINGER

Ginger soufflé was a favourite of James Beard. In a letter to Helen Evans Brown, he praised her version 'with gobs of preserved ginger in it'. I had a go, resisting the temptation to add ground ginger, gingerbread spices or cardamom. The sweetened white sauce stayed elegantly plain. Brown's soufflé calls for more egg than our starting point, but the method is the same. Make a roux with 45g butter and 30g flour and cook it for a minute or so. Stir in 180ml warm milk, continuing to stir until the mixture is thick and smooth. Lightly beat 5 egg yolks with a little of the warm white sauce, then add it to the rest. Stir in 100g sugar and 8 tbsp finely chopped preserved ginger. Whisk 6 egg whites to soft peaks, then fold a third into the sauce to loosen it, followed by the rest. Pour into a buttered and caster-sugar-dusted 1.25-litre soufflé dish. Bake at 190°C for 25–30 minutes until risen and lightly browned. Serve with sweetened whipped cream.

GRAND MARNIER

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recalls taking a date to Lapérouse, the legendary restaurant overlooking the Île St Louis in Paris, and spotting a bargain bottle of Château Petrus on the _carte des vins_. It was only when the free glass of Champagne arrived that he wondered if the management had extra reason to be glad of his custom. The bottle cost £650, not £65: he'd got the exchange rate wrong. Thankfully, the food was sublime, the soufflé Lapérouse world-beating... 'crusty on the outside, light and moussey under the crust, and completely gooey and saucy in the middle.' Butter the ramekins and dust with caster sugar. Make as per our starting point, at step **6** stirring in 2 tbsp marmalade, 2 tbsp Grand Marnier and ¼ tsp vanilla extract instead of the cheese.

RICE PUDDING

An alternative to roux, ganache or pastry cream as a base for a sweet soufflé is blended rice pudding. Philip Howard uses it at his restaurant The Square, and in the _Sweet_ volume of his two-volume cookbook, gives a recipe for individual Peach Melba soufflés (he blends rice pudding and peach purée before whisking in the egg whites). The dishes are lined with dried almond-cake crumbs, and the soufflés served with a sharp raspberry sauce and vanilla and almond ice cream. Howard believes that no sweet soufflé is complete without a scoop of ice cream dropped into it: 'The sensation of eating a hot, full-bodied soufflé with a cold melting ice cream is one of the greatest dessert pleasures.' For a domestic, vanilla-flavoured version, make a rice pudding with 100g short-grain rice, 500ml whole milk (or a mix of milk and cream), 50g sugar, 1 split vanilla pod and a pinch of salt. Purée it, weigh out 250g to use as the soufflé base and fold in 5 egg whites whisked to soft peaks with 75g sugar. Bake in 4 ramekins on a preheated baking tray for no more than 8–9 minutes at 180°C, carefully rotating the tray halfway through the cooking time. If you prefer your soufflé with the rice grains left intact, seek out Hungarian _rizskoch_.

SPINACH & RICOTTA

When our parents came to visit us in London in the mid-1980s, my sister and I, considering ourselves girls about town, took them to Langan's Brasserie in Mayfair, which was a place celebrities went and therefore somewhere my mother might have read about in the papers. 'Don't expect to see anyone famous,' I said, with a teenage scowl. 'London really isn't like that.' We were shown to a table between Rod Stewart and half the England football team. My parents sniggered behind their menus. Gary Lineker folded an asparagus stalk into his mouth while I studiedly didn't watch. This was not only to broadcast my metropolitan indifference but also because I was genuinely more interested in my starter, a Langan's classic: spinach and ricotta soufflé with an anchovy sauce. There was, and is, no Langan's cookbook – imagine that now, when you can sell fish fingers out of a knackered old Citroën H van and score a TV-book deal – but here is my own interpretation, adapting the starting point. Leave out the 150g grated cheese. Wilt 500g washed spinach in a large wok for 2–3 minutes with nothing but the droplets of water clinging to its leaves; squeeze, finely chop and set aside. Prepare 6 ramekins as per step **1**, then make up a white sauce following steps **2** to **4**, using 400ml milk and 40g each of butter and flour. Let the sauce simmer over a low heat for 5 minutes, then remove from the heat and allow it to cool a little before stirring in just 3 egg yolks. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl and thoroughly stir in the spinach, along with 100g ricotta and 4 tbsp finely grated Parmesan. Season with salt, pepper and about a quarter of a nutmeg, freshly grated. Whisk 4 egg whites to soft peaks, then fold a quarter of them into the spinach mixture with a metal spoon, followed by the rest. Divide between the prepared ramekins, sprinkling over some more grated Parmesan if you like. Bake the soufflés on a pre-heated baking tray at 180°C for 20–25 minutes until they are risen and light brown. While you're waiting for the soufflés to rise, make the anchovy sauce: warm 200ml crème fraîche in a small pan, or in a jug in the microwave, with 1½ tsp anchovy paste, a dash of Worcestershire sauce and a few drops of Tabasco. Make a small incision in each just-cooked soufflé, pour over a little of the anchovy sauce and serve the rest in a jug.

**Croquettes: Chicken Croquettes**

Roux-based croquettes are further testament to the adaptability of white sauce – it's a mixture that takes particularly kindly to being deep-fried. Whereas a pouring white sauce calls for about 25g flour per 500ml milk, and a soufflé base 50g, this variation demands 75–80g, making it closer to a batter mixture.

_For 15 cylindrical croquettes about 6cm in length_

INGREDIENTS

500ml milk **A**

75g butter

75–80g plain flour **B**

50–100g finely diced, cooked chicken **C**

Salt and white pepper

1 egg, beaten

150g dried breadcrumbs

Vegetable oil for deep-frying

**1** Warm the milk in a saucepan.

You can infuse the milk, as you would for béchamel, for an extra flavour dimension.

**2** In another, heavy-based saucepan, melt the butter over a medium heat, sprinkle over the flour and whisk or stir in vigorously. Cook, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes, without allowing the roux to darken beyond a pale sand colour. **D**

**3** Off the heat, gradually add the warm milk, whisking or stirring vigorously to see off any lumps. Turn up the heat to medium–high and bring to the boil, stirring all the time.

**4** Simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat, allow to cool a little, then stir in the chicken and check for seasoning. **E**

**5** Spread the croquette mixture out on a baking tray, to a depth of about 2cm. Leave to cool then chill for at least 2 hours.

**6** Have three shallow bowls ready: one of flour, another of beaten egg and a third of breadcrumbs. Remove the chilled mixture from the fridge not long before you're due to cook the croquettes and fashion into the classic cylinders or ball shapes.

**7** Flour each croquette all over, then dip in the beaten egg, then the breadcrumbs, aiming for a comprehensive coating.

**8** Deep-fry in oil heated to 180°C, a few at a time, for a couple of minutes each side or until crisp and golden. Keep the cooked croquettes warm in a 120°C oven. **F**

If you are new to deep-frying, see here.

LEEWAY

**A** As with most béchamel-like sauces, a combination of milk and stock can be used.

**B** It's typical to use marginally more flour than fat.

**C** When it comes to coating and frying the croquettes, it helps to keep any added pieces quite small, so the finished croquettes are smooth and less inclined to leak.

**D** Make the roux around some onion, or other chopped vegetables (finely diced red pepper makes an excellent flavouring), that you plan to keep in the finished croquettes. Make sure you dice the vegetables finely enough, and give them time to soften sufficiently in the butter before adding the flour.

**E** Constance Spry recommends starting with a more dilute white sauce and reducing it, on the basis that a longer, gentler reduction will result in a more concentrated flavour. (See serrano ham, for a recipe that works along similar lines.)

**F** Croquettes can be baked instead of being deep-fried, but they will be given to oozing.

Croquettes → Flavours & Variations

ASPARAGUS

I like to use the woody ends of asparagus to infuse the milk for croquette-making, before straining them off and using the milk to cook the middle parts of the asparagus stems, subsequently straining and puréeing those too. The resulting asparagus-infused milk is then used to make a thick croquette base, to which the puréed asparagus is added (in place of the chicken). The croquettes are fashioned into rough rounds about the size of new potatoes, then coated and deep-fried. Serve with the tender, al dente asparagus tips – no need for any sauce, if the insides of your croquettes are as creamy as they should be. Use about 18 asparagus spears for the starting-point quantity.

BEEF

On a business trip to Tokyo my colleague suggested I try beef karaoke. What could this be? A strip of tofu doing a tuneless imitation of prime rib? A medley of protein-crazed Shania Twain covers? _Korroke_ , my colleague repeated. A corruption of 'croquette'. These are like the sort of mini cottage pies you might be served if there were any such thing as a British fast-food chain. Delicious, and salvation to the bleary-eyed salaryman, stumbling to his bullet train after a night on the _shochu_. Nonetheless, the mashed-potato base of Japanese croquettes lacks the inimitable creaminess furnished by a thick white sauce. In the Netherlands, _bitterballen_ are spherical _kroketten_ typically served with evening drinks. Beef _bitterballen_ are often based on beef stock, rather than milk, and are a revelation when made with espagnole. Follow the starting point for croquettes, using 50g butter to 75g flour, and 500ml good-quality beef stock. If you're not using a naturally gelatinous, home-made beef stock, stir 2 soaked and squeezed-out leaves of gelatine into the cooked croquette mixture once it has cooled a little, at step **4**, before you stir in the chopped, cooked beef (instead of the chicken).

MUSHROOM & CIDER

Asturias is a fertile, mountainous region of north-western Spain, a place of sea mists and damp valleys, well suited to mushrooms and cider production. According to local myth, mischievous _duendes de seta_ , or mushroom sprites, steal into cider mills at night and drink themselves silly. It's why the _paraguas de pequeñito_ ('little fellow's umbrella'), the species of mushroom under which the _duendes_ are said to sit, has such a large, drooping cap: to help hungover goblins keep the sun out of their eyes. None of this is true, but you may wish it were after tasting one of these croquettes: the combination of piquant cider and musty mushroom is almost mythically delicious. Gently cook 100g rinsed, trimmed and diced mushrooms in some butter until soft, then follow our starting point, replacing the chicken with the mushrooms, and 100ml of the milk with a none-too-dry cider.

OLIVE

Classic croquette ingredients are salty. So why shouldn't the olive have a croquette to call its own? By my reckoning black, or a mixture of black and green, work best. Nice to make the roux in our starting point with 80ml olive oil instead of the butter. Chop 100g stoned olives, and consider infusing the milk with 1 lightly crushed garlic clove, warming it gently and leaving for a few minutes before tasting for strength; discard the clove once the desired depth of flavour is achieved. Garlic milkshake is an acquired taste, but remind yourself that you're doing this for the sake of the croquettes.

ORANGE & CINNAMON

Sweet croquettes: no reason why not. I made a batch with milk infused with orange zest and cinnamon. For 500ml milk, use the grated zest of 2 navel oranges, 10cm cinnamon stick and ¼ tsp ground cinnamon. Use all ground cinnamon (adding an extra ¼ tsp) if you're in a hurry, but the stick will give a nicer flavour. You'll need to strain out the aromatics at the end of step **1**. You could also add sugar to the white sauce, although better in my view to serve the croquettes hot and sugar-sprinkled. Proceed from step 5 ****of the method, cutting the mixture into triangles and adding a few pinches of crushed fennel seeds to the breadcrumbs. Eat them straight from the deep-fryer and imagine you're at a Saint's Day _feria_.

SAFFRON **,** PEA & RED PEPPER

A painting 'is an experience', not a representation of it, thought Mark Rothko. He was rarely so reductive as to interpret his work, but of _Green and Tangerine on Red_ (1956), he related the red to 'the normal, happier side of living', and the green rectangle above it to 'the black clouds or worries that always hang over us'. This croquette is called _Green and Red on Saffron_ and symbolises the pleasures of paella without the worry of washing up a large cast-iron pan with rice stuck to the bottom. While the 500ml milk is warming, infuse it with two pinches of powdered saffron. Cook the peas and finely diced red pepper – a handful of each will be about right – in 1 tbsp olive oil for a few minutes, then add them at step **4**, in place of the chicken.

SALT COD

On a hot day in July I had an unseasonally comfort-seeking yen for fish pie. On the way to the fishmongers I ran through the task ahead of me. Whisking the roux, stirring the béchamel, tweezering bones from the fish, peeling, boiling and mashing potatoes. By the time I reached the fishmongers the yen had vanished. Maybe just a quick one at the tapas bar next door. A _copita_ of stern fino was set before me. I ordered a plate of salt-cod _croquetas_ ; they arrived still spitting from the deep-fryer. I took my first bite, then ordered a second plate, and a third to be on the safe side. Then another glass of fino, just to be on the comprehensively insured side of safe. _Croquetas de bacalao_ or _jamón_ are standard fare in tapas bars, but Roux at the Landau in London serve something a notch or three swankier, coated in a handsome black crumb made with squid ink, and served with a fennel purée. You'll need to soak salt cod for 24 hours, with several changes of water, then pick it over, removing any bones, before shredding it: 150g (prior to soaking) is a good amount for a base made with our starting-point quantities. Soften 1 finely chopped small onion in 2 tbsp olive oil. Add the shredded salt cod and cook for a few minutes, then set aside. Make up a batch of croquette base, adding the salt-cod mix at step **4**, in place of the chicken.

SERRANO HAM

Nacho Manzano is famous for his serrano-ham croquettes. He puts their reputation partly down to the long cooking time of his white sauce: 30–45 minutes, rather than the 5 minutes stipulated in our starting point. Manzano also starts with only 50g each of butter and flour per 500ml milk, cooking 30g diced serrano in the butter before adding the flour. Season once the croquette base has cooked for a while, so that you can judge how much salt the ham has already contributed. Chill the mixture for 24 hours, then pick up the method from step **6**, using sunflower oil as the deep-frying medium.

SHRIMP

The Belgian speciality of _garnaalkroketten_ contain the _crangon crangon_ or _crevette grise_ shrimp, which is tiny and tasty. In Ostend, some of the catch is still harvested the old way, by _crevettiers_ on horseback. The _crevettier_ sits on his hardy cob, up to its girth in the sea, wearing yellow oilskins and scooping up shrimp in his net, dreaming of landing a movie contract or at least a cigarette advertising campaign in south-east Asia. (Or maybe just of buying a boat.) _Garnaalkroketten_ are consumed by the plateful with plenty of good Belgian beer. There is, perhaps, a kind of correlation at work here: countries that love a good beer seem also to love a good croquette. Some recipes call for a 50/50 mix of milk and shellfish bisque, resulting in a harmoniously persimmon-coloured medium for the shrimp, which turn brown when cooked. These same shrimp are known as brown shrimp in the UK, and are widely available in supermarkets. Many cooks enrich the croquette base with egg yolk, and sometimes grated cheese.

SWEETBREAD

You might think it extravagant to use the king of all offal in a croquette, but sweetbreads needn't be expensive, especially if you're prepared to use lamb's. One thing that makes sweetbreads more popular in professional than domestic kitchens is their time-consuming, fiddly preparation. Ideally, they should be soaked and blanched before the deft removal of their gristly, sinewy and fatty bits, leaving the membrane intact. If you do cut the membrane, and your cutting board is strewn with debris too untidy to serve to anyone but the dog, you can always make croquettes. André Simon gives a recipe including fresh peeled mushrooms, ham, and 'if possible, a truffle cut into small dice' – all added, along with cut, blanched sweetbreads, to 250ml very thick white sauce enriched with 2–3 egg yolks.
Stock, Soup & Stew

STOCK

Turning water into stock may not quite warrant miracle status, but it almost does, and it's considerably easier to achieve for the unanointed. Like bread-making, stock-making is a habit worth acquiring and requires very little hands-on time from the cook. A good chicken stock can be ready in the time it takes to watch a movie. Many cookbooks claim that stock cubes will do in most circumstances. Don't believe a word of it. It's merely what the consensus thinks you want to hear: you're busy (so buy stuff that will save you time).

Powdered or cubed bouillon can give your cooking the same thin, repetitive backbeat that the Linn 9000 sequencer gave to Stock, Aitken and Waterman records. If you're making a dish where stock is a prominent feature, like French onion soup, it's hard to avoid the effort proper stock demands. Treat your guests to white truffles, exotic flavour combinations or a rare citrus fruit with an unpronounceable name, but good stock trumps the lot and sticks as much in the mind as it does on the lips. In the early stages of planning this book I drew up a list of the best things I have ever eaten, and it was remarkable how many of the dishes depended on stock for their deliciousness.

Stock-makers are like survivalists or the self-employed. They hoard bones and peelings with the ardour of a post-apocalyptic shack-dweller happening on a scrap of corrugated iron, or a freelancer with a Sainsbury's bag full of stationery receipts. The mildly committed might intervene at the sight of a chicken carcass about to be tipped into the bin; a true fanatic will watch like a spaniel while you carve the joint. I veer between the two extremes. At a friend's house the other day, I was about to ask, quite casually, if I could have the pile of chicken bones left over from lunch, when another guest claimed them for her pet parrots. I folded my zip-lock bag back into my handbag with good grace. But my Christmas-card list is now two addresses shorter.

The lessons you learn making stock and broth apply to most of the dishes on this continuum. Little technical skill is required to make a soup or stew. This sort of cooking depends more on your feel for ingredients, cooking times and temperatures, taste and flavour. The challenge is to broker the best deal between solids and liquids. Optimal texture and flavour is the dividend. The opportunity to adjust and improve flavour during the cooking period is particularly satisfying. Baking rarely affords such luxury – once your buns are in the oven, your bets have been placed.

I use chicken stock as the exemplar for our starting point. Pampered parrots notwithstanding, chicken stock is doubtless so familiar due to the ready availability of carcasses. Once you really get hooked on home-made stock, however, you may find your frozen hoard of Sunday-roast debris insufficient. With any luck your local butcher, if you have one, will supply raw bones and scraps for free or next to nothing, especially if you buy the occasional joint or string of sausages. Chicken carcasses and ham bones constitute the unofficial loyalty scheme of the independent butcher. (Same thing goes for hake heads and turbot frames from the fishmonger.) There are, however, other options if your shopping is restricted to the supermarket, or you're short of time.

The first option is to use a combination of bones and meat. Chicken thighs lend excellent flavour and viscosity, thanks to their relative proportions of skin, bone and flesh, and can furnish a litre of very decent stock in about 40 minutes. In a 2-litre saucepan, brown 1kg chicken thighs quickly in a little bland oil, stirring from time to time. Browning contributes depth of flavour to all stocks, soups and stews, and will make what is often referred to as a 'brown stock'. (A 'white stock' is made with bones and meat in the raw.) For a sweeter, more caramelised stock, make a mirepoix of diced onion, carrot and celery once the chicken is underway and add that too. Pour in 1.5 litres _boiling_ water (which will speed things up, and won't affect the flavour, although it will make the liquid a bit cloudy). Reduce the heat and simmer very softly for at least 30 minutes before straining. One advantage of this quick method is that the meat will not have been boiled into inedibility, so you're only an onion and some Arborio away from a very good chicken risotto. Note that the flavour of this stock is mild, as it should be for a risotto. It will also make a superior vegetable soup, lending both flavour and body, but for chicken noodle soup you'll probably want to reduce the stock to concentrate its flavour. By how much depends a bit on how tasty the original chicken was, and so frequent tasting is essential. Remember to add a few grains of salt to each tasting to bring out the flavour.

To cooks with less than 40 minutes to spare, I would recommend layering flavour into double-diluted shop-bought stock. This can be done in 10–15 minutes. Extra water is added for the simple reason that at its recommended dilution, most convenience stock has a whiff of tinned meat, if not cat food, which is disguisable in a busy soup or stew, but brutally exposed in a dish that features stock more prominently. The idea is to give your additive-laden stock a top note of actual food, like cladding your breeze-block bungalow in handsome split-oak clapboards. I once simmered a sliced leek, a handful of frozen peas, some asparagus trimmings and a pinch of fennel seeds in bought vegetable stock for just 10 minutes. Strained, it made one of my best-ever asparagus risottos. Likewise, for French onion soup, simmer a small quantity of minced beef, some fresh thyme and a dash of dry sherry in the stock for 10 minutes then strain. Organised cooks might freeze small quantities of mince to add true meat flavour to dilute stock (a rare reason to buy strangely creepy minced poultry). Note, however, that without bones your stock will lack the viscosity that separates truly epic stock from the plain good stuff – although you can cheat here too, with the cautious application of gelatine, as long as you're not planning to boil the liquid afterwards.

BROTH

The differences between stock, broth and soup are as murky as a consommé shouldn't be. Alan Davidson maintains that 'broth occupies an intermediate position between stock and soup', and this is the position I have taken in the continuum. In the case of broth, the solid ingredients are generally consumed with the liquid, whereas they are discarded for stock. The simplicity of this distinction is clouded by cooking waters, which can be categorised neither as broths nor stocks. This is not to say they aren't worthy of consideration. Cabbage water, for instance, is a mainstay of good gravy, and potato water can lend the crust of home-made bread a deeply satisfying crunch. If you've used water to boil something, pause before pouring it down the sink. Fuchsia Dunlop notes that in China the waters used to cook both fermented black beans and sprouted soy beans are used as stock. It's traditional in the Périgord to prepare a soup called _bougras_ from cabbage and the water used to cook blood pudding. Cooking waters may not merit valuable freezer space, but they are too rich and easy a source of flavour to discard without thought.

When I think of broth, I envisage a translucent, unthickened and intensely flavoured liquid served in one of three weights: at its lightest, the thin, clear soup known as consommé; more substantially, and with tidbits floating in it, in the case of Thai _tom yum_ or Italian _pasta in brodo_ ; and at its heartiest with assorted chunks of meat or fish, as in French _pot au feu_ and bouillabaisse _._ I use _pot au feu_ as the starting point for broth – which, in its simplicity of preparation, differs negligibly from stock. Apart from deciding whether or not to brown the meat and vegetables, and choosing your aromatics, all you need do is work out the optimum simmering time for each of your ingredients, and add them to the pot in the right order.

With most meat broths, the key is not so much how quickly you can cook them, as identifying the sweet spot whereby a pleasingly soft texture is achieved without cooking them for so long that the flavour leaches out. (There is generally some leeway, especially when you're cooking meat on the bone, or tough cuts from the hard-working parts of the animal like legs and shoulder.) Removing the fat from the broth is probably the biggest hassle with dishes such as these, and even that is a cinch if you cook it a day in advance, chilling the broth overnight so that the fat solidifies on top. I like Elizabeth David's suggestion to time the cooking so that the meats are ready to serve for lunch or dinner with a little broth, and cornichons and mustard alongside. The remainder of the broth can then be stored in the fridge for the following day, when it will invariably taste better, and is more easily de-fatted.

PURÉED SOUP

The next starting point on the continuum is puréed soup. Again, the method is straightforward. Start as if making a broth, but once the solids are cooked through, purée them with the liquid. As with broth, the key technical consideration is how long it will take your ingredients to cook. In most cases, they should be cooked for long enough to make them purée-able, but no longer, so as not to take the edge off their freshness. Note that some types of soup are to be found under other starting points – for example, lentil soup under dal, nut soups under tarator and avgolemono, the Greek chicken stock and lemon soup, under crème anglaise. However, 'puréed soup' covers many of the classics, like cream of tomato, vichyssoise, watercress, mushroom and curried root vegetable.

The liquid nature of soup is what makes it so adaptable: you can almost always add or subtract (by reduction), making it the ideal training ground for the culinary ad-libber. It's where I started, although in the early days I was so lashed to the recipe book I probably would have looked up how to butter the bread I was serving on the side. The odds and ends in your salad crisper and veg rack are a good (which is to say low-stakes) source of improvisatory material. Other than remembering that a single portion of soup amounts to about 250–300ml, there are two guidelines worth following. Firstly, err on the side of too little liquid. It's usually quicker and easier to dilute an intense soup than it is to embolden, or thicken, a watery one. Simply submerge your ingredients in your chosen cooking liquid, or follow this rule of thumb: 1 onion and 500g vegetables will need 1.2 litres liquid. Secondly, it's worth having some notion of the result you're aiming for. A bubbling pot of soup on the hob is a tempting call to incessant fiddling. Even if you're making something that calls for a wide range of ingredients, like minestrone, tinkerers might want to rein themselves in. An unadorned purée of one or two ingredients can be the essence of good eating – the tomato and carrot soup being a case in point.

CHOWDER

The definition of chowder is not just murky; it's as slippery as the eel you might find lurking in its depths. In contemporary cooking, chowder is generally considered a soup, in line with its position on the continuum between soup and stew, but historically it was hearty enough for salty types with Queequegian appetites to eat it as the main meal of the day. The word itself is thought to be derived from the French _chaudière_ , or cauldron. The story goes that fishermen would gather around the communal cookhouse _chaudière_ , each contributing some fish in exchange for a share of the meal. The custom took hold, and spread along the Atlantic seaboard all the way down to New England.

The earliest documented chowders were very simple and made with the catch of the day. Salt pork would be laid on the bottom of the _chaudière_ , followed by layers of potato, onion, butter and fish fillets. A mixture of stock made from the fish heads and bones, milk and seasoning would be poured over, before the dish was cooked for half an hour. Ship's biscuits were added when the chowder was nearly done, dissolving into and thickening the broth. You might point out that cooking fish fillets for 30 minutes isn't going to do their texture any favours, and you'd be right. The compensation is in the flavour. Modern recipes stipulate a shorter cooking time – often just a few minutes – so a highly flavourful fish stock is essential to achieving a similar depth of character. A terrific seafood stock can be ready in as little as 20 minutes, so while the total cooking time will still hover around the half-hour mark, the fish in your chowder will be sable-soft.

The starting-point quantities for chowder can easily be committed to memory: they're essentially the same as for pureéd soup, using diced potato as the vegetable, a mix of fish stock and milk as the 1.2 litres liquid, plus 500g fish and an optional 100g bacon. Some cooks would mash some of the potato to thicken the broth, but this can be achieved in other ways – by beginning with a roux (as in our starting point) or by finishing with double cream. Chowder simply must not be watery: fishermen see quite enough water all day.

Ship's biscuits may no longer be everyone's thickening agent of choice, but the small crackers commonly supplied with bought soups in the US are a welcome alternative. When I was first handed a packet, in a Minneapolis diner, I gave the waitress the kind of indulgent smile you might give a toddler presenting you with a single, disconnected section of toy train track. That's lovely. Would you like it back? But it didn't take long to discover that pushing a salty, soup-softened cracker into a paste in the roof of your mouth is an addictively pleasant experience.

STEW

The progression from soup to chowder describes a gentle ascent towards heartiness, continuing on to stew. I find that even seasoned improvisational soup-makers baulk at being inventive with a stew. Often the risk of spoiling expensive meat or fish is a justifiable cause for caution. As, of course, is the possibility of ending up with a main course that nobody wants to eat. In most cases, however, you can throw open your larder doors and be bold, especially if you keep the following questions in mind.

**1** What are the main features of the dish I'm making – meat, fish, poultry, vegetables?

**2** What liquid am I cooking them in – water, stock, wine, juice, tomatoes, milk, a mixture? And how much of it? A small amount for a braise, or plenty for a stew?

**3** What aromatics am I using – a mirepoix, a 'holy trinity' of onion, celery and green pepper, bouquet garni, spices, herbs, cocoa?

**4** Am I going to thicken it? If so, how – with a roux, mashed veg, beurre manié, cornflour, cream, ground nuts?

**5** How long will it need to cook?

**6** How am I going to cook it? In the oven, on the hob or in a slow cooker?

If you need any convincing re: unconventional flavour combinations, allow me to direct your attention to the duck with chocolate and Marsala, or Vietnamese duck and orange. Alternatively, if you've never tried poultry cooked with pomegranate and walnuts ( _fesenjan_ ), take a look here. Along with other Persian, Indian and Moorish nut-based stews, such as korma and _carne en salsa de almendras_ , _fesenjan_ can be found on the nuts continuum (which would, in theory, intersect with this continuum, as the methods have much in common).

BEAN STEW

Bean stew and dal are the next two starting points. Most recipes call for the pulses to be soaked before cooking. For the simplest bean stews, all the ingredients are then put in a pan and cooked together, as in the example recipe, the classic Asturian dish known as _fabada_. In some variations, like Boston baked beans, the pulses are soaked and cooked until tender _before_ they're combined with the meat and aromatics. This approach may derive from a precaution: making sure the beans are soft before mixing them with more expensive ingredients, or keeping them separate from salted meats, as some cooks believe salt prevents pulses from ever softening. Opinions on this, and whether beans should be given a long soak before cooking, differ considerably. I soak whenever possible. When it isn't, a quicker method is to boil the beans for about 10 minutes, leave them to soak in the hot cooking water for an hour, rinse, and then cook as if you'd soaked them overnight.

In some recipes, tinned (i.e. pre-cooked) beans are a perfectly workable option. You might narrowly get away with using tinned _fabes_ (or butter beans) in _fabada_ , because it contains a decidedly flavourful mixture of smoked and unsmoked pork, chorizo and morcilla, but the superiority of dried beans in this context lies in their slow plumping-up in the cooking liquid, the deliciousness of which is partly down to the flavour of the beans themselves. Some _fabada_ recipes call for a little saffron, but I prefer it without. The dish needs no other embellishment than the seasoning in the sausages; it's a happy marriage of meat and beans that no other ingredient should put asunder. I have read modern recipes which claim you can do without the morcilla. Ignore these with extreme prejudice. They are written by the sort of people who thought it was okay for The Doors to go on without Jim Morrison. Leave the morcilla on the side of your plate, if you must, but it has to go into the pot, where it lends the broth a darkness as solemn as 'Riders on the Storm'.

Researching bean stews left me clear about one thing: the world needs more bean stew recipes. Or at least a few that don't combine pork and beans. Ken Albala points out that bean dishes were historically excluded from cookbooks because they were considered coarse; if you had to eat them, you probably knew how to prepare them. Meanwhile, bar the odd cassoulet, I couldn't recall ever seeing a bean stew on a restaurant menu. Or any bean-seafood combinations. I had, as my research revealed, forgotten about Iberian variations on _fabes con almejas_ , dried white beans (of varying types) with clams. In _Larousse_ I found a recipe for flageolets cooked with salt cod in place of the more traditional salted meats. Jane Grigson's _Fish Cookery_ contains only one dried bean recipe, although it is a corker. In _haricots à l'anchoïade_ , the little white beans are cooked and mixed, still warm, with anchovy mayonnaise. A spoonful of these, in place of the usual sugary tomato sort, will bring out the best in your breakfast bangers and bacon.

As for meat- or fish-free bean recipes, the newfangled veg-centric cookbooks I looked at had little to say. This may be for want of appropriate salty ingredients to infuse the beans with flavour, as ham or seafood can. There's miso, of course, or seaweed, or olives, but in my experience few have yielded very satisfactory results. Of those I tried, the most effective was a combination of burnt aubergine, soy and paprika; the recipe this inspired ( **here** ) passes the crucial bean stew test – it needs nothing other than a bowl, a fork and a basket of crusty bread. Similarly, the Greek dish of butter beans with honey, tomato and dill is one of my favourites in the book, and can be made saltier with a scattering of feta cubes. Incidentally, while I was looking for vegetarian bean recipes, I kept coming across _ful medames_ , the Egyptian dish eaten by every social class at every mealtime. It's too simple to be called a stew, made as it is with a type of dried broad bean that's boiled and fully or partially mashed. Lemon wedges, crushed garlic, parsley, cumin, olive oil, fresh flatbread and (quite often) boiled eggs are then handed round to complement your hill of beans.

DAL

A similar principle applies to dal, monotonous without the pickles, chutneys, raita, rotis and fresh herbs commonly served with it. Poke me in the eye with a cinnamon stick but I never saw the point of dal until I made it myself. I'd eaten dal in every shade and consistency; dals as thick as the swamps of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta and as thin as Ceylon tea, dals sneering with tamarind and so laden with medicinal turmeric and dusty cumin that they tasted like a failing hospital. It wasn't until I settled on a tarka chana dal recipe, a hybrid of several I tried during a month in which I cooked nothing but Indian food, and made it over and over again, that I realised it had become a comfort food I craved like a dish from my childhood – a rare compliment from my gastric subconscious.

Naming principles in Indian food tend to be as plain as its flavours are complex: 'tarka chana dal' is dal made with chana and embellished by a tarka. Chana is a small, split, skinned chickpea, simmered to softness. Tarka adds pizazz: it's essentially a fry-up of aromatics, a pan of sizzling ghee infused with, say, cinnamon sticks, cloves, bay, mustard seeds, curry leaves, cardamom pods, sliced onion and chopped tomato. This is stirred into the dal at the end of its simmer, transforming it from contemplative recluse to the life of the party. The aroma is enough to reawaken anyone's appetite. Tarkas should be used more widely, and not just for dal. Yotam Ottolenghi applies something similar to a corn chowder, dry-frying ground cumin and coriander seeds before adding butter, smoked paprika, white pepper and salt.

UNSTIRRED RICE

From lentils to rice: broadly the same principle applies to the starting point for unstirred rice as it does to that for dal – the grain is hydrated with flavoured water or stock to create a comforting one-bowl dish. The technique is highly adaptable; it can be used to make kedgeree, jambalaya or an inauthentic but delicious sort of vegetable biryani. All three can be made with water rather than stock, as their ingredients are so strongly flavoured: kedgeree with its pungent smoked fish and curry spices; jambalaya with its slow-cooked 'holy trinity' of onion, celery and green pepper, plus skin-on, bone-in chicken, shellfish and spicy sausage; vegetable biryani with onions, garlic, vegetables and an aromatic curry paste. It's rather as if you were making a delicious broth and cooking rice at the same time. Use the absorption method, and a reliable liquid-to-rice ratio, and you'll end up with a complete meal in around half an hour.

RISOTTO

The usual means of cooking risotto is a high-maintenance variation on the absorption method. Instead of trapping the rice in an enclosed space and forcing it to take up all the stock or water that's poured into it, risotto rice is gradually fed liquid in small amounts, allowing the grains to hydrate slowly while the starch is simultaneously coaxed out of them by stirring, thus rendering the remaining liquid somewhat creamy. For 400g short- or medium-grain rice, our starting point for unstirred rice calls for 800ml stock. In risotto's case, assume this is the minimum you'll use – it can sometimes take up to 50 per cent more to cook the rice perfectly. Risotto has attracted its share of prescriptivists, who will tell you that no risotto is ready until a spoon will stand up in it, or that its surface should describe a gentle wave like Le Corbusier's Ronchamp chapel. Take it from me: the only reliable test is to put some in your mouth. A grain between the teeth will tell you if it's done, or better still, very nearly done, at which point it can be removed from the heat.

The risotto police may also insist on water as the liquid, on the basis that it allows you to appreciate the flavours of the other ingredients – including, of course, the rice. The idea is appealing. I would also like to be the sort of person who can appreciate the stitchwork on a piece of clothing. But I'm not. Even with strongly flavoured feature ingredients, risotto made with water is too subtle for me. The weaker 'white' stocks often stipulated by Italian cookery writers seem much more like it. The rice benefits from the leg-up in flavour, and there's a boost in body, too. Unreduced, the quick chicken-thigh stock outlined earlier is an option, although I prefer my risotto more boldly flavoured. My ideal is Mark Hix's heavenly butternut squash risotto: made with the squash peelings, and enhanced by typical aromatics, the stock only takes an hour to prepare. You won't get to watch a movie while it bubbles away, but you could get started on a box set.

**Stock: Brown Chicken Stock**

Home-made stocks are the elixirs that underpin really good soups, stews and sauces. I use chicken as the example for our starting point simply because it's easy to procure the raw materials. This is a classic method using standard ingredients, but some faster alternatives that yield very satisfying results are given **here**. No one new to stock need get too hung up on the technicalities. You really can just put all that remains of a roast chicken, broken up, in a big pot, cover it with water and simmer on a low, low heat for a couple of hours to create the basis of a fabulous risotto or noodle dish.

_For about 750ml flavoursome stock – how flavoursome will depend on the cooking time and level of reduction_

INGREDIENTS

1kg chicken carcasses/bones/joints **A B**

1 onion, quartered (but not peeled) **C**

1 celery stick, cut into a few pieces **C**

1 carrot, cut into a few pieces **C**

Tomato purée, wine or vermouth – optional

1–1.5 litres water, or enough to cover **D**

Salt

A few parsley stalks **C**

1 bay leaf **C**

1 tsp black peppercorns **C**

2 egg whites, to clarify – optional

**1** Brown the scraps/joints in a large saucepan or stockpot over a medium – high heat using a little bland oil. (For larger quantities than those given above, you'll need to work in batches, in which case you might prefer to do the browning in a 200°C oven. This will, however, carry a risk of burning, and anything remotely singed will need to be excluded from the pot.) The vegetables can also be browned, but if you'd rather avoid the resulting sweetness, add them raw at step **4**.

**2** Add the tomato purée, wine or vermouth, if using, and allow to cook for 1 minute. Pour the water into the pot and place over a medium – high heat.

Tomato purée, or a few tablespoons wine or vermouth, will enrich the stock. Starting with cold water helps keep the stock clear, as fewer insoluble proteins are drawn out of the bones. If clarity is less important than speed, use boiling water; it won't make any difference to the flavour.

**3** Just as the liquid approaches boiling point, turn down to a slow simmer. Skim away any scum as it rises to the surface.

If it's a clear stock you're after, a slow simmer means a barely perceptible shimmer. If clarity isn't a consideration, it can go a little bubblier.

**4** Season with a little salt, if desired, and add the parsley, bay and peppercorns when the scum desists. Add the veg too, if you didn't at the browning stage.

Received opinion recommends not salting until the very end of the cooking process. I'm in the minority who add a little salt early on (¼ tsp for these quantities), knowing that I won't reduce the finished stock so much that the extra salt will make it unpalatable. Some cooks prefer to add the herbs and vegetables considerably later – say an hour before the simmering time is up – as they begin to lose their fresh flavour if cooked for too long. Nonetheless, as in a stew, there's nothing wrong with slowly cooking them for a few hours.

**5** Cook, uncovered, for 2–3 hours, skimming as necessary.

Alternatively, slide the pot, partially covered, into a 100°C oven and leave it there for 3–4 hours. The low temperature will yield a fine-tasting, uncloudy stock.

**6** Strain the stock **E** (through muslin, if you have it), then pour back into the pan and simmer to reduce as required. Taste and add salt, depending on the stock's ultimate use. Once cool, your stock can be refrigerated for 1 week or frozen for 6 months.

Short of burning the pan dry, it's impossible to over-reduce: you can always re-dilute. You can under-reduce, however. If you're using the stock immediately, remove as much fat as you can by skimming or blotting the surface with kitchen paper. If time permits, cool and then chill the broth, so the fat solidifies on top and can be easily lifted off.

**7** If you want to clarify your stock, you have two choices. After you've strained and chilled it and removed the fat from the top, whisk the egg whites, then add them to the cool stock in a pan. Slowly bring it to a gentle simmer and cook for 30–40 minutes, by which time the egg white will have formed a raft that can be lifted off, along with all of the impurities it collected as it rose to the surface. The downside of this technique is that it can also remove some of the stock's flavour, so it's common to whisk the egg with some extra raw ingredients, say a little minced meat. The other method, as recommended by Heston Blumenthal, is to freeze the cooled stock in an ice-cube tray, then transfer the cubes to a muslin-lined sieve set over a bowl. Cover and leave in the fridge while the stock drips itself clear – this can take a day or two.

It's the gelatine in the stock that makes the Blumenthal method work, so it can't be used for vegetable stock (unless gelatine has been added).

LEEWAY

**A** Pale or 'white' chicken stock is made with raw bones. Some cooks think you get a cleaner flavour if you rinse the bones in cold water first. Continue from step **2**.

**B** Frozen and fresh bones/carcasses can be mixed if you give them all a good few hours of simmering. The same goes for frozen meat, as long as it has reached its required safe internal temperature before you finish. Clearly, large pieces of meat or anything on the bone will take longer.

**C** Chicken stock can be flavoured with a wide range of aromatics, or, conversely, left as it is if you'd rather keep it neutral (and thus adaptable). Options include turnip, parsnip, sweet potato, watercress, lettuce, red or yellow peppers, courgettes, kale, bok choy, beansprouts, celeriac, Swiss chard, green beans, mushrooms or mushroom peelings, sweetcorn cobs (stripped of kernels is fine), tomato, cucumber, bouquet-garni herbs, juniper berry, coriander leaf/stalk, coriander seeds, ginger, lemongrass, garlic (a whole bulb sliced in half horizontally), celery leaves, star anise, fennel seeds and allspice. Caution: avoid asparagus, beetroot, broccoli, cauliflower, endive, globe artichoke, green peppers, radicchio, spinach and sprouts. They're variously too bitter, sulphurous or earthy. Note that squash and potato peelings cause cloudiness.

**D** Most meat stock recipes call for 1kg bones/meat to about 1–1.5 litres water, or a little more than enough to cover the solids. It may need topping every now and then to keep all the pieces submerged. Naturally, the smaller the quantity of water, the quicker the stock will intensify – even more so when the solids are packed tightly into the pan.

**E** Once you've strained the bones and aromatics from your first stock, use them again, as Ferran Adrià recommends, to make a second stock, which can be used in place of water the next time you make stock. This way, you can tell people who brag about making their own stock that you make _your_ own stock with your own stock.

Stock → Flavours & Variations

BEEF

For a brown beef stock, follow the starting point, using beef bones instead of chicken, but simmer the stock with the pan partly covered, and for 4–5 hours, before straining and reducing as necessary. I must confess that I have never been pleased with any of the beef stocks I have made using just bones. Avoid disappointment by making broth instead; the flavour of bones _and_ meat is always a success.

DASHI

Dashi is a Japanese seaweed-based stock. It can be made with just two ingredients: kombu seaweed and water. Buying the ingredients has historically been the most challenging thing about dashi, but they are now easily available online. To make kombu dashi, immerse 15g dried kombu in 2 litres water and place over a medium heat. Turn down to a simmer just before the water reaches boiling point; keeping the heat low is crucial to achieving a delicate flavour. Cook for 20 minutes, strain and cool. To make _katsuo_ dashi, the fishy version, gently submerge 60g _katsuobushi_ (dried tuna shavings) in the finished kombu dashi. Place over a low heat and when the water seems on the point of trembling, take off the heat and leave for 5 minutes, then strain. Use straight away, or cool and keep in the fridge for up to 2 days; opinions differ on the advisability of freezing dashi. If you'd rather avoid the expense and hassle of seaweed and tuna shavings, instant dashi powder is available. Tim Anderson prefers it to from-scratch dashi, at least for home cooking, and says it has the added benefit of being great sprinkled on chips. Aside from its use in miso soup, noodle dishes and _chawanmushi_ ( **here** ), dashi has many non-Japanese applications: consider it for soups, chowders, stews, bean and rice dishes on this continuum.

FISH

Even if you have no immediate call for the head and bones your fishmonger has removed from the portion of white fish you have just bought, ask for them anyway. Ask nicely and they may even trim the gills (which impart a nasty flavour to stock) and chop the frame into small pieces if you doubt the heft of your own knife collection. Back home, you can bag and freeze them for another day, but why wait? This stock is made very quickly, and, restricting ourselves to this continuum alone, can be used for watercress or nettle soup, chowders, fish stews, risotto and paella-type dishes, Thai soups and curries. For other uses, see gumbo and _romesco de peix,_ as well as velouté and beurre blanc sauces. I've specified white fish, as oily fish are not usually recommended for stock. That said, salmon stock is good for salmon chowder or soup, so if you have the bones and debris, give it a try to see whether you like it. It's made the same way as white fish stock. For either, follow the starting point, but tend to the lower end of the solids-to-water ratio – 1kg per litre is ideal. Try to include at least one fish head: they lend body. And for extra flavour intensity, slowly sweat the fish bones in butter before adding the water. Grate or finely dice the veg, as they'll need to yield their flavour during the relatively short simmering time of 20–30 minutes – any longer and the fish bones can start to yield strange flavours. It's not typical to reduce fish stock, but some recipes suggest removing the fish solids after 20 minutes, then adding the veg – i.e. flavouring the stock and reducing it at the same time. Some cooks omit the carrot in favour of fennel, either in the form of diced bulb or a pinch of seeds. Escoffier's fish stock is notably less sweet, calling only for onion, parsley, lemon juice and white wine to be added to the fish and water. Zakary Pellacio, chef at The Fatty Crab in New York, makes a very aromatic fish stock with lemon zest, white peppercorns, coriander seeds, star anise, onion, fennel bulb, garlic and white wine. However austere or elaborate your version, once you've strained it, let it cool, then refrigerate and use within 4 days, or freeze for up to 3 months.

GAME BIRD

In Balzac's _Eugénie Grandet_ , Felix, penny-pinching father of the eponymous heroine, instructs the servant to make stock with wild ravens, pronouncing them 'the game that makes the best broth on earth'. Crane stock also has its fans. Hunters in the US refer to sandhill crane as 'the rib-eye of the sky'. But ravens are brainy, and cranes have a lifespan of a thousand years. Lucky, then, that pigeons yield a stock that's 'almost beefy in intensity', according to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Elizabeth David suggests adding a pigeon to a broth of lean beef and chicken, to boost the richness – a good use for a 'rather dull little bird'. There's usually no reason not to mix poultry in stocks, although waterfowl can have an unwelcome fishiness that will only become more pronounced in stock form. As for what vegetables you might include, parsnips are a particularly delicious addition to game stock.

LAMB

I suspect the reason otherwise-sensible Brits habitually bin the debris from cooked leg of lamb, lamb breast and chops is because lamb stock means Scotch Broth, which in turn means pearl barley, which could serve as a gristle substitute for vegans who like their food to recall what they're missing. Lamb should be stamped with the word 'harira', as a reminder of the soup traditionally served to break the fast during Ramadan in Morocco. Harira might contain rice or small pasta, chickpeas, tomatoes, spices and coriander leaf. Additions can include saffron, the North African spice mix ras-el-hanout, a fried egg, or a little sourdough starter, stirred in towards the end of the simmering, to give the soup a distinctive tang you might otherwise achieve with a squeeze of lemon juice. Rice or couscous pilafs present a similar opportunity for the experimental cook, and lamb stock makes a fitting background for the combination of aubergine, onion and dried apricots ( **here** ) or a luxurious lamb biryani. Watch out for an excess of fat in the stock, which will make it greasy and too farmyardy in flavour. Follow the starting point, but simmer the stock for 3–6 hours before straining and reducing. It's common to add tomatoes and/or thyme to lamb stock, along with the vegetables and bay.

MUSHROOM

An intense mushroom stock can be made by cooking nothing other than chopped button mushrooms over a low heat until they release their liquid – just remember to stop before it all evaporates. For a more typical, longer stock, cook a mirepoix of 1 onion, 1 carrot and 1 celery stick, all chopped, in 25g butter for 3 minutes, then add 1kg sliced button mushrooms. Once the mushrooms have begun to give up their moisture, add 2 litres water and a bouquet garni. Simmer for 20 minutes, leave to stand for 10, then strain. For a more complex and layered version, add 50g dried mushrooms, soaked in hot water for 15 minutes, once the stock is simmering. Leeks make a good addition to the mirepoix, or add a little wine in place of some of the water.

PEA POD

Double your green points by making a stock out of your empty pea pods before composting them. Pea pod stock, an essential component of _risi e bisi_ , is quintessentially Venetian: dazzling on the surface, murky and fathomless beneath. Some recipes call for the addition of fennel, but try it without first, to appreciate the freshness and savoury depth of pure pea. As for the newfangled addition of pancetta: _va' al diavolo_. Let the pea have its moment in the sun. Pea pod stock is also excellent for vegetarian pasta dishes. Marx Rumpolt, head cook to the Elector of Mainz and author of _Ein new Kochbuch_ (1581), suggests the use of pea stock in a sauce made with egg yolk, vinegar, butter and chopped fresh herbs – a kind of proto-béarnaise – to serve with poached eggs. For _risi e bisi_ , pod 1kg peas, set them aside, then wash the pods and pat them dry. In a saucepan, soften the pods in butter for a few minutes, then add 1 litre water and simmer for a further 30 minutes. Strain, and set the liquid aside. Soften an onion in butter without browning it. Add the freshly podded peas and cook for 1 minute before pouring in the stock and bringing to a simmer. After 10 minutes, add 250g risotto rice and cook gently, stirring regularly, until al dente. Add parsley to freshen and Parmesan to enrich, but only in modest amounts if you want the flavour of rice and pea to be detectable (you do). If you have a spare 15 minutes, it can be worth blending and straining the pod stock for a _risi e bisi_ that's murky but a whole lot deeper.

PORK

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe for pork stock resembles our starting point, except that he recommends roasting the pork bones at 200°C for 10–15 minutes – a shorter time than chicken or beef bones – then simmering the stock for 3–5 hours. The result will be a fitting substitute for chicken stock in most recipes, but will come into its own in gumbo, bean stews, pea or lentil soups, paella-style rice dishes, pork with clams, and the Polish braised cabbage dish _kapusta_. Pork stock is also great for cooking greens, for binding the masa mix in Mexican tamales, or as a medium for ramen noodles. If you're after a jelly to fill the cavity of pork pies, or just a sticky stock, add a trotter to up the gelatine content. Pork stock is as intrinsic to Chinese cuisine as veal stock is to classic French, and it's often mixed with chicken or shellfish for a fuller flavour. A good pork and chicken stock can be made with pork ribs and chicken carcasses or joints. When the scum has desisted, add a little sliced ginger, a dash of Shaoxing wine and the chopped white parts of 1 or 2 spring onions.

SHELLFISH

Their shells are so delicious that crustaceans can't resist eating their own: lobsters have specially adapted grinders in their stomachs to deal with the most chitinous bits. Unless you have something similar, I'd recommend making a stock with their shells instead. It's quick and easy, and will make your seafood dishes taste like you've dropped anchor at a secret little place on the Amalfi coast. Serve it as a sauce on simply cooked fish, or for risotto, paella, chowder, bisque or gumbo. Use the starting-point quantities of 1kg shells to 1–1.5 litres stock. If you're short of shells, supplement them with de-gilled fish heads and frames. Simmering the shells in water with a few aromatics will yield a light flavour, but for something deeper, first brown the shells in oil or butter with a fennel-enhanced mirepoix, then add a squeeze of tomato purée and a dash of brandy before pouring in the water. Most recipes stipulate a maximum cooking time of 30 minutes, but the Louisiana-raised chef John Besh takes 2 hours over his. For a bisque-y effect, blend the simmered stock shells and all, before straining out the gritty bits with a fine or muslin-lined sieve. (Leave out any very hard pieces of crab or lobster if you don't want to ruin the blade of your blender or food processor.)

SHIITAKE & KOMBU

A combination of mushrooms and seaweed makes an excellent stock for soup or noodles. Rinse the mushrooms but not the seaweed. In a pan, soak 30g (about 6) dried shiitake mushrooms and a 15cm piece of kombu in 1.5 litres water. After about 15 minutes, place the pan over a medium heat and bring to a simmer. When the stock has been simmering for 3 minutes, remove the kombu and let the stock simmer for a further 12 minutes. Include the shiitakes in your dish, or set them aside for something else. The cooled stock should be refrigerated and used within 3 days.

TURKEY

Of course you can't go for the long walk on Boxing Day. _Somebody_ has to keep an eye on the stock. Rather than a curry to use up the leftover bird, use it for a _blanquette de dinde_ ( **here** ), agreeably plain after the seasonal excess, or a gumbo as murky as the plot of the soaps' Christmas specials. Simply swap turkey for chicken in our starting point for stock; as the turkey is roasted already, no need to brown it, so start at step **2**.

VEAL

_Caldo sin jamón ni gallina, no vale una sardina_ , say the Spanish – 'Stock without ham or chicken isn't worth a sardine.' This may be intended as a poke in the eye to the French, so fond of veal stock, pale and rich and neutrally meaty. Michael Ruhlman is rhapsodic: veal stock, in his view, is up there with the Goldberg Variations and Plato's cave allegory. Make it Ruhlman's way by chopping 900g veal bones into 7–8cm pieces and roasting them, in a tin large enough to spread them out a bit, at 230°C for 45 minutes, turning occasionally. Remove, then turn the oven down to 90°C, and transfer the bones and sticky pan scrapings to a 2-litre ovenproof pot. Pour in 1.35 litres water, return to the oven and cook, uncovered, for 8–10 hours. Whatever length of simmering you decide on, set a timer to add 1 diced onion, 1 diced carrot and 1 bay leaf for the final hour. Strain through a muslin-lined sieve and you should have about a litre of veal stock. You're now seven-eighths of the way to very, very good French onion soup. Just be careful to avoid 'stock shock', the trauma caused by the unthinking act of pouring your precious liquid down the sink while retaining what should be the discards.

VEGETABLE

Of all the stocks that come in cubes, vegetable stock must be the least like its fresh counterpart. It's not really clear to me why you'd use it over plain salted water. A quick, all-purpose vegetable stock can be made with finely diced or grated carrot, onion and celery, plus some bay leaves, peppercorns and parsley. Work on the basis of 2 onions, 2 carrots, 2 celery sticks, 12 peppercorns and a small bunch of parsley per litre of cold water. Bring to the boil and simmer very slowly for 10 minutes, let it rest for 5, then strain. This will yield a light, fresh flavour. For a rich, brown vegetable stock, do as above, but cook the vegetables in oil (or oil and butter) until golden before adding the water, and increase the simmering time to 1 hour. Vegetable stock can be a little sweet, so for a balancing savouriness consider adding soy sauce, Parmesan rind, lentils, shiitake mushrooms, rinsed and drained fermented black beans or a dab of Marmite. Vegetarians looking for an alternative to the classic mirepoix trio of onion, carrot and celery might consult pea pod stock, lentil broth or butternut squash risotto; see also **C** under Leeway for a list of ingredients to use or avoid in stocks.

Stock → Other Directions

HAM OR RICH CHICKEN STOCK USED TO COOK COLLARD GREENS

Collard greens slowly braised for 30–60 minutes in a smoky stock made from ham hocks and/or chicken.

PASTA IN BRODO

Tortellini or _stellini_ (tiny star-shaped pasta) gently simmered in broth.

TO MAKE POLENTA

See here

BOULANGÈRE POTATOES

Thinly sliced potatoes and onions baked in stock with butter and thyme: 180°C for 30–40 minutes.

AVGOLEMONO

See here

ALSO USED IN MANY OF THE DISHES ON THE ROUX CONTINUUM

See here

**Broth: Pot au Feu**

Broth is a stock with benefits – the ingredients that create it are eaten rather than discarded. _Pot au feu_ is a good basic example. It's a 'poem of the French soul', according to Daniel Boulud, and one that takes a good while to compose. Marlene Dietrich liked to make it in the lulls between scenes. It doesn't, however, require a lot of attention, so there'll be plenty of time to run your lines and pluck your eyebrows. As with stock, you may or may not brown the ingredients before adding cold water, bringing it slowly to a simmer and turning the heat right down for a slow, slow cook. Unlike stock, you need to know when to retrieve the meat from the pot so it doesn't overcook – your best bet is simply to extract a sample and taste it.

_For a broth and main course for 10–12_

INGREDIENTS

1.5kg boneless stewing beef (shin, leg, flank, brisket), in large pieces **A**

1.5kg bone-in stewing beef (shin, short-rib, oxtail), in large pieces **A**

4 medium carrots, peeled and cut into large chunks **B**

4 celery sticks, cut in half **B**

4 medium onions, peeled (but left whole), 2 studded with a clove **B**

4 leeks, trimmed, rinsed and cut into large chunks **B**

1 bouquet garni of bay, parsley and thyme

8 black peppercorns

½ tsp salt

500g marrow bones, cut into 5 cm pieces, tied up in muslin if possible – optional **A**

**1** Place the meat in a pan or stockpot large enough to hold all your ingredients, pour over enough cold water to cover by a few centimetres, then set on the hob over a medium heat.

If you're including types of meat that require notably different cooking times, start by adding those that need to cook for longest and then calculate when to add the others.

**2** Just as your broth approaches boiling point, turn it down to a very slow simmer. If scum has begun to collect on the surface, skim until it desists (or it's just a thin white froth), then add the vegetables, bouquet garni, peppercorns and salt. Partially cover the pan, using a baking tray if you don't have a lid big enough, and let the broth simmer for 2½–3 hours. **C**

You may need to use a diffuser to slow the cooking down sufficiently. If you prefer your vegetables less cooked, add them a bit later.

**3** Top up with enough boiling water or stock to keep the ingredients immersed.

But don't add so much that you risk diluting the delicious broth.

**4** If using, add the marrow-bone pieces 2 hours into the cooking.

**5** About half an hour after adding the bone pieces, check the meats to see if they are cooked. If they could do with a little longer, return them to the pan. If they're ready, remove and keep them warm if serving imminently, or cool and refrigerate if serving later. Discard the bouquet garni, strain the broth and adjust the seasoning.

If you're serving the broth immediately, remove as much fat as you can by skimming or blotting the surface with kitchen paper. If time permits, cool and then chill the broth, so the fat solidifies on top and can be easily lifted off. If you decide you want a thicker broth, simmer to reduce it, mash some of the strained-out vegetables and return them, or use a beurre manié ( **here** ) or a cornflour slurry.

**6** Traditionally, the broth is served as a starter, and the meat as a main course with cornichons and mustard.

LEEWAY

**A** The number and types of beef cuts vary a great deal, but a mixture of lean stewing cuts, bone-in stewing cuts and bones is common. Other additions include garlic sausage, a small stewing chicken, ham hock, smoked streaky bacon or tongue. A Provençal cook might add lamb, tomatoes, juniper and white wine.

**B** The types and quantities of vegetables are highly negotiable. Celeriac, turnip, potato, whole peeled shallots and quartered cabbage all have their advocates. The cabbage might be cooked separately, in some hived-off broth, to prevent it contributing too much sulphurous funk to the stockpot. Note that potato may make the broth cloudy.

**C** If you'd rather use the oven, put the broth in a 130°C oven at the end of step **2**, and cook, partially covered, setting the timer for 2 hours as a reminder to add the marrow bones. You may need to check that the ingredients remain immersed, and top up with boiling water if they're not.

Broth → Flavours & Variations

CHICKEN

In my twenties I made friends with an elderly man who was selling his house and going to live on a tiny boat. As part of his clear-out he gave me a lidded pot in the shape of a chicken. I thought it was for keeping eggs in, but he assured me it was a 'chicken brick', and as it was slightly larger than a medium-size chicken, and therefore able to accommodate one, that's how I used it. In those days I went out most evenings, except on Sunday, when I would scatter the nest-shaped base of the brick with diced onion, carrot, celery and bacon, sit a chicken on it, pour over some bought stock and white wine, put the hen-shaped lid on, then slide it into a 180°C oven with an accompanying brood of baking potatoes. Ninety minutes later I had a delicious, comforting dinner that had called for very little effort and would need minimal clearing-up. Quite an advantage over the nine-pan roast. The following night, I'd strain the stock, then reduce it at a determined boil until it was deliciously concentrated. Shredded leftover chicken, some of the vegetable bits and a nest or two of egg tagliatelle could then be added to the pan, and the finished pasta, glistening with broth, served with toasted pine nuts and chopped parsley. An entire winter of Sundays I made this meal; I still can't watch _University Challenge_ without pining for the smack of sticky chicken stock. If I'd known about Hainanese chicken rice, I might have added it to my lazy Sunday-to-Monday repertoire. It's an interesting variation on broth, with the chicken cooked very lightly, creating a notably soft, almost jelly-like texture. There are several traditional ways to cook Hainanese chicken, some which call for the bird to be placed in and out of hot and cold water as if at a plunge spa. This is one of the simpler versions. In a large saucepan, cover a 1.25–1.5kg whole chicken, breast down, with cold water, add a little sliced ginger and spring onion and bring it up to a simmer. Let it bubble gently for 15 minutes, then turn the heat off, cover the pan tightly and leave for another 30 minutes, before removing it from the stock, which is used to cook the rice. Chop the cooked chicken into chunks and brush with sesame oil. Serve with dipping sauces, like a sweetened soy sauce diluted with water, or a paste of ginger and garlic, fried golden and salted.

FISH

There's a fish restaurant in the crook of a cove in Ibiza that you can't reach by car or phone. The result is a peculiar mix of punters rich enough to arrive by yacht, or dogged enough to hike over the bluff from the neighbouring beach. All, however, wear the self-satisfied smirk that comes of having schlepped there once before and been turned away, every last table having been taken by an identical mix of bronzed socialites and sweaty ramblers who had been required to book in their turn. The first time I went, finding, sure enough, every last table taken, I made a reservation for the following week and walked back to the beach for a sulk. I was just fishing in my tote bag for the remains of a packet of crisps when my husband emerged from the sea holding aloft a car key attached to a hire-company fob. He had been snorkelling about twenty feet out, he explained, when he spotted an octopus that had made its home in a biscuit tin on the ocean floor. Crikey, I thought. Clearly such vast quantities of drugs had been excreted by visitors to Ibiza that the sea itself was now hallucinogenic. He had hovered above the octopus for a while before noticing that it was repeatedly unfurling one tentacle in a particular direction. Just out of its reach something glinted on the seabed. The car key. It looked un-rusty, as if it had been dropped recently. My husband made a tour of the beach, asking the sunbathers if they had dropped anything. 'Mmff', said a man sitting by a rock with his wife and three kids, and took them without so much as a thank you, or an expression of surprise that a complete stranger had just emerged from the sea with his keys, let alone the fact that they had been located by a benevolent cephalopod. We returned to the cove a week later for lunch and sat at a trestle table overlooking the water, snug up against our fellow diners. Nearby, vast stockpots bubbled away on a wood-burning stove. The menu was simple to the point of peremptoriness. You could have the single dish on offer or bugger off. It was _bullet de peix_ , a traditional Ibizan stew of the morning's catch, with potatoes and saffron. I suppose it can go either way with single-dish restaurants: practice either makes perfect or profoundly bored. In this case, we suspected the latter. The catch of the day was bony and earthy-tasting, the yellow broth thin and sour as the patron's welcome. Save yourself the bother and make a _bullet_ properly at home. Soften garlic with some peeled chopped tomato in olive oil for 15 minutes, then add some firm potatoes cut into chunks. Pour in a glug of white wine and enough fish stock to cover. Add salt and saffron, then simmer until the potatoes are cooked through. As with most seafood broths and stews, the fish goes in last, simmered for the few minutes it takes to cook. Add some shellfish too, if you like. Your first course consists of the fish and potato with a little of the stock and a dollop of allioli. For the second, a simple dish of rice and cuttlefish or squid is cooked in the remainder of the stock. Later the same afternoon, burping saffron-scented bubbles through his snorkel, my husband went back to visit his octopus friend and complained about the lacklustre lunch he'd waited a week to eat. The octopus unfurled its tentacle. This time it was pointing north. We duly drove in that direction until we reached Aguas Blancas, a beautiful beach with an Argentinian-run _chiringuito_ , where we sat chewing superb steak and chimichurri baguettes and drinking cold _cañas_ of Mahou, staring out over the bright waters at the mysterious ski-jump island of Tagomago.

GAMMON **/** BACON

Time was men walked the streets of Spain hiring out ham bones by the minute for housewives to use in their bean pot. In this country, it's rare to make gammon or bacon stock _per se_ , since the water used to boil a ham can so easily be added to a soup, or bacon be added to a mirepoix. The chef Richard Corrigan, however, does make his own non-by-product ham stock, rating it up there with the 'cheffiest _jus de veau_ ', and recalling that his mother would add it to leftover colcannon. It's so usual for pea soup to contain ham stock that it's surprising to learn that it was once routinely made with other stocks, including pork, mutton, beef and poultry, according to Robert Kemp Philp, author of _The Family Save-all_ (1861); he also notes that a ham-shank bone, the root of a tongue or some pieces of red herring would suffice. (The red herring is a red herring: Philp means strong kipper.) To cook a whole gammon, place it in a deep pan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer, allowing 40 minutes per kilo plus an extra 20 minutes, or until the temperature in the centre of the joint reaches 75°C. David Chang, founder of Momofuku, advises that the _katsuobushi_ (dried tuna shavings) usually used to make Japanese dashi can be replaced with smoked bacon. Put a 15cm × 8cm piece of dried kombu in 1 litre cold water and bring it to a simmer, then immediately remove the pan from the heat and let the seaweed steep for 10 minutes. Take the kombu from the pan and set aside. Add 110g smoked bacon to the warm water, bring back to a simmer, then turn down very low and give it 30 minutes while you ponder how to use the cooked seaweed. Strain, cool and chill the broth, then remove the fat. The broth will keep in the fridge, covered, for a few days; use it to make a meaty miso soup, or to cook your own buckwheat noodles.

LENTIL

There aren't many occasions in life that call for lentil broth, but it's wise to be prepared. Arabella Boxer's recipe for mushroom soup requires 75g of brown or green lentils to be cooked in 600ml lightly salted water, yielding about 300ml liquid; the lentils are set aside for a different dish (which is what merits its inclusion in the broth section). In a similar vein, Elizabeth David urges us not to throw away the cooking water from cannellini beans. Note that the butter beans with honey, tomato and dill taste markedly better made with the water the dried beans have been cooked in. Bean broths are so good, in fact, that you can comfort yourself, when confronted with a batch of beans that refuse to soften, with the thought that you'll have _something_ worth eating (or cooking with) at the end of it. What makes them so interesting is their savoury depth, in contrast to vegetable stock made with onion, carrot and celery, which has a tendency to be sweet. Use pulse broth in soups, noodle dishes, pilafs, or something paella-esque.

OCTOPUS

Greek fishermen bash their octopuses against rocks to tenderise them. Frank Walter Lane notes that, to the same end, islanders in Honolulu treat their catch to a long washing-machine cycle. Any octopuses reading this are advised to move to Japan, where they'll at least get a massage before they're cooked. _O' bror e purpo_ is a Neapolitan octopus broth served from street stalls with lots of black pepper and a twist of lemon. It's meant to be excellent if you have a cold. Gennaro Contaldo rinses a whole 1.2kg octopus, then brings 1.5 litres water to the boil with 1 tsp salt, 4 bay leaves and 15 black peppercorns. He then takes the octopus by its head and dips it into the hot water. This will curl the tentacles – it would certainly curl mine – before the whole thing is submerged. Put a lid on the pot and simmer over a low–medium heat for about 1¼ hours or until it's tender. Serve the broth, and cut up the octopus to use in a salad, pasta or rice dish, once your cold subsides and sense of taste returns.

RABBIT

The game meat in _Larousse_ 's consommé is taken off the bone and turned into the hodgepodge known as a salpicon, which can be used, amongst other things, for croquettes, rissoles, stuffing, small pies or canapés. That makes it a broth by this book's definition. Whether a consommé counts as a broth or a stock would surely have been beside the point to the self-proclaimed 'very fussy consommé maniac' Egon Ronay. Keep the stockpot going too long and the consommé will be too dark, he mutters; go heavy on the vegetables and the consommé will be too acidic. If the cook has been miserly with their meat, using cheap cuts, and not shin of beef – or, heaven help us, just bones – the results will be 'bland and empty'. Ronay singles out the British chef Brian Turner as his kind of consommé-maker, praising Turner's rabbit consommé for its balance – light with a touch of meat essence – and cleanness. To try Turner's version, add 3 rabbit carcasses to 3.6 litres cold water and bring to the boil, then skim. Add 1 leek, 4 celery sticks, 1 onion, 2 carrots, all chopped, plus a 400g tin of tomatoes, 1 bay leaf, a few juniper berries, a sprig of thyme and some parsley stalks. Simmer for 2–2½ hours, then strain and allow to cool. Finely chop another 3 rabbit carcasses with a cleaver. Blend 450g large, flat mushrooms with 1 carrot, 1 onion, 1 leek, 1 garlic clove, 2 tsp juniper berries, 1 tsp tomato purée and 2 egg whites. Thoroughly stir this mixture into the cold rabbit stock. Bring to the boil, add a stalk each of thyme and rosemary, and keep stirring frequently until a crust forms. Reduce to a simmer and cook for 1½ hours. Line a sieve with a fine muslin cloth, and carefully tip the crust onto the muslin, straining the consommé through it. Season, and garnish as desired.

RED BRAISE

Hypernatraemia is a word I learned after trying a recipe for a Chinese pork stew, then frantically googling my symptoms to see if I was about to die from a heart attack (it refers to a level of sodium in the blood above 145 mmol/L). The combination of extreme thirst, sudden exhaustion and tachycardia brought on by the ingestion of industrial quantities of soy sauce was unpleasant, of course, but the dish was so compelling in other respects that I made it a few more times before investigating the possibility of a similar-tasting dish minus ingredients that make you feel as if you've just completed the _Marathon des Sables_. Here is a hybrid of a pot au feu and a red braise. Brown 5 cm ginger, sliced, and 4 crushed garlic cloves in a little bland oil. Add a split pig's trotter and 1kg pork shoulder, cut into large chunks, and allow to brown a little before adding 6 tbsp Shaoxing wine or dry sherry, 3 tbsp dark soy sauce, 2 tbsp light soy sauce, 2 pieces of cassia bark, 2 whole star anise, 3 strips of orange peel, 1 tbsp treacle and 2 tbsp brown sugar. Bring to the boil and cover, then transfer to a 160°C oven and cook for half an hour. Add 12 spicy sausages (not chorizo) and return to the oven for a further hour. To serve, cut the shoulder, sausages and trotter into smaller pieces. Remove any surplus broth and thicken what's left in the pan by adding a little cornflour mixed with water, then leaving it to simmer for a few minutes. Serve with rice and stir-fried greens. Use any leftover stock as a poaching medium or a base for noodle soups.

SAUSAGE

In my marketing days it was once my duty and honour to visit a washing-machine factory in Italy. Try as I might to be business-like, a regal air came over me as I was shown around the floor, hands clasped behind my back, Duke of Edinburgh style, nodding with heavy-lidded half-attention at a robot arm inserting the impeller in a centrifugal pump. We moved on to drum assembly. A young guy with a shock of un-mussable black hair and a criminal charisma straight out of Pasolini's _Ragazzi di Vita_ was bending sheets of hole-punched metal into cylinders. 'Wow,' I breathed, 'they're made by hand.' My host, fussy in trim moustache and starched white lab coat, beamed, under the impression that someone, finally, was showing an interest in his manufacturing process, and not the little Adonis grimacing against the metal's resistance. I was rewarded for my curiosity with a seven-course lunch at a trattoria just outside the town of Fabriano, where I ate a _primo_ of _strozzapreti_ that I still yearn for every time I crank the dial to Delicates. _Strozzapreti_ are thin, rolled strips of pasta, around 10cm in length, served in this instance with sausage and vegetables in a broth so golden it looked as if an egg yolk had been stirred into it. The _secondo_ was wild boar with chunky, cubed roast potatoes cooked with rosemary; then a ewe's-milk cheese, farmyardy as a nuzzle from a gregarious sheep, followed by a plate of figs that when cut in half were blood-red flecked with old ivory, like a well-aged steak. We drank a voluble Rosso Conero and finished the meal with a shot of the local grappa and a strong, dark coffee. Not strong enough, alas, to keep me awake back in the meeting room during a lengthy explanation of the latest advance in washing machine technology, something called fuzzy logic. I felt my blinks begin to lengthen. Logic rapidly lost ground to fuzziness. And then I woke with a start to see my host, so happy back on the factory floor to have found an eager student, unable to disguise his disappointment. I flew back to London only marginally less ignorant about washing machines, but an instant expert on _strozzapreti in brodo_. It's not impossible to find _strozzapreti_ outside of Le Marche, but other good-quality dried pasta will do as a substitute, so long as it's not too thick. Tagliatelle is a good bet. This _pasta in brodo_ will serve 2. First soften 1 onion, 1 carrot and 1 celery stick, all finely chopped, in a little olive oil, then add 2 skinned, roughly crumbled, top-quality plain pork sausages, and brown. Add 300ml hot water and 1 tsp salt. Simmer very gently for 15 minutes, before adding the pasta and cooking until al dente. Serve in large bowls with a little of everything. Ravioli stuffed with butternut squash are also good cooked and served in _salsiccie brodo_ – sausage broth – especially with a flotilla of shaved Parmesan.

VEGETABLE

I first came across the idea of a meat-free _bollito misto_ in a book about vegetarian slow cooking by Robin Robertson. She softens shallots, garlic and celery in olive oil, then transfers them to the slow cooker with potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, stock, bay leaves and seasoning, and cooks the whole lot for 5–8 hours, adding some seitan (wheat gluten) and vegetarian sausage just before the end. To me, seitan has an unpleasantly doughy flavour and I'd rather leave it out. I made my _bollito_ on the hob with turnip, sugar snap peas, Yukon Gold potatoes, pattypan squash, ricotta gnocchi, faggots of thin green beans bound with string, and scrubbed radishes with their leaves. The radish idea I borrowed from Deborah Madison, who serves her vegetarian _bollito misto_ with olive oil and fresh herbs (but also suggests flavoured butter as an alternative), as well as the traditional accompaniment for the meat version _,_ salsa verde. It's tempting to offer all three. Boiled vegetables can be a little samey, particularly if they've been boiled in the same water, so it's nice to have the contrasting condiments – one herb-fresh, one rich and one salty – to shake things up a bit.

**Puréed Soup: Vegetable Soup**

As easy as making a broth and then blending the mixture, but it's hard to make something truly outstanding. Preparing a puréed vegetable soup is one of the true tests of a cook's tastebuds. As with stocks, broths and stews, use the ingredient quantities here as a rough guide – an extra carrot or onion isn't going to hurt. If you're a bit short of 500g, potato makes a reliable back-up to most vegetables, but soup is also a good place to experiment with more unusual combinations, like the pea and pear.

_For 4 servings_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

1 onion, diced **B**

2 tbsp butter or oil

500g vegetables, rinsed, peeled and chopped if necessary **C D**

1.2 litres water or stock **E**

Herbs or spices – optional **F**

Salt

Vinegar or lemon juice – optional **G**

**1** Gently soften the onion in the butter or oil for 8–10 minutes.

The longer you cook, the sweeter the taste. Use oil, butter, or a mixture of butter and oil. If using just butter, watch that it doesn't start to burn. Some cooks prefer oil for soups that will be served chilled.

**2** Add the prepared vegetables. Allow them to cook in the hot fat for 1–2 minutes if you want to enrich and sweeten the soup a little further.

**3** Add the water or stock, bring to the boil and then reduce to a simmer. Salt modestly.

Use hot or cold water or stock. Bank on simmering for as long as the vegetables need to soften.

**4** Cool a little, remove any hard or unwanted aromatics, then blend or semi-blend as preferred. Thin with stock or water, if required. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

Reheat gently before serving. If adding cream or cheese, reheat the soup very gently.

LEEWAY

**A** A typical serving of soup is 250–300ml.

**B** Alternatively, start with a mirepoix (diced onion, carrot and celery), augmented with chopped bacon or chorizo, if you like – or, for leafy vegetable soups, a mixture of potato and onion. You might also add some chopped garlic when the onion is nearly softened. Omit the onion if you don't want the richness and sweetness it brings.

**C** Roots, mushrooms, aubergine, squashes, cooked beans, tomato, and brassicas all work to the 1 onion and 500g veg to 1.2 litres liquid rule. Exceptions are frozen peas and fresh asparagus – you'll need about 750g.

**D** If using leeks, leafy greens like radish tops or watercress, mix them with potato – see **here**.

**E** Stock made from cubes or powders is the standard liquid in so many soup recipes, but water will often give a better flavour, especially if you're softening the vegetables in butter, or finishing the soup with a bit of crème fraîche or cream. A mix of water and milk is good, too. Replace some of the liquid with a few tablespoons of wine, fruit juice or coconut cream.

**F** Add hard aromatics – thyme, rosemary, star anise, cumin seeds cinnamon, cloves, parsley stalks – once the onion has about 1 minute left to go at step **1**, remembering to remove them before blending. Add soft herbs like tarragon, basil, mint and coriander leaf just before the blending at step **4**, or use as a garnish.

**G** Vegetable soups can be very sweet, so always consider adding a sour ingredient to balance the taste. Taste a little of the soup on a spoon with a few drops of vinegar or lemon juice first – 1 teaspoon may be enough for the panful. Also consider yogurt, buttermilk or crème fraîche.

Puréed Soup → Flavours & Variations

ASPARAGUS

Soup royalty, to be served in Spode. Made according to our starting point, asparagus soup would be a little thin. You might take this as a sign of its refinement – but it _is_ possible to be too thin (not to mention too rich). Some recipes call for a little flour as thickener, others for potato, as in the radish-top variation. Tastes good, but it's a bit blowsy in texture – and asparagus soup must be silky and elegant. My advice is to buy more asparagus and up the ratio of stalk to stock, allowing at least 750g asparagus to 1.2 litres liquid. However classy your asparagus, fibre will almost certainly be a problem. There are several ways to approach this. You can peel the fibrous stalk-ends, or make a simple stock out of them, and cook the rest of the spears in it. Or, like me, you can strain them out of the blended soup at the end. Make as per the starting point, using just onion or shallot at step **1**. A notable variation, given by Diana Kennedy, is asparagus and orange soup, which calls for spring rather than bulb onions, and substitutes some of the stock with orange juice, adding the zest too, in an orangey echo of sauce maltaise ( **here** ).

CANNELLINI BEAN & SAGE

Our starting point works perfectly well with dried beans – once cooked, 250g will be about right for 4 servings. (As a rule of thumb, dried beans double in weight once cooked.) But you will need to add more boiling water as you go, to allow for evaporation during the beans' lengthy cooking time. No need to worry if you haven't soaked your beans overnight. You can simply rinse and cook them, in the expectation that they'll need a longer simmering time than if soaked. As to exactly how long, it's hard to say: cannellini beans take anything from 45 minutes to 3 hours, partly depending on their age and size. You might think of pressure cooking as a sure bet, if speed is a priority, but be warned that many cooks think it compromises the flavour and texture of beans. The issue of salt opens up another debate. Most reliable sources agree that salting the beans early during the simmering is a good idea, even if it adds a little to the cooking time. Other cooks claim that adding salt during the soaking gives the best flavour. You'd be forgiven for throwing up your hands and opting for tinned beans. But know that in this everyone is pretty much agreed – they don't taste as good as dried. I think the difference is tolerable. Drained of their liquid, 2 × 400g tins will yield about 400g beans, which will be enough for a hearty soup made up with 1.2 litres stock. Whatever the provenance of the beans, for the soup base it's preferable to use a mirepoix, rather than onion alone, and to add 3 chopped sage leaves or ½ tsp dried at step **3**. I sometimes forgo puréeing the mixture and serve it with _pa amb oli_ , the Balearic answer to bruschetta: a slice of rustic white bread, rubbed with garlic and tomato, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt.

LEEK & OATMEAL

Vichy O'ssoise? It's said that the leek was introduced to Ireland by Saint Patrick, an escaped slave from Rome, where the allium was a popular vegetable. (Before its arrival, the following type of soup was made with nettles or chives.) The oat content is small, but it does lend an irresistibly creamy texture to the soup, something for which vichyssoise has to rely on actual cream. Significant, perhaps, that the word 'porridge' is a sixteenth-century corruption of 'pottage': the association of oats and thick soups is long-standing. Cook 350g sliced leeks and 100g diced potato in a little butter and oil until soft. Pour in 1.2 litres hot chicken stock, add ½ tsp salt and 50g pinhead or coarse oatmeal, and simmer for 25 minutes. Taste before you blend, and imagine how good the mixture would be with roast partridge – a hybrid of polenta and stuffing. Blend, adding as much as 500ml more water, for a thick soup consistency. Adjust seasoning and reheat if necessary.

PEA

Not the sliceable sludge of Dickensian penury, made with dried pulses (see pease pudding), but the fresh, garden-pea soup of Austenesque pertness. Most recipes call for a diced potato to be added to the softening onion, to give body; 500g frozen peas and 250g potato will be enough for 1.2 litres water. If you'd prefer to skip the potato, 750g peas will give a good flavour and texture. Use fresh peas by all means, if you can get your hands on the truly fresh – you'll need double the weight if you're buying them in pods. A handful or two of shredded cos or gem lettuce leaves will lend depth to the flavour of pea by matching and extending its sweet earthiness. Add for the last minute of cooking. Lindsey Bareham likes to add pears to a pea soup that's very quick to make, since there are no onions to soften. The flavour is unusual – identifiably pear-y. Cook 450g frozen peas in salted water for a few minutes, then strain. Remove the fruit from 2 × 400g tins of pears in juice (not syrup), and make the juice up to 900ml with cold water. Use the liquid to blend the peas with the pears. Reheat and season with salt, white pepper and a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh mint or mint jelly.

PUMPKIN WITH THAI SPICE

October is the hungriest month, the shops and stalls glazed in appetising oranges and browns: maple, pecan, gingerbread, caramel, cinnamon, pumpkin. Ah, pumpkin. What to do with all that flesh once you've hollowed them out to make jack-o'-lanterns? Pumpkin pie is not for me. Tastes like a vegetarian lobster bisque set with wallpaper paste. Ravioli will take care of a few thimblefuls. So it's pumpkin soup, at least until Guy Fawkes Night, when I can throw the remaining flesh on the bonfire. Of all the variations – pumpkin and mushroom, pumpkin and apple, pumpkin and sweetcorn – pumpkin and Thai flavours is my favourite. Pumpkin and coconut blend into something so soft and seamless you'd be slipping into your onesie were it not for the hot and highly complex curry paste the combination demands (plus the impolite fish sauce). Pumpkin may sound inauthentic in a Thai context, but it is used in soups there, cut into cubes for a broth, rather than puréed as it is in this recipe. Follow the starting point, softening 1 chopped onion or 2 chopped shallots at step **1**. Add 2 tbsp Thai green curry paste (Mae Ploy is good) and cook for a minute or two. Stir in 500g chopped pumpkin flesh, then 600ml each of stock and coconut milk, 2 tbsp fish sauce and 1 tbsp brown sugar. A fresh or frozen lime leaf will add a fresh, sweet top note. When the pumpkin is cooked, let it cool a bit, fish out and discard the lime leaf, blend, adjust the seasoning and garnish with chopped coriander, sliced chilli and a sprinkle of sesame seeds.

RADISH TOP **/** WATERCRESS **/** LEEK **/** LETTUCE **/** NETTLE

Instead of a mirepoix, a soup made of greens is usually started with a combination of onion and potato, which contribute a mild, comforting bass note underneath the strident, iron-rich chlorophyll. For a classic watercress soup, follow the starting point but simmer – ideally in a mixture of water and milk – the diced potato (about 200g) and onion until soft, then add the cress (200–300g) for the few minutes it takes the stalks to soften. The same principle can be applied to leek, lettuce and nettle – the latter measured, according to one sado-masochistic recipe I came across, by the handful. Jenny Baker makes radish top soup using both stalks and leaves with the potato-onion base, simmered for 15 minutes and seasoned with salt, pepper and a little nutmeg to taste.

TOMATO & CARROT

I am a veteran of too many carrot soup recipes. Most are okay, some almost good, but none worth writing home about. Same goes for tomato. Leafing through a book of Arabella Boxer's _Vogue_ columns, I came across a recipe for both: carrot and tomato soup. It hadn't even crossed my mind. Carroty _meh_ \+ tomatoey zing = amazing. Boxer's original recipe was for a cold soup, with lots of buttermilk added at the blending stage, but I was just as taken with it hot from the blender, sans buttermilk. Note the absence of additional aromatics. Not so much as a bay leaf. It's one of those heaven-sent combinations that would be diminished by embellishment. Chop 250g peeled carrots into coins and sweat them in 25g butter for a few minutes. Add 250g skinned, chopped fresh tomatoes and cook for another few minutes. Pour in 1 litre chicken stock (double-diluted if you're using a cube) and season with sea salt, ½ tsp sugar and some pepper. Simmer gently, lid on, for 35 minutes, then blend. If you plan on serving it cold, use only 800ml stock, blending the finished, cooled soup with 200ml buttermilk, and chill before serving.

TURNIP WITH BROWN BREAD & BROWNED BUTTER

Whatever its rustic reputation, I think of turnip as the white-collar swede. It has a silkier texture and a more refined vegetal flavour; the cruciferous bite without the sulphurous stink. Even so, Michael Smith, whose recipe follows _,_ advises against telling your guests what this soup is made from until they've tasted it. Brown 50g butter in a pan, then add 675g diced turnip and 50g chopped onion. Sweat, lid-on, over a low heat until the turnip is tender (about 25 minutes). Cut 50g dry brown bread into cubes, and fry them in 1 tbsp olive oil until crisp and brown. Add the bread to the turnips with 1 litre cold chicken or veal stock, bring to a simmer and cook gently for another 20 minutes. Blend, seasoning with salt, pepper and freshly grated nutmeg. Serve with a garnish of watercress or chopped cooked chestnuts.

**Chowder**

A hearty, creamy soup that would once invariably have featured seafood. These days it's more open to interpretation. Nonetheless, this starting point calls for ingredients in keeping with its earlier incarnations. Oyster crackers are the traditional garnish for chowder. Make enough for 4 servings by rubbing about 4 tbsp unsalted butter into 250g plain flour, then stirring in 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar and 2 tsp baking powder. Add most of 150ml water and mix to a dough, adding the rest only if necessary. Let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes, then roll out to a 5mm thickness, and either press out rounds about the size of a ten-pence piece, or cut into small squares. Bake on a greased baking tray at 160°C for 20 minutes, rotating the tray halfway through.

_For 4 servings_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

1 fish head and frame for stock or 600ml warm fish stock

25g butter **B**

100g smoked bacon **C**

1 large onion, diced **D**

2–3 tsp plain flour **E**

500g potato, peeled and cut into 2cm dice **F G**

1 bay leaf **H**

Salt

600ml milk

500g haddock fillet, skinned and cut into bite-size pieces **I**

¼ tsp white pepper

2–4 tbsp cream – optional

**1** If you're making fresh stock, simmer the de-gilled fish head and bones in 700ml salted water for 20–30 minutes to make a stock. Strain through a muslin-lined sieve and set aside.

Making your own fish stock is quick and simple, and really pays dividends in chowder – see **here** for more details.

**2** Melt the butter in a saucepan and cook the bacon until it's turning crisp at the edges. Remove with a slotted spoon.

**3** Use any remaining bacon fat – or a little more butter or oil – to soften the onion. Golden is okay, but don't let the onion brown.

**4** Off the heat, sprinkle the flour into the onion and stir it in. Cook for 1 minute.

**5** Pour in the warm stock gradually, stirring to dilute the oniony roux, and deglazing the pan as you do.

**6** Add the bacon, potato and bay leaf, then season modestly with salt. Bring to the boil and reduce to a simmer.

The bacon will salt the soup, as will the fish.

**7** Cook for 10–15 minutes until the potato is soft.

**8** Add the milk, bring back to a simmer, then stir in the fish, cover the pan, turn the heat down to low and let the fish cook for 4–5 minutes. Remove from the heat, add more salt to taste, and gently stir in the pepper – and the cream, if using.

**9** Serve the chowder with oyster crackers, saltines (thin, salty crackers), crusty bread or sweetcorn fritters.

LEEWAY

**A** As with most soups, this is a fairly elastic recipe. To serve 6, for instance, you could add another potato and 250ml more liquid.

**B** Use 2 tbsp oil instead of the butter, although the flavour of the latter is hard to beat.

**C** Bacon is optional, but if you're not using it, I urge you to make a good, strong fish stock. Or consider experimenting with seaweed.

**D** As an alternative to onion, use spring onions, leeks or a mix of leeks and onion. Garlic is particularly good with shellfish chowders.

**E** Not all chowders rely on flour as a thickener. In some, a portion of the potato is mashed and stirred back in, or butter/cream is added. I've seen as much as 125ml double cream added to the quantity here, but 2–4 tbsp stirred in when the fish is cooked gives pretty rich results.

**F** Any potato will do, but a variety that holds its shape is preferable.

**G** Replace or mix the potato with sweet potato, pumpkin or other root veg.

**H** Thyme is the other classic aromatic for chowder. Others include celery salt, cayenne and mace.

**I** Mix the fish – white fish, shellfish, salmon and smoked fish can all intermingle promiscuously.

Chowder → Flavours & Variations

CLAM

Among many other things, _Moby-Dick_ is a powerful appetite stimulant. In Chapter 15, 'Chowder', a ravenous Ishmael and Queequeg, fearing that the landlady at the Try Pots in Nantucket is about to fob them off with a single clam between them, are relieved to be served two smoking-hot bowls of clam chowder. 'It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.' Mrs Hussey, the proprietor's wife, 'a freckled woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown', looks not unlike a chowder herself. By Ishmael's account, the Try Pots is the 'fishiest of all fishy places', where even the milk tastes of fish, a phenomenon that puzzles Ishmael until he takes a stroll along the beach and sees the Husseys' 'brindled cow feeding on fish remnants'. Adapt our starting point, using 2kg clams in their shells in place of the 500g fish. In a large saucepan that has a lid, reduce 200ml dry white wine by half, then add 500ml hot water. Turn the heat down to medium and add the cleaned clams. Apply the lid and leave for 4–5 minutes, shaking the pan halfway through the cooking time. When the time is up, check if most of the clams are open. If not, replace the lid and check every minute until they are. Then remove the clams from their shells. Do this over the cooking pan so as to catch as much of their liquor as possible. Discard any clams that failed to open. Now follow the method from step **2**, using the clam-cooking liquid (strained through a fine or muslin-lined sieve) in place of fish stock, and adding the clams where you would have added the fish – they will only need a minute or two to reheat. Tom Kerridge makes a chowder with cockles, potato and sweetcorn, drizzling the finished dish with sweetened vinegar in a nod to the English seaside classic.

JACKET POTATO

A chowder where potato, ever the support act, takes top billing. Highly recommended if you're in the mood for something buttery. Skip step **1** of the method, and instead rub 2 large jacket potatoes (250g each) with oil, sprinkle with sea salt and bake in the oven at 200°C. They should be good and soft in 1 hour and 20 minutes. Cut the cooked spuds in half and scoop out most of their flesh. Return the potato skins to the oven for 10 minutes on each side. Then follow the method from steps **2** to **7**, adding the potato flesh at step **6**, still including the diced raw potato, which is important for texture and will give the flavour an extra dimension, especially if you use a different potato variety. For the liquid, a mild vegetable or chicken stock is best. Garnish with extra bacon, sliced and fried to a crisp, plus some chives, sour cream and chopped spring onions, dressing the crispy potato skins with the same. Serve a laden skin on the side of the soup for a rich feast. Or eat the skins while they're warm (they don't reheat well) and have the soup the next day.

MUSSEL & GARLIC

Like a _moules marinière_ , but with the fries pre-dunked, and _so_ much sauce you're gonna need a bigger bread basket. Sliced baguette is the obvious choice, but I'd recommend the potato bread for its miraculous absorbency. Mussel and garlic chowder deviates from our starting point in a similar way to the clam version, above. The shellfish cooking liquid furnishes the stock, but here it's flavoured with garlic and wine, so the result is a far richer soup. Over a medium heat, in a lidded pan with room for all the mussels, melt 1–2 tbsp butter and cook 2–3 finely chopped garlic cloves until just turning golden. Turn the heat up to high and add 250ml dry white wine, bring to the boil and simmer for 1 minute. Add 2kg scrubbed and debearded mussels. Cover and leave for 2 minutes, then stir and re-cover. If they haven't opened already, check the mussels every minute to see if most of them have opened – this can take up to 8 minutes if they have particularly thick shells. As soon as they're open, remove the lid and liberate the mussels from their shells, discarding any that remain closed. Reserve the liquid and top it up to 600ml with water: this will be your stock. Follow the method from steps **3** to **7** – you'll find the intense flavours of mussel and garlic obviate the need for bacon. Add the cooked mussels at step **8** and briefly heat through. If the mussels are a bit big for your tastes, cut each one into 2 or 3 pieces.

RED WINE

The first documented recipe for chowder appeared in an anonymous poem published by _The Boston Evening Post_ in 1751:

First lay some Onions to keep the Pork from burning

Because in Chouder there can be not turning;

Then lay some Pork in slices very thin,

Thus you in Chouder always must begin.

Next lay some Fish cut crossways very nice

Then season well with Pepper, Salt, and Spice;

Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory, and Thyme,

Then Biscuit next which must be soak'd some Time.

Thus your Foundation laid, you will be able

To raise a Chouder, high as Tower of Babel;

For by repeating o'er the Same again,

You may make a Chouder for a thousand men.

Last a Bottle of Claret, with Water eno; to smother 'em,

You'll have a Mess which some call _Omnium gather_ ' _em_.

Recipe writers might question the poet's failure to specify hob or oven; poets, the advisability of rhyming 'Thyme' with 'Time'. And red wine with fish? Historically, to be fair, the pairing was less unusual. Best to avoid a tannic Bordeaux in favour of a young Beaujolais. Even so, it's an idea to mellow the wine first by cooking it.

SMOKED HADDOCK & POTATO

Cullen skink is the famous Scots soup made with smoked haddock and potatoes. It's not unlike our starting point for chowder, but simpler. No need for stock or bacon. Simply put the diced potatoes and chopped onion in a saucepan, add 600ml water and simmer until both are soft (about 10–15 minutes). Similarly, put the smoked haddock ('finnan haddie') in another pan and pour in 600ml milk, add a bay leaf and simmer until cooked (no more than 10 minutes). Remove the fish and retain the milk, which will now be as fishy as milk from the Husseys' brindled cow (see clam, **here** ). Flake the fish, removing any bones as you go. Remove roughly half of the cooked potatoes and onions from their cooking water, mash, then return them to their pan, along with the flaked fish and milk. Warm through and serve scattered with parsley or chives and with a side of oatcakes or bannocks, squashed scone-like breads made with oat or barley meal and cooked on a griddle. Parsnip was traditionally popular with smoked fish; using it in place of half the potato yields a tasty variation.

SWEETCORN **,** SWEET POTATO & CRÈME FRAÎCHE

Sweetcorn chowder is best kept simple – the earthiness of the corn isn't improved by the classic chowder herbs, bay or thyme. Crème fraîche offsets the sweetness of the vegetables. If possible, use a PDO crème fraîche from Isigny: its flavour, somewhere between Greek yogurt and a Camembert on the cusp of maturing, is well worth the small price premium. Make as per the starting point, making corn stock instead of fish stock at step **1**: strip the kernels from 4 sweetcorn cobs and set aside; immerse the shorn cobs in 1 litre water with ½ tsp salt and simmer for about 20 minutes. Reserve 600ml of the stock and compost the cobs. Pick up the method from step **3**, using just butter or oil to soften the onion. Use sweet potato instead of potato, and add it and the sweetcorn kernels with the milk and salt at step **6**. Bring to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Add 4 tbsp crème fraîche and heat through gently. Theodore Roosevelt liked to eat his fish chowder with popcorn instead of oyster crackers. If you decide to follow his lead, add a few pieces at a time, to let them absorb a little soup without entirely losing their crunch. Salted corn nuts also make an excellent garnish.

TOMATO **(** MANHATTAN CLAM CHOWDER)

Caused a right hoo-ha in 1934, when it first appeared in print: J. George Frederick called the invention of tomato and clam chowder the most controversial in American culinary history, 'exceeding easily the strawberry shortcake controversy'. Maine assemblyman Cleveland Sleeper introduced a bill to make it illegal to add tomato to clam chowder. Eleanor Early, writing in 1940, called it a 'terrible pink mixture', and claims that clams and tomatoes had no more compatibility than horseradish and ice cream. How times change. The tomato-clam drink Clamato (launched in 1966) is a staple of the American corner store, and if horseradish ice cream isn't already available in your local gelateria, it's only a matter of time. To see what all the fuss was about, follow the starting point, but make a shellfish stock rather than a fish stock at step **1**. Then follow the method from step **2**, adding, along with the onion, 1 carrot, 1 green pepper and 1 celery stick, all finely chopped, and 3–4 crushed garlic cloves. When the vegetables are soft, stir in 2 tbsp tomato purée and cook for a minute before adding 1 potato, the shellfish stock, a bay leaf, a few sprigs of thyme and a little salt and pepper. Simmer until the diced potatoes are just cooked through. When they are, add a 400g tin of chopped tomatoes and a few pinches of chilli flakes. Give it another 15 minutes, then add 1kg scrubbed clams, cover and simmer until they're all opened. You're supposed to wait until the next day to eat the chowder, preferably leaving it outside. I left mine on a stoop in Brooklyn and by the following morning someone had started a microbrewery in it.

**Stew: Lamb & Vegetable Stew**

A one-pot dish of meat or fish and vegetables. The example here is a straightforward lamb and vegetable stew, but the Flavours & Variations include a curry and a tagine, as well as classic French casseroles. For our starting point, the stew is cooked in the oven, but the hob can be used instead. If you are cooking a stew on the hob, use a diffuser to tamp the heat, if possible – it will make an appreciable difference to the texture of any meat or fish.

_For 4 servings, made in a lidded, 3-litre hob-worthy casserole pot_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

50g butter or 2–3 tbsp oil **B**

1kg boned shoulder or leg of lamb, diced **C D E**

2 onions, roughly chopped **F**

2 carrots, roughly chopped **F**

2 celery sticks, roughly chopped **F**

200g bacon lardons **F**

3–4 garlic cloves, finely chopped **F**

1 tbsp plain flour **G**

750ml hot stock **H**

1 bouquet garni **I**

**1** Heat the butter or oil in your casserole pot and brown the meat, in batches if necessary. Remove with a slotted spoon.

**2** Add more fat if needed and when it is hot, soften the onion, carrot and celery with the bacon over a medium heat for about 10 minutes. Add the garlic and cook until it's just turning golden.

**3** Off the heat, sprinkle in the flour and stir it in. Return to the heat and cook for 1 minute.

If the bacon and meat have rendered a lot of fat, you may want to remove all but about 1 tbsp of it before adding the flour.

**4** Pour in the hot stock gradually, stirring to deglaze the pot as you do. Return the meat to the pot and add the bouquet garni.

**5** Bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and transfer to a 160°C oven. Cook for 1½– 2 hours.

Larger lamb joints and bone-in pieces like shank will need longer.

**6** Serve – or, better still, cool and leave in the fridge for a day or two, to allow the flavours to develop and the fat to rise to the top for easy removal.

LEEWAY

**A** If the lid is a bit loose, interpose a piece of foil or parchment between it and the pot. This will prevent steam escaping, and thus the stew from drying out and ultimately burning, especially if you're tending towards the lower amounts of liquid. If your casserole pot doesn't go on the hob, start the stew in a heavy-based pan, pre-heat the casserole pot in the oven, and then transfer the stew to it at step **5**. While a bigger pot will do, the ideal is to have the ingredients packed tightly and covered with the minimal amount of liquid, in order to furnish the most intense results.

**B** Use oil if the flavour principle or cuisine is more suited to it, say for a tagine or Chinese braise.

**C** If you're buying meat on the bone, ask for 50 per cent extra weight – i.e. 1.5kg.

**D** Shoulder is a good choice for a lamb stew, but scrag end is another option, as is chump, breast, shank and neck fillet (adjust cooking times according to the cut).

**E** Err on the side of larger pieces, which are harder to overcook and look more appetising in the finished dish.

**F** The above is a classic set of flavourings, but you may omit or substitute freely. Onion, red pepper and tomato makes a good base for most meats.

**G** As an alternative to thickening with wheat flour, stir in a mixture of cornflour and cold water just before the end of cooking (see Vietnamese duck and orange). Or, if the ingredients allow, you might mash or purée a small portion of the vegetables and stir that back into the finished stew. Also note the beurre manié **here**.

**H** Use more or less liquid but adjust the flour accordingly: 1 tsp per 250ml stock will yield a moderately thick sauce. It's conventional to add enough liquid to cover the ingredients by a centimetre or two. If you're using less (that is, making a braise) ensure that your pot has a tight-fitting lid, so the contents will cook properly. The stock can be partially or entirely replaced with the same volume of wine or chopped tomatoes.

**I** A fresh bouquet garni can make a huge difference to the finished flavour. A solitary bay leaf or a few sprigs of thyme are good, too; 1 tsp dried mixed herbs will suffice. If you're adding any spices, add whole ones at step **2**, and ground at step **3** once the flour has been absorbed, checking the pan isn't too dry in case they burn.

Stew → Flavours & Variations

BEEF IN BEER

The world's second-best application for beer is called _carbonnade_ in the francophone south of Belgium, _stoofvlees_ in the Flemish north. The stew is the same, even if the _stoofvlees_ is considerably more likely to come with chips. Delia Smith warns against tasting the stew before it has been cooking for at least 2½ hours, as it will need that time for the bitterness lent by the beer to mellow; Garrett Oliver, owner of the Brooklyn Brewery, suggests that 1½ hours should be enough. He also notes that 'used correctly, beer has much to add to cuisine across a wide range of cooking applications', an observation about as enthusiastic as the gym entry in my husband's school report. ('A good effort in swimming and basketball. A pleasant boy.') How tepid you feel about your _stoofvlees_ will partly depend on the type and amount of beer you use. I use Mackeson's milk stout, black as hot tar, mixed with beef stock, but any dark beer will do. Escoffier called for a lambic – see **here** – although I'd save that for drinking. Follow the starting point, using the same weight of stewing beef, and forgetting the carrot and celery, but using at least twice as much onion, sliced rather than chunked. For the liquid, use 50/50 beef stock and beer, plus 1 heaped tbsp sugar, 1 tbsp Dijon mustard and 4 tsp cider vinegar or wine vinegar. A bouquet garni is pretty much non-negotiable. Anne Willan also adds ½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg. It's not uncommon to pave the top with toasted slices of bread spread with mustard; food critic Mimi Sheraton records a _carbonnade_ served with a sort of gingerbread topping. If you're not serving it with fries, go for plenty of plain potatoes, boiled or mashed, or ribbons of egg pasta. I can't speak for every dark ale, but on occasion I've replaced the beef with a dozen pork sausages (left whole and briefly browned), cooked it for no more than 45 minutes, and found the small remnant of bitterness welcome.

CHANFANA

A stew from the Beira region of Portugal. Traditionally made with goat, modern versions are just as likely to contain lamb or mutton. Some say the dish dates to the Peninsular war, when Napoleon's Grande Armée polished off all the best livestock, leaving the Portuguese with a bunch of old goats. Necessity can be the mother of a decent stew, however, and marinated slowly in red wine the meat becomes nicely tenderised – up to a point. According to Celia Pedroso and Lucy Pepper, the dish still requires 'good teeth'. The aromatics are pretty inventive, too. The mixture is unlike any I've come across – mint, bay, parsley and paprika, alongside onion and garlic. The dish also merits mention for requiring neither softening nor browning. The ingredients are loaded into a lidded (preferably earthenware) ovenproof pot, layered if you like, immersed in red wine, left to mingle for an age, then given a long, slow cook in the oven. Marinate 2kg diced goat or mutton for 8 hours (in the fridge) in 750ml red wine, 1 bulb's worth of chopped garlic, 25g chopped parsley, 15g chopped mint, 1 tsp paprika, 1 tbsp salt, 1 tsp piri piri seasoning or chilli flakes and a few dots of lard. When ready to cook, give it a stir and add a bit more wine if the meat has absorbed a lot. Cover, transfer to a 160°C oven and cook for 3 hours. Serve with boiled potatoes and a multi-coloured fan of interdental brushes.

CHICKEN & WINE

On the basis that he's married to someone who writes about food, people assume my husband eats like a king. So when they ask about the best meal I've ever cooked for him, they're often disappointed at the answer. On our last night at a holiday cottage on Dartmoor, it so happened that I had most of the ingredients for a _coq au vin_ to hand. What I didn't have (brandy, shallots, bread) was supplied by the delightfully well-stocked village shop. I jointed a chicken, and proceeded as per our starting point, flambéing the bird in a miniature of Courvoisier. Opposite the cottage was the absurdly attractive Drewe Arms, so I slid the Pyrex dish into a 1970s oven set to 150°C, and we strolled across the road for a sharpener. The pub was just as a Devon country pub should be: thatched, with a choice of small rooms, furnished with tongue-and-groove benches and a floor of enormous flagstones. There was no bar; you bought your pint from a hatch opening onto the taproom, full of kegs wrapped in blankets as if recovering from their traumatic journey from the brewery. A chalkboard listed simple hearty classics – lamb chops, pie and mash. We caved, and ordered. Halfway through dinner, I tiptoed over the road to remove the poor, scorned chicken from the oven. I think I might even have apologised as I left it to cool on the counter and returned to my bread-and-butter pudding. The following morning, standing in the driving rain, looking at the junction of three paths heading out of the car park, arguing as to which one led to which tor, we cut our losses and got back in the car. Time for an early lunch. What I produced from the foil wrapper wasn't much to look at: _coq au vin_ sandwiches. The purple sauce had seeped into the bread, leaving it soggy and vaguely toxic-looking. The chicken, however, was juicy, mildly truffly in flavour, and the wet bread nutty and fruity. At that moment a soggy sandwich, eaten amid the mild background note of dirty engine oil, staring out at a bog while infuriated rain lashed the windscreen, became and has remained the single most delicious thing my husband has apparently ever consumed. Regarding the _vin_ , Waverley Root reckons that reds from Chinon or Bourgueil combine best with meat in cooking, while _coq au vin_ 'is never better than when made with Touraine wine'. He also observes that the Franche-Comté version is made with Château-Chalon, a rich, sweet wine he likens to 'a mountain Sauternes'. Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers' _River Cafe Two Easy_ gives eleven recipes for 'birds with wine', including slow-roast chicken in vermouth, roast partridge in _vin santo_ , pheasant in Chardonnay and roast grouse with Chianti Classico. To make a classic _coq au vin_ , adapt the starting point by using a jointed chicken in place of the lamb, and red wine for the liquid. Celery is optional. The traditional finish is to cook little onions and bacon lardons in butter for 10 minutes, add button mushrooms for another 5, then – assuming the onions are now soft enough to eat – stir the lot into the stew just before serving. To thicken it, make a beurre manié by mixing equal weights of unsalted butter and plain flour to a paste. Stir a teaspoon of the mix at a time into the finished stew, allowing a minute of cooking after each addition, until the sauce is as thick as you want it. The same flavouring principles and garnish apply to beef bourguignon: simply follow the starting point, using beef in place of lamb and red wine for the liquid.

DUCK WITH CHOCOLATE & MARSALA

The ingredients I'd choose for my desert-island dish would be duck, garlic, fennel, chilli, a bar of Green & Black's Raisin & Hazelnut chocolate, and a bottle of Marco de Bartoli Marsala. I could then choose between getting drunk, eating the chocolate, and throwing the rest in the sea, or making something like this opulent Sicilian dish from Jacob Kenedy's _Bocca: Cookbook_. Follow the starting point, using a jointed, seasoned duck. Brown the duck pieces for 5–10 minutes on each side, then remove the triple-bypass-worth of fat that will have collected in the pan. Pour in 1 tbsp olive oil, then soften 1 onion and 2 garlic cloves (all finely chopped), followed by a 3cm cinnamon stick, ½ tsp chilli flakes and a pinch of salt. Cook over a low heat for 10–15 minutes. Add 1 tsp crushed fennel seeds, 80g raisins, 40g pine nuts and cook for a further 2 minutes. Return the duck to the pan. Pour in 250ml dry Marsala or oloroso sherry with 80ml red or white wine vinegar. Cover tightly, and simmer very gently until the duck is tender and the sauce is thick – this should take about 1 hour. Skim as much of the fat as possible from the top of the sauce, then stir in 50g chopped dark chocolate, taste and season. Sprinkle with parsley and (maybe) a little more chilli. Serve with couscous – a nod to the dish's supposed Arab heritage – or, as Kenedy recommends, spinach sautéed with a little garlic and chilli.

OSSO BUCO

Bone Hole. Sounds like the kind of gay bar you might have found in Manhattan's Meatpacking District before the dreary fashionistas took over. Osso buco is, of course, a veal stew from Lombardy, made plush by the marrow seeping from the bone, to the extent that you may wish to take off your shoes and simply stand in it. What marrow remains you scoop out from the cavity, leaving the 'buco' in the 'osso'. So I was delighted when a friend told me he was serving it for dinner. I arrived with a purposefully sharpened appetite, to find that although he had already chopped the garlic and parsley for the gremolata, the lemon-zesty garnish traditionally sprinkled over the finished dish, the veal lay on the kitchen counter, brutally, unapologetically raw. My offers to help were politely refused. 'No, no. You _relax_.' I was handed a glass of Gavi di Gavi. I inhaled its citric and herbal aromas, which only served to remind me of the gremolata and the stew that it wouldn't be garnishing for several hours. An hour and a half into the osso buco's simmer a mutiny was brewing. Another guest _made himself an omelette_. Without offering to share it. Appallingly rude, in other circumstances, but tonight it was every man for himself. At 10.45p.m., those guests who hadn't passed out drunk on the sofa were presented with steaming plates of veal stew on soft, creamy saffron risotto. It was actually worth the wait. It restored the power of speech. How often does a meal do that? Follow the starting point, using 6 × 4cm slices of veal shin, and browning them in olive oil rather than butter. Chop the mirepoix more finely than you would for a beef stew. Once you've softened it, and lightly coloured the garlic, add 125ml dry white wine and cook for a few minutes. Pour in 2 × 400g tins of chopped tomatoes, 250ml water, the finely chopped needles from 1 sprig of rosemary and the leaves from 4 sprigs of thyme. Season with salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, then cover, transfer to a 150°C oven and cook for 3 hours. Serve with saffron risotto, polenta or mashed potato. Without the veal, the recipe comes very close to cacciatore; in fact some recipes are pretty much interchangeable, other than replacing the veal with rabbit or chicken, and holding the gremolata. Other versions of cacciatore might include peppers or mushrooms. You'll find the French equivalent, chasseur, **here**.

SAAG GOSHT

Hard to imagine grumbly, socialist spinach could be so lavish, but in the Indian dish saag gosht, yogurt arbitrates between a wealth of it and the lamb juices, creating a velvety sauce. (Feel free to use other kinds of meat, but adjust the cooking time if necessary.) Start either by quickly cooking 1kg fresh spinach in just the rinsing water clinging to its leaves, then squeezing thoroughly and chopping it, or by defrosting 250g frozen chopped spinach and squeezing it well. Follow our starting point, browning the lamb in oil. Exclude the carrot, celery and bacon in favour of 2 tbsp finely chopped ginger, added with the garlic. No need to add flour at step **3**, as the spinach does the thickening. Instead, stir in 1 tbsp ground coriander, 1 tsp mustard powder, 1 tsp ground cumin, 1 tsp ground turmeric, ½ tsp ground black pepper, ¼ tsp freshly grated nutmeg and chilli powder or flakes to taste, then cook for 1 minute. Return the lamb, with the spinach, to the pan and stir in 300ml natural yogurt and 1 tsp salt. Cover and cook in a 160°C oven for 2 hours, adding a little hot water if it begins to dry out towards the end. Serve with rice or flatbreads and chutney.

SEAFOOD

The main challenge for the maker of seafood stew lies in achieving a good depth of flavour in the broth. Few types of seafood can withstand more than 10 minutes of cooking, so unlike a stew made with meat or dried beans, a tasty broth will need to be made separately, before the star ingredient is added – scaled and gutted whole fish, fillets, crustaceans, bivalves or a mixture – and letting it poach for the short time it needs. A fish stock made with heads, frames and/or shells can often taste so exquisite as to need no further embellishment – or can be flavoured with curry or tagine aromatics. Alternatively, use it to dilute a nut paste, as in _romesco de peix._ In the absence of stock ingredients, try a tomato base instead, and flavour it with some of the following: onion, leeks, garlic, celery, fennel, bell pepper, thyme, bay, tarragon, saffron, bacon, chorizo, sausage, chilli, white wine or pastis. Or, more unusually, make a red braise and use the spicy, pork-infused liquid as a broth. A handy short cut to deliciousness is to add a handful or two of mussels or clams, which will open as they cook and impart their juices to the cooking liquid; also consider adding a little fish sauce, anchovy ketchup or seaweed as a booster.

TAGINE

The trouble with eating out in Marrakech is the volume of sensory information competing for your poor tourist-brain's attention. At a restaurant in the medina, I picked at my plate of couscous, lamb and apricots in a vast room tiled in blue and white, and half off its rocker with ornate mirrors, rugs, cushions and little fountains spurting fans of golden light. A few feet away, a man playing some kind of lute span the tassel on his fez in time with the music. Even the walk to the restaurant was remarkable: we were picked up at our riad by a small boy, who led us, in his bright-red djellaba, through a moonlit maze of back streets; like a parched reversal of _Don't Look Now_ , our diminutive guide stayed several paces ahead but never quite out of sight. Oddly, the tagine that lingers most in my mind for its flavour, I ate in a Corsican seaside caff – reached not thanks to a hooded child, but a hired Fiat Punto. That afternoon we had walked the final stretch of the island's long-distance mountain trail, the GR20, and we arrived at the café after a cooling, twilit swim that had only left us hungrier. The sinewy look of the chicken leg, sticking out of the stew as if appealing for help, suggested it had seen a bit of exercise itself, but that only made it more appropriate in a slow-cooked dish like a tagine. Afterwards we skipped the baklava and mint tea and hit the ice-cream parlour across the square, where our waitress gamely supplied miniature beach-spades of every flavour they served, until my teeth ached as badly as my legs. For a chicken tagine, follow the starting point, using a jointed bird (or a mix of legs and thighs) in place of the lamb, and olive oil rather than butter. With the flour, add 1 tsp each of ground cumin and turmeric, plus ½ tsp ground cinnamon. Return the browned chicken to the pot with a drained 400g tin of chickpeas, and some pitted green olives if you like. For the liquid, go for a 50/50 mix of white wine and chicken stock – or, if you want to avoid the alcohol, all chicken stock. For a red-meat tagine, follow the instructions for chicken, but use 750g diced, boneless stewing lamb or beef, and a mix of red wine and beef stock. Add 8–12 prunes or dried apricots with the chickpeas. Serve either tagine with couscous, sprinkled with parsley, coriander and/or toasted pine nuts.

VIETNAMESE DUCK & ORANGE

Rick Stein has said that of all the recipes in his _Far Eastern Odyssey_ TV series, the duck braised in spiced orange juice is the one everyone should try. He's right. The distinct sulphurousness of cooked orange juice is one of its high points. The sauce can be used with other meats (chicken legs, beef short ribs) but duck is nonpareil. The mix of aromatics bears comparison with the sort used in Chinese master stock, although the lemongrass pushes it in a south-east Asian direction. It's much like our starting point for stew, method-wise, except it's cooked entirely on the hob. Joint and brown a 2.5kg duck. Set aside and remove all but 2 tbsp fat from the pan. Use this to fry 50g each of finely chopped garlic and ginger together until golden. Pour in 1 litre orange juice, 4 tbsp fish sauce, 1 tbsp sugar, 5 whole star anise, 4 whole red bird's-eye chillies and 2 finely chopped stalks of lemongrass. Season with black pepper, return the duck pieces to the pan and simmer very slowly for 1½ hours, partially covered. Slice the white parts of 8 spring onions lengthways, add to the pan, and cook for a further 30 minutes. Remove the duck and keep it warm while you skim the excess fat from the liquid, then simmer vigorously to concentrate the flavours. Finally, to thicken the stew, mix ½ tsp cornflour with 1 tsp cold water, add to the pot and simmer for a final minute. For an easier time at the table, you might remove the bone and gristle from the duck – it should slip away easily – before warming it through in the sauce. Garnish with the sliced green remainder of the spring onions, shredded coriander leaves, sliced red chilli and sesame seeds. Try not to eat it all, as the dish benefits from being fed back into itself: make a duck stock from the carcass, then add it to the leftovers for a second serving the following night, so intense in flavour it may well push your eyeballs out on helical springs.

**Bean Stew: Fabada**

A stew from the mountainous Spanish region of Asturias, _fabada_ is made with large white beans and a mixture of pork cuts and sausages. It's hefty, as so many pork and bean dishes are, and the inclusion of morcilla, a blood sausage, makes it rich and sumptuous. It's traditional to serve it with crusty bread and a beaker of cider. Marvel, as you undo the button of your jeans, that in Asturias it's not unusual to serve _fabada_ as a starter. The method for _fabada_ requires little more than putting ingredients into a pot, but for many of the other bean stews in the Flavours & Variations section, you'll need to brown the onions and meat, or pre-cook the beans.

_For 6–8 servings_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

500g dried butter beans **B**

1 large onion, diced **C**

2–3 garlic cloves, finely chopped **C**

750g mixture of pork belly, morcilla and chorizo sausages, all left whole **D**

100g smoked bacon lardons

Salt

**1** Soak the beans in plenty of water for at least 8 hours, or overnight.

**2** Drain and rinse the beans. Transfer them to a pan large enough to hold all of the ingredients and cover them with cold water. Bring to the boil and cook for 10 minutes then turn down to a simmer, and skim off the scum until it desists.

**3** Add the onion and garlic and return to a simmer.

**4** Prick the morcilla and chorizo and add to the pan, along with the pork belly and bacon lardons.

**5** Pour in enough boiling water to cover, return to a simmer and cook, partially covered, on the lowest heat for 2 hours, or longer if the beans need it. Regularly shuffle the pan (try not to stir, for fear of breaking up the ingredients) and check the water level; you don't want the pan to run dry and burn. Test the beans to see how cooked they are. Once they're fairly tender, sprinkle over some salt. **E**

Some cooks prefer to salt the beans earlier; others believe that doing so breaks their skin.

**6** Adjust the seasoning and chop the meat into bite-size pieces. Serve with crusty bread.

LEEWAY

**A** The proportion of bean to meat is up to you. You could easily double the amount of beans without increasing the meat. _Fabada_ freezes pretty well for several months.

**B** If your beans are old and you're worried they might not soften, cook them until just tender first, then add the other ingredients and simmer for 1½ hours.

**C** While the odd recipe calls for paprika or saffron, _fabada_ usually relies on the spiced sausages and smoky bacon for its seasoning. Some recipes even go as far as leaving out the onion and garlic.

**D** For a variation on _fabada_ , with meat and root vegetables, add the latter 1 hour into the cooking to preserve their texture and flavour. If you're using tomato, or any other especially acidic ingredients, it's best to add them after the beans have softened.

**E** If you prefer to cook your _fabada_ in the oven, cover it tightly and cook at 160°C for about 2 hours after bringing it to a simmer at step **5**.

Bean Stew → Flavours & Variations

BOSTON BAKED BEANS

Make _fabada_ look like fast food. Despite their small size, haricots can take a good deal of cooking. Bostonians leave nothing to chance. They soak them overnight, simmer them on the hob for an hour or so, transfer them to a clay bean pot with some pork and a few aromatic ingredients, and cook them in the oven for 4–5 hours, or even overnight. Time-consuming, but pretty hands-off. The beans are traditionally eaten with Boston brown bread, which is similar to soda bread, but made with a special blend of wholemeal and rye flours and cornmeal, and milk mixed with molasses. Unlike soda bread, Boston brown bread will not be ready to eat in 30 minutes. It is steamed for 2 hours, then left in the tin for a further hour before being unmoulded. Why there isn't a saying like, 'She has the patience of a Boston cook' is beyond me. The first published recipe for Boston baked beans calls for nothing but pork and beans, but like a tall story the recipe has been embellished over the years. The following is on the fussy side, but feel free to simplify. Soak 500g dried haricot beans for about 8 hours, then rinse and transfer them to a pan of fresh water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 1–2 hours, or until tender. Meanwhile, chop a large onion and cut 200g smoked bacon into lardons or strips. Drain the cooked beans, reserving the stock, and transfer about a quarter of the beans to a lidded, and preferably earthenware, 2½-litre casserole. Scatter over a quarter of the onion and bacon before ladling over another layer of beans. Keep going till you've used all the ingredients. Mix 500ml of the bean-cooking water with 2 tbsp molasses (or dark brown sugar, or treacle), 1 tbsp tomato purée, 1 tbsp mustard powder and 1 tsp salt. Pour the mixture over the beans until they're submerged to a depth of a few centimetres, topping up with more stock if necessary. Cook, covered, in a 150°C oven for at least 3 hours. Check the liquid from time to time, adding more of the hot bean-cooking water, or plain hot water, if it drops below the surface of the beans.

BURNT AUBERGINE **,** SOY & PAPRIKA BORLOTTI

I told my mother I had made a burnt-aubergine stew. 'Never mind,' she said. 'You can always have cheese on toast.' 'No, Mum, you don't understand,' I said, just as I would have done thirty years earlier, when she looked askance at the latest LP by Einstürzende Neubauten. 'Burnt is _fashionable_.' Silence at the other end of the line. 'How,' she asked, 'do you tell if it's fashionable or just burnt?' 'Context,' I said, but I knew I'd lost her. Aubergine gives a meaty quality to stock, all the more so if you've roasted it good and hard. It lends as much substance to this meat-free dish as a special advisor to a blustering politician. The broth is made with a little soy sauce and mirin – enough to put the beans in a deep, dark, salty mood, but not so much that they'll taste noticeably Asian. Dried borlotti beans are worth seeking out for this dish. Never judge a bean by its cover – although the Rosalia-marble skin of dried borlotti is hard not to admire, even if it turns a mottled mid-brown when cooked. Once soaked, the beans can be cooked in as little as 25 minutes, by which time they will have both tripled the deliciousness of the broth and plumped up to the extent that the dish easily qualifies as a main course for 4. Chop 2 aubergines into 3cm chunks and roast in a little groundnut oil, together with 12 halved cherry tomatoes, for 30 minutes at 200°C. While you're waiting, dice 1 onion and soften it in oil, adding 3 finely chopped garlic cloves and a pinch of fennel seeds for the last few minutes. Squeeze in 1 generous tbsp tomato purée and cook for 1 minute. Add 250g soaked and drained borlotti beans, 1 litre boiling water, 1 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tbsp mirin and 1 tsp smoked paprika. Simmer slowly for 30–40 minutes or until the beans are good and soft, adding extra boiling water if necessary. Drain any excess water from the beans and mix in the aubergines and tomatoes, then season and add a squeeze of lemon juice. (Instead of cooking the dried beans in 1 litre water, you can use 2 × 400g tins of borlotti beans, drained, adding just a splash of water to the stew.)

CHUCKWAGON LIMA BEANS

I once took part in a cattle round-up in Arizona. Hitching my horse for the night, I was disappointed to find that one of the ranch hands had driven up to the camp and dropped off some flowery old sunloungers as bedding, the dirt being too real a surface for our tender city slickers' bones. I slipped off my boots and cracked open a beer, while some fellow fairweather cowboys made up a pitcher of G&T with the Tanqueray they had asked the ranch hand to bring in his truck with the sunbeds. The camp cook heated the beans and fried the steaks on an open fire. We ate in the dark, under a night sky feverish with stars. We polished off the Tanqueray and retired to our loungers drunk. I woke three hours later with a terrible thirst. The wrangler had fallen asleep with his arm around my bottle of water. My sweet, sweet bottle of water. He was snoring and had his finger on the trigger of his gun. So there I lay for hours, my throat a desert, propitiating the rain gods, as I listened to the restless horses lapping water from their tin buckets. In Ken Albala's recipe, 2 cups (300g) dried lima beans (i.e. butter beans) are soaked overnight, cooked until almost tender (about 30 minutes), then layered with 1kg tenderised, floured round steak (also called Jewish fillet or bullet muscle) cut into 4 pieces. Mix 1 tbsp brown sugar, ½ tsp mustard powder, 250ml tomato juice and 1 tbsp bacon fat, and pour it over the beef and beans. Chop an onion and sprinkle it on top. Cook at a minimal simmer until the meat is tender (at least 2 hours), adding water as necessary.

FEIJOADA

_Feijoada_ , the national dish of Brazil, owes its good looks to the shiny little black beans it's made with. It's tough to make a fully authentic version unless you have a proper Brazilian butcher nearby, but I urge you to improvise nonetheless, as in my view it's not the smoked beef tongue or _carne seca_ (dried beef), nice as they are, that make this dish such a joy. It's the carnival of side dishes that goes with it: sour sliced orange; bitter greens finely shredded and fried with garlic; spicy malagueta peppers; sweet, mild rice; and my favourite, _farofa_ (toasted cassava flour), which is delectably sweet-salty-savoury, like pulverised digestive biscuits. In Rio it's the done thing to go to the beach after _feijoada_ , but I've only ever eaten it in London, where the oily shores of the Thames offer little incentive for sun-worship. If you know a Brazilian butcher, ask for his _feijoada_ recipe. Otherwise, try this approximation. Use 500g black beans and 1kg mixed beef and pork. The aim with the meats is to achieve some variation in flavour and texture; my last _feijoada_ contained pork ribs, spicy sausages and a piece of pickled brisket. Follow our starting point, but soften the onion and garlic in lard or vegetable oil before adding it to the soaked and drained beans with 2 bay leaves. Cook for as long as the meat needs to soften – mine took 2½ hours. If you think the stew needs thickening, remove some of the beans and blend them, then return to the pot and simmer for a little longer. Remove any bones from the meat and discard, then chop the meat into bite-size pieces and reunite it with the beans. Don't skimp on the side dishes – they really are the point. Coerce your guests into preparing one each over a pitcher of ice-cold caipirinhas.

FLAGEOLETS WITH SALT COD

Flageolet (pronounced _fla_ -zhee-o-lay) beans are just about small enough to insert in the holes of the woodwind instrument with which they share their name. Some are the colour of Camembert cheese, but most are a shabby-chic pastel green, as if Tic-Tacs were running a Farrow & Ball promotion. Flageolets contain less starch than most other beans, so cook down to a smooth, rather genteel texture. _Larousse_ proclaims them 'perhaps the finest of all pulses', and a classic accompaniment to blade of pork or leg of lamb. It also gives a recipe for salt cod with flageolets: an interesting stand-in for salted pork, which pescatarians might apply to other bean stews. Note that the beans are given a long soak and, along with the cod, a very short cook, so this dish represents a deviation from the starting point. Soak 400g dried flageolets in plenty of water for 24 hours. Do the same to 1kg salt cod cut into 4 pieces, changing the water a few times over the 24 hours. The following day, simmer the beans in fresh water for 30 minutes with 1 roughly chopped carrot, 1 halved onion studded with 2 cloves, 3 crushed garlic cloves and 1 bouquet garni. Strain (keeping the stock for soup) and discard all but the beans. Drain the soaked cod, pat dry and sprinkle over some black pepper before browning both sides in groundnut oil. Put the beans in an ovenproof dish and place the fish on top, then scatter over 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped. Pour over 250ml crème fraîche, then cook in a 200°C oven for 20 minutes. Serve with chopped chervil. Rick Stein uses flageolets along roughly the same, albeit more elaborate, lines in his bouillabaisse-cassoulet hybrid.

HONEY, TOMATO & DILL BUTTER BEANS

_Gigantes_ – _fasolia gigantes_ , or giant white beans – would serve as a handy travel pillow for a shrew. The following is an adaption of a recipe by the Greek cookery expert Diane Kochilas. Butter beans make a fine substitute, not least because this recipe makes them live up to their name. Somehow, the sweet-and-sour combination of tomato, vinegar and honey, with the unusual addition of fresh dill, draws out the beans' butteriness. The results are moreishly rich. I first cooked this dish as a side to an excellent leg of lamb I needn't have bothered with. It was the bean-pot my guests went at like locusts. Like good butter, this needs no other accompaniment than a basket of crisp French bread. Soak 500g dried butter beans for 8 hours. Drain the beans before boiling them for 10 minutes, then simmering for a further 20, or until they are just cooked. In a separate, ovenproof pan, fry 2 chopped onions in 2 tbsp olive oil until lightly golden. Drain the beans, reserving their cooking water, and add them to the onions with another 3 tbsp olive oil, 2 × 400g tins of chopped tomatoes, 500ml of the bean-cooking water and 2 tbsp honey. Stir and cover tightly with a lid or foil. Cook in a 190°C oven for 1 hour, adding more of the bean water if needed. Assuming the sauce looks good and thick, stir in a chopped bunch of dill, 4 tbsp red wine vinegar, 2 tbsp tomato purée and salt and pepper to taste, then return to the oven for another 30 minutes. Kochilas serves these with crumbled feta on the top.

WHITE BEANS, CLAMS & CIDER

Beans are a staple of the cash-poor, time-rich cook. But not in this dish: if there's a faster recipe that achieves such intensity of flavour, I'd like to know about it. Scrub 1kg clams. In a large saucepan, soften 2 large, finely chopped garlic cloves in 2 tbsp olive oil until just turning golden, then add 250ml cider. Bring to the boil and simmer for 1 minute. Add the clams, apply the lid and cook for 4–5 minutes. They're ready when most of them have opened – check every minute after 2 minutes. Meanwhile, warm 450g jarred or tinned white beans (if you prefer a clam-heavy dish) or double that amount (if you prefer a bean dish with clams). Try to use jarred beans from a Spanish grocer; they're far tastier. Butter, cannellini, or haricot beans are all fine. Haricots go especially well with palourde clams as, being a similar size, they become lodged in the shells, and, infused with garlicky liquor, are transformed into creamy little vegetarian bivalves themselves. The first quantity will feed 4, the latter 6. Mix the warm beans with the clams, sprinkle with parsley and serve with good crusty bread.

**Dal: Tarka Chana Dal**

Dal doubles as the name of the dish and its main ingredient, lentils. Tarka is the fragrant mixture of oil and spices (and sometimes tomatoes and onions) that is stirred into the lentils when they're just about cooked. Not all dals include tarka, but maybe they should. The recipe that follows calls for split chana dal, an Indian variety of chickpea that's smaller and darker-skinned than its European counterpart. They're easily mistaken for yellow split peas, which can be substituted, and don't need soaking, but the chana taste marginally better. Consider this a scaled-down version of the previous starting point for bean stew – you're essentially applying the absorption method to produce softly cooked lentils with a small amount of liquid, which can be mopped up with home-made chapatis ( **here** ). Serve with yogurt, chutney and poppadoms, too. If you prefer your dal more soup-like you'll need to make it wetter: see **B** under Leeway.

_For 4 as a main dish, or 8 as a side_

INGREDIENTS

250g chana dal **A**

750ml water **B C**

½ large onion, diced

1 tbsp finely chopped ginger

½ tsp ground turmeric

Salt

FOR THE TARKA **D**

2 tbsp bland oil or ghee

½ large onion, sliced

1 cinnamon stick

4 cloves

4 cardamom pods

2 tomatoes, roughly diced

1 tsp garam masala

½ tsp ground cumin

½ tsp ground coriander

**1** Rinse and pick over the chana dal. Soak for 30 minutes, then drain.

**2** Transfer the chana dal to a pan with the water. Bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer.

**3** Skim off any scum and once it desists, add the onion, ginger and turmeric.

**4** Simmer, uncovered, for 50 minutes, stirring occasionally, and judiciously adding boiling water if the dal is drying out. Add salt after about 20 minutes. **E**

**5** When the chana dal is almost cooked, make the tarka. Heat the oil or ghee in a frying pan and fry the sliced onion and whole spices. When the onions are soft and tinged with brown, add the tomato, followed by the ground spices, and cook for a further minute.

**6** Stir the tarka into the dal and warm through if necessary. Garnish if you like. **F**

LEEWAY

**A** Urad dal, toor dal, Mysore dal and moong dal can all be used in place of chana dal. These can cook in as little as 20 minutes. Just be careful with split urad dal, which has a tendency towards _over_ -softening. Use a mix of lentils for a complexly flavoured and textured composite dal.

**B** This ratio of lentils to liquid yields a mashed-potato consistency. For a soupy consistency, use 250g chana dal and 1.2 litres water.

**C** Replace some of the liquid with coconut milk, stock or tamarind water.

**D** The tarka here is basic. It can be embellished with any number of the following: curry leaves, asafoetida, tomato purée, whole or sliced garlic, cumin seeds and mustard seeds. (See **here** , **here** and **here** for more tarka ideas.)

**E** Ingredients that can be added 10 minutes before the dal is ready: chopped fresh spinach, frozen peas, or other cooked pulses such as tinned chickpeas or kidney beans. As a rule, acidic ingredients are held back until the lentils are soft.

**F** Garnish with (toasted) shredded coconut, fine strands of fried ginger, fried whole garlic cloves, fresh coriander, basil or mint, crushed toasted coriander seeds, garam masala, Bombay mix, roasted salted cashews.

Dal → Flavours & Variations

COCONUT, RAISIN & CASHEW DAL

The Bengali speciality of _cholar dal narkel diye_ is the sort of dal you could sell at a funfair. It has a sportive sprinkle of sugar added at the end of cooking, and is served with a sweet, multi-textured, lucky-dip garnish, and a luchi, a thin, round bread that looks like a clutch purse and is ideal for scooping up mouthfuls of sweet, soft stodge. Follow the starting point, using chana dal and adding 1 bay leaf, 2 cloves and 2 cardamom pods at step **3**. While the dal is cooking, make the following tarka. Chop a palm-size piece of fresh coconut into 1cm dice and fry in oil or ghee until brown, adding 1 tbsp each of golden raisins and cashews when the coconut is golden. Set the fruit and nuts aside and use the same oil or ghee to fry 1 bay leaf, 1 cinnamon stick, 2 cloves, 2 cardamom pods and ½ tsp chilli flakes. Drain any excess water from the dal if necessary, but retain it in case the dish needs moistening later. Stir the fruit and nuts and the spice mixture into the dal, along with 1–3 tsp sugar.

LENTIL **,** APRICOT & CUMIN SOUP

Not a dal, but this fabulous soup (from Armenia, according to David Ansel) is vibrant enough to be sold on the streets of Mumbai. The secondary ingredients pull the lentil base in opposite directions – cumin is gloomy, bitter and earthy, while apricot is bright, sweet and floral. It's like listening to The Smiths on a glorious summer afternoon. Dice 1 large onion and 2 carrots. Soften them in olive oil in a covered pan over a low heat for 10 minutes. Add 2 tsp ground cumin, replace the lid and give it all another 10 minutes. Add 250g rinsed split red lentils and 1 litre water, bring to the boil, and then simmer for about 20 minutes until the lentils are soft. Remove from the heat and stir in 150g sliced dried apricots, 1 tsp salt and 200ml more hot water. Blend in batches, then gently reheat and serve.

LENTILLES AU CURRY

I wanted to find out how dal principles might be applied to Puy lentils. In contrast to the masoor or urad lentils used in India, tiny, slate-green Puy lentils resist disintegration, retaining an elegant French integrity. Rather than mix the cooked lentils with a tarka of roughly chopped onions and whole spices, as you would for Indian dal, it seemed more appropriate to mix them with a delicate curry oil before serving them under some plain fried seafood with a little cumin-roasted cauliflower on the side. The curry oil is adapted from a Raymond Blanc recipe, although my version calls for more curry powder: I found it needed an extra kick of heat to register. Carefully toast 1 tbsp Madras curry powder in a dry frying pan over a low–medium heat for 5 minutes. Add 100ml warmed extra virgin olive oil, along with 1 lemongrass stalk, bruised and finely chopped, 2 lime leaves, thinly sliced, the grated zest and juice of ½ lime and a pinch of salt. Take off the heat and leave to infuse for at least an hour, then strain through a muslin-lined sieve before use. To serve 2, cook 175g rinsed Puy lentils with 1 large diced shallot in 750ml simmering water until the lentils are softened – this will take about 25 minutes. While the lentils are still warm, mix in the curry oil and a squeeze of lemon juice.

MAKHANI DAL

While the coconut, raisin and cashew dal opposite is enriched with sugar, fruit and nuts, _makhani_ dal is slow-cooked, then enhanced with butter and cream. _Makhani_ means 'buttery', and the dish lives up to its name. It's the dal equivalent of Joël Robuchon's famously opulent _purée de pomme de terre_ , except you don't even have to pretend to want anything else to go with it. A pulse dish heavily enriched with dairy products is unusual in any cuisine, and you may be taken aback by your first mouthful. Lentils are often described as meaty, but here they taste positively beefy. Add some peas and you'll have a vegetarian keema. It's not uncommon to mix in some kidney beans or chana dal, but I prefer to make _makhani_ dal with just urad dal – the sort with the skin still on, so they stay intact during the slow cook while their insides turn creamy. The method departs from our starting point in being a little more involved – once you've cooked the dal, made the tarka and mixed them together, the dish goes into the oven for a long time before the butter and cream are stirred in. Soak 250g whole black urad dal for 12 hours. In fresh water, bring the dal to the boil and cook hard for 10 minutes, then reduce to a simmer and cook for a further 60 minutes. When the scum desists, add 2 chopped green chillies, 1 black cardamom pod and ½ tsp ground turmeric. After the hour of simmering, when the dal is soft, melt 2 tbsp butter or ghee in a small frying pan, and gently cook 2 tsp sweet paprika, 1 tsp ground coriander, 1 tsp ground cumin and ½ tsp chilli powder. After 1 minute, add 200g boiled and puréed onion, 1 tsp tomato purée, 8 crushed garlic cloves and 1 tbsp chopped ginger. Cook gently for 2 minutes, then add to the lentils, along with 2 peeled, de-seeded and diced tomatoes, ⅓ tsp freshly grated nutmeg, 3 tbsp garam masala and enough water to make the dal pourable. Transfer to a 160°C oven and cook, uncovered, for 3 hours, checking the water levels several times and topping up with hot water if necessary. About 30 minutes before the cooking time is up, remove the pot from the oven and stir in 125g butter, 150ml double cream and 2 tsp salt. An option at this stage is to drain and rinse a small tin (210g) of chickpeas or kidney beans and add them too. Serve with home-made flatbreads.

MISIR WOT

This Ethiopian dish is made with red lentils, onions, garlic and berbere – an admirably complex mixture traditional in Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine, comprising chilli, other hot aromatics like black pepper, ginger and clove, plus ajwain, allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, coriander seed, cumin, fenugreek and nutmeg. In most cases _misir wot_ is made like a standard lentil soup, although some recipes take an approach more along the lines of our starting point: cooking the lentils first, then frying the onion, garlic and berbere together like a tarka and stirring them into the lentils. The version that most piqued my interest, however, was more akin to a risotto, in that the cooking liquid was added in increments (even if, in this instance, there's no need to keep stirring). Once the water has been absorbed, the lentils are allowed to catch – i.e. stick to the bottom of the pan and start to caramelise – before the next few tablespoons of water are added. It's a culinary game of chicken: how far are you prepared to let the lentils darken before you give them a scrape? The process is repeated until the lentils are cooked through. To finish, it's traditional to add a spiced, clarified butter called _niter kibbeh_. Dice 1 large onion and, in a medium-size saucepan, soften it in oil or ghee. Add 4 crushed garlic cloves and 2 tbsp tomato purée, cook for a few minutes, then add the berbere with the rinsed lentils and 125ml hot water to start. Salt when the lentils are almost soft. If you're new to berbere, I would recommend starting with 2 or 3 tsp – you can add more towards the end of cooking if necessary.

PANCHMEL DAL

A Rajasthani dal made with five different pulses ('panch' means five): moong dal, chana dal, skinless black urad dal, toor dal and either moth beans (matki) or split red lentils (masoor dal). Soaking in a glass bowl, the pulses look very pretty, like the coloured gravel in a tropical fish tank. The recipe has a Jain heritage, and so contains no onion or garlic. What sets it apart is the side dish of _baati_ , a bread made with 125g coarse wholemeal flour and ½ tsp salt, mixed (rather like shortcrust pastry) to a breadcrumb texture with 4 tbsp ghee, then brought together into a dough with water and salt. The dough is then fashioned into small, burger-shaped pieces and cooked over charcoal or baked at 180°C until golden – 10–15 minutes on each side. The finished _baatis_ are soaked in melted ghee then broken into pieces and dunked in the dal. The other accompanying dish is a _churma_ – crumbs of _baati_ , fried in ghee and then sweetened with jaggery, a kind of unrefined sugar. Coconut, almond and cardamom are all optional additions for the _baati_ and _churma_. Soak 4 tbsp of each dal in water for 2 hours, then drain and cook as per the starting point (but leave out the onion). For the tarka, fry a pinch of asafoetida in oil or ghee with ½ tsp cumin seeds and 4 or 5 cloves for 1 minute, then add 1 tsp each of ground coriander and cumin and ½ tsp chilli powder. Cook for 1 further minute, then add 3 chopped tomatoes. Mix the tarka into the dal and serve with a sprinkle of garam masala, plus the _baatis_ and _churma_.

PARIPPU

An everyday Sri Lankan dal made with red lentils and coconut milk. Follow the starting point, using red split lentils – which only need rinsing, not soaking. At step **3**, when the scum has desisted, add 75g coconut cream, 1 chopped green chilli, ½ tsp ground coriander and ½ tsp ground cumin with the diced onion and ground turmeric, but leave out the ginger. Simmer for 20–30 minutes until the lentils are soft, or longer if you like them on the mushy side. Make a simple tarka with 1 tsp cumin seeds and 1 tsp brown mustard seeds cooked in the oil until they start to pop (use a splatter guard to stop them flying everywhere), then add ½ large onion, sliced, plus a few curry leaves if you have them. Stir it into the dal and heat for a few minutes. Serve with rice and sliced chillies, or the coconut flatbread.

PEASE PUDDING

I was describing pease pudding to an Indian friend. 'It's like dal,' I said, 'but without any of the aromatics.' Let's just say he remained unconvinced. It didn't help when I added that it was traditional to boil it in a piece of old cloth. He had forcibly repatriated himself by the time I told him that the dish was often finished with butter and/or cream, and a sprinkling of white pepper or mint. His loss: I love it. Jane Grigson recalls that pease pudding, made with yellow split peas, was sold at the butcher's in her youth: you bought it by the slice. For a sliceable pudding, use the ratios in our starting point. At step **3**, add the diced onion (obviously no turmeric or ginger) and, if liked, a little butter to the peas in their cooking water. Salt after 20 minutes. After 50 minutes, blend the mixture with more butter, white pepper and, again, if liked, a little cream. Scrape the pudding into a loaf tin to set if you do intend to slice it. Serve in a floury bap with fried fish or a slice of cooked gammon, or as a side for the butcher's plumpest sausages.

TAMARIND DAL

A dal with edge. Tamarind and lime give soft, comforting lentils a racy makeover. It's what I want to eat if I come down with a cold in July. You'll need some tamarind water, so put 1 tsp tamarind pulp to soak in 2 tbsp boiling water, leave for 30 minutes then strain and discard what's left of the pulp. Try making this one with toor dal, which is the most popular lentil in India and, compared to other varieties, has a slighter blander flavour, and a mildly gelatinous texture when cooked. You can buy it in a shiny, 'oily' form, with a longer shelf-life; just remember to give it an extra-attentive rinse before use. Follow the starting point, using an extra 250ml cooking water from the outset, as the consistency should be quite runny. The cooking time will be about 45 minutes. To make the tarka, fry 2 finely chopped garlic cloves and 1 chopped green chilli in oil. After a few minutes, add 3 chopped tomatoes and 1 tsp each of ground coriander and ground cumin. Stir into the toor dal with the tamarind water and the juice of 1 lime. Serve with lime wedges, coriander leaves and thick, creamy yogurt.

**Unstirred Rice: Kedgeree**

Not the usual way to make kedgeree, but it works well and is a deal less fiddly – a benefit if you fancy making it for breakfast or brunch. Once the lid is on, you can quickly prep the eggs and garnish, knowing that in half an hour you'll have perfectly cooked rice and fish. The method is easily adapted to the oven – you'll find examples in the Flavours & Variations section, or see **G** under Leeway.

_For a main course or decent breakfast for 6_

INGREDIENTS

1 medium onion, diced

2 tbsp butter or bland oil

3 tsp garam masala **A**

Chilli powder, to taste

½ tsp ground turmeric

700ml hot fish stock or water

1½ tsp salt (less if the stock is very salty)

50g frozen peas

400g white basmati rice, rinsed and drained **B C D**

300g smoked haddock, cut into bite-size pieces, bones removed **E F**

6 eggs

A little butter or cream, to finish

Chopped parsley or coriander and fresh chillies, to garnish

**1** In a large saucepan with a tight-fitting lid, soften the onion in the butter or oil over a medium heat.

**2** Stir in the garam masala, chilli and turmeric and cook for 1 minute.

**3** Pour in the hot stock or water and salt, then stir.

**4** Add the peas and bring to the boil, then add the rice and fish, stir, reduce the heat to low–medium and cover. You should be able to hear the contents of the pan gently simmering. Set the timer for 10 minutes. Once the time is up, leave the pan covered, but remove from the heat and leave to rest for 20 minutes. **G**

**5** While the rice is cooking, boil the eggs in a saucepan for about 6–8 minutes, depending how soft or set you like the yolks. Leave to cool a little, then peel and cut each egg into 4 or 6 wedges.

**6** When the 20-minute rest is over, remove the pan lid and check to see if the rice is cooked. If it isn't quite, replace the lid and leave it for a few more minutes. Sprinkle over a few tablespoons of boiling water before you do if it's looking a little dry.

**7** With a fork, fluff the rice grains with the butter or cream and serve garnished with the eggs, parsley or coriander and chillies. Avoid too much stirring, as it can turn the rice mushy.

LEEWAY

**A** In place of garam masala, use your favourite bought curry powder, or custom blend. You may want to add some whole spices, too – cinnamon sticks, cloves, split cardamom pods.

**B** Long-grain rice ( _not_ easy-cook) can be cooked to this method and time. As can short-grain rice, if you add an extra 100ml stock or water, although note that short-grain is not appropriate for kedgeree.

**C** Brown basmati and long-grain rice will need 30 minutes simmering and 5 minutes resting time, using the same ratio of rice to liquid; although note that some long-grain rice can take longer. Cooking times for brown rice tend to vary more – it's fine to take the lid off and check.

**D** Use the same method to cook plain rice. Pour the hot stock or water into the pan and allow 1–3 tsp oil or butter to melt into it, then add the rinsed and drained rice, along with ½ tsp salt. You can also use the oven method at **G**.

**E** The same technique can be applied to any raw meat, fish or veg that will cook in the allotted time. If in doubt, pre-cook or partially pre-cook it by browning, roasting, frying, grilling or poaching. If you opt for the latter, the poaching water could be used as stock to cook the rice.

**F** You can be pretty flexible with the quantities – say up to twice this amount of fish.

**G** If you prefer to cook the rice in the oven, use an ovenproof saucepan or a casserole dish that will go on the hob. Once all the ingredients are in the pot at step **4**, cover it tightly and put it on the centre shelf of a 160°C oven. White basmati and long-grain rice will need about 25 minutes, as will white short-grain, although in the latter case you'll need to increase the liquid to 800ml for 400g. Brown basmati and long-grain will need more like 30–35 minutes, but note that brands do vary. It's fine to take the lid off and check, but remove the lid only briefly before returning the pan or dish to the oven if needed.

Unstirred Rice → Flavours & Variations

ARROZ CON POLLO

A few summers ago my husband and I chanced upon an isolated _chiringuito_ on the Playa de Zahara near Cadiz. As we paid for a couple of beers we spotted, behind the beach shack, a gas burner the size of a bicycle wheel. Precariously balanced on it was a paella pan full of _arroz con pollo_. No vegetables. No herbs or spices. Just rice with bits of chicken in it. A paper plateful cost a euro and was one of the best meals I've ever eaten, largely because it was made with the sort of dark, sticky chicken stock that somehow tastes profound. Eating outdoors actually diminishes intensity of flavour, for the simple reason that the wind on which irresistible cooking smells are borne also whisks them away from your olfactory bulb, and I had to marvel at how good my lunch must have been to taste so incredible _al aire libre_. Make the quick chicken stock with chicken thighs as described **here** , adding ½ tsp salt. Simmer for 45 minutes, then strain, skim and reduce to 800ml. Follow our starting point, using the cooked, boned chicken, cut into pieces, in place of the fish, and cooking some garlic with the onion. Omit the eggs, peas and kedgeree flavourings. Use short-grain paella rice rather than basmati. Garnish with a sprinkle of cayenne and some chopped parsley.

AUBERGINE **,** CHICKPEA **,** APRICOT & PINE NUT

Classic pilaf flavours, for when you lack the time for the faff of pilaf. The idea with pilaf is to keep the grains separate, so you absolutely must give the rice a good rinse first to rid it of starch. Leave out the fish, peas, spices and garnish used for kedgeree. For 2 servings, dice 1 large or 2 medium aubergines, toss them in oil, then cook with the onion at step **1**, allowing everything to soften and brown before adding 2–3 crushed garlic cloves. Sprinkle in ½ tsp ground cinnamon, ¼ tsp ground turmeric and 2 tsp ground coriander. Allow 30 seconds before adding 1 tbsp tomato purée and cooking for a further 30 seconds. Stir in 200g cooked chickpeas (tinned are fine, and organic have a notably better flavour and texture) and 12 dried apricots cut into strips. If you've cooked your own chickpeas, use 350ml of the cooking water as stock; if not, plain water will do. Add ¾ tsp salt and bring back to the boil. Stir in 200g rinsed and drained brown basmati rice, then cook as per step **4**, giving it 30 minutes, followed by a 5-minute rest. Pile onto plates and zigzag over some Sriracha or other chilli sauce. Garnish with plenty of toasted pine nuts. If the carnivore in you is feeling left out, first fry 200g lamb mince (not too lean) for a few minutes, then set it aside before continuing with the onion and aubergine. Add the meat back in with the rice. The combination of meat, pulses, nuts, fruit and spices crops up in various forms across the Middle East. In addition, Alan Davidson makes reference to Caribbean pilafs, very loosely based on their Middle Eastern counterparts in their combination of pork, peanut, olives, brown sugar and Worcestershire sauce.

BROAD BEAN **,** ONION & DILL

The kind of side dish to steal the show. Takes its cue from _baghali polo_ , the Persian rice dish sometimes served with charcoal-grilled meat or fish. The flavour comes from plenty of sliced onion, fried hot-dog brown, and enough butter to flatter the basmati rice. Dill adds a balancing freshness and can be augmented with mint and/or parsley. You can make this on the hob, but as I most often serve this at barbecues, I prefer the oven method. This makes enough to serve 6 as a side. Assuming you're barbecuing smaller items like kebabs and merguez sausages, as opposed to an entire lamb, if you add the rice to the water just as the charcoal is glowing red and turning white, everything should be roughly synchronised. This means the onions (3 medium) will need their long, slow frying ahead of time, in an ovenproof pan or dish. When the charcoal's ready, add 700ml boiling water, 1½ tsp salt and 1 tbsp butter to the onions in the pan and bring back to the boil. Stir in 400g white basmati rice and put into a 160°C oven for 25 minutes. When the time is up, gently stir in a couple of handfuls of cooked, podded and skinned broad beans (or more, if you don't mind skinning them), a few tablespoons of butter and lots of chopped herbs. A pile of the rice and a skewer of lamb will be all your guests need, bar a spicy red and the rain to hold off. Once or twice I have saved myself the trouble of skinning the broad beans by using shiny green edamame instead, but it's a questionable economy; the flavour isn't as good.

JAMBALAYA

Mother's on Poydras Street in New Orleans serves the most memorable jambalaya I've ever eaten, the soft rice smoky and piquant with sausage and cayenne, fragrant with herbs, and deeply savoury with chicken stock and celery. Cut 350g chicken (boned breast or thigh is fine) into small pieces. Set a large pan over a medium–high heat and brown 250g sliced spicy, smoky sausage with the chicken in a little vegetable oil. Add 1 medium onion, 1 green pepper and 2 celery sticks, all diced, and 2 finely chopped garlic cloves. Stir, then add 1 heaped tsp dried oregano, 1 bay leaf, ¼ tsp cayenne, 1½ tsp salt and a good grind of black pepper, followed by the 700ml chicken stock (or use boiling water and ½ tsp more salt). Stir, bring to the boil and add 400g long-grain rice. Bring back to the boil, then reduce the heat to low – medium, cover and cook for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and leave for another 20 minutes with the pan still covered. Fluff, then serve with sliced spring onions and a splash of Tabasco.

KHEER

I had long been curious about the Hindu festival of Diwali, and so planned a trip to Leicester, where the biggest celebrations in Britain are held. I asked a friend to come with me. 'It's the festival of light,' I explained, failing, largely due to my near-total ignorance, to make it sound vaguely enticing. I tried a different tack. 'It's really the festival of sweets,' I said, but I'd lost her by then. I arrived alone on Belgrave Road, 'the Golden Mile', famous for its sari-sellers and Indian restaurants. It was a cold, grey November day. I had four hours to spare before the festivities were due to begin. I had been given a recommendation for a Gujarati restaurant, and took a table with the intention of making my meal last as long as possible. I ordered the special thali _._ The starter consisted of a seemingly endless supply of _farsan_ , a pick-and-mix selection of vegetables dipped in chickpea-flour batter, like a vegan _fritto misto_. Next the thali arrived. The removal of its poppadom lid revealed two curries – one of smoky mashed aubergine, the other of mixed vegetables – plus plain rice, a thin, earthy dal, a fruity chutney with a tamarind edge, a chilly raita and a salad with whole spice seeds and coriander leaves mixed into it. The chapatis arrived regally, on a plate of their own. I ate everything slowly, savouring every dish. The waiter cleared my plate and returned with a bowl. Kheer, he announced, a special for Diwali. This was bad news. Kheer is rice pudding. I wouldn't eat rice pudding if it were the last food on earth. I examined the bowl. Admittedly it looked different to the glutinous horror of my school days. It was thinner. The rice grains were defined and separate, as they might be in a savoury dish. I could see pistachios and toasted almonds. It smelled not of baby posset but of cinnamon, cardamom and caramelised milk. And instead of a blob of jam it was garnished with gold leaf. Still. It was _rice pudding_. Blech! Then I looked out the window, at the street busy with Diwali-goers carrying boxes of fireworks and sweets. They looked cold and fed up. So I took a hamsterish nibble on the tip of my spoon. Little by little, as the cinnamon and caramel sweet-talked my palate, I came to realise it was exquisite. Three hours after I'd sat down, the waiter brought me the bill like he meant it. European rice puddings are usually made with short-grain rice – say 75g rice with 1 litre milk and 2–3 tbsp sugar – and are baked, uncovered, in a 150°C oven for 2 hours. Kheer is made on the hob, with long-grain rice simmered slowly (a diffuser will be handy) so the milk thickens and caramelises. From our starting point, it's possible to make something very like kheer – without the risk of the milk boiling over, or the patience to wait for the rice to cook through (it takes longer to cook in milk or coconut milk than it does in water). In a large saucepan with a lid, melt 2 tbsp butter in 700ml boiling water with a pinch of salt. Stir in 400g rinsed and drained white basmati rice, cover and reduce to a gentle simmer. After 10 minutes, remove from the heat and leave covered for a further 20 minutes. Meanwhile, put 2 × 10cm pieces cinnamon stick, 6 cracked cardamom pods and 6 cloves in 200ml milk and microwave on high for 60 seconds (you might also add a pinch of saffron). Leave the spices to infuse. When the 30 minutes are up, check the rice is cooked. Strain the spice-infused milk, mix with half a 400g tin of condensed milk (adding a touch of rosewater, if you like) and stir gently into the rice. To loosen it, add as much of the remaining condensed milk as you like. This amount should be enough for 6–8. Serve hot or cold, in bowls, decorated with pistachios, rose petals and a little silver or gold leaf.

KITCHURI

Kitchuri is a mixture of lentils and rice, a fragrant heap of dots and dashes that, decoded, might reveal how a staple for sixteenth-century Hindustani peasants became kedgeree, the mildly curried breakfast dish enjoyed by Bertie Wooster. I make it following our starting point, first cooking 2 onions, sliced rather than diced, in butter and oil until they are lightly browned. Then I add the spices – usually a mixture of ground cumin, coriander and garam masala – and finally 1 cup (180g) rinsed split red lentils and 1 cup (190g) rinsed basmati rice. Pour in 3⅓ cups (800ml) boiling water, plus ½ tsp salt, and simmer, covered, on the lowest heat for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat, leave covered and allow to stand for 20 minutes. Adjust the seasoning, then serve with flatbreads, poppadoms, chutney, pickles and (inauthentically) a fried egg.

PAELLA

The small, busy cove had no natural shade, so to avoid the lunchtime sun we had no choice but to retire to the restaurant. When our paella arrived, I served us both a modest spoonful from the surface. 'You know what?' I said to my husband. 'I feel a bit faint. You wouldn't fetch my fan from the car, would you?' Left alone at the table, I dislodged a large section of _socarrat_ and ferried it directly to my mouth. _Socarrat_ is the layer of crispy rice that, with a modicum of luck and skill, forms on the bottom of the paella. My husband returned. 'You've got to see this,' he said. 'A basket of the most _adorable_ puppies. Just there, behind the bins.' Puppies! I hurried off to see them. When I returned, the paella had been ransacked and the rest of the _socarrat_ had gone. To this day I don't know what had happened to those puppies. Another mystery is what constitutes an authentic paella. Some say that to qualify as the real deal a paella must be cooked in the Spanish countryside, over an open fire, at the weekend, by a man. We had returned home from holiday. It was a Tuesday in London. And I was a woman. At a gas hob. Unqualified, that is, in every particular. An approximation of paella can be made by adapting the starting point for unstirred rice – either the hob or oven version – to paella-ish ingredients, as the method works as well with the short- and medium-grain rice required by paella as it does with long-grain. But then there's the _socarrat_ , whose utter deliciousness comes at a price: an authentic, wide, shallow, thin-bottomed, lidless, non-non-stick paella pan. No lid, in turn, means you need to get the ratio of stock to rice exactly right – it's far higher than in our starting point – and judge the heat carefully, so it's absorbed at the right speed to cook the rice through before the dish dries out. Adapting the recipe to your hob and cooking vessel is a matter of trial and error. To make sure my paellas cook evenly I generally use two gas rings and rotate the pan by 45 degrees every 2–3 minutes. To practise my _socarrat_ skills I use the following inexpensive, low-maintenance set of ingredients in a 30cm paella pan (enough for 3 generous servings). Slowly soften 1 large diced onion in 3 tbsp olive oil. Add 4 crushed garlic cloves and cook until golden. Push the onion and garlic to the edge of the pan and brown 3 spicy pork sausages, sliced, and 2 chicken thighs, cut into bite-size pieces. Meanwhile, stir 2 tbsp dry white wine, 2 tsp smoked sweet paprika, 1 tsp thyme leaves (fresh or dried), a few pinches of cayenne and ⅛ tsp powdered saffron into 750ml hot chicken stock. Once the sausages and chicken are browned, stir in a handful of halved green beans and the same of frozen peas, then pour over the stock mixture. Bring to a simmer, then pour 250g paella rice evenly into the stock, spreading it out with a spoon. The trick now is to keep as much of the stock as possible at a low simmer – the edges of the paella will be particularly prone to undercooking, so if your pan is bigger than 25cm, you'll probably need to move it around. The rice will need 20–30 minutes to cook through. When it has – or almost has, and the liquid is dropping beneath the ingredient line – it's time to pay attention to the _socarrat_ (assuming your relationship can take the strain of sharing it out). Move the pan to the largest ring on the hob and whack up the heat. After a few minutes, check the hardness of the rice at the bottom with a prod of a fork, or pull back a little of the rice and take a peek at the colour – it's best to look in the centre. If it's not crispy or golden enough yet, keep a watchful eye on it – you don't want your _socarrat_ burnt, or cooked for so long that the rest of the rice goes mushy. Serve using a fish slice, palette knife or whatever implement will dislodge as much of the _socarrat_ as possible.

ROASTED VEGETABLE SPICED RICE

Inspired by the exotically spiced biryani dishes eaten at lavish banquets, and thought to have been introduced to India by the Mughals. Well, that, and my husband's inability to use the last of anything. Our fridge is full of tiny Tupperware boxes containing a tablespoon of tuna mayo, two soggy spears of roast asparagus, a pinch of grated Parmesan.

In the crisper, you'll find a single carrot, a lone courgette, a quarter-cauli and a sixth of a red onion, its layers separating like parched petals. My husband defends this as sound environmental practice, but in truth his need to retain very small portions of food is akin to his reluctance to leave parties: he just can't bear the finality. For 2 generous helpings, chop a few double handfuls of vegetables into bite-size pieces, put them in a large roasting tin with a tablespoon or two of groundnut oil, and roast at 200°C for about 25 minutes. Transfer the veg to a large saucepan and pour in 350ml boiling water, then add 3 tbsp good-quality biryani paste and 1 tsp salt. You might also add some frozen peas, green beans, and/or a few cardamom pods. Bring to the boil, stir in 200g rinsed and drained white basmati rice and reduce to a simmer, then cook as per the starting point. Serve with chopped coriander, toasted flaked almonds, plain yogurt or raita, and a stack of poppadoms.

**Risotto: Risotto Bianco**

For all its plainness, risotto bianco would make an excellent side dish to a stew or a simply cooked piece of fish. Its neutrality also means it can be easily and productively flavoured. Whereas in the starting point for unstirred rice, precise quantities can be given for the liquid, with risotto the cook must respond to the ingredients to hand, continuing to feed the grains with warm stock until they're on the point of being cooked all the way through. It's the starch released by the grains as they cook, and are stirred, that thickens the stock and lends the dish its signature creaminess. Carnaroli rice is more given to this than other varieties. Add butter and cream at the end of cooking for an extra-luxurious consistency, although some chefs prefer to use olive oil when the risotto features seafood or green vegetables.

_For a main course for 4, or a side dish for 6_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

800ml –1.2 litres stock or water **B C**

1 medium onion or 2 shallots, finely chopped **D**

1 tbsp each of butter and olive oil

400g risotto rice **E**

1 small glass of white wine **F**

4 tbsp finely grated Parmesan

Salt

**1** Make your stock, or reheat if already made. Keep it warm over a very gentle heat. If you're using water rather than stock, bring it to the boil, then allow it to cool a little.

**2** Over a low–medium heat, soften the onion or shallots in the butter and oil.

This will take 8–10 minutes. Don't let the onion or shallots colour. You might also add other aromatics here.

**3** Add the rice and stir to coat it with the butter and oil. Cook for 1–2 minutes.

Until you hear it 'crack', as many recipes have it. My hearing is not _that_ good.

**4** Add the wine and allow it to evaporate almost entirely.

Skip the wine if you'd rather. But it's a small amount. No one ever got tipsy on risotto.

**5** Start adding the warm stock, ladle by ladle, stirring often enough that the rice doesn't stick. If it is sticking, turn down the heat. Start tasting the rice after about 12 minutes. **G**

It can help to set a timer. Some like their risotto chalky – with a little white spot in the centre of the grain – others comprehensively cooked through. The precise temperature of the stock, the size of the pan, and the variety of rice will all have an effect on the speed of the cooking. Stir gently, to avoid mashing the rice grains.

**6** When the rice is perfectly cooked, add the Parmesan, salt to taste and serve.

Some cooks add a final ladle of stock before removing the risotto from the heat, to insure against dryness; others add butter, olive oil, or a splash of dry white vermouth.

LEEWAY

**A** Giorgio Locatelli advises against making more than 10 servings in one go, at least in a domestic kitchen.

**B** In Marcella Hazan's opinion, risotto stock should be on the lighter side, as opposed to a richer, more French-style stock. You may prefer the flavour of a brown stock.

**C** Both Judy Rodgers and Jacob Kenedy advocate water over stock. Rodgers says it gives the 'clean rice' flavour its due. They will, of course, be using top-notch rice, butter, cheese, etc. A white risotto is as unforgiving as a white swimsuit; short cuts and penny-pinching will be mercilessly revealed. Some cooks even stipulate bottled mineral water.

**D** Jamie Oliver adds a little finely chopped celery with the onion in his risotto bianco. Fennel is often added to seafood risotto. Garlic can be added to the onion or shallots towards the end of their softening time.

**E** It's said that Carnaroli makes a creamier risotto; Arborio stays firmer. Both are good.

**F** Dry white vermouth can be used in place of wine at step **4**, but expect it to leave a definite aromatic trace in the finished risotto. Where suitable, red wine is also a possibility.

**G** I've gone with the classic method. Judy Rodgers, however, suggests adding half the stock up front and letting it cook out before starting with the incremental additions and regular stirring. She also recommends a saucepan rather than a low, wide pan – a good tip if you're making a risotto for 1 or 2, when the volume of ingredients is small, and the stock can evaporate too quickly.

Risotto → Flavours & Variations

BLUEBERRY

To prepare _The Silver Spoon_ 's blueberry risotto, adapt our starting point by making a vegetable stock at step **1**, then adding a few handfuls of blueberries once the white wine has evaporated at step **4**. Keep a few berries back for the garnish. Blueberries are sometimes added to mushroom risotto in northern Italian restaurants. _The Silver Spoon_ also gives a recipe for strawberry risotto, in which the crushed berries are added once the rice has cooked for roughly 10 minutes. In contrast to the blueberry risotto, there's no call for Parmesan, but both are finished with cream.

BUTTERNUT SQUASH & FENNEL

The Ivy's butternut squash risotto is unusual, in that it tastes as good made at home, following the recipe in the restaurant's legendary cookbook, as it does at the restaurant itself. And that's not to disparage the chefs: the recipe is just a bona-fide classic. This is in part down to the fennel seeds, but it's the stock made from squash peel that lends the dish its deep, dark bass note, just as bones do to meat stock, and pea pods to _risi e bisi._ The recipe is more or less in keeping with our starting point, but I give Mark Hix's quantities anyway, since there is no sense in meddling with perfection. Make the stock with the peel of 1 butternut squash, 400g chopped carrots, 3 sliced leeks, 6 peeled garlic cloves, some parsley stalks (leaves stripped and set aside for the risotto), 1 tsp fennel seeds, 20 black peppercorns, 5g thyme, a pinch of saffron, 100ml white wine, 110g tomato purée and 3 litres water. Cook the vegetables and garlic in a little vegetable oil for 5 minutes, without allowing them to colour, before adding the aromatics and water. Simmer for 1 hour, allowing the flavour of the stock to deepen. Strain the stock, reserving 1.5 litres for the risotto, and chilling or freezing the rest for another time. Cook 400–500g diced butternut squash in half of the reserved stock until just tender, then remove with a slotted spoon and set aside. Add the other half of the stock to the pan and warm. Heat 4 tsp vegetable oil in a heavy-based pan, and fry 8 finely chopped shallots over a low heat for a few minutes without colouring. Add 330g Carnaroli or Arborio rice, stir for 1–2 minutes, then start adding the stock. When the rice is almost cooked, add the squash, then stir in the chopped parsley leaves, and 100g each of unsalted butter and grated Parmesan. Check the seasoning and serve.

CHICKEN LIVER

The sort of risotto where the feature ingredient is cooked separately and folded in when the rice is almost cooked. I say risotto, but this version includes some of chef Peter Gordon's unconventional ideas, and they might not play well with your Italian grandmother. Follow our starting point, but use a brown chicken stock. Cook the onion or shallots with a star anise. Use red, not white wine. Stir in 1 tsp soy sauce when you've used about half of the stock. Fry 300–400g chicken livers (any sinew and greenish-tinged parts removed, then chopped or left whole, as you prefer) until just cooked through, and stir into the almost-finished risotto. This will only take a few minutes. Deglaze the liver pan with 1–2 tbsp stock and add that too. Treat yourself to a glass of Barbaresco. If soy is too far out for your tastes, follow the chef Valter Maccioni, of Antico Masetto in Tuscany, and add either an anchovy or anchovy paste to your chicken liver risotto. Then again, he recommends basmati over Arborio or Carnaroli, so nothing is sacred. _Mio Dio!_

CITRUS

Judy Rodgers notes that her citrus risotto pleases cooks and diners alike. Soften 50g finely diced onion in unsalted butter, stir in 400g Carnaroli or Arborio rice, then start to add between 850ml and 1.25 litres chicken stock (there's no wine in this risotto). Add 16 chopped, skinned segments of pink or red grapefruit and 8 of ripe lime, plus any juice that collected when you filleted them. When the rice is done, turn off the heat and vigorously stir in 4 tbsp mascarpone, so the citrus is 'reduced to pretty flecks in the creamy rice'. Rodgers suggests serving this as a bed for prawns sautéed in their shells. Seared scallops are the obvious alternative.

JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE

I came across a recipe for Jerusalem artichoke risotto that recommends serving it for a Valentine's Day dinner. Either the author has their globes and Jerusalems mixed up, or they were being mischievous. The tubers play such havoc with most people's digestion that they should be sold in joke shops. Others are unaffected. Lucky them: the flavour is wonderful. Peel 6 Jerusalem artichokes and cut them into 3mm slices. Heat your chicken, veal or vegetable stock and simmer the artichoke slices in it until tender. Remove them with a slotted spoon and set aside. Follow the starting point, adding the cooked artichoke slices to the risotto after the first ladle of stock has evaporated. Garlic is particularly pally with the flavour of Jerusalem artichoke.

MUTTON

Elizabeth David cites a _Risotto in capro Roman_ , a Venetian recipe, and one of the few Italian rice dishes to make use of mutton. When the onion has softened, add 150–200g diced raw mutton to the same pan and brown. Add 100g peeled and diced tomato, followed by a glass of white wine, enough meat broth to cover and seasoning. Apply the lid and simmer gently until the meat is almost cooked (check a piece after 10 minutes to see how it's coming along). Add 240g rice and return to a simmer, now uncovered, until it has absorbed all the stock in the pan. Continue adding up to 1.15 litres stock gradually, only stirring in Parmesan and butter when almost all of the stock has been absorbed. David suggests swapping a wooden spoon for a wooden fork towards the end of cooking, to avoid crushing the rice grains. Note that this calls for just under two-thirds of the starting-point quantity of rice.

PRAWN

If you're lucky enough to find a source of great-tasting prawns, go back immediately, buy more and make a risotto. You'll need 300g shell-on, raw prawns, but opt for 500g if you're feeling particularly flush. Bring 800ml salted water to the boil, reduce the heat to low–medium and cook the prawns for 2 minutes. Remove them with a slotted spoon and turn off the heat. When they're cool enough, peel the prawns, retaining the debris, including the heads if you have them. Remove and discard any dark veins. Heat some butter in a saucepan and fry the prawn debris for a few minutes. Add the prawn-cooking water and reduce to a simmer. After about 20 minutes, strain the stock, then return it to the pan over a low heat to keep warm while you make the risotto as per the starting point, adding some finely chopped garlic at step **2**. The cooked prawns can be added when the rice seems a few minutes away from being cooked. If you run out of stock, hot water will do. Some cooks fry raw prawns in butter and add them just before the risotto is finished, but poaching them in the stock you're about to use ensures their flavour is dispersed throughout the dish – which is, after all, the point of risotto.

RADICCHIO & GORGONZOLA

Radicchio, the red-blooded member of the chicory family, is highly prized in the Veneto region of northern Italy. The Chioggia variety is compact and round: the most throwable radicchio, and the easiest to come by. Treviso, especially tardivo Treviso, which has a pronounced bitter-sweet taste, is particularly revered, and appears on market stalls in midwinter. It has thick, white, rippling limbs, as if it's been harvested from an underwater garden in the lagoon. Hot pork fat, and a local cheese called Montasio, were traditional Venetian pairings for radicchio, but in recent years it has formed a winning partnership with an ingredient from the other side of northern Italy. Now radicchio and Gorgonzola are combined in just about every Italian dish you can imagine: panini, bruschetta, sauces for pasta and risotto. They're a good-looking pair – the ivory cheese with its fine blue tracery, and the pink-and-white strips of leaf, make as pretty a picture as Florentine marbled paper. But it's their collaboration on the palate that really distinguishes them. The slightly metallic, grassy flavour of the raw radicchio harmonises with similar notes in the cheese, and the bitter leaves sluice the mouth of Gorgonzola's richness and pungency. Gorgonzola may have a reputation for smelliness, but you'll probably have to go to Italy to find one that's properly pungent. Most of the stuff available here is sold young and sweet – i.e. pale, easily spreadable and, if you try it with your eyes closed, tasting like freshly churned butter with a mild electric current running through it. Cook 1 sliced head of radicchio with the onion or shallots, then add the rice and proceed as per our starting point, stirring in about 100g cubed Gorgonzola at the end. Finish with Parmesan.

SAFFRON **(** RISOTTO MILANESE **)**

The classic partner to osso buco, so ask the butcher for some marrow bones when you're buying the veal. For a risotto Milanese made as per our starting point, add approximately 25g of the extracted marrow to the butter you're using to soften the onion or shallots, and do include some finely chopped garlic. Use veal or light beef stock, if possible. Add the saffron – a healthy pinch of strands, ground to a powder using a pestle and mortar – with the rice. I like to make too much, then flatten the leftovers into an omelette shape, coat it in breadcrumbs and fry in butter until golden. If this sounds a bit frugal-housewife, know that _risotto al salto_ , as it's called, was once a favourite at the glamorous Ristorante Savini in Milan, the kind of place you might take a dissolute Hungarian duke after he'd fallen asleep halfway through _Nabucco_ at La Scala.
Nuts

MARZIPAN

Marzipan is the unluckiest guest at the wedding, stuck between dry fruit cake and uptight royal icing. It can only be thanks to the famous British sense of humour that we would mark so joyous an occasion with such a godawful cake. No wonder more and more couples get married abroad.

Having a soft spot for marzipan, I'm often tempted to peel it away from its dreary neighbours, before the DJ drops 'We Are Family' and the caterers scrape two hundred slices of barely touched cake into the bin. In Britain, other than in wedding and Christmas cakes, marzipan is a rare sight outside of those corner shops that keep an eccentric line in confectionery. Search among the Polish wafers and Ethiopian marshmallows and you might discover a lozenge of marzipan seemingly wrapped in the original publicity material for _Die Fledermaus_. These treasure hunts become redundant once you realise how easy marzipan is to make. Mix equal weights of sugar and ground almonds. Add just enough raw egg white to bind it into a dough. Give it a brief knead. Then eat.

That's the basic version. For a finer, paler, more labour-intensive result, you'll need to blanch, skin and grind the almonds yourself, then make a hard-ball sugar syrup – **here**. Next, make a praline by mixing the nut meal with most of the syrup, then bake, break and re-grind it, adding more syrup as needed to make a dough. Harder work, but the advantage here is the absence of raw egg, with its shorter shelf-life and risk of food poisoning. (No-egg and cooked-egg versions of marzipan are outlined **here**.)

Marzipan is, of course, edible Play-Doh, as will be plain from the windows of Italian pasticcerie, which are thronged with fat friars, bucktoothed lions and reproachful frogs that we can only assume are edible. Less plastically minded cooks might coat marzipan cubes in chocolate, coarse-grate it onto puff pastry for _palmiers_ , or roll it in stollen. In Spain, marzipan is flavoured with aniseed liqueur, or lemon and cinnamon, then fashioned into cigar shapes, wrapped in thin pastry and fried to make _casadielles_. It's not obligatory for marzipan to taste like marzipan. The signature bitter-almond flavour that's disliked by so many comes not from the nuts but from an added extract. The nuts used for the paste are the sweet, lightly flavoured variety, and most of their faint bitter-almond flavour can be masked if you prefer. I say most, as a mild aftertaste persists unless the nuts are ground very finely. That said, not all marzipan is made of almonds – see the peanut, pistachio and walnut options, and respectively.

Marzipan can also be baked or grilled. Glaze it first and it will turn an appetising gradated brown, like a loaf, as noted by the pâtissiers who fashion it into miniature bloomers, plaits and baguettes. To my eye, the particular shades of brown and ivory it takes on lend themselves perfectly to faux porcini mushrooms, although you'll need to balance them on their stalks in the oven to get a brown cap and pale stem effect. In Toledo, which prides itself on its marzipan, the same technique is used for bite-size bones, snails and fish, or coiled and elaborately decorated snakes; you'll also find little baked marzipan cups filled with sweet pastes of crystallised potato, egg yolk or chestnut.

MACAROONS

There's scarcely a foil wrapper between marzipan and the next starting point on the nuts continuum, macaroons. A late-sixteenth-century source collapses the distinction altogether. What it calls macaroons are in fact small baked pieces of marzipan. Although these days the two preparations are distinct, macaroons are still very close to marzipan, whether in the form of those puffy coconut domes zigzagged with chocolate, the flatter, cracked-almond discs decorated with a solitary nut, or the tastefully varicoloured, sandwiched variety that in certain quarters are as essential a lifestyle accessory as a pinched expression or a dog the size of a gerbil. All are baked mixtures of ground nuts, sugar and egg white. Another variation on this mixture is the nut-enriched meringue called dacquoise, which can be found on the sugar continuum. Unlike macaroons, dacquoise also contains a little cornflour, and is cooked for longer and at a lower temperature.

NUT-MEAL CAKE

Rather than just the white, some cooks add whole eggs to macaroons made from coconut, to counter its tendency to dryness. This gives a spongier, more cake-like texture akin to the next starting point on the continuum, that splendid nut-meal cake from Galicia called _torta Santiago_. Arguably, this is the best known of a variety of cakes that pitch the same weight of ground almonds and caster sugar against whole egg. _Torta Santiago_ is flavoured with citrus zest and often a touch of cinnamon too. As with macaroons, you simply whisk the egg white with sugar, fold in the dry ingredients, and bake. It's the custom for pilgrims who have completed their walk to Santiago de Compostela to celebrate with a slice of the eponymous _torta,_ which is graced by the cross of St James reversed out of icing sugar on the top; every pastelería, café and restaurant in town sells it.

I once undertook an unintended pilgrimage to Santiago. On the drive out of London to the airport my then husband-to-be, who suffers from a condition known as motorway priapism, which compels him, poor man, to overtake other vehicles for no other reason than that they're not going as fast as he would like them to, allowed himself one last Zafira and rocketed past the slipway to the airport. We found ourselves in what I now know to be Britain's third-longest gap between junctions. 'It's fine,' he said, ignoring the stationary London-bound traffic on the other side of the central reservation. We watched our flight depart from the comfort of our car seats. Five hours and one hefty surcharge later, we were on a flight to some cowshed with a landing strip three hundred miles from our destination. We had anticipated lunch in Santiago. Instead we arrived to find the city resounding with the clatter of closing metal shutters. The one place that was still open smelt of sweat and served the kind of tapas that make you grateful for small portions. Only the _torta Santiago_ was edible, presumably because it had been made somewhere else. At the table next to ours a septuagenarian couple from Nîmes told us they had walked a total of 778 miles, 'seventeen-and-a-half of them today'. I nobly resisted the temptation to compare their ordeal to mine. The next day my boyfriend got down on one knee and produced the engagement ring that had been seeping anxiety into his luggage. Completing the Camino de Santiago has traditionally been considered a penance. If it had cured him of his motorway priapism, and shown us both that we could put up with entirely avoidable six-hour car journeys without murdering one another, that was good enough for me. Reader... well, you know.

If you've ever made Claudia Roden's famous orange and almond cake, you'll note that Santiago cake is quite similar. The main difference comes down to her addition of whole, cooked, pulped oranges – everything bar the pips. Making the cake is something of a pilgrimage in itself, starting with the two-hour slog of boiling the oranges (although you can always hitch a lift to the shrine, and cook your – pierced – oranges in the microwave for a few minutes). Roden's recipe shows how liberally additions can be made to the basic Santiago-style batter. Nut-meal cakes have a moist texture that puts them at ease on a pudding plate with a dollop of crème fraîche. The one drawback, Roden's lovely burnt-sienna creation excepted, is that they tend to unsightliness. You can see why the bakers of Santiago reached for their sugar shakers.

FRANGIPANE

Take your Santiago-cake batter, add the same weight of butter as each of the other ingredients (sugar, ground almonds, egg) and you'll have the starting point for frangipane. The addition of butter necessitates a change in method, however: instead of beating the sugar with the eggs, it's creamed with the butter. Frangipane is what provides the filling of Bakewell tarts, and in French tarts, sets fruit like fanned pears or halved apricots in place. It also makes a good cake mixture. The ingredients are, after all, the same as for butter sponge cake, except ground nuts are used in place of plain flour.

'Franchipane' first cropped up in cookery books in the seventeenth century, but referred at the time to a tart filled with pastry cream and often enhanced with nuts or crushed macaroons. The name can be traced back to the Frangipani, powerful aristocrats in medieval Rome. In the early seventeenth century, one of their descendants living in Grasse invented a means of liquidising perfumes in alcohol, and lent the family name to the resulting scent, a heady mixture of orris (derived from iris roots), spice, civet and musk that was often used to perfume gloves. The similarity, on the nose, to the aroma of _Plumeria alba_ flowers was so striking that the plant itself came to be known as 'frangipani'. According to the Perfume Society, this was the first and only instance of a plant taking its name from a fragrance, rather than the other way around. The Perfume Society describes the smell of frangipani flowers as creamy, peachy and soft, which might account for the seventeenth-century pastry cream adopting the name, particularly given the flavour notes shared by stone fruits such as peach and the almonds or macaroons included in the pastry cream. It's unclear precisely why the term frangipane began to be applied to the thicker, cake-like preparation it denotes today, although the semantic shift is recent, dating to the latter half of the twentieth century.

Other than in tarts and cakes, frangipane has all sorts of uses. You might pipe it into the cavities of cored apples for baking, or peach halves for grilling; dot it amongst the fruit in a strudel before you roll it up; fold it into croissants; or mix in just enough plain flour to turn it into a dough, and roll it out for biscuits. It's one of those preparations that's worth making in greater quantities than immediate circumstances demand – all the more so, in fact, as it is the best-tasting raw batter you'll ever lick off a spoon. No need to feel that this is in any way transgressive, at least not if you think of it as a sweet version of the nut dips and sauces that furnish the next starting point on the continuum.

NUT SAUCE

There are many flavour variations on the basic combination of raw ground nuts, supplemented with breadcrumbs, garlic and herbs, and then emulsified with a mixture of oil and vinegar or lemon juice. Romesco, for example, is a savoury Catalan sauce made of almonds and/or hazelnuts, roast red peppers, tomatoes and sherry vinegar. Since I first encountered it at Moro in London, I've found it hard to stop making it. A good romesco achieves a perfect poise between sweetness, sharpness and a deep, nut-buttery savouriness that elevates roast meat, fish or vegetables to truly awe-inspiring heights of deliciousness. It's my favourite in a category where it's hard to pick a favourite, but I've chosen tarator as the starting point because it's eaten as a sauce, a dip and a soup, which usefully demonstrates, for the experimental cook, how broadly applicable the basic principle can be.

The term 'tarator' originated in Turkey, and was used to describe a blend of pounded walnuts and vinegar. It's easy to imagine how an oily paste thinned with vinegar might serve as a creamy dressing with a sharper side. The Levantine-Arab version of tarator is made with ground sesame seeds (in the form of tahini), lemon juice in place of the vinegar, and a little crushed garlic. Depending on its intended use – it is, for example, the region's most popular sauce for fish dishes – it may or may not be thinned to a more pourable consistency with water. More elaborate recipes might call for breadcrumbs and/or olive oil, and may dispense with blended smoothness in favour of a chunkier texture. In Bulgaria, pounded walnuts are mixed with sour yogurt, dill and grated or diced cucumber, and eaten chilled as a soup. From the simple starting point of pounded nuts or seeds, offset by something acidic, the possibilities branch and multiply.

Contemporary chefs have been finding ingenious ways to elaborate on the basic principle. Doug Ducap makes a hazelnut and cashew tarator with dried thyme, serving it with lamb 'corn dogs' cooked in falafel batter. Andrew McConnell, of Cumulus Inc. in Melbourne, puts sliced garlic in lemon and red wine vinegar to 'cook', then adds roughly chopped, toasted pine nuts, parsley, sumac and olive oil. He serves this over chargrilled sardines, laid on sourdough toast spread with onion cooked with oil, red wine vinegar and raisins, and garnished with dill. Greg Malouf sprinkles a mixture of toasted, skinned and finely chopped walnuts, chopped onion, coriander leaves, red chilli, sumac, lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil over gently cooked sides of salmon coated with a blend of yogurt, tahini, lemon juice and garlic. His tarator is served at room temperature and is probably the neatest you'll ever see, certainly compared to the sauce served with skewers of deep-fried mussels on the banks of the Bosphorus.

Cosmopolitan tarator has many like-minded cousins. Some are less well known, like French _lou sassoun_ , a mixture of nuts, mint, fennel, anchovies, olive oil and lemon juice; or _pipián_ , a Mexican sauce made with pounded sunflower seeds and epazote, a herb otherwise known as Mexican tea. Others, like mole and pesto, are world-famous. Picada, the Catalan sauce commonly considered a sister to romesco, mixes garlic, nuts, toasted bread and olive oil, pounded in a mortar with herbs and/or spices. It's either served as a sauce or added to a stew or rice dish just before serving. Paula Wolfert goes so far as to call picada 'the future of cooking'. Given the piquant and roasted flavours it contributes to cooked dishes, on top of its enriching and thickening properties, it's easy to understand her enthusiasm, whether you follow the traditional route or try an adaptation of your own devising.

NUT STEW

If you're a fan of picada, you might also consider Persian _fesenjan_ , our final starting point on the nuts continuum. _Fesenjan_ presides over a grand family of luxurious nut-thickened stews, including Indian korma, Georgian _satsivi_ and African _mafe_. _Fesenjan_ can feature all sorts of meat, fish or vegetables, but duck or pheasant are typical. The sauce is made with pomegranate (either juice, or a mix of stock and pomegranate molasses) and thickened with ground toasted walnuts. It might be only moderately spiced, say with cinnamon and saffron, but the wondrous sweet-sourness contributed by the pomegranate makes a tagine, by comparison, taste about as exotic as Irish stew.

As with most of the recipes on the nuts continuum, _fesenjan_ is pretty simple to make. Follow the classic stew method: brown the meat and set it aside while you soften some onions. Return the meat to the pan, add any aromatics and other flavourings, then stir in the liquid and ground nuts. Bring to the boil, then turn the heat right down to a gentle simmer and cook the _fesenjan_ , tightly covered, until the meat is tender and the sauce has thickened.

_Mafe_ , or groundnut stew, which is indigenous to Mali but popular across West Africa, also follows our starting point, but here the liquid is supplied by tomatoes, and the nuts come in the form of peanut butter ( _mafe_ translates as 'peanut-butter sauce'). Turkish Circassian chicken is similar, but in this case the meat is poached with onions, carrots and spices, before being removed and boned while the stock reduces. The chicken is added back to the concentrated stock with enough ground walnuts to make a thick sauce. Like _satsivi_ , it's served at room temperature. And like most stews, it benefits from being left overnight after cooking – tomorr-inated, as I like to say _._ On a very hot day I tried some leftover Circassian chicken, cool from the fridge, and it was as soothing as a _vitello tonnato_.

The dishes in the nut stew family are a cinch to adapt. Take the starting point and apply it to any nut, nut butter or purée you fancy; feel free to vary the liquid beyond the classic stock, wine or fruit juice. _Aji de gallina_ , for example, is a Peruvian dish of chicken cooked in evaporated milk with hot, fruity _aji amarillo_ chillies and cumin and thickened with walnuts or peanuts. As with many of these nut dishes, cheaper breadcrumbs or crushed crackers may be substituted for some of the nuts. Such is their cost that there are few traditional recipes that rely on pistachios, at least in the quantities required by _fesenjan_ and its cognates, but if money is no object, a pistachio sauce is particularly good with a fine-flavoured oily fish like red mullet.

**Marzipan**

A simple mixture of equal weights of ground almonds and sugar, marzipan can be eaten as confectionery, or fashioned into edible decorations as plain as the Malteser-size balls traditionally used to top Simnel cakes at Easter, or as elaborate as a basket of miniature fruits. In the US, almonds and sugar mixed to these proportions might be referred to as almond paste, whereas 'marzipan' will contain a higher proportion of sugar; the grind of the nut will also be finer, not unlike supermarket marzipan in the UK.

_For enough to cover a 20cm round cake, or about 36 × 2cm cubes_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

200g ground almonds **B C D**

100g sifted icing sugar **D E**

100g caster sugar **D E**

Pinch of salt – optional

A few drops of almond extract or other flavouring – optional **F**

1 egg white, lightly beaten **G H**

**1** Thoroughly mix the ground almonds with the icing sugar, caster sugar and, if using, salt.

**2** Make a well in the centre, add flavouring if using, and gradually incorporate just enough egg white to bring the dry ingredients together into a kneadable dough.

**3** Knead for a few minutes, then put in the fridge to firm up a bit.

If you're planning on using it for _petits fours_ or dipped chocolates, it helps to fashion the marzipan into a 2cm-deep square or rectangle while it's still soft.

**4** When ready to use the marzipan, bring it to room temperature.

If you're rolling your marzipan, e.g. to cover a cake, do so on a sprinkling of icing sugar to prevent it from sticking.

**5** Well wrapped, the marzipan will keep for 1 month in the fridge or 6 months in a freezer.

Reduce the amount of sugar and the marzipan won't keep as long.

LEEWAY

**A** For a flavour-testing quantity, use 30g ground almonds and 15g each of icing and caster sugar.

**B** Other nuts can be used – see Flavours & Variations.

**C** If your almonds aren't already ground, blanch them in boiling water for 3 minutes, then slip their skins off. Grinding your own almonds will leave them damper than the shop-bought ground kind, and they will need less binding agent.

**D** If you want a less sweet marzipan, use a 2:1 weight ratio of nuts to sugar.

**E** For a softer texture, forget the caster and just use 200g icing sugar.

**F** Some cooks replace the almond extract with vanilla extract, and many recipes call for ½–1 tsp brandy or sherry. There are all sorts of flavouring options, but if you add more moisture, you might want to up the ground almond content to make the dough less tacky. This will be more of an issue if you plan to roll out or model the marzipan, less so if you're coating it for chocolates.

**G** There are no-egg versions of marzipan that use other liquids for binding. Claudia Roden's recipe for Toledo marzipan uses a few drops of almond extract in water. Some recipes call for golden, glucose or corn syrup.

**H** If you'd prefer to use cooked egg, there are versions in which whole eggs and sugar are whisked over heat to the ribbon stage – see **here**. Any flavourings are added off the heat and the mixture is whisked constantly until cool. The almonds are then folded in and the dough mixed and kneaded.

Marzipan → Flavours & Variations

ANISE

Used in the marzipan-like filling for _casadielles_ ('homebodies') from Asturias in northern Spain. _Casadielles_ are rough rectangles of pastry, similar to strudel, but bound with anís (or white wine) instead of egg, filled with the nut mixture and pinched at each end before being deep-fried and dusted with icing sugar. Think of them as baklava's slovenly cousin, baggy where their Middle Eastern relatives are neat and tight. Recipes vary. The proportion of nuts to sugar is, in some versions, higher than in our starting point. Anise-flavoured liqueurs from Spain may be less well known than French pastis and Italian sambuca, but Anís del Toro is immortalised in Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants'. A man and a girl are drinking beer in the sun outside a station bar. The girl notices the bull logo on a beaded curtain and asks to try some. 'It tastes like licorice,' she says, after her first sip. 'Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe.' If the idea of everything tasting of liquorice fills you more with dread than longing, take note (and heart) that some _casadielles_ are flavoured with sherry.

CALISSONS D'AIX

_Calissons d'Aix_ are lozenge-shaped sweets from Aix-en-Provence, made from a mixture of ground almonds, honey and candied melon, brought together with Grand Marnier and orange flower water, and then finished with glacé icing as white and shiny as the hull of a motor yacht in the marina at Antibes. In the mouth they're a little like wedding cake, minus the cake bit. One theory goes that they were created to celebrate the nuptials of _Le bon roi_ René of Anjou to Jeanne de Laval in 1452. If celebrate is the right word. History records that the princess was less than keen to marry a man twice her age. Forced marriage notwithstanding, _calissons_ are worth making yourself. Candied melon is fairly easy to find in France, although you'll get far better results by candying your own. A decent substitute can be made by soaking mixed peel in orange brandy.

CHAROSET

As your Jewish friends will tell you, _charoset_ is the one part of the Passover Seder meal worth eating down to the scrapings (not that there's a great deal of competition – a bone, some horseradish, lettuce, salt water and some matzo cracker). _Charoset_ is a sweet paste of fruit, nuts, spices and red wine, intended to resemble the clay, or _cheres_ , enslaved Israelites were forced to use as building material in ancient Egypt. There are many varieties, but the earliest documented recipe is rather like a marzipan that pre-dates sugar, containing dates, walnuts, sesame and red wine vinegar. The Ashkenazi version more widely encountered today calls for apple, cinnamon, walnuts and red wine.

HONEY

You might try swapping egg white for runny honey as the binder for marzipan. I wondered whether almond flower honey might be just the thing, recalling a drive around Majorca in February, when the fields were a blizzard of almond blossom. I made some enquiries. Almond flower honey is by all accounts vile – 'bitter and not suitable for human palates,' says _The Backyard Beekeeper's Honey Handbook_. Apiarists who, for the pollination season, take their bees to California, where four-fifths of the world's crop of almonds is grown, must thoroughly scrub their hives afterwards, to rid them of all traces of the thick, foul-tasting honey. Orange flower it is, then.

LEMON

Local law requires marzipan from Toledo to be made with 50 per cent sweet almonds and 45 per cent sugar, with the remainder taken up by essential ingredients like the preservative citric acid. To make a virtue of this necessity, I made a lemon marzipan, adding lemon zest, a little juice and a cymbal-ping of citric acid, turning the flavour of lemon zest into tart lemon. It was fantastic covered in dark chocolate; uncovered, it was rather like eating little cubes of concentrated lemon drizzle cake. For 100g almonds and 100g sugar, use the finely grated zest of 1 lemon, 1 tsp lemon juice, a pinch of citric acid and just enough egg white or sugar syrup to bind. I also came across a recipe for a lemon marzipan that calls for soaking a dozen dried lemon peels in water for 2 days, changing the water every 4 hours. The peel is then rinsed and simmered in water for about an hour, by which time it should have become soft enough to purée. Measure the purée and put it in a pan with the same volume of ground almonds and twice its volume of granulated sugar. Cook on low, stirring, until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan. When cool, knead it with icing sugar – again about the same volume as the purée. Roll the mix into small balls and leave for a day before eating.

PEANUT

Although peanuts are technically not nuts, but legumes, and aren't as interchangeable as almonds or walnuts, they can be used to make a marzipan-like confection. In Mexico, peanuts are ground up with sugar and vanilla and sold, under the de la Rosa brand, as _dulce de cacahuate estilo marzipan_. The packaging looks like a make-up compact from the 1950s. If you've ever eaten a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, the marrow of a Star Bar, or peanut butter on a teaspoon you've first dipped, wet, into the sugar bowl, you'll have an idea of what it tastes like.

PISTACHIO

Aside from the smooth, lipped shell seemingly designed by Arne Jacobsen, the great visual pleasure of the pistachio is its incongruous green, so appetising when the nut is sliced or chopped. Ground, on the other hand, it takes on the appearance of wood lichen, which is handy for adding that extra touch of authenticity to a Yule log. The pistachio is 'mildly exotic', writes Waverley Root, but not so remarkable, in his opinion, as to justify the prices growers charge for it. The marzipan I made with supermarket pistachios mounted no challenge to Root's judgement. Made with _Sicilian_ pistachios, it would have caused him to reconsider.

POIRE

For one reason or another I was alone in Paris. From my hotel, which was handily close to the local recycling centre, I might just have been able to make out the Eiffel Tower on the horizon had it not been for the vast extractor fan outside my window. It was so depressing I wanted to lie on the bed and watch _Asia Business Report_ while chewing inattentively on a club sandwich served with a trio of cocktail onions and six stale crisps. Nonetheless, I roused myself, taking to the streets with only a pound-shop telescopic umbrella between my grey suede shoes and the glowering sky. I walked until I found myself in a _quartier_ that I vaguely recognised, where I came across a restaurant so bustling and cosy and stereotypically Parisian it might have featured in a late-period Woody Allen movie. The waiter showed me to a bijou table with a view of the street. I ordered _steak-frites_ and a carafe of ordinary red Bordeaux. When I was in my twenties I ate alone in restaurants all the time. Here, in a city where solo dining carries less social stigma, I was reminded of the feeling of independence it gives – perhaps because, by lending purpose and the structure of a meal to time spent alone, it frees you from the obligation of missing human company. All too soon my plate of _nougat glacé_ was reduced to streaks of white like Monet's _Snow at Giverny._ The waiter suggested a digestif. I said yes, and not only because I was reluctant to leave the snug interior, with its spill of golden light on dark wood, the locomotive hiss of the coffee machine, and the break-up/post-affair recriminations playing out in dumb show at the bar. It was also because I was _expected_ not to hurry. I ordered a _poire_ , the highly potent eau-de-vie that tastes like a white jelly baby caught in a beam of winter sunlight through a clear cathedral window. It arrived in what looked like a test tube, laid on a bed of crushed ice, with a brandy balloon standing stoutly in wait. Its very logic demanded I take my time. The rain lifted and the usual Parisian zoetrope of lovers, old ladies and tiny clockwork dogs returned to the boulevard. On my walk back to the hotel, I stopped in at a supermarket and, hoping to prolong the feeling, bought a bottle of _poire William_ so I could enjoy a second glass before bed. No sooner had I walked into the lobby than the dream evaporated, and the bottle remained unopened, until, months later in London, I wanted to make marzipan with a traditional addition of kirsch, but found I didn't have any. Out came the _poire_. I fitted the marzipan into a small tin, poured over the same depth of _poire_ -infused dark chocolate ganache and left it to set, then sliced it into small rectangles with every intention of dipping them in tempered chocolate. I never quite got around to it. The combination of creamy dark ganache, almond and pear was superb, recalling a _belle Hélène_ , albeit after Hélène had hit the bottle. Maybe she had been in Paris _toute seule_.

RUM TRUFFLE

'The Catalan preoccupation with shit,' writes the art critic Robert Hughes, 'would make Sigmund Freud proud.' On 6th January every year, the Feast of the Kings, all good children are given pretty sweetmeats lovingly fashioned from marzipan, while naughty children receive _caca i carbo_ , 'shit and coal' (except no one can be bothered to make the coal). Some pâtissiers strive for maximum authenticity by finishing their cocoa-dusted lumps with sugar-sculpted flies. If you're not by now thoroughly disgusted, try this rum truffle variation of marzipan, which masks the bitter-almond flavour that puts so many people off: use 4 tsp sifted cocoa powder and 1 tsp rum to 100g nuts and 100g sugar.

STICKY GINGER PUDDING

Marzipan's fashionable, contemporary counterpart is variously called a 'power ball', 'raw truffle' or 'energy bite', and is made with ground nuts and the kind of sweetener considered nutritionally superior to white sugar, like puréed dates or maple syrup. You can play fairly fast and loose with the idea, adding spices, flavour extracts and nut butters as you fancy, as long as you end up with a firm, rollable paste. For a sticky ginger pudding flavour version, add the following to the bowl of a food processor: 100g ground hazelnuts, 100g ground almonds, 100g chopped medjool dates, 2 tsp vanilla extract, 2 tsp treacle, 1½ tsp ground ginger and a few pinches of salt. Pulse until the mixture is fairly smooth, and beginning to form into a dough. Now shape the mixture into 12 balls, or, as I prefer, 6 small bars ('fun size', in chocolate-bar parlance).

WALNUT

According to _The Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook_ , compiled in the early thirteenth century, _jawzinaq_ is a form of marzipan made with ground walnuts and sugar syrup. The Swiss chocolatier Läderach makes a walnut marzipan covered in white chocolate, then dipped in dark chocolate, and topped with a walnut, while the Australian company Zotter makes a 50% cocoa chocolate bar filled with a walnut and rum marzipan. I made something similar, using our starting point for marzipan, and found it hard initially to tell it apart from almond marzipan – until the walnut crept up on me. Much of the walnut's distinctive flavour is contained in the skin, which is very difficult to remove entirely. Many chefs' recipes call for skinned walnuts, which is all very well if you have an eager apprentice ready and willing to do it for you. Don't bother, is my advice. The tannic bitterness lent by the skin is as essential to the character of walnut as pointy ears are to Nosferatu. _Nociata_ is an Italian confection that's similar to marzipan, made with equal weights of honey and finely chopped (rather than ground) walnuts. The sweet nut paste is then sandwiched between fresh bay leaves, which lend it their own flavour; you peel the leaves back to eat the sweet.

Marzipan → Other Directions

CLAUDIA RODEN'S MAJORCAN GUINEA FOWL

Stuffed with marzipan, prunes, blanched almonds, dried apricots and sugar.

SWEDISH PRINCESSTORTE

Layers of sponge, jam, pastry cream and whipped cream, covered with green marzipan.

MARZIPAN LATTICE ON A FRUIT TART

MOROCCAN M'HENCHA

Marzipan wrapped in filo pastry, rolled into a coil and baked, then sprinkled with icing sugar.

MARZIPAN-STUFFED DATES

MARZIPANSCHWEIN

SIMNEL CAKE

Fruit cake topped with marzipan and 11 marzipan balls, baked for Easter.

**Macaroons**

Like marzipan, macaroons are made with equal weights of sugar and ground almonds mixed with egg white, but a lot more egg white is used. For our starting point, the egg whites are whisked with the sugar, as for meringue, lending the finished confection its characteristic domed shape. A faster, flatter version can be made with the same ingredients by hand-whisking the egg whites until foamy before folding into the nuts and sugar.

_For 18 macaroons of about 7cm in diameter_

INGREDIENTS

2 egg whites

Pinch of salt

200g caster sugar **A B C**

200g ground almonds **A D**

Rice paper – optional, but recommended

**1** Whisk the egg whites with the salt until frothy. **E**

**2** As you whisk, add the sugar gradually. The mixture should become stiff and shiny.

**3** Fold in the nuts to make a mixture that can be piped, or fashioned with a pair of spoons, into 4cm rounds. **F G**

**4** Leaving a little room for the macaroons to spread, place on a baking tray lined with rice paper or a silicone mat. In the absence of these, grease the tray well.

Rice paper is preferable.

**5** Bake at 180°C for around 20 minutes until turning golden on top, then cool on a rack.

**6** When cool, roughly tear around the rice paper (if using) to set your macaroons free.

Store in an airtight container.

LEEWAY

**A** The ratio of ground nuts to sugar varies from recipe to recipe: anywhere between 2:1 and 1:2 is common.

**B** Using 50/50 icing sugar and caster sugar will soften the texture of the finished macaroons.

**C** Using all or part brown sugar will boost the flavour of both sugar and nuts.

**D** Other nuts can be used: see Flavours & Variations.

**E** As noted, the whisking involved in this method gives the macaroons their distinctive domed shape. If you're not bothered about the rise, give the egg whites a quick whisk by hand, then stir into the sugar and ground nuts.

**F** Some recipes call for 1 tsp–1 tbsp cornflour or rice flour, which will absorb excess moisture.

**G** For almond macaroons, gently nestle a whole almond on top of each one before baking.

Macaroons → Flavours & Variations

ALMOND & RASPBERRY

Michel Roux makes a raspberry powder for macaroons, drying fresh raspberries in a low oven, or an airing cupboard, then grinding them. I'm more likely to grab freeze-dried raspberries in the baking section of the supermarket, and crush them. Either way, the raspberry retains its distinctive character, making for as vivid and spiky a contrast with the sandy macaroon as the pinkness of prickly pears in the dun-coloured Sonoran Desert. Add a little almond extract to the mixture, and the resulting marzipan and jam-like flavours will yield what you might call Bakewell macaroons. Follow our starting point, adding 50g crushed dried raspberries with the nuts at step **3**.

AMARETTI

When I first worked in Soho, many of the local restaurants were still Italian, and at lunchtime my colleagues and I would gorge on bread-sticks and cheap bowls of pasta. Too full for pudding, we got our sweet fix in the form of flaming sambuca shots and Lazzaroni amaretti biscuits, whose paper wrappers we'd set alight, as is the custom, and watch float to the ceiling like burning wishes. Mine was always that I didn't have to go back to work that afternoon. Steadily the old Italian joints were replaced with Thai restaurants and sushi bars, which I'd assumed was just the march of fashion, but on reflection might have been linked to the insurance implications of encouraging table-top arson. Years later I was disappointed to find that diners in Italy were far too cool to set fire to anything other than a chain of Dunhill cigarettes; now, of course, they can't even do that. There are two types of amaretti, _morbidi_ and _secchi_ (soft and dry). Lazzaroni's amaretti are the dry type, making them hard to duplicate in a domestic kitchen. Why bother, you may ask, especially as the bought version comes in such attractive packaging? The answer is simple: to understand what wonders can be achieved by a few basic tweaks to our starting point for macaroons. The following might not be quite to Lazzaroni standards of neatness, but they're very good to eat. In old-fashioned recipes some of the bitter-almond character would have been lent by apricot kernels, but current advice is to avoid them entirely, as they contain trace amounts of cyanide. No matter: a good-quality almond extract will provide flavour in spades. Whisk 2 egg whites with ½ tsp egg white powder until foamy, add ¼ tsp cream of tartar and keep on whisking until soft peaks form. Add 100g caster sugar, 25g at a time, whisking for a minute to stiff peaks after each addition. Then, in another bowl, thoroughly combine 225g ground almonds, 200g icing sugar and ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda, sift the mixture, and fold into the egg-white mixture with 2 tsp almond extract. Transfer to a piping bag, and pipe into 5 cm domes on a silicone mat or well-greased tray. At this point you might sprinkle over some sugar pearls, if you have them. Leave at room temperature for 30 minutes, then bake at 140°C for 25 minutes. Turn the oven up to 180°C and leave in for a further 10 minutes. Transfer to a baking rack to cool.

COCONUT

For coconut macaroons, whisk a whole egg with a little salt before thoroughly mixing in 100g each of desiccated coconut and caster sugar. The inclusion of the yolk makes for a spongier macaroon, and the additional moisture offsets some of the coconut's dryness. Shape and bake as per the starting point. Decorate with a zigzag of chocolate once cooled. If you prefer old-fashioned pyramid macaroons, shape the mixture into small mounds by hand, topping with a cherry if desired. If they simply must be pink, stir a little red food colouring in with the nuts and sugar. They'll need longer in the oven – more like 25 minutes.

HAZELNUT & CHOCOLATE

In Italy, _brutti ma buoni_ ('ugly but good') biscuits are as popular as their spelling and preparation are various. Most recipes I've come across call for the egg and sugar to be heated in one way or another. Either a meringue is made and gently warmed before the nuts are added; or the egg, sugar and nuts are processed together then heated in a pan; or, as a third alternative, the sugar and egg white are stirred for 5 minutes in a double-boiler before being whisked to peaks. But you'll also find _brutti ma buoni_ made with a cold mixture, as per our starting point. You'll need to make sure the egg whites are whisked to firm peaks, so the biscuits are robust enough to hold their messy shape as they're baked. Use a mixture of ground and coarsely chopped nuts for an authentic knobbly finish. That's the _brutti_ part covered. For the _buoni_ , add a little cocoa powder and vanilla extract to flatter the naturally beautiful flavour of hazelnut. The only unforgivable tweak is to make the biscuits attractive to look at: where's the fun in _belli e buoni_?

MACADAMIA & BROWN SUGAR

In their shell, macadamias, the premium-priced nuts from Australia, look like the kind of large wooden beads Hampstead ladies wear to the theatre. Eating a shelled one is like taking a bite out of a porcelain teacup – brittle and extremely fine. Concentrate and the flavour might remind you of Brazil nut. Both taste a little like coconut once you've chewed the sugary juice away. A less attentive munch may yield little more than a kinship with bland cooking oil, which is unsurprising given how oily macadamias are; so oily, in fact, that's it's a mug's game trying to make nut meal out of them. As with other fatty nuts, chilling before you grind them will have a temporary effect, but they will still melt into nut butter. Best to accept that its texture is the macadamia's best feature and use it in coarse chunks in an almond macaroon. Go with 100g roughly chopped macadamias, folded in at step **3**. Using soft brown sugar in place of white caster gives the macaroons extra flavour and teases out a hint of butteriness in the macadamia. To loosen the batter, I add a few teaspoons of maple syrup too.

OATMEAL & RAISIN

The first time I saw the launch ad for 'breakfast biscuits' – a sort of edible oval précis of cereal and milk – I was bemused. When were biscuits ever _not_ for breakfast? In my youth, before concerns over calorific intake brought an end to those halcyon days of eating anything, anytime, in unlimited quantities, I often scoffed garibaldis and fig rolls with my sugary coffee before setting off for school or work. Intrigued, nonetheless, by the potential for timeslot-specific refreshments, I wrote to Smirnoff with my suggestion for breakfast vodka. I took the lack of response as a sure sign they were about to launch their own version without crediting me. Breakfast biscuits slipped my mind until I tried making macaroons with oats instead of nuts. I had the chewiness of whole oats in mind, but the fineness of the oatmeal I used made for slabs of petrified porridge the likes of which a Highland shepherd might keep in his sporran for desperate times. To achieve proper biscuit status they needed a coarser texture and more sweetness, so taking inspiration from the wonderful Anzac biscuit, the second batch combined 100g porridge oats, 75g caster sugar, 25g dark brown sugar and 1 tbsp golden syrup, 2 tbsp raisins and ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda with the whisked egg whites. Opt for the hand-whisk method mentioned at **E** under Leeway for a super-quick breakfast version: they'll take 5 minutes to mix up and can be baking while you jump in the shower/trim your nostril-hairs for that 10a.m. presentation.

POTATO

_Panellets_ are nut-based biscuits from Catalonia that are eaten with a glass of sweet wine on and around All Saints' Day. A common variation calls for the inclusion of mashed potato – either ordinary spud or sweet potato. Try adding 200g cooked, mashed sweet potato to the starting point. Include enough egg yolk – rather than white – to bind, and some finely grated lemon zest for flavour. Once chilled, fashion the dough into balls. Roll them in egg white, and then in chopped, untoasted pine nuts or hazelnuts (about the same weight as almonds) before baking for 15 minutes at 200°C.

WALNUT, CHEESE & CAYENNE

My low-carb, gluten-free friend was coming to dinner and I didn't want her to miss out on the nice cheese I'd bought. I made savoury macaroons for her, taking my cue from the biscuits **here** , in which the sugar is replaced by the same weight of Red Leicester. I mixed 100g ground almonds with 50g chopped walnuts, 100g finely grated Parmesan, ¼ tsp cayenne pepper and just enough of 1 whole beaten egg to make a dough. I rolled it into small balls, flattened them with the heel of my hand and baked them at 180°C for 12–15 minutes. 'I think I'm allergic to nuts,' said my friend. I smiled and handed her the glorious Williams pear I'd bought specially for the leftovers lunch I was planning for the following day, plus the magnificent cheeseboard. 'And dairy,' she added, looking at the Camembert like it was an improvised explosive device. She took the pear, though. When I cleared her plate I found she'd cut the pear into quarters, but not taken a single bite. Fussiness I can handle, but the waste singed my soul. I lost a friend, but gained some excellent walnut and cheese biscuits.

**Nut- meal Cake: Torta Santiago**

This Spanish nut-meal cake is normally made in wide, shallow, round tins, and so often looks like a tart filling removed from its pastry case (and some versions are baked in a pastry case). Using a 20cm tin will make a more conventional-looking cake – one that will tend towards the upper end of the given baking time. Like marzipan and macaroons, _torta Santiago_ is made with equal weights of ground almonds and sugar, but here the entire egg is used, not just the white.

_For a 23–25cm cake_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

4 medium or 3 large eggs **B C**

200g caster sugar **D**

200g ground almonds **E**

1 tsp baking powder **F**

Finely grated zest of 2 oranges or lemons **G**

2 tsp ground cinnamon **G**

Icing sugar, to decorate **H**

**1** Whisk the eggs with the sugar until the mixture becomes pale and voluminous.

You can do this with an electric whisk, but a vigorous assault with a hand whisk will do.

**2** Mix together the ground nuts, baking powder, citrus zest and cinnamon (or other flavourings), then fold them into the egg and sugar mixture.

**3** Scrape into a well-buttered tin. Bake at 180°C for 20–30 minutes. When a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean, the cake is ready.

You might also dust the tin with flour or ground nuts, as the mixture is sticky. These cakes need watching, as they form a sugary crust that's prone to burn. Start to check at around 17 minutes. If yours is getting too brown, cover it with a loose tent of foil.

**4** When the cake is cool, cut a St James's cross template out of paper, lay it on the cake, and sprinkle over icing sugar. Carefully remove the template.

LEEWAY

**A** Use 50g each of sugar and ground almonds, ⅛ tsp baking powder and 1 egg to fill 2 darioles or ramekins; reduce the baking time to 18–25 minutes.

**B** As with sponge cake, roughly the same weight of eggs is used as other ingredients – i.e. 1 medium egg per 50g each of nuts and sugar. An extra yolk or two can be added for a richer, moister cake.

**C** Some recipes recommend beating the yolks of the eggs and the sugar together before adding the almonds and aromatics, then folding in the whites of the eggs whisked to soft peaks.

**D** The ratio of sugar to nuts is adaptable. Rick Stein's recipe calls for 3:1 ground almonds to sugar.

**E** Other ground nuts can be used – see Flavours & Variations.

**F** Baking powder is not essential, but it makes the cake notably lighter.

**G** Ferran Adrià suggests port as an alternative flavouring.

**H** Forget the icing-sugar cross and decorate with flaked almonds, scattered over the cake before baking.

Nut-meal Cake → Flavours & Variations

HAZELNUT

Anyone who prefers hazelnuts to almonds will be glad to know that there are many hazelnut variations on the classic Galician _torta Santiago_. The Slovenian version is often topped with a caramel butter icing, the Austrian a mocha. The food writer Carol Field adds candied orange peel to hers and finishes it with a chocolate glaze. My favourite is the plain cake noted by Elizabeth Karmel, which is served with a gooseberry sauce made with sour cream. Edward Behr's _The Art of Eating Cookbook_ includes an Italian equivalent, _torta di nocciole_ , to which a little cocoa powder is typically added – a fairly common enhancement in hazelnut cakes and biscuits. The cocoa lends depth, as will a little instant coffee (1 tbsp dissolved in 1 tsp boiling water will do the trick). In Behr's opinion, however, the cocoa is a distraction, and the cake is best served with a zabaglione made with Barolo or Moscato, or nothing but a glass of Moscato d'Asti.

HONEY & CRÈME FRAÎCHE

Andrée Maze, better known as La Mazille, author of the classic _La Bonne Cuisine de Périgord_ , was a collector of recipes in the Elizabeth David mould. She gives a recipe for a hazelnut cake that's similar to _torta Santiago_ , but with honey replacing the sugar. I had a pot of good heather honey that I wanted to try in a cake, but I plumped for almonds over hazelnuts because they provide a more neutral-flavoured background. I also added a little crème fraîche to the batter, to offset some of the sweetness. The finished cake had a subtle but exquisite flavour, and the sour edge from the cream made it so interesting that I nixed my plan to serve it with a compote of greengages and had only a glass of ice-cold Jersey milk on the side. Follow the starting point, but replace _half_ the caster sugar with the same weight of honey (gently heated if it has hardened in the jar). Fold in the crème fraîche with the nuts: aim for 1 tbsp for every 50g ground nuts.

LIME & CASSIA

Santiago cakes are traditionally flavoured with citrus zest and cinnamon. This variation calls for the combination of cassia and lime zest: so assertively spicy as to threaten the cake's dedication to a saint. Cassia is Charlton Heston to cinnamon's Montgomery Clift – stronger and less complex. Where cinnamon comes in delicate cigarillo-like scrolls, cassia is like a partly unfurled Gran Corona, thick and stippled and often broken into rough shards. Grind some and sprinkle a pinch onto a just-cut slice of lime. The fragrance may well remind you of cola. Accordingly, I recommend brown sugar in this cake variation, for its caramelised quality. For a 20cm cake, I used 2 eggs, 125g ground almonds, 100g light brown sugar, 25g dark brown sugar, the finely grated zest of 3 limes (as well as, or instead of, the orange or lemon zest), 2 tsp freshly ground cassia and ¼ tsp freshly grated nutmeg.

ORANGE-CHOCOLATE

Claudia Roden's famous almond and orange cake could be considered a variation on _torta Santiago_ : 2 cooked, whole, puréed oranges are added to 250g each of ground almonds and sugar, and 6 eggs, along with 1 tsp baking powder. It's all mixed up in a food processor. The only drawback of the recipe is that it's tempting to wheel it out too often. To prevent déjà-vu, try a choc-orange variation – or rather orange-choc, as the fruit dominates at these proportions. You can increase the cocoa content or add some grated dark chocolate if you want to level things out. For a deep 18cm tin, use 125g each of ground almonds and caster sugar, 4 tbsp cocoa powder, 3 eggs, 1 cooked and puréed whole navel orange and a pinch of salt. Last time I made this, the orange was on the juicy side, and I wanted to add a dash of Cointreau, so I mixed in a few tablespoons of plain flour to absorb some of the excess moisture. As with most cakes of this type, crème fraîche on the side is a must – as is a cup of coffee. Readers of _The Flavour Thesaurus_ may recall that I'm a fan of the orange-coffee combination; I recommend replacing the cocoa powder in the cake mixture with 4 tsp instant coffee granules dissolved in 1 tsp boiling water.

PECAN

According to Ken Albala, the original 1925 recipe for pecan pie was the work of a corn syrup manufacturer. The nut, sugar and egg ratios are fairly in line with our starting point – 175g pecan halves to 200g sugar and 3 eggs – but a great deal of syrup (240ml) is added, as well as a few tablespoons of melted butter, a teaspoon of vanilla and a pinch of salt. All of which means the cooked filling differs from the sponge-cake texture of _torta Santiago_. It's more of a glistening, transparent, super-sweet jellified custard embedded with nuts. Bake it in a 20cm pastry case, on the lowest shelf, at 180°C for 50–60 minutes.

WALNUT

The advantage of Santiago-style nut cakes is that they can be in the oven within a matter of minutes. The disadvantage is that they are so delicious, they deter your dinner guests from leaving. Pellegrino Artusi reports that his guests found his _torta di noci_ , made with ground walnut meal, 'exquisite'. All I can say is the cake I made with ground walnuts and a grating of blood orange zest, served with coffee and a glass of Armagnac, kept our friends dabbing at their plates for stray crumbs long after the ostentatious yawning had started. With hindsight, it might have been wiser to kill the evening dead with a white chocolate trifle and a shot of Mulligan's Irish Cream Hint of Mint.

**Frangipane**

Frangipane adds an equal weight of butter to the nut-meal cake ingredients. While it makes a fantastic cake, frangipane is more often associated with tarts. It furnishes Bakewells with their classic filling, or fanned apples and pears with their soft context in the tarts that fill the windows of French bakeries.

_For a 20cm cake, or 750ml tart filling_ **A B**

INGREDIENTS

150g unsalted butter, just soft enough to beat **C**

150g caster sugar **C**

3 medium eggs **D**

150g ground almonds **E F**

1 tsp almond extract – optional **G**

Pinch of salt

**1** Cream the soft butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. **H**

**2** Beat in the eggs, one at a time.

**3** Thoroughly stir in the nuts. **H**

Add any liquid flavourings here.

**4** Scrape the mixture into a buttered and lined deep 20cm cake tin or a blind-baked tart case ( **here** ). Bake at 180°C for 25–35 minutes, starting to test from 25.

Use the skewer test – when the frangipane is done, a skewer inserted in the centre should come out clean.

LEEWAY

**A** For a quantity to fill 2 ramekins, about 250ml, use 50g each of butter, sugar and ground nuts, plus 1 egg; bake for 15–20 minutes. To make a deep 25cm cake, use 200g each of butter, sugar and ground nuts, plus 4 eggs, and bake for 30–40 minutes.

**B** This quantity will also be enough for a 23cm Bakewell tart – do use the almond extract. Scrape the frangipane mixture on top of a blind-baked tart case, cooled and spread with a layer of jam. Sprinkle with flaked almonds and bake as per step **4**.

**C** As with a butter sponge cake, you can reduce the butter and sugar to half the weight of the ground nuts and still get good results – just remember to reduce the tin size too.

**D** Or 2 large eggs will suffice. Use more eggs if you want a fluffier, puffier frangipane for a cake (the puff might be less desirable in a tart).

**E** Nuts other than almonds can be used – see the Flavours & Variations section.

**F** Add 1 tbsp flour per 100g nut meal for a more robust texture. Wheat or rice flours, or fine cornmeal, will all do the job. Worth considering if you're adding wet ingredients to the mix.

**G** Flavour your frangipane with 1 tsp vanilla extract, rosewater or rum, or boost the almond flavour with a few drops of almond extract.

**H** Some cooks mix the egg yolks into the creamed butter and sugar, then fold in the whisked egg whites after the nuts. This will lighten a cake, but may be too puffy for a tart.

Frangipane → Flavours & Variations

CASHEW

A brief (if enjoyable) survey of French pâtisseries revealed that cashews are about as welcome as Dr Atkins. Maybe it's the way they look. The cashew lacks the vivid colour of pistachio, the elegant shape of the almond, or the cerebral intricacy of the walnut. Untoasted, unsalted cashews are foetal in appearance, mundane in flavour. The best that Frederic Rosengarten has to say about the 'bland' cashew is that it's sometimes used to extend almond. I tried cashew on its own in a frangipane, and could see his point. It tasted like the filling of a treacle tart might if you'd run out of treacle and resorted to plain sugar syrup instead. Malcolm Livingston II, pastry chef at WD~50 and Noma, brooks no blandness by smoking his cashews and using them for a nougatine.

FRIANDS

Leftover egg whites needn't always mean meringues. Friands, the little French cakes so popular Down Under, are so much more fun to eat. Think of them as a riff on frangipane. The formula is not quite as easy to remember as that for frangipane (equal weights of four ingredients), but for friands I go by a rule of thumb: equal weights of icing sugar and meal, the latter split 70/30 between ground almonds and plain flour; a little less butter, about 80 per cent of the weight of the sugar/meal; and 1 egg white for each 40g icing sugar. In a bowl, mix together 140g ground almonds, 60g plain flour, 200g sifted icing sugar and a pinch of salt, then make a well in the centre. Whisk 5 egg whites – a hand-whisk will do – until frothy, then pour into the well and mix a little before stirring in 160g melted and cooled unsalted butter. You may also want to add the finely grated zest of a lemon or the seeds of a vanilla pod and 100g raspberries or blueberries. Pour into 10 small silicone moulds or well-buttered tins and bake at 180°C for 15–20 minutes until golden.

OLIVE OIL & CHOCOLATE

Nigella Lawson's recipe for this frangipane-like cake calls for olive oil rather than butter. Compared to our starting point, it contains a little more sugar, offsetting the harshness of the cocoa. Mix 50g cocoa powder with 125ml boiling water. When combined it resembles a glossy ganache. Don't be taken in. It may initially taste chocolatey, but quickly develops a powerful bitterness, like aspirin. While the cocoa is cooling, and your gag reflex subsides, whisk 3 eggs with 150ml non-virgin olive oil and 200g caster sugar. Once the sugar has dissolved, whisk in the cocoa mixture and 2 tsp vanilla extract. Taste again and you should just about be able to detect the olive oil. Mix in 150g ground almonds, ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda and a pinch of salt. Put into a lightly oiled 22cm tin lined with baking parchment and bake at 170°C for 45 minutes. The results have a moist, fudgey texture that suits chocolate cake very well.

ORANGE FLOWER WATER

Old recipes for frangipane, or 'franchipane', did not always contain nuts. It was originally a pastry cream, which can be found on our custard continuum. A recipe in _The Professed Cook_ (1769) calls for 3 eggs, 1 pint of cream, 2 or 3 spoonfuls of flour and a 'proper' quantity of sugar. Once the custard was cooked, some crushed almond biscuits, lemon peel, butter, a couple of egg yolks, orange flowers and orange flower water were stirred through. In _English Food_ , Jane Grigson gives a similar recipe for a baked custard, except it calls for ground almonds rather than biscuits and sherry rather than orange flower water. According to _The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets_ , the derivation of frangipane is frangipani, a flower (otherwise known as plumeria) used by French glove-makers to perfume their wares.

PINE NUT

I bought a packet of ground pine nuts to try them in a frangipane in place of almonds. As expected, the flavour was mildly resinous, but the grind of the meal came as a surprise. It was as fine as wheat flour, which meant the batter (made to frangipane proportions) was too dense when cooked. A little baking powder improved matters. Some cooks use a little leavener in their frangipanes for a fluffier texture. As to the pine-nut meal, let's just say I won't be restocking once the packet is finished. It's expensive, for one thing, and the resulting tart paled in comparison to Italian _torta di pinoli_ , an almond frangipane cake covered with whole pine nuts: mix in 50g pine nuts at the end of step **3**, then scatter another 50g pine nuts on top before baking.

PISTACHIO

Used in early frangipane recipes, but prohibitively expensive for all but the swankiest pâtisseries and restaurants. At The Square in Mayfair they make a pistachio frangipane with chopped, ripe figs folded into it. The mixture is then piped into _kataifi_ pastry, and served with vanilla and almond panna cotta, thyme ice cream and fig pulp. Pistachio and grapefruit are well matched, perhaps because (as Waverley Root observes) the flavour of pistachio is more suggestive of a spice than a nut, and grapefruit is famously fond of spice, especially cinnamon. I once baked a pistachio frangipane over segments of pink grapefruit. The results were like an extreme crumble. If they eat puddings in deep space, this is what they'll taste like.

RUM

Raymond Blanc includes 1 tbsp rum or Cognac in the filling for his _galette des rois_ ('king cake'), effectively a frangipane calling for equal weights of butter, icing sugar and ground almonds (75g in this case, plus 1 egg, and 1 extra yolk). This will fill 400g puff pastry, rolled into two circles, the lower and upper being 20cm and 22cm in diameter respectively. Spread the frangipane over the lower circle, leaving a 2cm margin all around the edge and painting it with yet another yolk. (Blanc suggests grating chocolate over the frangipane, or covering it with slices of fried quince.) Lay the upper layer of pastry over the lower, chanting a low-pitched invocation, and seal around the edges. Chill for an hour, in both senses of the word. Brush the top with more yolk and score a pattern in it, traditionally a fan of spokes that curve as they near the edge, but you might prefer a grid of diamond shapes, a sprig of laurel leaves or a cameo of Elvis with the collar of his jumpsuit turned up. Bake at 180°C for 45 minutes. _Galettes des rois_ are traditionally eaten on 6th January, at Epiphany, the _rois_ being the Magi visiting the infant Christ. Whoever finds the bean or charm customarily baked into the cake gets to wear a crown for the day (or to spend it on the phone trying to get a dentist's appointment). Dorie Greenspan notes that French pâtisseries now sell _galettes des rois_ from Christmas to the end of January, and that the almond cream might be flavoured with rose or clementine. Pithiviers, which is not dissimilar, is made year-round, and often contains a layer of jam on top of the frangipane.

SPICY CHOCOLATE

Rather than frangipane, my spicy choc cakes are made along friand lines ( **here** ). If you've ever pressed your face to the window of a pâtisserie and wanted _all_ of the cakes, this flavour is for you. It's inspired by an outstanding iced biscuit recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi who, in turn, were inspired by Israeli _duvshanyot_ or German pfeffernüsse. It tastes like a bite out of every cake in the shop: ginger cake, fruit cake, chocolate cake, citrus cake, spice cake and, thanks to the glacé icing, lemon drizzle cake. Cover 25g currants in rum or brandy and soak for a few hours, or a few days. In a large bowl, mix 100g ground almonds, 50g plain flour, 150g sifted icing sugar, 1½ tsp cocoa powder, ½ tsp each of ground cinnamon, allspice, ginger and freshly grated nutmeg, ¼ tsp salt, the finely grated zest of 1 lemon and 1 orange, and ½ tsp vanilla extract. In a separate bowl, whisk 4 medium egg whites to a foam, then fold them into the ground almond mixture until well combined. Stir in 120g melted butter, 75g coarsely grated 70% cocoa dark chocolate and the drained currants until just about combined. Pour into 10–12 small cake tins or moulds (bars/midi-muffins) and bake at 180°C for 15–20 minutes. When they've cooled a little, glaze with an icing made from 75g icing sugar and 2 tbsp lemon juice, and finish with little jewels of mixed peel.

Frangipane → Other Directions

PITHIVIERS

See here

JÉSUITE

Frangipane-filled puff-pastry triangle decorated with sugar glaze and flaked almonds.

BAKEWELL TART

Shortcrust pastry case, spread with jam, topped with frangipane and baked.

MINCE PIES

Put a little mincemeat in pastry cases and top with frangipane.

FRUIT TARTS

VINE-LEAF FRITTER

Soak vine leaves in brandy, fill with frangipane and roll up. Dip in batter and fry, then sprinkle with icing sugar.

FRANGIPANE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE

ALMOND CROISSANTS

**Nut Sauce: Tarator**

The term 'tarator' applies to any number of preparations, but for our purposes refers to a pounded walnut and garlic sauce, sometimes mixed with yogurt to make a cold soup – see **here**. As with frangipane, our starting point for nut sauce calls for equal weights of its principal ingredients (in tarator's case, bread, milk, nuts and oil). Adjust the quantities of garlic and vinegar according to preference.

_For about 200ml sauce_

INGREDIENTS

100g white bread (about 2 slices), preferably a bit dry **A**

100ml milk or water

100g nuts **B**

1 garlic clove, roughly chopped **C**

½ tsp salt

100ml olive oil **B**

1 small bunch of dill, chopped **D**

1–4 tbsp lemon juice or red wine vinegar **E**

Chopped walnuts, chopped dill and/or walnut oil, to garnish

**1** Put the bread, shorn of its crusts, to soak in the milk or water until soft, then squeeze dry.

**2** Place the nuts in a blender or small food processor and pulverise. Add the squeezed-out bread, together with the garlic and salt, then blitz to a coarse or smooth paste according to taste.

If you don't have a blender or processor, or prefer to use a pestle and mortar, see **F** under Leeway.

**3** With the motor running, slowly drizzle in the olive oil.

**4** Stir in the chopped dill, then add lemon juice or vinegar, tasting as you go.

**5** Check the seasoning, then chill. Allow time for the flavours to meld, if possible.

**6** Garnish with chopped walnuts, dill or a drizzle of walnut oil, or all three.

LEEWAY

**A** The bread can be replaced by more ground nuts, if you prefer.

**B** Use skinned walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts or pine nuts, preferably blanched or toasted first to intensify their flavour. Walnuts can be hard to grind – it may be easier to use a pestle and mortar. Claudia Roden makes her pine nut tarator sauce for fish with fish stock instead of oil. Leanne Kitchen uses blanched almonds in her recipe, and adds a small amount of ground cinnamon.

**C** Some cooks use as many as 5 garlic cloves.

**D** Sally Butcher uses coriander leaf and summer savoury in place of dill in her walnut tarator sauce to serve with fried vegetables. Herbs can be omitted – it'll still be tarator.

**E** Some recipes call for a lot more acidity – 4 tbsp is a pretty authentic quantity, but I find it too sour, and tend to use just 2 tbsp.

**F** The time-honoured (and time-consuming) means of preparation is with a pestle and mortar. Pound the garlic with the salt first, then add the walnuts in stages, pounding until you have a paste. Then repeat with the bread. Either transfer to a blender or food processor and pick up from step **3**, or gradually whisk in the olive oil by hand, as you would for a vinaigrette, then continue from step **4**.

Nut Sauce → Flavours & Variations

AUBERGINE **,** WALNUT & RED PEPPER

Petrol stations should sell aubergines next to the barbecue charcoal. Left to char and soften as the embers cool, barbecued aubergine will develop the smokiness and silken texture to take the _meh_ out of your _melitzanosalata_ – (roughly) the Greek equivalent of _baba ghanoush_. There are many versions, and while roasted aubergine flesh is common to all of them, nuts aren't – although my favourite combines aubergine with walnuts, roasted garlic and red pepper, red wine vinegar, olive oil, parsley and seasoning. Not dissimilar, that is, to romesco, which is probably why I like it. In a food processor, reduce 2 roasted garlic cloves and 100g chopped walnuts to a paste, adding 2 tbsp olive oil in increments. Gradually add the scraped-out flesh of 2 barbecued aubergines and 1 roasted, skinned red pepper, 6 more tbsp olive oil, 2 tbsp lemon juice and 1 tbsp red wine vinegar, plus salt and pepper. If you don't have a food processor, make the paste using a pestle and mortar and beat in the other ingredients. Garnish with plenty of chopped parsley and eat with flatbreads fresh from the grill.

CUCUMBER & YOGURT SOUP

Also known as tarator, this Bulgarian soup takes the starting-point sauce as its base. At step **4**, add just 1 tbsp lemon juice or vinegar, then transfer the mixture to a bowl and whisk in 500ml natural yogurt. Add 1 peeled, de-seeded and diced cucumber and stir well. Taste and season, adding more lemon juice or vinegar if you like, plus as much cold water as necessary to thin to your desired texture. Some cooks use sour cream, or a mix of sour cream and yogurt, to give a richer texture, then refrigerate. Others prefer the cucumber with its skin on, or grated or mixed with some diced fennel. Serve chilled.

GARLIC & ALMOND SOUP

_Ajo blanco_ translates as 'white garlic', and while there are dozens of allegedly authentic variations on this almond-based soup, the garlic is non-negotiable. As is sunshine. _Ajo blanco_ is a swim you can drink. Try to make this at the cooler time of morning, so you don't get hot and bothered, and the soup has enough time to chill. Make an almond, garlic and bread paste (no dill) as per our starting point for nut sauce, but with three times the amount of bread, nuts and garlic. Transfer to a blender with 100ml olive oil and ½ tsp salt and whizz. With the motor running, slowly add 750ml cold water until the soup has a creamy consistency. Finish with up to 3 tbsp sherry vinegar and additional salt to taste. Chill in the fridge for a couple of hours. Relax in the garden with a glass of very cold Tio Pepe and some green olives while you consider your garnish options. Diced ripe melon, quince jelly, apple, pear, Muscat grapes, or, as recommended by Frank Camorra, a grape granita? In more remote parts of Andalusia, _ajo blanco_ is served with roast potato, but I'd opt for a little nebula of olive-oil droplets.

LOU SAUSSOUN

Jenny Baker describes a nut-based sauce from the Var ( _lou saussoun_ is a regional term for 'poor man'). To make about 125ml, pound 3 sprigs' worth of mint leaves with ½ tsp fennel seeds using a pestle and mortar. Add 25g anchovy fillets and 50g ground almonds, and beat in 1–2 tbsp olive oil and enough water to make a paste. Taste, and add salt and/or a squeeze of lemon if required. Serve in a little pot with an extra sprig of mint and eat, thinly spread on crackers. Reminded of Vietnamese cuisine by the combination of mint and pungent fish, I served it on white-rice crackers. _Cerneux_ , from Touraine, is a similarly obscure nut-based spread described by Waverley Root. It's made with green walnuts steeped in the juice of green grapes, and garnished with chopped chervil. Quite tart, records Root, but it sharpens the appetite.

PEAR & WALNUT

_Intxaursalsa_ , from the Basque Country, is a 'walnut cream' made from the ground nuts, cooked in milk with sugar and cinnamon, and served in small portions at room temperature with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. Thomas Keller's exquisite walnut soup is more complicated. He makes a purée of pear that's been cooked in a stock of sugar and Sauvignon Blanc. Next, he simmers roasted, skinned walnuts in cream infused with vanilla, and strains it. The pear purée and nut cream are then combined, and the soup is served cold with a little walnut oil. You might feel bad about discarding the nuts; no doubt their grainy texture wouldn't impress the Michelin inspectors, but at the domestic table, they may be welcome. You could make a hybrid of the French Laundry and Basque versions – a _kellerintxaursalsa_. I find the mixture of fruit, nut, vanilla and cream delectable, like a whole serving of the god-given concoction at the bottom of a sundae glass. The bonus of cooking the Keller version was discovering how good pears are when poached in Sauvignon Blanc. I'll never go back to red.

PESTO

Being served pesto at a special meal is like being given socks for Christmas. When a friend took me for lunch at Assaggi, a pricey Italian restaurant in Notting Hill, and insisted everyone have the pesto, my heart sank. She was paying. How could I object? The pasta, a fresh tagliolini, arrived tightly ravelled like a miniature Egyptian mummy. The pesto was made with seven herbs, the exact constituency of which was a secret. Suffice to say it was perfectly balanced, like a stroll in a herb garden in summer, and made the dominance of basil in ordinary pesto seem crude and overbearing. In place of pine nuts, it contained walnuts, which lent a pleasing bitterness. I've since tried to recreate it at home, mixing basil, parsley, chervil, mint, thyme, rosemary and sage, with decent results that nonetheless fall mysteriously short of the mark. Pesto Trapanese is a Sicilian variant from the western port of Trapani, where local cooks, catering to homesick Genoese sailors, supposedly created an approximation of Ligurian pesto using the indigenous small-leaved basil, almonds in place of pine nuts or walnuts, and fleshy ripe tomatoes. Cheese was generally omitted, although pecorino does feature in some versions, as do other Sicilian specialities like anchovies, chilli flakes and even mint. Delicious, but you can't help but think the main effect of pesto Trapanese would be to remind the Ligurian sea dogs that they were five hundred miles from home. For a classic basil pesto, pound 50g toasted pine nuts with 1 garlic clove, a few pinches of sea salt and 40g basil leaves until you have a paste-like consistency. Transfer to a dish and stir in up to 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil and 50g finely grated Parmesan. Check for seasoning, adding a little fresh lemon juice if you like. Alternatively, blitz the ingredients in a blender. For pesto Trapanese, use 75g blanched almonds, 2 garlic cloves, 25g basil or mint leaves, 500g skinned raw tomatoes and 50–100ml extra virgin olive oil, plus salt and pepper. Eat with linguine, from a shallow bowl, dreaming of pine nuts and Paganini.

PICADA

A sauce so transformative it deserves its own Disney movie. Use picada to thicken stews, to flavour bean or lentil dishes, to stir into steamed clams (for _almejas de palam_ ó _s_ ), to serve alongside roasted meat, fish or vegetables, or simply spread on slices of French bread. Toast or fry a slice of crustless white bread, then pound it with 1–2 garlic cloves, a handful each of skinned toasted almonds and hazelnuts, ¼ tsp sea salt and the leaves of a few sprigs of flat-leaf parsley. Some versions call for a pinch of saffron, others for a hint of chocolate. You can dilute it further with a little oil, water or stock. Single-nut versions are just as common as the almond-and-hazel combination.

WALNUT & CREAM

Walnuts can be as bitter as a washed-up sales rep in a motel bar and grill. This is particularly apparent when they're ground, but their harsh edge can be softened with some thick white cream. On the Italian Riviera, _salsa di noci_ is served at room temperature with hot pasta. It's made with pounded walnuts, garlic, parsley, olive oil and double cream. Escoffier gives a recipe for a rather similar-sounding sauce, made with coarsely chopped walnuts, sour cream, freshly grated horseradish, dill, sherry vinegar, salt and pepper. On a slightly grander note, Elizabeth David recounts a description by Sir Harry Luke, briefly British Chief Commissioner in Transcaucasia, of a salmon trout unique to Lake Sevan in Armenia, served with its own amber-hued caviar and a sauce of fresh walnuts mixed with buffalo cream and a touch of horseradish.

Nut Sauce → Other Directions

AS A STUFFING FOR APRICOTS OR FIGS

... with pine nuts and mostarda di Cremona soaked in Campari, wrapped in bacon and grilled until crisp.

THINNED FURTHER WITH OIL TO MAKE A DRESSING

AS A GARNISH FOR SOUP, OR TO ENRICH A STEW

TO FILL AN OMELETTE

ON THIN TOASTS, LIKE TAPENADE

STIRRED THROUGH PASTA, LIKE PESTO

TO MAKE PALMIERS

Spread a sheet of puff pastry with pesto and sprinkle with grated Parmesan. Roll one long side to the middle, then the other to join it. Cut into 1cm slices and bake at 200°C for 10–15 minutes.

MIXED WITH A LITTLE SHREDDED MEAT TO MAKE EMPANADAS

**Nut Stew: Fesenjan**

Imagine a korma on opium. _Fesenjan_ is a Persian stew that has all the tastes covered – sweet, salty and savoury – but it's the exotic, sour and bitter notes of pomegranate and walnut that make it so memorable. It's a sumptuous treat. The Persian rice dish _chelow_ is the authentic accompaniment: it's flavoured with butter and saffron, and is fairly elaborate to prepare. So I've opted for plain white rice.

_For 4 servings_

INGREDIENTS

250g lightly toasted walnuts **A**

1.3–1.5kg chicken or duck, jointed **B**

Olive oil or ghee for frying

1 large onion, finely diced

½ tsp ground cinnamon **C D**

Pinch of powdered saffron **C D**

500ml pomegranate juice **A E**

1–2 tbsp pomegranate molasses **F**

1–2 tbsp sugar or honey

1 tsp salt

Chopped parsley and/or pomegranate seeds, to garnish

White basmati rice, to serve

**1** Grind the walnuts. Better still, pound using a pestle and mortar.

Walnuts tend to get claggy when blitzed in a machine. If you have time, try refrigerating them first, but if they still don't pulverise in your grinder/blender/processor, you might find it faster to use a pestle and mortar, or a strong plastic bag and a rolling pin.

**2** In a pan large enough to hold all of the ingredients, brown the poultry joints in oil or ghee, in batches if necessary. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.

**3** In the same pan, soften the onion.

You may need to supplement the fat, or, if you're using duck, remove some.

**4** Stir in the cinnamon, saffron and any other ground spices and cook for 1–2 minutes.

**5** Return the poultry joints to the pot. Add the walnuts, pomegranate juice, molasses, sugar and salt. Stir thoroughly and bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer.

**6** Simmer slowly for as long as the meat needs to cook through and the sauce to thicken.

Chicken or duck joints will take about 1 hour. If you have the time, the poultry is likely to become more tender if cooked in a 160°C oven, under a tight-fitting lid or foil, for 1½ hours.

**7** Taste and adjust the seasoning, if necessary.

**8** Garnish with chopped parsley. Pomegranate seeds look good, too. Serve with rice.

LEEWAY

**A** The ratio of ground walnuts to pomegranate juice varies from recipe to recipe, anything from 1:1 to 1:4 grams of nuts to millilitres of juice. Whatever proportions you use, the finished dish should have a thick and creamy sauce.

**B** Lamb, quail and pheasant are also traditional, but aubergine slices, meatballs and fish can be given the _fesenjan_ treatment. If you're using an ingredient that does not need a long simmer – say fish or quail – cook the sauce for 30 minutes before you add it, allowing the flavours to develop and meld.

**C** Spices vary a good deal from recipe to recipe. Some call for turmeric rather than saffron. Others add black pepper or fenugreek.

**D** Some cooks add 1–2 tbsp tomato purée with the spices at step **4**.

**E** The pomegranate juice can be freshly squeezed or shop-bought, and partially supplemented with chicken stock if you don't want your _fesenjan_ too fruity.

**F** In the absence of pomegranate molasses, use a mixture of honey and lemon juice.

Nut Stew → Flavours & Variations

AJI DE GALLINA

A Peruvian dish of chicken in a creamy sauce, made with walnuts, garlic, chilli and bread, and often cheese and evaporated milk. _Aji_ means 'chilli pepper', and _gallina_ translates as 'hen', but in Lima you're just as likely to be served a plate of creamy guinea pig. If the kids are back from school and there's no getting near the hutch without being spotted, you can substitute prawns, boiled eggs, sweetcorn or squash. The type of chilli specifically denoted by _aji_ is _aji Amarillo_ , a bright yellow pepper that scores a 7/10 rating for heat. If you can't find them either in fresh or paste form, Martin Morales, owner of the London-based Peruvian restaurant Ceviche, suggests that their heat and flavour can be roughly reproduced with an orange Scotch bonnet chilli, an orange or red pepper and a squeeze of orange juice. If this sounds too fiery – Scotch bonnet is at least twice as hot as _aji Amarillo_ – you can make a similar dish with a milder chilli, orange in colour if possible. According to Maria Baez Kijac, indigenous Peruvians used walnuts and peanuts as thickeners until the Spanish shipped up with their almonds and pine nuts. Poach a jointed chicken with carrots, onion and garlic in water until cooked through. Remove, strain, and reduce the stock to 250ml. Soften an onion, 4 garlic cloves and de-seeded chillies/peppers in oil until light golden. Add the stock, 1 tbsp ground cumin, 4 tbsp ground nuts (walnuts or peanuts) and simmer for a few minutes. Blend 4–5 handfuls of breadcrumbs or cream-cracker crumbs with a 400g tin of evaporated milk and add to the sauce. Shred the chicken from the bone and add to the sauce, along with 100g grated Parmesan, to reheat. (If Parmesan sounds like an odd ingredient for a traditional Peruvian dish, note that there was a large influx of Italian immigrants to Peru in the mid-nineteenth century.) Some garnish their _aji de gallina_ with a sprinkle of turmeric, hard-boiled eggs and olives, and serve it with rice and new potatoes. The price of authenticity, in this case, is a finished dish straight out of a 1950s all-colour cookbook.

CARNE EN SALSA DE ALMENDRAS

Cancel that cookery-school holiday in the Tuscan hills. Book an apartment within walking distance of La Boqueria in Barcelona. You'll need somewhere with a decent kitchen, a magnetic strip of knives that don't shy at onions, and some outside space, even if it's only a foot-wide strip of crumbly balconet. You'll need somewhere to sit, or lean, with a cold Estrella and a tapa of _sobrassada_ spread on toast, while your _carne en salsa de almendras_ mutters on the hob. The _carne_ is typically chunks of pork shoulder, although Claudia Roden's faster version calls for meatballs made with veal and/or pork. Which you choose will depend on how much Spanish you summoned, faced with the bloodstained _carnicero_ at the market, leaning impatiently on his cleaver. The technique for _carne en salsa_ is similar to _fesenjan_. For 1kg pork, you'll want about 250ml each of stock and dry white wine. The meat is cut into roughly 3cm dice, browned in olive oil and set aside, then the onions are softened. Chicken stock, white wine and aromatics (½ tsp smoked paprika, a sprig of thyme, a bay leaf, a pinch of saffron) are added before the meat is returned to the pot and brought to the boil, tightly covered then gently simmered for 1½ hours. The almonds, bread and garlic are stirred in at the end, in the form of a pounded sauce called picada. The dish is either served as a tapa or a main course. In the latter case, Rick Stein suggests boiled potatoes or steamed rice and green veg as accompaniments.

CIRCASSIAN CHICKEN

Until the mid-nineteenth century Circassia was a small independent nation on the north-eastern shore of the Black Sea. After the Russians annexed the country, many ethnic Circassians were expelled and formed a diaspora across the Ottoman Empire. Circassian chicken may be so-called because of its paleness, recalling the skin tone of the legendary Circassian women (as an ideal of femininity, the 'Circassian beauty' can trace her origins to the late Middle Ages). The recipe is fairly simple, so it's worth seeking out the best-quality ingredients. As with _fesenjan_ , the chicken is cooked first, but poached as opposed to browned or stewed. Use enough water to cover the chicken by a good couple of centimetres. Because the poaching liquid is essentially your stock, treat it as such, and cook the meat with typical stock ingredients – carrot, onion, celery, bay, parsley, garlic and peppercorns, and maybe some cardamom pods and cloves too. Clifford A. Wright's version includes coriander seeds, leek and allspice berries. Remove the cooked chicken meat from the bones and skin and set aside. Reduce the stock to 400–500ml. Grind 200g lightly toasted walnuts with 2 slices of stock-dampened bread. Soften 2 garlic cloves with a chopped onion, and a pinch each of paprika and cayenne, then mix with the ground walnuts. Gradually add enough stock to the nut-onion mix to achieve a thick but pourable sauce (some add a little cream here too). Mix the chicken with the sauce, holding back a little sauce to pour over the top. Gently warm 2–3 tsp paprika and a few pinches of cayenne in 2 tbsp walnut oil, then drizzle it over the dish so it gathers in red puddles like dying post-Soviet lakes. Scatter with chopped parsley. Circassian chicken is best served at room temperature, and is therefore a shoo-in for picnics. (Evelyn Rose suggests using it as a filling for pastry cases – a nice idea, as it is a little like a _vol-au-vent_ sauce.) Take the rusty-red oil along in a bottle, together with some good bread and a salad of diced cucumber, tomato and radishes in a lemony dressing. Then fruit and Turkish Delight for dessert.

KORMA

I had my first London curry-house experience aged eighteen, a gauche girl recently arrived from rural Hampshire. Wary of chilli heat, I was coerced by my more worldly sister into trying a korma. I was won over by my first mouthful, and not a little surprised that Indian food could be as soft and comforting as Christmas turkey in clove-warm, creamy bread sauce. As Pat Chapman points out, in India korma refers more to a technique than a single dish; the term is said to be Middle Eastern in origin, and means 'braise'. Chapman goes on to give a recipe for Kashmiri _mirchwangan_ korma, which calls for red wine, bottled beetroot and plenty of red chilli. You're unlikely to encounter that in your local Taj Mahal. Nonetheless, don't knock the thick, rich ivory-coloured sauce we Brits commonly understand as korma – the kind with layers of spices, and almonds, cashews or coconut, or a mixture of all three – until you've made it yourself. To serve 2, cut 300g skinless chicken breast into bite-size chunks and marinate them in 250g natural yogurt while you get on with the chopping and pounding. Soften 1 finely chopped onion in oil. For the paste, blend or pound 2 shallots or 1 small onion, 1 tbsp desiccated coconut, 30g blanched almonds, 2 green chillies with the seeds and seams removed, 3 garlic cloves, a thumb of ginger, very finely chopped, 1 tsp ground cumin, 2 tsp ground coriander, a pinch each of ground clove, cardamom and cinnamon with 1 tsp salt. Add to the softened onion in its pan and cook over a low heat for a minute. Add the chicken with its yogurt marinade. Bring to a simmer, slowly, then cook over a low heat, covered, for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add a little hot water if it looks like it's drying out. Towards the end of cooking, stir in 5 tbsp ground almonds or cashews. While I've specified pre-ground spices, the dish will be immeasurably improved if you toast and grind your own spice mix.

MAFE

_Mafe_ (pronounced 'ma-fay') needs a global ambassador. It could do for Senegalese food what green curry did for Thai. It is also very hospitable to whatever you have in your store cupboard, but one non-negotiable ingredient is peanut. In Senegal you might visit the market for a large, clear plastic bag full of fresh peanut butter. And I mean large. It can be used as a pillow when you stop for a much-needed breather on the way home. Huge quantities of peanut are not mandatory in _mafe_ , but you will need enough to offset the acidity of the tomato. The stew can be made with lamb, beef or chicken, or a selection of chunky-cut vegetables – carrots, say, with potato, yuca, turnips, okra and cabbage wedges. Season 1kg meat, brown it and set aside. Finely chop 1 onion and 1 green pepper and soften in groundnut oil, adding finely chopped fresh chilli to taste. Return the meat to the pan. Whisk 125g smooth peanut butter into 500ml hot stock and pour it into the pan with a 400g tin of chopped tomatoes. Add a bay leaf and a few sprigs of thyme. Season and cook at the lowest simmer, stirring occasionally until the meat is cooked through and tender. Season with salt and black pepper. Serve with white rice.

ROMESCO DE PEIX

_Romesco de peix_ is a main-course variation on romesco sauce – and, like picada, it is Catalan in origin. It might, in fact, be considered an elaboration of picada. Nuts, bread, oil and garlic form its backbone, but roasted tomatoes and ñora peppers are added too. The _peix_ is usually monkfish, but you can use any fish that holds together sufficiently, or shellfish if you like. Make a romesco by de-stemming and de-seeding 2 dried ñora peppers (ancho or pasilla chillies are acceptable substitutes) and soaking them in hot water from the kettle for at least 30 minutes. Roast 3 or 4 fleshy tomatoes and half a garlic bulb in some olive oil at 200°C until charred and soft. After dispensing with their skins, scrape into a blender with 1 torn-up slice of toasted white bread, 100g ground toasted nuts (almond, hazelnut or a mixture), 1 tsp salt and the soaked ñora. Whizz to a thick paste with up to 100ml olive oil. Add red wine vinegar to taste (1–3 tsp is typical) and set aside at room temperature. Transfer the romesco to a pan big enough to hold the fish too. Add a small glass of dry white wine and 300ml fish stock. Bring to the boil, then turn the heat down and simmer slowly for about 10 minutes. Taste and adjust the seasoning, if necessary. Add the fish (or shellfish) to the sauce and cook for a further 4–5 minutes, or as long as it takes to cook through. Some prefer to season and flour the fish fillets and fry them for a minute on each side before adding them to the sauce to finish cooking – this helps the fish hold together. Garnish with chopped parsley and serve with bread.
Cake & Biscuits

The aroma of a Victoria sponge being baked derives from just four ingredients – flour, sugar, butter and egg. If you concentrate, you can tell them apart: the toasty flour, the biscuit smell of warm butter, the candy-floss smog of caramelising sugar, the sweet sulphurous notes of gently cooked egg. It's as heady and innocent as a freshly bathed baby. I say four, but arguably there's a fifth ingredient. Or perhaps a fourth-and-a-bit – the near-odourless raising agent. Before baking powder and bicarbonate of soda, or their coarser predecessors like pearlash, were easily available, the baker relied on eggs, yeast or, less commonly, beer, to put the spring in their sponge. Thus yeasted cakes like buns and babas sit on the bread continuum, since the methods used to make them have more in common with bread. This chapter deals with egg and/or powder-risen cakes and their flatter biscuit brethren. You might argue that egg is the defining point of difference in the cakes and biscuits described herein. The quantity (if any) used, and how; from the cakes at one end of the continuum, aerated with whisked egg whites, through the solitary yolk-as-dough-binder, to eggless shortbread and flapjack at the other extreme.

ANGEL CAKE

We'll start with the most egg-risen of all: angel (or angel food) cake. Angel cake is in essence a flour-fortified meringue. Both share a dry, somewhat tiresome sweetness, but where meringue is as brittle as a New York socialite, angel cake is its softer, more mallowesque, Midwestern cousin. Study the recipes and you'll see why. Angel cake has a higher ratio of egg to sugar than meringue. But its origins are identical. Lots of egg whites are whisked with a little cream of tartar and maybe some flavouring, before half of the sugar is added, gradually, to form a billowing, shiny white mass, like a dowdy egg's extravagant daydream. The rest of the sugar, along with a modest amount of flour and a pinch of salt, are then folded in. Typically, angel cake is baked in a tin shaped like a giant O. When the cooled cake is turned out, its stippled, golden exterior makes it look like a lichen-covered fertility stone of great antiquity. Inside it's as white as chalk. Serve it at a garden party and you risk being overrun by pagans.

Its greatest devotees are health-conscious cake addicts who revere it for its absence of fat, the first and signal irony of which is that it is usually accompanied by large quantities of whipped cream – which, in turn, posits a gâteau variation on the Gaia hypothesis. Extract the most fattening bits from a cake, and the system will provide them by other means. The second irony is that the enormity of the standard angel cake cancels out any of the benefits of using zero fat. I bought the specified tube tin, then never used it, either from a fear that we'd never be able to eat a cake that size, or the fear that we would. That, or I just never got round to it. Rather than splash out on another piece of equipment, consider demoting the angel to cherub and making your cake in a loaf tin. The recipe also works very well in dariole moulds, which is handy to know if you're rationing your treats, or trying out adventurous flavour variations.

GENOISE

Like angel cake, Genoise relies entirely on whisked eggs for its lift. Both are categorised as foaming cakes. Where angel cake is made with 30g sugar for every egg white, and half the sugar's weight in flour, Genoise calls for egg yolks as well as whites, and 30g of sugar _and_ flour for every egg, plus a little melted butter to boost the flavour. Stand mixers make Genoise far less bother, but armed with only a hand-held electric whisk, you'll soon discover why it has traditionally been more popular with pâtissiers than domestic cooks. It's fiddly and time-consuming: you'll need to melt (and consider clarifying) the butter, whisk the eggs and sugar in a double-boiler, thoroughly fold in the flour without reducing the volume of whisked froth too much and, finally, carefully fold in the butter, which whisked egg whites like about as much as slugs do salt. All this effort for what to amateur eyes is a rather dry, dull cake. The benefits of Genoise to the pro are the ease of shaping that comes of its tight crumb, and its dryness, which means it can be topped with mousses and crèmes without turning soggy. It can also take a dousing of syrup – an open invitation to create fanciful layers of flavour. Only when a Genoise has been filled can its qualities be properly appreciated.

The Portuguese make a Genoise-type cake called _pão de castela_. In the seventeenth century, merchants took the _pão_ to Japan, where it became known as _kasutera_ , and caught on with the locals partly because it contained no dairy products. It is now a regional speciality of the Nagasaki prefecture, where the Portuguese merchants came ashore. At the Fukusaya bakery, famed for its _kasutera_ , the batter is hand-whisked by rows of chefs, dressed in what look like radiation-adapted beekeeping suits, rhythmically whirling balloon whisks the width of tennis rackets around tilted copper bowls of egg. The batter is then decanted into long, rectangular tins and baked until it attains its characteristic crème-caramel livery – a rich yolk-yellow on the inside, dark brown on the out. This is thanks to the malt syrup or honey added over and above the sugar content of a typical Genoise. The plank-like lengths of cake are cut into smaller portions, and wrapped in the sort of sumptuous packaging you associate with Bond Street boutiques or fine Champagne houses. Like Champagne, Fukusaya _kasutera_ is aged before it's sold. Everyone knows that soups and stews can benefit from a day or two's rest in the fridge – a process known as tomorr-inating in the Segnit household. The same principle applies to cakes and biscuits. Recipes for parkin ( **here** ) generally recommend a week of keeping before you cut it. According to James Beard, shortbread needs a week to attain optimal shortbreadiness. And you'll find the flavours in sponge cake are much more pronounced once the cake has been out of the oven for a day or two. It's surely only a matter of time before artisan bakers are equipped with temperature-controlled _caves de pâtisserie_ , or that we start to lay down gâteaux for special occasions.

Anyone put off by the prospect of setting up a double-boiler might be interested in the version of Genoise that doesn't call for the eggs to be heated first. A good deal of whisking is, nonetheless, still required. The main difference between the heated and non-heated versions is that the former is more robust. You'll notice this when you fold in the flour. The uncooked version is more given to losing its puff, and, when you take it out of the oven, to deflating a little. Naturally, this is unimportant when the height of your cake isn't an issue. Swiss roll is made via the unheated method. So are French madeleines, the little shell-shaped cakes that I rarely find as good to eat as they are to look at. Nonetheless, madeleines could scarcely have inspired seven volumes of remembrance without there being something to be said for them – although it should be noted that Proust's narrator dips his madeleine in linden flower tea, thus circumventing the problem of dryness. Without the tea, _À La Recherche du Temps Perdu_ might have been a novella.

BUTTER SPONGE

Next, the butter sponge. Or pound cake. Or, in France, the _quatre quarts_ , the four quarters, so called because of its equal weights of sugar, butter, flour and egg. No need for a clever mnemonic to commit that to memory. What I particularly love about this starting point is that you can replace the flour with the same weight in ground nuts, for a fluffy frangipane/almond cake or, with a minor tweak to the method, melted chocolate for a sumptuous chocolate cake. Where angel cake and Genoise are made by the foaming method, butter sponge relies on the creaming method, in which the sugar is beaten with the butter rather than the egg. This requires the butter to be soft, which tends to put the damper on a spontaneous urge to bake cake. Anyone who's tried to cream cold butter will recognise the four stages of declining impetus: 1) develop tendonitis/impatience with declogging the mixer beaters; 2) eat too many sugar-crusted butter nuggets out of the bowl; 3) set the remainder aside to reach a workable temperature; 4) get caught up in the afternoon showing of _Seven Brides for Seven Brothers_. By the time Howard Keel breaks into 'Spring, Spring, Spring' _,_ you'll have a bowl of over-softened butter and no cake-making inclination whatsoever. Faced with rock-hard butter, Dan Lepard's tip is to apply heat (in a pan or microwave) until a third of the butter is melted, transfer it to the mixing bowl and leave it for 5 minutes before proceeding.

Butter sponge can be made with no leavener other than eggs and the air that you've creamed into the fat by pushing the sugar through it. As a rule, however, most recipes call for a little baking powder, for extra lightness and an awful lot less beating. Another advantage of the butter cake is its tolerance for all sorts of flavouring ingredients. Liqueurs and spirits, zest, oil-based extracts, seeds, nuts and fruit can all be added to the dry ingredients – in contrast to foaming cakes, where, as in meringue, the egg whites can easily be deflated by careless additions, leaving you with a frothy white soup on your hands.

It might seem remarkable how conservative cake flavouring has remained compared to, say, the fanciful flavours Baskin-Robbins was adding to ice cream as far back as the 1950s. But the custard base of ice cream is that much more tolerant of additions. The recent annexation of Manhattan, and whole boroughs of London, by the cupcake industry has yielded its fair share of innovative sponge recipes, but by and large the classics like chocolate and vanilla prevail. The new popularity of red velvet cake is telling: the same old chocolate and vanilla sponge, just in a different colour.

GINGERBREAD

Ginger, of course, is another perennial favourite, at least in Europe and Australia. The classic dark, sticky ginger cake, or loaf, furnishes the next starting point on the continuum. It requires equal weights of sugar and flour, just like the butter sponge, but instead of an equal weight of butter, only half is used – the other half is replaced with syrup. The egg is greatly reduced, to just one per cake, but there's more milk used than in the butter sponge. Only one egg means that a small quantity of bicarbonate of soda is used to give some lift; the bicarb is activated by the acidity in the treacle or golden syrup. Sticky ginger cakes are made by the melting method, which means the butter, sugar and syrup are warmed in a pan until all is melted, then mixed into the dry ingredients, followed by the egg and the milk. As you might imagine, the batter is notably wet. The result, once baked, is a juicy, dense cake.

Other flavoured sticky cakes rely on similarly acidic ingredients – cocoa powder, say, or honey or citrus juice – to activate the bicarbonate of soda. Baking powder can be substituted if you're making your sticky loaf with non-acidic ingredients. This cake is perfectly amenable to experimentation, but be prepared for it to take one or two more attempts to perfect than a butter sponge or a Genoise. This is mainly because a sticky loaf cake is a one-recipe lesson in why cakes sink. The high sugar content makes it especially prone to subsidence. Furthermore, the lengthy spell in the oven may tempt you to check how it's doing before the batter has properly set. The quantity of leavener needs to be just right so the loaf doesn't expand too quickly, then deflate later on. On top of this, the loaf shape requires a certain amount of experimentation with heat and cooking times, so you end up with a cake that is neither burnt on the sides nor raw in the middle. Take heart from the fact that you'll often see mild indentations in professionally made loaf cakes. Other flavoured sticky cakes rely on similarly acidic ingredients – say cocoa powder, honey or citrus – to activate the bicarb. Baking powder can be substituted for bicarb if you're making your sticky loaf with non-acidic ingredients.

BISCUITS

Omitting the milk and half the granulated sugar turns sticky gingerbread loaf into gingerbread biscuits: roll the warm just-mixed dough between your palms to make walnut-size balls and then bake to make domed, tender cookies. Omit the egg, too, and biscuits made the same way will be flat, cracked, and, once cooled, hard on the teeth like an old-fashioned ginger nut. The dunking biscuit nonpareil. Egg or no egg, once the dough is chilled, rolled out to a depth of 3–4mm, cut into gingerbread men or dainty fluted rounds and baked, the difference will be negligible.

It's a commonplace that liberties are out of bounds to the baker, baking being more of a science than an art, etc., etc. There are authorities on the matter who would have you weigh water and measure your caster sugar on microchemist's scales. Fair enough, if your goal is to reproduce something you've seen in a swanky bakery's cookbook, but compare ten recipes for chocolate Genoise, Victoria sponge or shortbread, and the breadth of variation will be salutary. Never more so than for biscuits. Dan Lepard has it right: 'Biscuits are the ultimate in foolproof baking. There's so little that can go wrong... there is a paradise of tweaks and simple changes that can be made to most biscuit recipes, enough to keep an inventive cook busy for a decade.'

Use the 1:1:2 sugar, butter, flour ratio as a starting point from which you should, within reason, be unafraid to deviate. The same applies to the next point along the continuum, shortbread: the pole star of biscuit recipes, the first I learned, and promisingly easy to commit to memory – a simple 1:2:3 ratio of three ingredients. Then (of course) I forgot which ingredient corresponded to which number. Hence my handy mnemonic: Shortbread Biscuit Formula. Sugar, Butter, Flour.

SHORTBREAD

Shortbread is made with just the three ingredients and a small, but essential, pinch of salt. The creaming method is ideal. Once you've made a paste of the butter and sugar, mix in the flour and salt and the dough is ready to bake. The only liquid is the water in the butter, ensuring that very little gluten is developed and, assuming you haven't gone mad stirring in the flour (and thus developing the gluten), the texture of the baked shortbread will be crumbly and short. If you only have rock-hard butter to hand, you can rub the cubed butter into the flour, then stir in the sugar and salt and bring the dough together with some egg yolk. It will still be short – just not as much as if made by the creaming method. In place of the egg yolk, some rub-in recipes recommend pressing the crumb mixture into a prepared tin, but this can be at the expense of the shortbread's cohesiveness after baking, and it can be tricky to cut into shapes. Especially the traditional petticoat tails.

The main flavour of shortbread is butter. Historically, however, it was enhanced with many of the aromatics that have similarly fallen out of fashion in cakes. Shetlanders favoured caraway seeds (and they used a griddle to cook the shortbread). On the mainland, a Christmas variation called Pithcaithly shortbread contained a mixture of toasted almond and caraway and was decorated with whole almonds or citrus peel. Mrs Beeton uses the same aromatics in a very low-sugar 1:4:8 shortbread. The Nevis Bakery, run by Archie Paterson, in the foothills of Ben Nevis, has offered demerara, double-chocolate and ginger, lavender, chai and Earl Grey flavour variants, all of which are worth putting the kettle on for. I was once given a shortbread made with pink peppercorns. It looked very pretty, rosy as a Scotsman's knees, but pink peppercorns taste like hairspray and have a similar effect on the back of my throat.

Other common variations on the standard shortbread recipe include swapping a little of the wheat flour for a different cereal. Cornmeal or coconut flour will have a noticeable effect on the flavour, as well as the texture; cornflour and rice flour the texture only. I had high hopes for manioc flour, made from cassava. So toothsome, like a little pile of crushed digestive biscuit, sprinkled over or served on the side of Brazilian dishes, but its distinctive character was not apparent in a shortbread. Save it for _feijoada._

FLAPJACKS

A simple expansion of the 1:2:3 shortbread starting point can be applied to flapjacks: 1:1:2:3 – 1 part syrup to 1 part sugar, 2 parts butter, and 3 parts porridge oats in lieu of flour. Made by the melting method, like gingerbread, they will be ready for the oven in just 10 minutes. The great advantage here is that the recipe is so open to variation. You can add nuts, seeds, chocolate and fruit – both fresh and dried. They can be made with coconut oil if you are vegan, or treacle if you like punchy flavours. Do what you like with flapjacks as long as you don't try to make them too healthy; skimping on the fat and sugar will leave you with something closer to muesli. Not that there's anything wrong with muesli. It's just a pain to slice.

**Angel Cake**

The size of a typical angel (a.k.a. angel food) cake is all the more impressive considering that it is entirely down to whisked egg. No other leaveners are used. Its dryness and open texture give angel cake something of the look of a millstone, belying the lightness that accounts for its divine name.

_For a 25cm angel cake tin_ **A B**

INGREDIENTS

150g plain flour **C**

Pinch of salt

300g caster sugar

10 large or 12 medium egg whites, at room temperature

1 tsp cream of tartar **D**

1 tsp vanilla extract **E**

**1** Sift the flour with the salt and half the sugar. Sift again and set aside.

**2** Whisk the egg whites until foamy. Add the cream of tartar and whisk to soft peaks.

If your eggs have been in the fridge, sit them in warm water for 5 minutes before cracking and separating them.

**3** Gradually whisk the remaining sugar into the egg whites to reach stiff peaks. Whisk in the vanilla.

Don't let the mixture get too stiff (i.e. when it begins to look dry), or you'll struggle to incorporate the flour.

**4** Gradually fold in the sifted flour and sugar mixture.

One method is to sift a quarter of the mixture over the surface of the meringue, then fold it in, aiming to retain as much of the whisked-in air as possible. Repeat until all the flour mixture is incorporated, delving deep to catch any flour languishing at the bottom of the bowl.

**5** Pour into an _un_ greased cake tin (not the non-stick sort). Firmly bang the tin against a work surface, then 'cut' the mixture through with a knife in several places.

Both the banging and cutting are to knock out any large air bubbles introduced by the transfer from mixing bowl to tin.

**6** Bake immediately on the lower-middle shelf of a 160°C oven. It should take about 45 minutes.

But check 10 minutes before the time is up. When it's ready, the cake should spring back when you press it in the centre with your finger.

**7** Leave the cake to cool in the tin, open-side down. Ideally, place the hole in the centre of the tin over a bottle, so that the cake sits suspended on the neck of the bottle.

Some angel cake tins have legs or an extra-long tube in the centre, so you can upend them and allow air in underneath.

**8** After about an hour's cooling, run a knife around the edge of the cake before turning it out. Use a serrated knife to slice it. Be gentle.

**9** The cake will keep for 2–3 days. It doesn't freeze well.

LEEWAY

**A** A fifth of these quantities will fill 3 dariole moulds – count on 30–35 minutes baking time. Or, for a 900g (2lb) loaf tin, use 5 egg whites, 150g caster sugar, 75g plain flour, ½ tsp cream of tartar and ½ tsp vanilla extract, and allow for 40 minutes baking time. At step **7** the tins can simply be inverted on a cooling rack.

**B** Angel cake is never baked in a standard round cake tin. It needs an ungreased (not non-stick) tin with narrow sides to cling to.

**C** To make a gluten-free version, you'll need to use a special gluten-free flour mix. Ground almonds, cornflour etc. will not work.

**D** In place of the cream of tartar, you can use the same quantity of lemon juice or white wine vinegar.

**E** Avoid oil- or fat-based flavourings, which will deflate the egg peaks irreparably. You can get away with beating in up to 1–2 tbsp flavouring, once the egg white has stiffened at the end of step **3**. Try lemon juice with zest for a lemon cake or, for a coffee version, 2 tbsp instant coffee granules dissolved in 2 tsp hot water and then cooled.

Angel Cake → Flavours & Variations

ALMOND & ROSE

Pity the pre-First World War American prairie farmer. A 1912 edition of _Prairie Farmer Magazine_ urges its readers to 'try mixing almond and rose together as a flavour for angel food cake. It is delicious.' As if harsh winters, summer droughts, European wheat quotas, railroad companies overcharging for transportation, and cows requiring manual assistance in labour weren't enough, here's this magazine expecting you to slip a pinny over your dungarees and whisk up a delicate sponge infused with the flavours of the Maghreb. At least the mechanical whisk had been invented by then. In place of 1 tsp vanilla, whisk ¼ tsp almond extract and 2 tsp rosewater into the egg whites at the end of step **3**.

BUTTERSCOTCH

If the world were a fairer place, butterscotch angel cake would usurp the standard recipe: it's less of a flavour variation than a wholesale improvement. Not long after angel cake became the most popular cake in North America, cookbook writers started to put spins on the recipe. Butterscotch is one of the most widely documented, and is as simple as the straight substitution of light brown sugar for white. As a rule, using brown sugar in cakes will give moister, stickier results than white, which can't go amiss when your cake is fat-free.

CLEMENTINE

As with meringues, the basis of angel cake is foamed egg white, which can make the cake difficult to flavour – the addition of oil or fat will tend to deflate the bubbles. Citrus peel is handy in this instance, as its minimal oil content will not be enough to flatten your froth. Lemon is probably the most common angel cake flavour, but I wanted to use clementine, mourning as I do each claw of beautifully perfumed peel dropped in the bin unzested. The peel of four clementines, Microplaned into zesty flecks, flavoured an angel loaf cake – see **A** under Leeway. Returned to the fruit bowl, my grated clementines, matt and ridge-marked, looked as cold and forlorn as newly shorn sheep. So I puréed them and put them in a _torta Santiago_ ( **here** ). By teatime I had two clementine-flavoured cakes to offer my friends. The nut-meal cake was luscious with a tart edge. The angel cake had a restrained elegance and wore the clementine like a fragrance it had stepped through. Carmen versus the Spanish Ambassador's wife.

HARD BOILINGS

Such is the rock 'n' roll reputation of sugar, these days, that contemporary Lemmys might drop the Marlboro reds and Jack Daniels from their riders in favour of plain dangerous quantities of angel cake, made with crushed boiled sweets. Or 'hard boilings', as the Scots call them, with that inimitable Scottish ability to make a sweet your gran might produce from her handbag sound like an initiation ceremony at a young offenders' institute. Acid drops are surely the hardest of all hard candy. Laura Mason notes how confectionery manufacture was made easier after the discovery that acid, in the form of cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate), prevented sugar from crystallising at high temperatures, so that the transparent, gem-like boiled sweets we know today could reliably be produced in large quantities. Subsequently, she writes, they went 'quite quickly from being a technical novelty to something banal'. Other forms of acid, like vinegar or lemon juice, were substitutable – as they are in many toffee recipes – but cream of tartar had the advantage of being cheap, reliable, easy to store and flavourless. Acid drops are no more than sugar, water, cream of tartar and a drop of lemon essence. In Scotland, they're dyed livid green and called 'soor plooms', although they're only marginally more sour than the plums you'll find at the supermarket. To make the rock 'n' roll cake, cover the boiled sweets with a tea towel (or bandanna) and bash them into fine sugar crystals with a rolling pin (or the heel of your guitar). You'll want 5–6 tbsp for a cake made with 10–12 egg whites, folded in at the same time as the last lot of flour mixture at step **4**.

STRACCIATELLA

_Stracciatella_ has only the second-best name in the gelateria. _Primo premio_ goes to _fior di latte_ , 'flower of milk', a term suggestive of such tender ephemerality that ice would be the only possible hope of preserving it. It's a mixture of fresh cream, milk and sugar – no eggs, vanilla or other ingredients – so unless the gelateria is within a hoof-clatter of the milking parlour, best to stick to coffee and hazelnut. Name aside, nothing beats _stracciatella_ for looks, the flakes of dark chocolate jutting from the off-white cream like quartzite formations in snow. The trouble comes with the eating of it, as the ice cream chills the inside of your mouth to the point that the chocolate can't melt. It accounts for the weird, pasty-cardboardy sensation of all ice cream involving solid chocolate. In a cake, however, the chocolate can yield on your tongue as it should, and its bitterness is thrown into relief against the very sweet cake. Using a sharp knife, cut 50g 70% dark chocolate into thin shards. Fold them into a cake batter made with 10–12 egg whites, at the same time as the last of the flour mixture at step **4**.

**Genoise**

Like angel cake, Genoise relies entirely on egg and air for its leavening. It differs in containing yolks, more flour and a little butter, thus sitting somewhere between angel cake and butter sponge (a.k.a. pound cake). Genoise is light, a tad dry and, consequently, prized by pâtissiers: it welcomes adornment. Flavoured syrups, mousses, buttercreams, fruit and whipped cream can be piled on without fear of sogginess. Whichever size you make, the ingredients are fairly standard: 30g each of flour and sugar and about 1 tbsp melted butter for each egg used.

_For 2 shallow or 1 deep 20cm round cake(s)_ **A B**

INGREDIENTS

40g unsalted butter **C**

120g plain flour **D**

Pinch of salt

4 eggs, at room temperature

120g sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

**1** Melt the butter and set aside to cool. Prepare the cake tin(s) by buttering, lightly flouring and lining the bottom with baking parchment.

**2** Sift the flour with the salt, and set aside. Keep the sieve to hand.

**3** Whisk the eggs and sugar in a double-boiler (or a heatproof bowl set over – but not touching – a pan of barely simmering water), until the mixture feels warm to a dipped finger, or reaches about 43°C. **E**

Starting with room-temperature eggs, this should take about 5 minutes.

**4** Remove from the heat and keep whisking until the mixture holds its shape for 5 seconds after falling from the whisk.

Using an electric whisk, this will take about 10 minutes, or a bit less if you put the eggs and sugar in a stand mixer once heated.

**5** Sift about a third of the flour over the eggs and sugar. Fold it in thoroughly with a metal spoon, but try to minimise the amount of air that gets knocked out of the mix. Continue to sift and fold until all the flour is fully incorporated into the batter.

Delve down to the bottom of the bowl a few times, as the flour will collect there.

**6** Place a ladleful of the batter in another bowl and fold the butter into it, aiming to leave any butter solids behind in their pan. Fold in the vanilla, then briefly fold the butter mixture into the rest of the batter.

Some cooks skip this tempering stage, instead drizzling the cooled butter around the edge of the main bowl of batter and folding it in. If your butter is hot, however, you'll need to temper it as above.

**7** Pour carefully into the prepared tin(s). Level the top(s) with a light hand.

Don't push the air out by being too heavy-handed with the spoon or spatula.

**8** Bake straight away at 180°C for 20–30 minutes.

Start checking after 20 minutes – when ready, the edges of the cake should have shrunk away from the sides of the tin, and the centre should spring back when you press it gently with your finger.

**9** The cake can be cooled and kept wrapped at room temperature for a week.

If iced with buttercream or sugar glaze, the cake can be kept in an airtight tin for 4–5 days, but try to wrap the sponge part if possible. If filled or topped with cream or cream cheese, it will need to go in the fridge. This is less than ideal for a sponge, so eat it within 3 days.

LEEWAY

**A** For a 15cm springform tin, use 2 eggs, 60g each of flour and sugar and 2 tbsp melted butter. Bake for 20–25 minutes, checking after 15. For a 23cm springform tin, use 5 eggs, 150g each of flour and sugar and 4–5 tbsp melted butter. Bake for 25–35 minutes, checking after 25.

**B** If making a layer cake, 1 deep cake cut into 3 (or 4, for the more skilled) usually looks better than a 2-tin sandwich.

**C** Some recipes call for 3 tbsp bland oil, at room temperature, in place of the butter.

**D** Many recipes recommend a 50/50 mix of plain flour and a gluten-free flour like potato or cornflour.

**E** There are several low-rise variations on Genoise that follow the same (or similar) ingredients and method, but without heating the eggs and sugar. These include madeleines, Savoy biscuits and Swiss roll.

Genoise → Flavours & Variations

BROWN BUTTER BAY

Wasn't there a Shirley Temple song about Brown Butter Bay? There should have been. It's a good flavour for cake, and makes a Genoise highly suited to its classic accompaniment of berries and cream. If you're already melting butter, browning is only a step further. Start with about 10 per cent more butter than you need for the cake, to allow for wastage. In a pan – preferably a light-coloured one that lets you keep an eye on the browning – over a medium heat, melt the butter with a few torn bay leaves, then let it foam and turn amber. Remove from the heat before it goes dark. Strain, and use before it re-solidifies. To accentuate the bay flavour, consider making a syrup infused with bay leaves and pouring it over the finished cake. Fresh or dried leaves can be used, but fresh will yield their flavour faster.

CHOCOLATE

Chocolate Genoise is the sponge at the heart of a classic Black Forest gâteau, even if its flavour lacks the dark depths of the _Schwarzwald_ itself. The strength of the cocoa should not be too assertive, or it will blunt the impact of the gâteau's dousing in kirsch. The Queen's favourite birthday cake is a chocolate Genoise simply layered with a rich chocolate ganache. According to the royal chef Darren McGrady, Her Majesty's favourite _tea_ cake is chocolate biscuit cake. I wonder whether she longs for chocolate biscuit cake on her birthday too, but feels obliged to choose a more regal plinth on which to mount the royal candles? I once made a chocolate Genoise for my friend James's birthday. James favours food with low nutritive value – pre-gourmet, non-batch-cooked crisps, fried chicken from states other than Kentucky, chocolate with a cocoa content no higher than 20 per cent. Recently back from New York, and noting how well a Crunchie bar might serve as a scale model of a skyscraper, I set about making a chocolate Manhattan. I baked a few sheets of chocolate Genoise – it's an excellent cake for cutting into shapes – and left them and a sharp knife to my husband, who was appointed chief architect and builder. When I returned, there were two blocks of New York. Just like I'd imagined it. Towering buildings and everything. The streets paved with ganache. Yellow sugar-paste taxis. My husband was on the point of excavating a subway tunnel in the Genoise and modelling a little graffiti-tagged grey sugar-paste A-train to emerge from it. The cake was a delight to behold, but not so easy to cut into pieces. We settled down with a round of Black Russians and picked buildings off the cityscape at random, like Godzilla. Depending on how dark and chocolatey you want your Genoise, replace between 20 and 50 per cent of the flour weight with cocoa powder, making sure you sift the flour and cocoa together several times so they're well mingled. Some recipes that stipulate a lot of cocoa also call for a little extra sugar to help balance the bitterness.

COFFEE

Coffee will ensure an authentically log-coloured Genoise in your _bûche de noël_ : use 2 tbsp instant coffee dissolved in 2 tsp hot water, and allow to cool before adding with the butter at step **6**. Plus, it tastes great with the vanilla whipped cream and marrons glacés you'd be a Scrooge not to roll up into it. All that remains to be done is the thick chocolate icing, distressed to resemble bark, a growth of pistachio-crumb lichen and a meringue mushroom or two, if you can make them small enough. Try to take it as a compliment if someone dumps it on the fire.

GREEN TEA

In Japan, green tea is a popular flavouring, in particular for cakes made in the Genoise style, wherein the delicacy of matcha won't be spoiled by chemical leaveners or masked by butter. Not unlike true pistachio, the colour can tend to the queasy, but looks rather handsome set off by dark chocolate. Use 2 tsp matcha green tea, sifted in with the flour. The Paris-based Japanese pâtissier Sadaharu Aoki combines green tea and chocolate in his take on opéra cake, the neat, quadrilateral stack of layered sponge and crème pâtissière that will make your heart sing if you like beautifully bound books.

JOCONDE

Joconde is a close relative of the Genoise. Its name is said to be a measure of high regard: the joconde is to sponge cakes as the _Mona Lisa_ is to portraits of enigmatic young noblewomen. It departs from Genoise in calling for ground almonds in place of most of the flour and, as in Savoy biscuits, for the egg yolks and whites to be whisked separately. It's baked in a Swiss roll tin and used to make opéra cakes (see green tea, above) or, if you fancy yourself a bit of a Leonardo, to make joconde imprime, where a design is baked into the sponge using biscuit paste in a contrasting colour. Not only is this good fun, but if you're using your imprime to line a tin before filling it with mousse or bavarois, there'll be plenty of offcuts to nibble on. First, for your dark-chocolate design, make a biscuit paste by mixing together 50g each of icing sugar, butter, egg white and flour, plus 2 tbsp cocoa powder. Pipe your biscuit design on a silicone mat laid on a baking tray. If your design is text-based, remember it'll have to be mirror-writing. Freeze for an hour, then make the joconde. For 2 tins 30cm × 20cm, whisk 3 egg whites until frothy, add ¼ tsp cream of tartar, then keep whisking, gradually adding 3 tbsp caster sugar until the mixture stands up in soft peaks. Set aside, and immediately whisk together 3 yolks, 100g ground almonds and 100g icing sugar until pale and soft. Sift 3 tbsp flour evenly over the yolk and almond mix, then fold in a third of the egg whites, followed by the rest. Fold 1–2 tbsp cooled melted butter thoroughly into the mixture. When your biscuit design has been in the freezer for 50 minutes, set the oven to 180°C. Pour the joconde over the frozen design, gently level it with an offset palette knife and bake for 7–10 minutes, until the cake is a pale golden brown. While you're waiting for the cake to cool a little, liberally dust another silicone mat or sheet of baking parchment with icing sugar; flip the cooled cake onto it, and peel off the silicone or parchment from the top. In the case of smaller cakes, some chefs claim that a joconde made with more flour than nut meal makes the cake more flexible, and therefore less likely to break if you're using it to line little ring moulds.

LEMON

Lemon cake is so good with a sharp lemon frosting that bolder combinations seldom get a look-in, especially if they involve darker flavours. Not so at Aureole, Charlie Palmer's restaurant in New York, where they make a dessert of lemon Genoise in coffee jelly with an espresso ice cream. The pairing of lemon and coffee is not unusual in the US, where an espresso may well be served with a twist of lemon peel on the saucer. Everyone agrees you won't find it in Italy – which makes it, of course, the sort of utterly unimportant controversy that has gourmet forums swarming with authenticity police, the culinary equivalents of Comic Book Guy in _The Simpsons_. 'I've been to Italy _three times_ and _never once_ seen this.' All that aside, if something works well with coffee, chances are it works with chocolate too. In _The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake_ , the sadness in question belongs to nine-year-old Rose, who finds she can taste her mother's emotions in chocolate-frosted lemon cake. Curious to see whether I too had the gift, I made a very lemony Genoise and iced it with a dark chocolate ganache. Somewhere amid the mildly floral citrus and dark tang of chocolate I swear I could sense something. I wasn't sure, so had another slice, and sat dusting the crumbs from my cardigan and eyeing a third slice when I distinctly heard someone say, 'Why don't you stop stuffing your face and get on with writing your book?' It sounded a lot like my husband. Fold the finely grated zest of 2–3 lemons into the butter and batter mixture instead of the vanilla extract at step **6**.

ORANGE FLOWER WATER

_Madeleines de Commercy_ are the pretty little shell-shaped cakes that look like guest soaps, and, all too often, are about as nice to eat. The only one I've ever had that wasn't unpleasantly dry was undercooked. Still, the madeleine remains popular because of its enchanting form. The celebrity endorsement from Proust can't hurt, either. Madeleines are like glasses with plain lenses. Their sole function is to make you look clever. The following variation would sit between a Genoise and a butter sponge cake, based as is it on the _unheated_ Genoise method, but made with butter sponge proportions. Whisk 2 eggs with 100g caster sugar until pale and fluffy. Sift over 100g flour with a pinch of salt and fold in, then stir in 100g cooled melted butter and 1 tsp orange flower water. Variations include replacing 1 tbsp of the sugar with honey, using self-raising flour, adding baking powder to plain flour, replacing a little of the flour with the same weight in ground almonds, or adding some finely grated lemon zest instead of orange flower water. Many recipes stipulate resting the batter for a few hours, allowing the gluten in the flour to develop, so the cake grows a little bump on its non-grooved side. The most useful tip is to test, and test again, until you find the batter quantity per madeleine, and cooking time, to suit your oven and your baking tray. If your madeleine tray has 12 indentations, use 3 or 6 to start with, noting (or photographing) how much you've filled the indentations. Transfer to a 180°C oven and start checking from about 10 minutes, tinkering with the fill and cooking time until you hit the sweet spot. Unless you have a Proustian memory, write the final result down somewhere. You're aiming to give the cakes a good browning without overcooking the middle. Any cakes that turn out too dry may be dunked in linden flower tea.

QUINCE

One of the great benefits of Genoise is its hospitability to unusual flavours via the medium of syrup. And syrup is one of the few means of capturing the otherworldly flavour of quince. Like apple and pear, quince is a member of the _Rosaceae_ family, and would look more like a cross between the two were it not for its fine coating of fuzz, as if it were grown in the bag of a vacuum cleaner and not on a tree. They're too hard and sour to eat raw, shortcomings that only make their aromatic qualities more striking. Cooked, they taste like a sunny autumn afternoon in the twelfth century. Rinse off the fluff but don't peel. Core and chop 500g worth of fruit (i.e. about 2 large quinces). Place in a pan with 350ml water and 200g sugar and bring to a simmer. Cook until soft and use in a pie or crumble, or serve as they are, with a dollop of thick yogurt and a scattering of toasted nuts. Strain the remaining liquid, thicken it with more sugar if necessary, and drizzle over a Genoise. You'll need about 4 tbsp syrup for each layer of a 20cm round cake. Quince syrup can also be mixed with prosecco or with sugar, water, lemon juice and ice to make a sort of quince _pressé_ : we'll call it a Wife of Bath.

SAVOY BISCUITS

A swoon in biscuit form. Pale, fragile and sugared, Savoys are otherwise known as boudoir biscuits, or lady's fingers. Think twice about giving them to the builder with his tea. They're made with the same ratio of ingredients as Genoise – 1 egg to every 30g of sugar and flour – but no double-boiler is called for, and the yolks and whites of the egg are beaten separately. The egg yolks are whisked with half the sugar, and a little vanilla extract, to the point where the mixture holds its shape for 5 seconds after it falls from the whisk. This should take 5–10 minutes with a hand-held electric whisk, less with a stand mixer. Sift over the flour with a pinch of salt, but don't fold. In another bowl, whisk the egg whites, adding a few pinches of cream of tartar when they begin to foam. Continue whisking to soft peaks, then gradually add the rest of the sugar, tablespoon by tablespoon, and whisk to stiff peaks. Fold the meringue into the yolk and flour mix in a few batches until just combined. Taking care not to knock out too much air, spoon the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a 1.5cm plain nozzle and pipe 8–10cm lengths onto a lightly greased or parchment-lined baking tray. Sprinkle with caster sugar and bake at 180°C for 8 minutes. If you're making your Savoys to stand sentry around a Charlotte Russe, try and make sure they're the same length. If you're making them for a tiramisù, you can get away with greater irregularity. Or hang the biscuits and cook the batter in a Swiss roll tin, slicing the results into fingers. You won't get the pretty cross-sectional ellipses when your tiramisù is sliced, but then looks were never its strong point anyway.

SWISS ROLL

Like madeleines and Savoy biscuits, Swiss roll is made to the Genoise method, bar the double-boiler – simply whisk the room-temperature eggs and sugar to ribbon stage, then follow our starting point from step **5**. Use 3 eggs for 90g each of sugar and flour, and 1 tbsp melted butter mixed with 1 tsp vanilla extract. Bake in a greased and lined Swiss roll tin, about 30cm × 20cm, for 12–15 minutes until golden and springy. Shake some caster sugar over a piece of baking parchment just bigger than the tin. Turn the sponge out onto it. Working while the sponge is still warm, trim off the rough edges with a serrated knife. Score, from top to bottom, a line about 2cm in from one of the short sides – this will make it easier to roll the centre in on itself. Spread jam evenly over the sponge (you'll need at least 175g). Use the parchment to help you roll it up as tightly and neatly as possible. A thin layer of buttercream under the jam will be particularly welcome.

Genoise → Other Directions

CASSATA

A Genoise sponge case filled with sweetened ricotta and candied fruits.

TRIFLE

PUNSCHKRAPFEN

Cubes of rum and apricot cake sandwiched between layers of Genoise and covered with pink fondant icing.

FRAISIER

BAKED ALASKA

A Genoise base topped with ice cream, then entirely encased in Italian meringue **(here)** and baked.

CHARLOTTE ROYALE

Slices of Swiss roll are used to line a mould. This is then filled with bavarois, before being turned out and glazed.

MONT BLANC

Slice of Swiss roll topped with rum and chestnut cream, then piped with more chestnut cream.

**Butter Sponge Cake**

Known as _quatre quarts_ in France, as the mixture is made with equal weights of sugar, butter, flour and eggs. A little leavener and vanilla is included here too. It's okay to deviate slightly – some cooks like to use a bit more sugar and less flour for a moister cake. Excessive dryness can also be avoided by replacing some of the flour with the same weight of ground almonds: 25 per cent will make a notable difference; 80 per cent and you'll be in frangipane territory.

_For 2 shallow or 1 deep 20cm round cake(s), or 20–24 fairy cakes_ **A B**

INGREDIENTS

200g unsalted butter, softened **C D**

200g caster sugar

Pinch of salt

200g eggs – 4 medium or 3 large **E**

1 tsp vanilla extract – optional

200g plain flour **F**

1 tsp baking powder

2 tbsp milk **G**

**1** Prepare the cake tin(s) by greasing lightly and lining the bottom with baking parchment. Use a wooden spoon to cream the soft (not melting) butter and sugar with a pinch of salt until the mixture is pale and fluffy.

**2** Lightly beat the eggs with the vanilla extract, if using. Gradually beat the egg mixture into the butter and sugar, then sift in the flour and the baking powder and stir as little as is needed to combine thoroughly. Finally, stir in the milk.

**3** Spoon or scrape the batter into the prepared tin(s) or paper cake cases.

**4** Bake at 180°C for 14–18 minutes for fairy cakes, 20–25 minutes for 2 shallow cakes (to make a sponge sandwich cake), or 45–55 minutes for 1 deep cake. They are cooked when the top of the cake springs back to the touch, or when a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.

LEEWAY

**A** For 20–24 fairy cakes, use small (as opposed to muffin-size) paper cases.

**B** 50g each of butter, sugar and flour, plus 1 medium egg and ½ tbsp milk, will make about 200ml batter.

**C** If your butter is soft enough, you can use the all-in-one method, wherein all the ingredients are beaten together in a bowl, for 1–2 minutes with an electric mixer, or 3 minutes by hand. Compared to the traditional method, this can make for a slightly denser cake, so you may prefer to use self-raising flour in addition to the baking powder.

**D** For a lower-fat cake, reduce the butter weight by two-thirds, and add the full butter weight of apple purée. For example, instead of 200g butter, use 65g butter and 200g apple purée. It may need longer to bake.

**E** Replace 1 of the eggs with 2 yolks for a moister crumb (but don't replace all of them).

**F** Use self-raising flour instead of the plain flour and baking powder.

**G** The milk is not essential: it just loosens the mixture a bit.

Butter Sponge Cake → Flavours & Variations

BUCKWHEAT & ALMOND

Buckwheat was once used by peasants in the Italian Tyrol to make a sponge sandwich cake known as _la torta di grano saraceno_. The recipe on my bag of buckwheat flour called for equal weights of buckwheat flour, sugar, butter and ground almonds. Follow the starting point, using 150g rather than 200g of everything; use 3 medium eggs beaten with 2 tbsp milk, and omit the baking powder. Jam is the usual filling. Top with a shake of icing sugar. _Torta di grano saraceno_ is gluten-free, and relies on the eggs and creaming for leavening, so be sure to aerate the butter and sugar with a vigorous mix. Omit the vanilla in order to preserve the flavour of almond and buckwheat. Overall the cake has a slightly corn-like quality, with a subtle sweetness you wouldn't want to overwhelm with an excess of extracts (or jam, for that matter); whipped cream would be a better filling. Texture-wise, too, the cake recalls corn: its high flour content makes it dry and a little sandy, like cornbread.

CARROT

What happened to carrot cake? It used to be awful. Hmm, you'd think, perched on a repurposed pew in the cathedral tea shop. Why did I order _this_? The incongruity of cake made from root vegetables was just that: an incongruity, entirely as tiresome as it sounded. Then something happened. Left-leaning cake-makers started grating the carrots more finely, or hit upon exactly the right spice mix. Or maybe the frosting just got deeper. Some recipes depart only minimally from our starting point, substituting brown for white sugar, adding spices and the same weight of grated carrot as flour. It's not uncommon for the butter to be replaced by oil; tasted side-by-side, most people preferred the oil-based cake, which has the extra benefit of not relying on the creaming method. For a 20cm square tin, put 200g plain flour, 200g soft brown sugar, 2 tsp cinnamon, 2 tsp mixed spice, 2 tsp baking powder and ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda in a mixing bowl. Whisk 3 large eggs with 200g (240ml) oil (groundnut, sunflower or rapeseed) for 2 minutes – by hand is fine. Add 1 tsp vanilla extract towards the end. Pour the egg mixture into the dry mix and stir until nearly combined before stirring in 200g finely grated carrot. Pour into an oiled, lined tin and cook at 160°C for 45–50 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. Orange zest, raisins soaked in orange juice and/or chopped walnuts can be added with the carrots. For the frosting, mix 75g icing sugar into 250g soft cream cheese. The cake will keep, wrapped and in the fridge, for 3 days.

CHOCOLATE

Sachertorte may be more famous, but my mother's chocolate cake is miles better. Had she only refrained from jotting the recipe down for every neighbour, distant relation and door-to-door cleaning-products salesperson, she might have trademarked it, and I'd be dictating this sentence from a vicuña-covered Davenport while muscular flunkeys washed my feet with Champagne. When I left home for London I took solace in the chocolate fudge cake they used to serve at Kettner's, in Soho, although I've since learned it was made with a packet mix. It's possible to make chocolate butter sponge by replacing 10 per cent of the flour weight in our starting point with cocoa powder, but what elevated the Kettner's/packet-mix cake was the use of oil instead of butter, which counters the drying effect of cocoa in a way that butter doesn't. In this version I use the same weight of oil as butter, sugar and flour. To make your own chocolate cake mix, sift together 180g self-raising flour, 20g cocoa powder, ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda and 200g caster sugar. When the need for cake strikes, tip the dry mix into a bowl and excavate a well. In a jug, beat together 3 large eggs, 200g (240ml) vegetable oil and 2 tsp vanilla extract. Tip the wet ingredients into the well, mix everything together, and divide the batter between 2 greased and lined 20cm round cake tins. Bake at 180°C for 20–25 minutes, when a skewer should come out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool. For the fudge frosting, melt 75g butter with 3 tbsp cocoa powder and 3 tbsp milk, stirring all into a smooth paste. Then stir in 250g sifted icing sugar; don't skip the sifting. Mix to a homogenous brown, allowing the frosting a few minutes to thicken before spreading just under half of it on the bottom layer and the rest on the top. If you prefer to use butter in your chocolate cake, note that a professional cake-maker might freeze a butter cake once it's cooled – it will be moister when defrosted.

ELDERFLOWER

The fragrance and flavour of elderflower is a musky commingling of blackcurrant leaf, floral lemon oil and a West Country hedgerow after a shower in June. Ideal, then, as a flavouring for dainty fairy cakes, to serve after cucumber sandwiches and a camomile tisane – the very essence of a decorous garden tea, even if the only grass you own is the clump of municipal park stuck to the sole of your trainers. Like its vanilla equivalent, elderflower sugar can be a lovely thing to have on hand: layer about 1 tbsp fresh blooms per 100g sugar and leave to elderflowerise for up to 6 months. For a stronger hit, Jane Scotter and Harry Astley add the blossoms from 4 large elderflower heads directly into a cake batter. Out of season, you'll have to resort to cordial. For 100g each of sugar, butter and flour, add 3 tbsp cordial beaten into the 2 eggs in place of the milk and vanilla. Note that the sugariness of the syrup will give the cakes a light crust, and you'll find the flavour as mild as a vicar's small talk – so an elderflower glacé icing is a must if you hope to create a stir amid the croquet hoops. About 3 tbsp cordial mixed with 250g sifted icing sugar will be enough to top 24 fairy cakes.

FRUIT CAKE

This is a far simpler adaptation than you might expect. (Or than I expected.) A good fruit cake can be as straightforward a matter as stirring the fruit into the equal-weights-of-everything cake, after the eggs and flour have been mixed in. How much dried or glacé fruit / mixed peel is up to you, but a good rule of thumb is to use the same weight as each of the other ingredients, if the results are to qualify as bona-fide fruit cake, as opposed to a cake with some fruit in it. For something denser, more akin to Christmas cake, triple that amount. A few handfuls of almonds or walnuts can be thrown in to keep your teeth interested. Consider flavouring the crumb with a small amount of sweet spice (nutmeg, mixed spice, cinnamon), an ooze of treacle, some finely grated citrus zest, a dram of dark spirit, or any combination thereof. Some recipes call for vanilla, but vanilla is so ubiquitous, why not seize the opportunity to omit it? Brown is the usual sugar of choice; white will taste odd, unless you supplement it with treacle, or, indeed, dark sugar. As for the flour, you might experiment by substituting rye for half of it, or a gluten-free flour like buckwheat, semolina, nut meal or cornmeal for a third of the flour weight. For a 20cm cake, use 225g each of brown sugar, butter and plain flour, 4 medium eggs, 675g vine fruits soaked in 3 tbsp dark spirit (or sherry, or tea), 50g each of glacé fruit and mixed peel, 1 tsp spice, 1 tbsp citrus zest, 2 tsp treacle, and ½ tsp salt. Bake at 150°C for 2½ hours. For a 15cm round cake, halve these quantities and bake for just 2 hours. For a 25cm cake, double the quantities and bake for 3–3½ hours. Whichever size you make, you'll need to line the inside and outside of the cake tin with baking parchment to protect the cake during its long spell in the oven. As it bakes, keep an eye on the top as well, tenting it with foil if it's getting too dark. The baked cake will benefit from being very well wrapped and sprinkled with a tablespoon of rum or brandy every week or so. The same mixture can also be used to make Christmassy fairy cakes. Spoon into paper cases and bake at 160°C for about 25 minutes. One of the earliest fruit cakes I remember making was for the annual baking competition at my junior school. My mother, still wary after my performances in ballet competitions with my back to the judging panel, took things in hand and made much of the fruit cake herself. It lost to a buttercream hedgehog. The whole murky business taught me two valuable lessons: that cheating doesn't pay, and that (going by my mother's indignation), it definitely wasn't the taking part that counted.

LANGUES DE CHAT **/** TUILES

Mix 25g each of butter, sugar and flour per egg white _for langues de chat_ , or tuiles – pliable biscuits that can be fashioned into curls, cups and spirals. The shaping and baking require a little more skill than for their sugary cousins, brandy snaps, but with a bit of practice, or cheating with a stencil, you'll soon get the hang of it. Follow the method to the end of step **2**, omitting the egg yolks, baking powder and milk. Vanilla is optional, but if you are using it, limit it to ¼ tsp extract per egg white. Transfer the batter to a piping bag fitted with a 2cm nozzle. Lightly grease 2 baking trays, or line them with silicone mats or baking parchment, and pipe 7–8cm lengths of the batter onto them, leaving a good few centimetres in between to allow for spreading. Knock the trays on the bench to dispel any air bubbles, then bake at 180°C for 5–7 minutes. Once they're out of the oven, give your _langues_ a minute before taking a palette knife to them, to check if they're ready to shape. For variation, add ground spices to the flour, or sprinkle with sesame seeds or flaked almonds over the top before baking.

NAKED

Put down the vanilla bottle. Your Victoria sponge should be as naked as a calendar girl – except for the filling of raspberry jam, and the light sprinkling of sugar – allowing the Women's Institute judges to check that it's golden and evenly baked. Expect to be marked down for any tell-tale criss-crosses left by the cooling rack.

PEANUT BUTTER

Cooking with peanut butter can be a little touch and go. The flavour works well in this sponge mixture but, unlike most cakes, it's at its best soon after you make it. As the days pass, the beaniness of the legumes gets ever more apparent. Add the same weight of peanut butter as flour, sugar, butter and eggs, creaming it in with the butter and sugar. Omit the vanilla but keep the baking powder. Loosen the mix with some extra milk: 1 tbsp per 50g peanut butter. You might also add a few pinches of salt (or use salted butter), and a 50/50 combination of white and brown sugar is good.

POLENTA & PINEAPPLE

Cornmeal is evidently an aphrodisiac either side of the Adriatic. In Bosnia, 'sweetheart cake' is made with cornmeal, sometimes studded with pieces of walnut or chocolate and, once baked, soaked in lemon, wine or aniseed-flavoured syrup. In Italy, a variety of polenta cake flavoured with Maraschino, grappa or rum is known as _amor_ polenta. Some polenta cakes simply adapt our starting point for butter sponge, using 50/50 plain flour and (coarse or fine) polenta. Corn cakes can of course be made with no other flour than cornmeal – see **here**. I made a polenta cake for my friend Bruna, from Brazil, where corn-based cakes like _bolo de fubá_ are very popular. Rather than soaking it in booze or citrus, I made it with pineapple – another Brazilian weakness. She might have eaten it all if my husband hadn't tucked in too. Normally agnostic about cornmeal cakes, he claimed this was different, on the basis that it reminded him of two-day-old, leftover pineapple upside-down cake (a good thing, apparently). Follow the butter-sponge method, replacing up to three-quarters of the flour with the same weight of fine cornmeal. Use light brown sugar in place of white, if you have it. I used 200g butter, 50g plain flour, 150g fine cornmeal and 100g sugar (reduced on the basis that the pineapple and corn are both perfectly sweet enough). Drain 2 × 430g tins of pineapple pieces (about 500g drained weight), or the equivalent amount of fresh, and dab dry with kitchen paper. Once all the flour is mixed into the batter, stir in the pineapple. Continue as per our starting point, although note that the cake may need a little longer in the oven to pass the skewer test.

YOGURT

I made the _gâteau au yaourt_ French kids are taught to make at school, using the yogurt pot as a measuring jug. Crikey, I thought. This is why French women don't get fat. It was cheap-tasting and clammy. I double-checked the recipe online, only to find that I was not alone in finding it unpleasant. So let's leave the cake to little Hippolyte and Mathilde. If yogurt cake appeals on health grounds, make the Lebanese version **here**. It's much nicer: more of a cheesecake than a sponge, but tangy and delicious, and low in sugar, flour and fat.

Butter Sponge Cake → Other Directions

BATTENBERG

Squares of pink and yellow sponge cake encased in marzipan.

MARBLE CAKE

Two different colours of sponge-cake batter, swirled together before baking.

STEAMED SPONGE PUDDING

Put the starting-point batter into a greased pudding basin and steam (or microwave).

EVE'S PUDDING

Stewed apples topped with a butter-sponge batter and baked.

PINEAPPLE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE

Sponge cake baked on top of pineapple rings and sugar.

PANETELA BORRACHA

A Cuban sponge cake soaked in rum syrup.

BOLO DE ROLO

Brazilian sponge cake baked in a very thin layer, then spread with guava jam and rolled up.

**Gingerbread**

Gingerbread marks the transition on the continuum from cake to biscuits. With minor tweaks to the ingredients and method you can take this in either direction. The cake mix is very wet, thanks to the quantity of melted butter, sugar, syrup and milk, resulting in a moist, dense cake. For gingerbread biscuits, the milk and half of the sugar are omitted, yielding a drier, rollable dough.

_For a 900g (2lb) loaf tin_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

100g unsalted butter

200g soft brown sugar **B C D**

100g golden syrup or treacle, or a mix **B D E**

200g plain flour

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda **F**

1 tbsp ground ginger **G**

2 tsp mixed spice **H**

Pinch of salt

100ml milk

1 egg, beaten

**1** Melt the butter with the sugar and syrup in a small saucepan over a low heat until smooth.

**2** Meanwhile, sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda, spices and salt into bowl. Make a well in the centre.

**3** Pour the melted butter mixture and the milk into the dry ingredients and thoroughly combine without over-beating. Then mix in the egg.

**4** Pour into the greased or lined loaf tin.

A crimped-paper loaf-tin liner will help protect the cake from burning.

**5** Bake immediately at 180°C for 30–40 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.

Start checking from 30 minutes. You may need to cover the top loosely with foil to stop it from burning before the cake is fully cooked.

**6** If possible, wrap the cake tightly in baking parchment or greaseproof paper and keep it for a few days. The flavour will improve, and the texture will become moister and stickier.

LEEWAY

**A** Make a 20cm square cake, more in line with parkin, by switching the sugar and syrup quantities, and using 50/50 golden syrup and treacle. Add 100g medium oatmeal and an extra ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda to the dry ingredients, then proceed as opposite, baking the cake at 160°C for 30–35 minutes. Wrap and leave for a few days before eating.

**B** For an extra-sticky loaf cake, switch the syrup and sugar quantities (i.e. 200g syrup, 100g sugar).

**C** Use light or dark soft brown sugar. The latter has a stronger flavour, which you can tamp down by mixing it with white sugar. Using only white sugar is fine, but you'll need treacle rather than golden syrup to get a proper gingerbread flavour, and the squidgy texture of the baked loaf will take longer to develop.

**D** Sticky cakes like this are prone to sinking, due to their high proportion of sugar; I find some are better baked at 150–160°C for slightly longer than 40 minutes.

**E** I make my gingerbread with a 50/50 mix of treacle and golden syrup, as I love the liquorice tang of the former, but 100 per cent golden syrup mixed with dark brown sugar will still yield a dark cake. You might also use molasses, the syrup from a jar of stem ginger or honey.

**F** For a loaf cake, some cooks add 1 tsp baking powder along with the bicarbonate of soda.

**G** _The Joy of Cooking_ calls for 8 tbsp very finely chopped fresh ginger in place of ground ginger. Fans of ginger might like a combination of fresh, ground and glacé.

**H** In many gingerbread recipes, the ginger is augmented by other spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, clove and allspice are all common. Finely grated citrus zests might be mixed in too.

Gingerbread → Flavours & Variations

ALMOND & GINGER

Dijon is also famous for its gingerbread. The half-timbered premises of Mulot et Petitjean, rather appetising themselves in their red-and-cream paintwork, are the perfect place to sample _pain d'épices_. Besides the plain variety, they sell a version containing nuggets of glacé fruit, and another studded with big pieces of pale almond, creating, against the reddish-brown background of the crumb, a visual effect not unlike Spanish _salchichón_. Recently Mulot and Petitjean have been working with the late Bernard Loiseau's company to create a range of more exotically flavoured _pains d'épices_ – bergamot, five-spice, and Morello cherry. The last is said to be good with game and cheeses, and excellent toasted. For a 900g (2lb) loaf quantity of almond gingerbread, add 100g chunkily chopped blanched almonds, mixed in with the egg at step **3**.

CHOCOLATE & GINGER

When McVitie's launched the chocolate variant of their famous ginger cake, ginger nuts like me assumed they'd used chocolate _and_ ginger. They hadn't (the invertebrates). Here's the opportunity they missed: a chocolate gingerbread loaf. Use only 165g plain flour and sift it with 35g cocoa powder, the bicarbonate of soda, ground ginger, mixed spice and salt. Add the melted butter, sugar and golden syrup, as per our starting point. After the milk and egg have been added, stir in 50g chopped stem ginger and 50g dark chocolate chips. Bake for 45 minutes. This is the rare sort of sticky loaf that is not improved by a slick of butter. There's enough going on without it.

COCONUT MASALA

Marks & Spencer used to sell sweet curried popcorn. I must have been the only person who liked it. I went in search of some only a few weeks after its first appearance on the shelf and it had gone for good. I visit it, head bowed and hands respectfully behind my back, in my food-and-drink garden of remembrance, interred alongside Maynard's Salad Gums, Royal Scot biscuits, Milk Tray's Lime Barrel, the Lion Bar (as was), a veal cobbler my mum used to make until she lost the recipe, and the whitebait served at The King's Head in Wickham, where I worked for a bit. Some favourites have risen from the dead. I managed to resurrect Rowntree's much-mourned Cabana bar for an entry in _The Flavour Thesaurus_. And I was amazed to find a Chinese takeaway in Clerkenwell that makes pancake rolls the way I remember them from my teenage years: big, ugly, and filled to their folded ends with earthy beansprouts. M&S's curried popcorn contained a mix of spices, coconut and nigella seeds that invites reinterpretation along the gingerbread biscuit lines described. Use 130g plain flour and 65g desiccated coconut, 100g golden syrup, 100g brown sugar, 1 tsp garam masala, 1 tsp ground coriander and a pinch of nigella seeds. You might consider replacing the 100g butter with the same amount of ghee.

COFFEE & CARDAMOM

Coffee and cardamom struck me as an ideal combination for a sticky gingerbread-style loaf. I was so right I was almost wrong. The roasted notes in the coffee recalled the treacle in gingerbread, and cardamom is a member of the ginger family. My loaf, in other words, tasted like gingerbread, but less so. It turns out that the strident fieriness of ginger is key to gingerbread's success: if you plan a shot across its bows, be bold with the aromatics. For an unambiguous coffee and cardamom flavour – or _garwa_ , as they call it in the Middle East – add the crushed seeds of 4 cardamom pods to the dry mix in our starting point, and stir 5 tsp instant coffee into 2 tbsp of the milk, heated to help the coffee dissolve. Use golden syrup on its own or mixed with 1 tbsp treacle.

FLORENTINES & BRANDY SNAPS

Fancy chocolate biscuit, or toffee with benefits, Florentines are pretty enough to pin to your cardie. Like edible Andrew Logan brooches. The mixture is an almond-sliver away from the gingerbread biscuits variation over the page. Simply reduce the flour until you reach a 1:1:1:1 weight-ratio of butter, sugar, syrup and flour. Omit the bicarb, too: these biscuits are so flat they look like the marks a previous batch of biscuits left on your baking tray. For brandy snaps, mix in 1 tsp ground ginger per 100g of each other ingredient with the flour. For Florentines, assuming you're using 100g each of butter, sugar, syrup and flour, stir 200–400g sliced or chopped fruit and nuts into the dough. Choose from diced glacé fruit, ginger or angelica; slivered or flaked almonds; chopped hazelnuts and pistachios. Both brandy snaps and Florentines are made as per gingerbread biscuits, by melting the butter, sugar and syrup together, then adding them to the flour and spice. Once the ingredients are all combined, transfer teaspoonfuls onto a non-stick baking sheet, leaving each a few centimetres of elbow room. The brandy snap mixture can be left in mounds, but the Florentine mixture should be gently spread out with the back of a teaspoon. Bake at 180°C for 8–10 minutes. Once they're dark golden, remove from the oven. Leave Florentines to harden for about 1 minute (judge their readiness by poking at the edges with a palette knife), then lift them off and transfer to a cooling rack to await their coating (or two) of melted chocolate on the smooth side. As for brandy snaps, wrap them while they're still warm and pliable around the handle of a wooden spoon, or anything similarly circular in cross-section. Don't hang about, as they harden pretty quickly (although they can be re-softened if necessary by a short stint back in the oven).

GINGERBREAD BISCUITS

Elizabeth I had gingerbread people made to the likeness of her guests. It's a good idea: anyone who shuns your baking can have their head snapped off, voodoo-style, when they leave. Reduce the brown sugar to 100g and omit the milk. At the end of step **1**, allow the butter mix to cool for 10 minutes before stirring it into the dry ingredients. Fashion the warm dough into rounds, rolling walnut-size quantities into balls between your palms, and baking immediately, spaced out on a lightly greased or parchment-lined baking tray. Alternatively, allow the dough to cool, then refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, before rolling it out to make gingerbread men or neat shapes. In either case, bake at 180°C for 10–15 minutes. If you like a harder ginger biscuit, like an old-fashioned ginger nut, omit the egg too. Makes about 20 × 9cm biscuits.

GOLDEN SYRUP

I was so thin as a kid that my mother used to leave the lid off the golden syrup tin and surreptitiously fail to police it. I ate it on porridge made with 1 part oats to 2 parts sugar, or on stacks of Mother's Pride white buttered toast. My limbs remained twiggy while my teeth fell out one by one. Golden syrup is familiar in most Anglophone Commonwealth countries, but is mysteriously unknown in Europe. North Americans have corn syrup, which to me tastes like elevator music to golden syrup's good British pop. (Maple syrup is Miles Davis, wasted in a cake batter.) Golden syrup, with no ginger but a bit of help from a couple of teaspoons of vanilla extract, makes for a milder, cooler sticky loaf. Retain the bicarbonate of soda, as these super-sweet syrups are surprisingly acidic (golden syrup has a pH between 5 and 6, and treacle is more like 6).

HONEY

Honey cake, or _lekach_ , is traditionally served for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in the hope of sweetening the year to come. Jewish friends tell me the cake is so widely disliked it can easily hang around the house for a year before it's binned to make way for the next one. Honey cake is often horribly dry (it's known as 'the choker' in some circles). No risk of choking here: the quantity of sugar in this adaptation of the starting point lends the cake a pleasing moistness, further enhanced by the use of oil instead of butter. Sift and then thoroughly mix together 200g plain flour, ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda, 2 tsp ground cinnamon, 2 tsp mixed spice, ½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg and a few pinches of salt. In a separate bowl, mix together 100ml vegetable oil, 100ml honey, 100ml cold coffee, 100g caster sugar, 100g soft brown sugar and 1 egg. Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and pour in the wet mixture. Mix well, then pour the batter into a lined 900g (2lb) loaf tin and bake at 160°C for 45–55 minutes. Check on it after about 30 minutes – you may need to cover the top with a loose tent of foil to stop it darkening too much. Leave to cool for 15 minutes before turning out. The flavour of the cake will depend, to some extent, on what type of honey you've used. Buckwheat honey ('malty, spicy, assertive and memorable', according to Marie Simmons) is the choice of Ruth Reichl, who suggests eating the cake in toasted slices spread with cream cheese.

MALT LOAF

Once Soreen, never forgotten. Shop-bought malt loaf is dense enough to lag the walls of a black hole. This variation is a little lighter, and less likely to bond irreversibly to the roof of your mouth. But the brewery-floor pungency of malt extract, plus the sweetness of dried fruit, make it indisputably malt-loafy, and with a half-decent overarm it could still take out a window. Follow our starting point, leaving out the spices, substituting malt extract for the golden syrup, and omitting butter and milk in favour of the same amounts of sultanas and cold tea (100g and 100ml). Put the sultanas in the pan at the outset, to heat with the malt extract and sugar. Bake the loaf at a slightly lower temperature – 160°C – for 35–45 minutes. Keep wrapped for at least a day or two if you can, then reward your patience with a slice spread with plenty of butter.

TOMATO SOUP

Sylvia Plath made tomato soup cake the day she wrote 'Death & Co'. It was once known as a 'depression cake', not, as it happens, with reference to Plath's mental condition, but because it was one of those cakes popular during the 1930s for its low quantities of expensive ingredients like eggs, butter and milk, in favour of cheap sugar. On a cheerier note, the cake is a lovely reddish-ginger, like fox fur, and wonderfully springy in texture. M.F.K. Fisher calls it Mystery Cake, on the basis that it's best not to tell people what's in it before they give it a go. To my mind its flavour is less like tomato soup than the tin it comes in, but to my husband's it has the sweet and slightly estranged spiciness of carrot cake. Early recipes stipulate the creaming method and sometimes call for lard rather than butter, but this later version substitutes oil for hard fat, obliging, in effect, a non-melting method. Mix 150g each of plain flour and granulated sugar with ½ tsp each of baking powder and bicarbonate of soda, 1 tsp ground cinnamon and ½ tsp each of ground allspice and cloves. Make a well in the centre, then add a pre-mixed combination of 1 egg, 2 tbsp vegetable oil and half a tin of Campbell's condensed cream of tomato soup. Whisk for a couple of minutes, then pour into a 450g (1lb) loaf tin and bake for 40 minutes at 140°C. Consider frosting with cream cheese sweetened with icing sugar: cheese and tomato cake.

**Biscuits**

Drop the syrup from the gingerbread biscuits and you have a basic recipe for biscuits: 1:1:2 sugar to butter to flour. Sans syrup, you'll be glad of some egg to make a cohesive dough. _Larousse_ demands the same ratio of ingredients bar the baking powder to make _pâte sablée_ , a French sweet pastry. And like sweet pastry, this dough will need chilling if it's to be rolled out and cut into shapes. However, if you want fat, round biscuits, walnut-size balls of dough can be rolled between your palms then baked immediately. Bear in mind that the 1:1:2 ratio is only a starting point. Experiment. You might find that you prefer a sweeter 2:1:2, or a richer 3:5:6.

_For 20–24 biscuits_

INGREDIENTS

100g unsalted butter

100g sugar **A B**

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 egg or 2 egg yolks

200g plain flour **C D**

½ tsp baking powder **E**

Pinch of salt

Chopped nuts, raisins – optional **F**

**1** Cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl.

Start by softening the butter with a fork if it's still a little hard. Then add the sugar and cream them together until pale and fluffy. It's crucial that the butter is not warm or melting when you start – this will make the finished biscuits greasy and flat.

**2** Beat the vanilla extract with the egg and stir into the butter and sugar mixture.

**3** Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt and stir as little as is needed to combine thoroughly. If using chocolate chips, nuts or raisins, stir them through now.

Too much stirring will develop excess gluten. In some biscuit recipes, when a shorter texture is called for, the egg is added after the flour, to keep gluten formation to a minimum.

**4** If you're rolling out the dough, pat it flat, cover in cling film and leave in the fridge to firm up for about 30 minutes. When you're ready to bake, roll it out to a thickness of 4–5mm and cut out your shapes. Or fashion the just-made dough into a log, then wrap and refrigerate until it's firm enough to cut into 4–5mm slices. The instant-gratification route is to hand-roll the mixture into walnut-size balls and place them on a baking tray (only greased if it isn't non-stick), spacing them 2.5cm apart, before using the tines of a fork to flatten them a bit.

**5** Bake at 180°C for about 15 minutes, by which time the biscuits should be browning at the edges and underneath. Rotate the tray halfway through if your oven seems to have hot spots.

Make sure the oven is truly at heat, or the butter in the dough can start to melt before it starts to cook. If you think your biscuits are done, but aren't sure, take them out. You can always bung them back in for another minute or two if they turn out not to be.

**6** Remove the biscuits from the baking tray to a cooling rack. Once cool, quickly stash in an airtight tin before you eat them all.

Let the biscuits firm up for a few minutes before removing them from the baking tray.

LEEWAY

**A** The finer the sugar, the more the biscuits will spread in the oven.

**B** You can substitute the same weight of syrup for some or all of the sugar, but note that syrups contain water, and will make the finished biscuits less crisp.

**C** Self-raising flour can be used, but drop the baking powder.

**D** For chocolate biscuits, replace up to 25g of the flour with cocoa powder.

**E** The baking powder creates airier biscuits. Don't replace it with bicarbonate of soda, as there's not enough acidity in the other ingredients to activate it, and your biscuits will have a metallic flavour.

**F** Add as many choc chips, chopped nuts or raisins as you like at the end of step **3**.

Biscuits → Flavours & Variations

CHOCOLATE CHIP

Cookie is the obligatory term, even for Brits. Offer someone a chocolate chip _biscuit_ and you'll sound like a dowager duchess. Make these according to our starting point, stirring in, at the end of step **3**, roughly the same weight of chopped chocolate as sugar. Or maybe a bit more, to compensate for the stingily chipped commercial sort. Use half white and half muscovado sugar, if possible. Cook for no more than 8 minutes if you like your cookies soft; otherwise, follow the cooking time in the starting point. Allow your cookies to firm up on the baking tray for a few minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack. Heaven with a dog-eared copy of _Black Beauty_ and a glass of cold milk.

FIG **,** ALMOND & FENNEL BISCOTTI

Biscotti – the poster biscuit for the low-fat lifestyle. Made without butter or oil, these parched and petrified sweetmeats are desperate for a drink. Hence their place on the coffee-chain counter. They wouldn't stand a chance in a cake shop, next to an éclair or a strawberry tart. In any case, to hell with coffee. Biscotti are at their best dipped into wine, as anyone who has softened _cantuccini_ in a glass of _vin santo_ will know. They are very easy to make, and demonstrate what happens when you subtract all the butter from the starting point for biscuits. Whisk 100g sugar with 1 egg until the mixture is thick and pale, add a few pinches of fennel seeds, then stir in 200g plain flour, ½ tsp baking powder and a pinch or two of salt. Bring together to form a dough, then knead in about 200g in total of toasted nuts and dried fruit (both roughly chopped). Split the dough in half, then roll each half into a log. Place the logs on a parchment-lined or non-stick baking tray – not too close together as they will expand a bit as they cook – and bake at 130°C for 1 hour. Remove from the oven and immediately cut into 1cm slices using a serrated knife (you may need to slip an oven glove on your other hand to steady the logs). Return the slices to the baking tray and cook for another 30–40 minutes, turning them over about halfway through. When they're ready, they should be golden. Cool your biscotti on a rack, then store in an airtight tin or jar for up to a month. For a version to serve on a cheeseboard, use pistachios, hazelnuts, dried apricots and dried cherries, all cut into pea-size pieces; cut the rolls into very thin slices after their first bake, and re-bake for as long as is needed to turn them golden.

GINGER

Grasmere gingerbread, sold from a tiny shop in the Lake District, looks more like shortbread than the classic syrup (or honey) gingerbread used to make gingerbread men. It's more crumbly than chewy or snappish. I rather prefer the packaging to the contents. Mind you, there wouldn't be queues backing up to Stone Arthur if everyone felt the same way. The exact formulation of the gingerbread created in 1854 by Sarah Nelson remains a secret of Kentucky Fried proportions, but Jane Grigson gives a recipe that she claims is better. It's more in line, ingredient-ratio-wise, with our starting point for biscuits, although it's made into a dough using a just-the-butter melting method. Mix 125g light brown sugar, 250g plain flour or fine oatmeal, 1 tsp ground ginger and ¼ tsp baking powder in a bowl, then bring it all together with 150g melted, tepid, lightly salted butter. Press into a thin layer in a 20cm square tin, and bake for 30–35 minutes at 180°C until the top is golden brown. Mark into pieces immediately, then leave to cool before storing in an airtight tin.

LIME & CLOVE

A favourite pairing of chef Peter Gordon, who uses them with pine nuts in a shortbread, and in a cream to serve alongside banana and ginger cheesecake. Of all the citrus and spice combinations, this is up there with the most boisterous; you may want to fix the biscuit tin with a padlock. Best to follow Gordon in crushing whole cloves rather than using ready-ground. Freshly ground, the fruitiness of clove is that much more apparent. And lime zest is spicy. As with many of the best combinations, it's hard to tell where one aromatic ends and the other begins. Follow the starting point, but drop the vanilla. For 100g brown sugar, 100g butter and 200g flour, use the finely grated zest of 3 limes and ½ tsp freshly ground cloves. A grinding of black pepper gives an interesting edge. Lime and clove also coincide in a sweet Barbadian syrup, or liqueur, called Falernum. It can be bought off the shelf, or home-made with rum, lime zest, cloves and ginger. There are many variations, but lime and clove is the _sine qua non_.

RED LEICESTER & OTHER CHEESES

Naturally, when we stay with our Italian-American cousins in New York, we're treated to great food and wine. They point us towards the best groceries and markets, and recommend with gestural intensity the most interesting new restaurants on the scene. And when they're not looking, I sneak into the nearest drug store and buy peanut butter and cheese crackers. They do justice to neither ingredient, but I'm crazy about them. Just as well they're not available in the UK. They come in a lurid shade of orange, and are probably coloured with annato, a natural extract from the seeds of the achiote tree, used at low levels to make butter look like it's come from pasture-fed cows, and to make Red Leicester red. I used the latter to make cheese biscuits, planning to sandwich them with a 50/50 mix of smooth peanut butter and cream cheese. But you can't leave cheese biscuits on the cooling rack and expect many of them to survive. By the time I came to make my PB&C crackers, there was one biscuit's worth left – that is, two halves – enough, nonetheless, to establish their wholesomeness compared to the drug-store crackers' trashy friability. Much more usefully, I learned that the 100g sugar in our starting point for biscuits can be replaced with the same weight of grated cheese, using the 2 egg yolks to bring the dough together. Cream the butter, then mix in the flour, baking powder, cheese and 1 tsp mustard powder in place of the vanilla. Cheese biscuit doughs will probably need to be chilled if they get too soft. Stephen Bull makes a cheese biscuit with a 1:1:1 weight ratio of blue cheese, butter and flour, adding 1 tsp salt per 200g of each ingredient, plus a whole egg. The resulting mixture is very soft, so Bull freezes it, so as to be able to roll it out to a 2mm thickness and press out the biscuits. Bake them at 190°C for 12 minutes. If you prefer your cheese with, rather than in, your biscuits, see **here, here** and **here** for several cracker recipes. Or try the biscotti variation given under fig, almond and fennel ( **here** ) or wholemeal digestives (opposite).

TURKISH DELIGHT

Turkish Delight makes an exotic addition to biscuits. You'll need 6–8 cubes of Turkish Delight for a dough made to our starting point: use a sharp knife to cut 5mm dice, tossing them in the drifts of icing sugar that collects in the box, to stop them becoming exasperatingly sticky. (They also make a good substitute for mixed candied peel in yeasted buns and fruit cakes.) The rose flavour is sphinx-like in its subtlety, so keep the biscuit dough fairly neutral in flavour – perhaps just a touch of vanilla or cinnamon. Chopped pistachios are a classic pairing.

WALNUT

We were staying in a holiday rental on a Cornish creek, and planned to have supper at the local pub. It was a warm October evening. We had a drink on the little beach at the foot of the cottage garden, then walked along the coast path by torchlight, only to find the pub kitchen unexpectedly closed. Back at the cottage, the cupboards were all but bare. We were both over the limit for driving, and so isolated that ordering a takeaway would have struck our immediate neighbours as an improbable idea from the future. We had no choice but make do with what we had. Some butter and milk. A third of a bottle of whisky. An assortment of half-eaten cheese, a brown paper bag of walnuts in their shells. And my husband's muesli, brought in his suitcase from London. No bread, or wine. I pounded some of the nuts, creamed the butter and mixed them with the muesli to a ratio of roughly 1:1:2. Then I added a tot of hot milk, fashioned the dough into a rough, flat circle and cooked it on the hob. We wrapped the warm oatcake in a napkin, then packed up the rest of the walnuts and the cheeses – a heel of Comté, most of a Cornish Quartz Cheddar, and an unopened packet of Roquefort. Recalling an excellent cheese and whisky pairing I tried at the insistence of the bloke who used to work in Milroy's, the whisky shop in Soho, I grabbed the bottle of Laphroaig. We returned to the beach in our woolliest sweaters and sat on a thick rug, leaning back on the tortured trunk of a long-dead tree. By the light of a full moon, we ate our picnic while the black water fizzed in and out of the shingle.

WHOLEMEAL DIGESTIVES

A.k.a. the _reader's_ biscuit. (The chocolate sort is to be avoided. We won't stand for smears on the pages.) Three digestives, a glass of cold milk and a good book is, for me at least, as sure a path to serotonin release as a trip to Disneyland for a seven-year-old. Digestives can be made with half the sugar in our starting point – a 1:2:4 ratio, hence their other name, 'semi-sweet'. It's not the easiest dough to work with, and will almost certainly need to be chilled in the fridge. As you'd imagine, wholemeal flour predominates, with added bran for the lovely rough texture. Use granulated sugar, rather than caster, and make sure there is either salt in the butter, or add a little more than you would for a biscuit. Salt is as essential to the character of a digestive as is it to a fisherman's beard. Graham crackers are the digestive's American cousin, but often contain a little cinnamon and molasses, or honey, in addition to the sugar. For the British digestive, make up a dough in the same way as you would for our starting point: use 50g granulated sugar, 75g butter and 25g lard, 150g wholemeal flour, 50g plain flour, 4 tbsp wheat bran, ½ tsp baking powder, ¼ tsp vanilla extract and ¼ tsp salt. No egg. Chill the dough for at least 30 minutes at step **4**, then roll out to a thickness of 3–4mm and cut out 7–8cm circles, docking them with a docking roller, or stabbing them at regular intervals with a knitting needle or similar. Bake as per the starting point.

**Shortbread**

The ratio for shortbread is well known – 1:2:3. Useful as long as you remember which number applies to which ingredient. I rely on a mnemonic, Shortbread Biscuit Formula. Sugar, Butter, Flour. Don't forget the pinch of salt as you mix it up. Classic and memorable as it may be, the 1:2:3 ratio is not set in stone. James Martin goes for a 1:6:7 ratio – the butteriest I've come across.

_For a 17–20cm round, or about 20 fingers_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

50g sugar **B**

100g unsalted butter, softened slightly **C**

150g plain flour **D**

Pinch of salt

1 egg yolk – optional **E**

**1** Cream the sugar and butter until combined.

The butter should be cool and soft when you start, not melting, as this will affect the texture of the finished biscuit.

**2** Add the flour and salt, stirring with a spoon to form a dough.

If the dough is too dry, an egg yolk will bring it together, although for the shortest texture, it might be better to hold some of the flour back initially.

**3** Either press the dough into a greased 17–20cm round tin, then score and prick it as attractively as possible, or roll out the dough to a thickness of 4–5mm and cut into shapes. Or use your hands to roll it into walnut-size balls, placing them on a greased baking sheet and pressing their tops with the tines of a fork.

Rest in the fridge for 30 minutes if you have time.

**4** Bake at 160°C for about 45 minutes for a round, 10–20 minutes for individual biscuits, depending on how thick they are.

Some cook their shortbread for 15–20 minutes at 180°C, in common with most standard biscuit recipes, but a longer bake will give a toastier flavour, and the surface a distinctly un-Scottish tan.

**5** Store in an airtight container.

Shortbread should keep for a week, even two.

LEEWAY

**A** For 6 hand-rolled biscuits – both a good quantity and a quick means of testing flavour variations – use 15g sugar, 30g butter and 45g flour. To make enough for a 20–22cm square tin, use 75g sugar, 150g butter and 225g flour.

**B** You might think of Viennese whirls as a variation of shortbread, made with icing sugar and a high proportion of butter to flour. This makes a soft paste that can be piped into swirly rosettes and fingers.

**C** Some cooks deploy the rubbing-in method for shortbread. It's an option if your butter is hard, but you will almost certainly need to add some egg yolk to bring the dough together.

**D** Substitute a quarter to a third of the flour for the same weight of rice flour, cornflour, semolina or potato starch. These gluten-free flours will lend an even shorter texture.

**E** Heston Blumenthal adds a little baking power to his shortbread, and also includes egg yolk, which contains the liquid necessary to activate the powder.

Shortbread → Flavours & Variations

BLACK PEPPER

Salt is a must in shortbread, but rest easy if you have matching grinders and used the wrong one. Leiths give a recipe for black pepper shortbread, stipulating 1 tsp peppercorns crushed in a mortar for a dough made with 55g sugar, 110g butter and 165g flour.

CHICKPEA

Pakora, socca or dhokla might prompt you to file chickpea flour under 'savoury', but biscuits made with besan argue otherwise. What they have in common with their savoury counterparts is their deep, golden colour, which is suggestive, if not indicative, of a richer butteriness than a regular biscuit made with white wheat flour. The real gain is textural: they're so light and melting that the addition of fruit or nuts would only detract from them. Spices are another matter. Cardamom and nutmeg, as used in the Indian biscuit _nan khatai_ , are particularly popular during Diwali. Afghan _nan-e nodhokchi_ are flavoured with rose and cardamom. The besan flavour is quite strong and, if you haven't tried it in sweet biscuits before, you might start by mixing it into plain flour, as suggested for cornflour or semolina at **D** under Leeway.

CHOCOLATE

In the UK, it takes a minimum of 3% fat-free dry cocoa solids to qualify as a chocolate biscuit (in case you were thinking of applying). Biscuits that fall short of the minimum can only be called chocolate-flavoured. I have yet to calculate whether Granny Boyd's biscuits, from Nigella Lawson's _How to be a Domestic Goddess_ , make the grade, but I don't care: this is my favourite chocolate biscuit dough by a country mile. The ratio is more or less in line with our starting point for shortbread; there's just a little less flour than you might expect, as the cocoa takes the place of some of it. Use the time you haven't wasted calculating the dry-cocoa-solids content raiding the supermarket for some really good vanilla ice cream, the indispensable accompaniment. Lawson calls for 125g caster sugar, 250g unsalted butter, 300g self-raising flour and 30g cocoa powder. Make as per the starting point and bake for 5 minutes at 170°C, then reduce the heat to 150°C for a further 15 minutes.

CULTURED BUTTER

Only a swivel-eyed serial killer would eat butter by the spoonful. Clotted cream is about as fatty as social norms allow. To comply with its PDO (Protected Designation of Origin), Cornish clotted cream must contain a minimum of 55 per cent butterfat. (Most British butters contain 86 per cent.) I came across a recipe for clotted cream shortbread in which half the butter weight in the 1:2:3 formula was replaced with clotted cream. They were lovely, but questionably named, as the water content in the cream compromised the shortness. Butter is better. For a deeper dairy flavour, follow Michael Ruhlman's recommendation and try cultured butter. Most butter sold in the UK is of the sweet cream variety, but some smaller dairies are starting to sell the sourer, more complex cultured butter online. Or you can seek out a Normandy AOP butter on the premium-priced shelves of your supermarket. Or make your own with double cream, buttermilk and a stand mixer. The process involves washing the butter solids from the butterfat, a sensory experience that merits immediate inclusion on your bucket list: twenty fats to wash before you die.

CUSTARD

In _English Food_ , Jane Grigson calls custard powder 'one of our minor national tragedies'. I'd like to have heard her thoughts on the recipe for custard powder found, fittingly enough, between curry powder and cyanide of potassium in _The Pharmaceutist's and Druggist's Practical Receipt Book_ published in 1865. A concoction of sago flour, turmeric, bitter almond powder and oil of cassia – like cinnamon, but harsher – is stirred into sweetened milk. Alfred Bird's powder of cornflour, yellow colouring and vanilla is ambrosial by comparison. (Bird invented his eggless custard powder for his wife, who suffered from an egg allergy. As love tokens go, it makes a change from flowers or frilly underpants.) Custard shortbread is made by substituting custard powder for a third of the flour in our starting point. For a more richly custardy effect, add vanilla extract and a touch of egg-yellow food colouring or annatto.

DATE

Date slices: up your street if you like the crumbly bit of crumble more than the fruit. Date is the classic, but any dried fruit, or even a very thick compote, can be used. Make sure it's thick, though – a watery fruit mixture will seep into the bottom layer of crumble and make your slice too soggy to handle. The crumble is made to shortbread proportions, splitting the standard 3 parts flour between equal weights of flour and oats. Rub or process 200g unsalted butter into 150g plain flour, then stir in 150g porridge oats, 100g sugar and a few pinches of salt. Simmer 400g stoned dates with 250ml water until the excess water evaporates, then chop them roughly. Press half the crumble mix into a 23cm square baking dish, spreading it out evenly, followed by the dates, then the other half of the crumble. Bake at 160°C for 40 minutes. Mark into slices while still warm from the oven, then cut and transfer to a rack when cool enough to handle.

HONEY & GHEE

Honey is never better than when it's paired with butter, preferably salted. It was after making the _beghrir_ pancakes **here** , dripping with honeyed butter, that I picked up a tube of honey shortbread in Fortnum & Mason. On a return visit, I found that they no longer sold them, and ended up making my own approximation. It's possible to straight-swap honey for sugar in shortbread, but note that they have very different water contents – white sugar contains as little as 0.1 per cent, where honey contains anything between 12 and 23 per cent (good-quality honey will typically contain less than 20 per cent). The more water in your sweetener, the more the gluten in the flour will develop, compromising the shortness of your shortbread. Using ghee in place of butter is one way to compensate for excess water in your sweetener, since it's all fat. It's like clarified butter, except that it's been cooked as well, and so has a richer flavour. Some ghee has butter flavouring added, but it's not hard to find the pure sort if you have an Asian supermarket nearby.

LAVENDER

A modern classic. Dinky round lavender shortbreads are served on the Eurostar route that runs direct from St Pancras to Avignon. The idea, I suppose, is that as you hurtle past the sun-warmed stone hamlets through acres of purplish blur, the biscuit provides a foretaste of your holiday. There's no shortbread on the return journey, presumably because the flavours of King's Cross via Dagenham are not fit for human consumption. Use 1 tsp lavender buds per 150g flour, plus a few drops each of orange flower water and vanilla extract.

MINCEMEAT

It's December the 20th or thereabouts. You roll up the sleeves of your Christmas jumper and prepare to make mince pies. You regret it almost immediately. Sweet pastry is hard enough to roll out on the best of days, but the central heating is at full blast, so the pastry sticks and stretches and melts. Your plan to delight the children by topping each pie with a pastry reindeer founders when most of the reindeer have unsettlingly long legs. You remove the first batch from the oven only to find molten mincemeat has bubbled over the sides and turned into a bituminous deposit. You look at the next batch of pastry and think about dumping it. Don't. Our starting points for sweet shortcrust and shortbread dough have a lot in common. Put the dough and remaining mincemeat in a bowl and give it all a good mix. Pluck out walnut-size amounts to roll into balls using your hands, flatten the tops with the tines of a fork, then bake as per the shortbread starting point. When cool, dust with icing sugar. Serve with the bald assertion that _Pastetenfüllungbälle_ are a Swabian precursor of mince pies.

OLIVE OIL & OUZO

If the ouzo you brought back from Corfu isn't the same without the sunshine and bouzouki music, save your guests from unwanted late-night digestifs by using it as a flavouring. _Kourabiedes_ ('clouds') is a Greek member of the international shortbread family. It's usually made with olive oil. Adapt it to our starting point by using a 1:2: weight ratio of sugar, olive oil and flour, replacing 10–30 per cent of the flour weight with ground almonds, if you like. For 50g sugar, 100g (120ml) olive oil and 250g flour, add 2 tbsp ouzo with the oil. Mix all the ingredients together, roll into walnut-size balls and place on a greased baking sheet, making a depression with your thumb in the top of each one. Bake at 160°C for 30 minutes. While the biscuits are still warm, sprinkle them with icing sugar. Some sprinkle a little more ouzo over the cooked biscuit, but I prefer the milder version, where the flavour of the olive oil makes itself known. Variations include a Christmas _kourabiedes_ flavoured with brandy, and decorated with a whole clove, to signify the spices presented to Jesus by the Magi.

PECAN

A typical North American addition to shortbread. For 'pecan sandies', the nuts are toasted, chopped and added to a dough made with brown sugar, which lends a slight caramel flavour. Vanilla is usually used too, and some cookie-makers add a dash of bourbon. As with so many North American cakes and cookies, pecan sandies are sweeter than their British equivalents. Use 100g sugar (65g brown and 35g white), 150g butter, 250g plain flour, 75g chopped pecans, 1 tsp vanilla extract and ½ tsp salt. Roll into about 12 balls, then roll in caster sugar and bake at 160°C for 20 minutes. Chad Robertson, owner of the San Francisco bakery Tartine, makes his sandies with maple sugar, ground pecans and KAMUT flour, a trademarked wholegrain wheat flour, which he claims yields the sandiest texture of all 'alternative' flours. (Bob's Red Mill, the Oregon-based natural-food company, maintains that KAMUT has a buttery flavour, so it really does sound perfect.) Robertson tends more towards a 1:1:2:2 ratio of sugar, butter, flour and pecans. He adds baking powder and, rather than roll the uncooked cookies in caster sugar, once they're out of the oven, he brushes them with maple syrup.

SHERBET LEMON

A fantastic and truly lemony shortbread that tastes rather like a good _tarte au citron_. The secret ingredient, citric acid, is borrowed from the recipe for Indian dhokla, Don't stint on the zest – the complex aromatics that give lemon its distinct flavour, aside from the acidity, are essential to keep the citric zing in balance. For a batch made with 50g sugar, 100g butter and 150g flour, add the finely grated zest of 2–3 lemons and ⅛ tsp citric acid to the mix.

**Flapjacks**

The ingredients ratio for flapjacks is a simple extension of that for shortbread – 1:1:2:3. Like gingerbread, flapjacks are usually made by the melting method. This means they can be in the oven very quickly. Beware, however, of trying to eat them too soon. The sugar and butter need time to cool into a set strong enough to withstand cutting. If they're not quite ready, your flapjacks will crumble, along with any notion of portion control. Little nuggets of flapjack are very difficult to resist.

_For a 20cm square, or a 23cm round_ **A B**

INGREDIENTS

100g light brown sugar **C D**

100g golden syrup **D E F**

200g unsalted butter **G**

300g porridge oats **H**

Pinch or two of salt

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda – optional **I**

**1** Melt the sugar, syrup and butter in a small saucepan over a medium heat until smooth. Set aside to cool.

**2** Pour the oats into a bowl. Stir in the salt and the bicarbonate of soda, if using. Make a well in the centre.

**3** Pour the melted butter mixture into the dry ingredients and thoroughly combine.

**4** Tip the mix into a 20cm square or 23cm round silicone mould or well-greased tin and press it in evenly and firmly.

If you are using a silicone mould, put it on a baking tray before you scrape the mixture into it.

**5** Bake in the centre of the oven at 150°C for 25–30 minutes or until golden and firm.

If you prefer a crisper flapjack, bake at 190°C for 30 minutes.

**6** When the flapjack has been out of the oven for 15 minutes, score into individual pieces. Leave the flapjacks (still in the mould or tin) somewhere cool to set, preferably overnight. If you need the flapjacks sooner, once cold, they can go into the fridge for a few hours to fix the set faster.

Don't let the flapjacks get so cold in the fridge that they shatter when you try to cut them. If this happens, allow them to come up to room temperature and test now and then until they become pliable.

**7** Cut the pieces. Flapjacks will keep in an airtight tin for 1 week.

LEEWAY

**A** As a rough guide, for a 15cm square, use half the quantities given. For a 30cm × 20cm traybake tin, up the quantities by 50 per cent.

**B** Some say flapjacks are best made in a tin, but I prefer silicone, which makes them easier to turn out, and is much easier to wash up.

**C** Dark brown sugar can be used instead of light, but remember how strongly flavoured it is. White sugar is fine too: it can just be a bit bland in a flapjack.

**D** Syrup has a higher water content than sugar, and brown sugar has a higher water content than white. If you want your flapjacks to keep a firmer texture for longer, use 25g treacle and 175g white sugar, instead of 100g each of syrup and brown sugar.

**E** If you're short of syrup, make it up with the same weight of sugar.

**F** Use other syrups, or a mix, but some – including honey and corn – contain a higher percentage of fructose, which will start to brown at a lower heat, so keep an eye on them while baking.

**G** Salted butter can be used for flapjacks, but using unsalted and adjusting with pinches of salt gives you more control.

**H** Large or jumbo oats don't hold together very well. Stick with porridge oats (not the instant sort).

**I** The bicarbonate of soda is optional, but not if you like your flapjacks browned and crispy.

Flapjacks → Flavours & Variations

BAKLAVA

Baklavas are the flipside of flapjacks. Fatih Gullu, sixth-generation baklava-maker at the renowned Karakoy Gulluoglu in Istanbul, insists on the thinnest, crispiest pastry, and that the syrup must be exactly the right density, bearing in mind that it changes according to climatic conditions. A coin dropped onto a baklava from a height of two feet should shatter each layer from top to bottom, although sceptics would be ill advised to try this at their local bakery. Outside Turkey, baklava is flavoured according to regional preference. Michael Krondl notes that Syrians opt for orange flower water or rosewater, and Iranians add cardamom too. Greeks include honey in the syrup and cinnamon with the nuts. Flapjacks suit similar flavouring principles. You might, however, want to adjust the size. Baklavas are dinky for a good reason. I make my exotic flapjacks in mini tart trays, using honey, orange flower water and coarsely chopped pistachios.

BANANA

Flavouring the sugar, syrup and butter mixture with banana yields a flapjack that's the dimple-cheeked offspring of banoffee pie. It's only a minor variation on the starting point, but the results will send your eyebrows to your hairline. Ideally you want a well-browned banana, but yellower specimens can be titivated with a little vanilla extract and a pinch or two of mixed spice. Mash (or finely chop) 2–3 very ripe bananas and then stir into the hot melted butter mixture before adding it to the oats at step **3**.

PASSION FRUIT

Passion-fruit pulp is so concentrated in flavour it's almost like an essence in itself. Which means it can be used in sponge cakes and biscuits without compromising their texture. Raw passion-fruit seeds are about as easy on the teeth as fragments of lead shot in feathered game. However, when cooked, they become crunchy and are less out of place in a flapjack than a cake. Use the pulp of 3–4 passion fruit. The water content of the fruit will ensure that the flapjack is more chewy than crunchy. This variation was inspired by an Ecuadorian drink called _colada de avena_ , or colada quaker, which is made with soaked oats, a raw sugar called panela and fruit – it's a little reminiscent of old-fashioned lemon barley water.

PEANUT, CHOCOLATE & RAISIN

I can resist Mars Bars unless there's one in my backpack after (or during, or just before) a strenuous climb up a mountain. Don't get me started on what they've done to the other mass-market chocolate bars of my youth (other than Picnic bars, which are still properly delicious). Avoid mountain-top disappointment by making your own: the following are so quick and easy to make, and so much more delicious than anything – bar the Picnic – you'll find in the local newsagent, that I regularly rustled them up when my babies were tiny (with the not entirely dishonest self-justification that oats are beneficial for breastfeeding). To make a 17cm round, follow the starting point, using 40g each of sugar and syrup, 80g butter and 120g oats, plus 25g each of salted peanuts, chocolate chips and raisins. Add the peanuts with the oats, then let the mixture cool slightly before stirring in the chocolate chips. Sprinkle the raisins into the prepared tin and then cover them with the flapjack mix, to avoid any nasty scorched fruit on the top. Pick up from step **5** of the method.

TREACLE TOFFEE & ORANGE

I mourn the dessert trolley. Jingling with crystal bowls of fruit salad, hefty cheesecakes, lurid trifles and resplendently plattered gâteaux, short of a slice or two. Like miniature mobile libraries – for _puddings_. My grandmother would always opt for the oranges in caramel, a dish I recalled when making an orange and treacle flapjack, which tasted like the sort of old-fashioned, dark Oxford marmalade Frank Cooper makes. Far too grown-up and bitter for Paddington's under-hat sandwich. I make these flapjacks thin, like oatcakes, and serve them with glacé ginger ice cream. If you're doing the same, reduce the cooking time to 10–12 minutes. Mix 50g black treacle, 50g caster sugar, 100g butter, 150g porridge oats and a pinch of salt. Stir in the finely grated zest of 2 large oranges and the juice of 1. Bake in a 20cm round tin for a typical flapjack, or divide between 2 tins for the thinner sort.
Chocolate

In all but one of the starting points on the chocolate continuum the method is essentially identical. Melt chocolate with another ingredient. Add eggs and/or flavouring. Let it set (or encourage it to). The exception to this is chocolate sauce, whose tendency to set you want, of course, to inhibit. Chocolate is temperamental. When things go wrong, the blame usually rests with excessive heat or moisture. Which is ironic, given the conditions necessary for the cacao tree to flourish: excessive heat and moisture. Such, however, are the consequences of refinement (and chocolate is very, very refined). You lose touch with your roots.

When melting chocolate, it pays to have a little sangfroid. You will want to inspect your bowl and stirrer for moisture as obsessively as a sheriff polishes his favourite six-shooter. Water is your enemy. Wooden spoons can harbour dampness in their crevices. Steam can escape from the double-boiler you thought was water-tight. Beads of condensation quiver on the extractor fan, waiting to drop into the bowl. The planet is seven-tenths water: the odds are stacked against you. I have seen it written that 'even a few drops of water' will cause your molten chocolate to seize – that is, turn into a grainy sludge, like the mud pies you wished were chocolate as a kid – but the 'even' inverts the concern. It's the small quantities you need to watch out for. Were you, for example, to tip a good deal of water into your bowl, the chocolate might well be sufficiently saturated to avoid seizing, and therefore usable for something, if not quite what you originally had in mind. A small amount of water, on the other hand, will stick to the dry parts of the chocolate, resulting in runaway clogging and the sort of panic that takes over when Tetris outpaces your ability to play it. Whisking in fat can sometimes save seized chocolate. Sometimes it can't. No wonder Willy Wonka lost his mind.

Most of the dishes on the continuum _can_ be made by melting chocolate, then mixing it with other ingredients that have been warmed separately – the microwave is probably your safest bet. The methods laid out in the following pages, however, rely on the simpler principle of either gently heating the chocolate _with_ other ingredients – butter, for instance, as for the flourless chocolate cake – or melting the chopped chocolate by mixing it with a hot liquid, such as cream, for a ganache.

SAUCE

The first kind of ganache on the chocolate continuum is made to a long dilution: twice the amount of single cream as 70% dark chocolate. (Note that it doesn't matter if you are measuring your cream in grams or millilitres – they are more or less equivalent.) This will yield a rich sauce the colour of a hazelnut shell. A jugful made with 150g chocolate and 300ml cream will remain pourable for about 2–3 hours at room temperature. Left for longer, or in the fridge, the cocoa butter in the chocolate will begin to solidify, and it will need gentle heating to be pourable again. Extra liquid flavourings help keep your ganache saucy for longer – a splash of brandy, say, or coffee, or sugar syrup. Don't be tempted to increase the proportion of cream. Even with 70% cocoa, the chocolate flavour will be too weak.

Rita Rudner once said she never understood when people asked if she had any spare change. 'How can you tell? You haven't finished living your life yet.' I'm the same way with chocolate sauce. Leftovers are just the 'more' you haven't used yet. Spread it on your morning croissant. Dilute it with milk for a shake. Blend it with frozen banana slices to make an _almost_ healthy ice cream. Stir in a dram of Cointreau, decant into a dainty pot and eat with a couple of thin ginger biscuits. Or take a spoonful each morning in lieu of a vitamin tablet: it'll put you in a better mood, and surely can't be worse for you than a pellet of orange-flavoured chalk.

TRUFFLES & TART

A denser form of ganache – the next stop on the continuum – is made with equal amounts of 70% dark chocolate and double or whipping cream. Whip the mixture once it has cooled to room temperature and, thanks to the cream, it will become lighter and fluffier. Some serve it as a sort of chocolate mousse ( **here** ), and it's very good for frosting a cake. It's also sometimes flavoured, sweetened slightly, set in a tin and served as a truffle cake. Usually, however, it's left unwhipped and rolled into truffles, or set in a pre-cooked pastry case for chocolate tart. Add a little softened, unsalted butter for a silkier texture, and some sugar if you find the bitterness lent by a high-cocoa chocolate too much. The real interest lies, however, in the flavouring options available to the ganache-maker, either by infusing the cream with aromatics or adding an extract, spirit or liqueur to the ganache while it's still runny. The trick is not to add so much that the ganache will no longer set. Chocolate with 70% cocoa solids can generally take on 1½ times its weight in liquid (assuming most of the liquid is double cream) and still set to a rollable, sliceable texture, even if it needs a night in the fridge (having first cooled to room temperature) to get there.

Milk chocolate and white chocolate need more careful management than dark, since their sugar content makes them tackier when melted. They will not, as a rule, stand the same dilution as dark chocolate and still set, and they are more heat-sensitive. I say 'as a rule', because it's impossible to be definitive when there are so many brands available, and so much variation between them.

If you want to give your truffles a crisp chocolate shell, you'll need to master the art of tempering chocolate, which makes it shiny and smooth and gives a pleasing snap on the teeth. The process involves heating, cooling and stirring the chocolate to a rather rigid set of rules, ensuring the cocoa crystals set in the right way. Of the several ways to do this, I find the following the easiest, although it does require a thermometer (and at least 200g chocolate). If your chocolate is not in chocolate-chip form, cut it into small, even-sized pieces. Put about two-thirds of it in a heatproof bowl over, but not touching, just-about-simmering water and let it melt (alternatively, melt in short bursts in the microwave). Remove the bowl. Add the remaining third of the chocolate and stir until the temperature falls to 31–32°C in the case of dark chocolate, 30–31°C for milk, or 27–28°C for white. As soon as the temperature of the chocolate has fallen to within these ranges, it's ready to use. Dip the truffles into the tempered chocolate. Try to work quickly, as it won't stay in temper forever.

Harold McGee has remarked that cookery writers need to be precise about the sort of chocolate to use in a recipe. Proportions of cocoa butter, cocoa particles and sugar can vary widely, and since the cocoa particles absorb liquid, and sugar becomes syrup in a liquid, a recipe developed for sugary chocolate can go horribly wrong when a premium 70% bittersweet is substituted. That said, I find standard supermarket bars of dark chocolate (around 45% cocoa) work for all the starting points on this continuum, as long as you don't mind the sweetness. You might need to add some coffee or brandy to improve the flavour.

Milk and white chocolate turn up in a fair few of the Flavours & Variations, but they only work as a straight swap for dark in chocolate sauce and mousse. In sum, the milk solids, high sugar content and (in some cases) partial substitution of vegetable fat for pricey cocoa butter make milk and white chocolate substantively different from dark. Even diehard fans of the most candy-like chocolate will concede the superiority of dark for cooking, once its bitterness has been tamed by butter or cream plus sugar.

Here we intersect with the custard continuum. _Petits pots au chocolat_ are made in a similar way to ganache, except instead of melting the chocolate in double cream, a warm, pourable custard is used. The results will be silkier than ganache, rather like a ladle of the brown computer-generated chocolate you see in TV commercials. In my experience, making _petits pots_ this way works considerably better than baking them crème-brûlée-style in the oven, as the chocolate doesn't get the opportunity to overcook. Flavour variations can be achieved by infusing the custard with hard aromatics – see **here** – or adding liquid flavourings once the chocolate has been stirred into the custard.

MOUSSE

You might be forgiven for thinking that _petits pots_ are to chocolate mousses as solid chocolate bars are to Aeros: the same thing with the air let out. But in _petits pots_ the egg is cooked, where in a classic mousse it is not, which is a problem if you're catering for someone who can't or won't eat raw egg. Some chefs dodge the issue by whipping a ganache and calling it chocolate mousse, and while the results are lovely, they lack bubbles, which are as much the point of mousse as they are of Champagne. Where mousse has a singular advantage over _petits pots_ is in its ease of preparation. The typical method is to fold whisked egg whites into cooled, but still liquid, melted chocolate. The process will take 10 minutes at most. My ideal chocolate mousse is made with coffee and a splash of rum: the perfect combination of complex flavour, light texture and palate-stimulating kick. Served, of course, in a small vessel with no gouges or dimples or otherwise inaccessible interior-design features. There is no frustration like the half-millilitre of mousse dislodgeable only by the bristles of a washing-up brush.

The best chocolate mousse I have ever eaten came not in a dinky ramekin but a huge white tureen. It was served at a cosy candle-lit restaurant in Clerkenwell that I'm pretty sure no longer exists. The waiter would hand you a white tea plate and administer a dollop of wondrous reddish-brown mousse with a comically enormous silver spoon. He would then return with another tureen of whipped cream and spoon a generous amount on top. The last time I went there was on an early date. We ordered the mousse for two, which was the same as the mousse for one, except served on a dinner plate to share. The date was going passably well. We talked about Martin Amis. He preferred _London Fields_ to _The Information_ ; I took the opposite line. It seemed a lively and mutually enlightening disagreement. The plate began to look more white than brown. We began discussing our experiences of Istanbul, or maybe it was Cardiff. I can't remember. Soon the plate was white but for the smears I hadn't yet tidied up with my index finger. 'Isn't that a great mousse?' I said, dabbing my lips with my napkin. 'I'll take your word for it,' he said, as I clocked the spoon gleaming untouched at his elbow. The next time I saw him was nine years later and he was married with three kids.

FRIDGE CAKE

The method for making chocolate fridge cake is very similar to the method for chocolate mousse, except that you whisk whole eggs with sugar, rather than just egg whites. Once this is folded into melted chocolate and butter, you stir in some broken biscuits. It's as simple as that. No need to bake. Simply scrape the mixture into a tin or silicone mould and leave to set. Most modern recipes tend to omit the eggs, but if you're happy to eat the odd raw egg, or have a supplier you trust, I would recommend keeping them in: they lend volume to the chocolate mix and a more sliceable texture to the finished cake. Many egg-free versions amount, essentially, to a butter ganache, which is given to melting and can feel rather slippery in the hand. Nonetheless, egg-free options are given in the Flavours & Variations section.

Chocolate fridge cake entered my family's culinary consciousness after my mother saw Delia Smith make it on Saturday-morning children's TV. Smith called it Belgian biscuit cake, which I always considered a misnomer. At least in the context of chocolate, Belgium represented ambassadorial levels of refinement, a country-size little finger raised above the oily mediocrity of British cocoa solids. This did not square with chocolate fridge cake. It was undoubtedly delicious. But about as refined as a belch on the forecourt of a petrol station. Nowadays it seems to be more commonly known as plain old chocolate fridge cake, chocolate biscuit cake or tiffin, all of which capture its lumbering unpretentiousness rather better.

Actually, it's likely that so-called 'Belgian' biscuit cake originated in Germany; the recipe is said to have been invented a century ago by Bahlsen, Germany's biggest biscuit manufacturer, to encourage use of their famous Leibniz-Keks. Leibniz are a crisp, plain variation on the classic French Petit-Beurre, although not as plain as the (British) Rich Tea biscuits used in chocolate fridge cake, which have no _beurre_ in them at all. In Germany they call chocolate fridge cake _Kalter Hund_ – 'cold dog' – which sounds less like a cake than a particularly gruelling state of narcotic withdrawal. The reality is, in fact, rather closer to the refined ideal to which British 'Belgian' biscuit cake singularly fails to measure up. _Kalter Hund_ is typically made in a loaf tin with whole biscuits, layered with Teutonic precision, giving each slice the orderly appearance of something in the window of an upmarket pâtisserie, as opposed to a rubble of chocolate and biscuit bits thrown together by your mum. If the chocolate fridge cake did originate in Germany, it's no wonder that it's the Queen's favourite tea cake, according to the royal chef Darren McGrady. Prince William requested it for his wedding, alongside the traditional tiered fruit cake. The Palace's version is topped with a generous amount of dark chocolate, and finished with white. Not quite as rustic as my mother's version, but still artless enough to have Carême weeping into his toque. At least until he tasted it.

McGrady remarks on how frequently he is asked for the recipe for his chocolate fridge cake; likewise, testing it for this book, I was struck by how irresistible people find this sort of cake. I went through a phase of making it Italian-style – the Portuguese and Croatians make a similar version too – in the form of a salami, dusted with icing sugar and served in slices after dinner with coffee. The speed with which the slices disappeared called into question the point of fashioning a realistic potting shed out of marzipan and grated chocolate, or spending hours perfecting a quince millefeuille.

Which is not to say there aren't ways of sprucing up your fridge cake. In the eastern Italian region of Le Marche they make a version with dried figs, almonds and walnuts laced with brandy, spices and aniseed liqueur, then eat it with pecorino cheese. Delia Smith herself has updated the idea for adult palates, making one chocolate fridge cake that uses amaretti biscuits dipped in brandy and cider, layered with a ganache in a pudding basin, and another that uses a mixture of pistachios, dried sour cherries, oat biscuits and rum. I once made a white chocolate, raspberry and pistachio version that looked very much like mortadella. All these elaborations, it has to be said, make me nostalgic for the untidy exuberance of the chocolate fridge cake of my youth. If the Windsors can't resist it, why should we?

FLOURLESS CAKE

The continuum ends with its only cooked dish. The intensity and luscious texture of flourless chocolate cake is achieved by melting chocolate with butter, whisking together sugar and eggs, then folding them into the cool chocolate mixture and baking. Aside from the spell in the oven, the method departs only minimally from chocolate fridge cake. Note that in the absence of flour, it's akin to cooking a custard, with the liquid chocolate and butter standing in for sweetened milk or cream. This means that the cake will need to be baked at a low temperature, preferably in a water bath, until it's set but for a slight wobble in the centre. Precisely when flourless chocolate cake is done is hard to determine by timer alone. It's more a question of knowing when to start repeatedly checking it. The skewer test works well, but in contrast to sponge cake, you want the skewer to come out a little wet, with a modicum of crumb attached. A dry skewer means your cake is overcooked.

'Fallen chocolate cake' and 'fallen chocolate soufflé cake' are very similar to flourless chocolate cake. The same ingredients and quantities can be used for all three, but in the 'fallen' cakes the egg whites are whisked separately from the yolks and sugar, then folded into the mixture of chocolate, butter and egg yolks. This ensures the essential amphitheatre-like depression in the centre of the finished cake. Take note: sod's law dictates that, on the rare occasion you actually want them to, soufflés deflate painfully slowly.

There are many versions of flourless chocolate cake; some call for a lot more sugar, or the addition of fruit, or some ground almonds folded into the mixture for more substance. The great advantage of our starting point is simplicity: with its equal weights of chocolate, butter, eggs and sugar, it's as easy to commit to memory as it is to eat.

**Chocolate Sauce**

A quick-to-make chocolate sauce to pour on ice cream, sundaes, pancakes etc. It's made with twice as much cream as chocolate. For a fuller, smoother sauce, try adding a tablespoon or more of soft, unsalted butter at the end of step **3**.

_For 400ml_

INGREDIENTS

150g 70% dark chocolate **A B**

300ml single cream **C D**

1–2 tbsp caster sugar or sugar syrup – optional

**1** Chop the chocolate and place in a heatproof bowl large enough to hold the cream too.

**2** Bring the cream to the boil in a saucepan, heating it just until small bubbles appear at its edges (i.e., scald it). Remove from heat. If you're using hard aromatics to flavour the cream, turn off the heat, let them infuse until their flavour in the cream has reached the required intensity, then strain and re-scald.

Any flavourings will need to be bold to register against the chocolate flavour.

**3** Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and leave for a minute or two to allow the chocolate to melt. Stir until thoroughly combined and glossy. Stir in any liquid flavourings now.

If you prefer, you can add the chocolate to the cream. Some think this reduces the chance of the chocolate seizing.

**4** Taste for flavour and sweetness; correct if necessary.

A few tablespoons of caster sugar or syrup should melt easily in the still-warm mixture. If you know you prefer your chocolate sauce much sweeter than this, best to add the sugar or syrup to the warming cream at step **2**.

**5** Pour the sauce into a jug, and lay a piece of baking parchment or cling film on the surface, to prevent a skin from forming.

The sauce will keep in the fridge for a week, but it may need warming to liquify it again.

LEEWAY

**A** Milk chocolate and white chocolate both require extra care when heating. Do use high-quality bars.

**B** If you're out of solid chocolate, a chocolate sauce can be made with equal weights of butter, cocoa powder, sugar and syrup. Simply bung them all in a pan, place over a low–medium heat and stir constantly until you have a dark, homogenous liquid.

**C** You can use all sorts of cream. Double or whipping will be very rich and will eventually set solid; they can be re-liquified by gentle heating. Alternatively, prevent your cream from setting by diluting it with milk. Good-quality bought custard is another option. I have an old cookbook that suggests plain old milk is fine for 'family occasions'.

**D** Jamie Oliver makes a chocolate sauce in the same way, but uses the syrup drained from 2 × 400g tins of pears (in place of dairy) on 200g chopped 70% dark chocolate.

Chocolate Sauce → Flavours & Variations

CHERRY, LIQUORICE & CORIANDER SEED

The kind of tasting notes you can find in chocolate enthusiasts' online forums are a good source of inspiration for flavourings. A blend of red cherry, liquorice and cedar in a dark chocolate inspired a sauce that proved very popular with my tasting panel. To approximate cedar flavour, I used coriander seeds, which have a sawmill hint of freshly cut timber about them. Lightly toast 1 tbsp coriander seeds – and I mean lightly, just enough to tease out the flavour. Don't brown them. Add them to 300ml single cream, along with 1 tsp aniseed, and scald. Leave to infuse for an hour. Scald the cream again, then pick up at step **3**, straining the cream onto the chocolate. Once the chocolate and cream are a unified brown, stir in 2 tbsp cherry brandy. Like cakes, casseroles and radical new hairstyle decisions, flavoured sauce often seems better the day after it's made.

CHOCOLATE MINT & VODKA

According to a letter he wrote to his friend Helen Evans Brown in 1954, James Beard thought a chocolate mint was 'sensational' with a properly dry martini. Having put the pairing to the test, with an After Eight and a gin martini (I presume Beard meant gin, given the time of writing) _and_ a vodka martini (in case he didn't), I can only conclude that Beard was being wry. The mint smothers the botanicals and the icy booze makes the chocolate seize in the mouth. Mutually assured destruction. Adapt the means of delivery, however, and the combination _is_ sensational. By opening the nasal passages, the menthol can make you more receptive to the flavour, and its cold blast only emphasises the alcoholic heat of the spirits. It's way more fun than the 1990s party game of snorting vodka off a spoon. I ended up melting 9 After Eights in 300ml scalded cream, giving the chocolates a few minutes to soften before stirring them into a homogenous sauce, adding 1 tbsp vodka, and stirring some more. The vodka seemed to open up the peppermint, as if I had fitted my taste buds with 3D glasses. Try with any sort of chocolate mint, but I find the sauce made with After Eights retains the musky note detectable in their vacated paper sleeves, as stimulating as the pheromones on a lover's unwashed T-shirt.

DARK CHOCOLATE & AMBERGRIS

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of _The Physiology of Taste_ (1825), prescribed a pint of ambergris-flavoured hot chocolate for the overworked, the over-indulged and anyone feeling a little dull around the edges. Someone should tell the Head of Flavour Variations at Berocca. Ambergris is formed in the intestines of sperm whales, as a natural defence against digestive problems caused by the beaks of the squid they ingest. It's passed as faecal matter, some of which washes up on the seashore. You're about as likely to find some, walking Fido on the beach, as you are a message in a bottle from a shipwrecked slave-trader, but that needn't dissuade you from keeping your eyes open. The problem is in identifying it. Ambergris only develops its more perfumed qualities as it ages – animalic, with notes of musk, tobacco and leather, as I imagine the interior of the Duchess of Cornwall's Range Rover might smell. In the seventeenth century, the adventurer Sir Philibert Vernatti claimed the best ambergris was found on Mauritius, where 'the hogs can smell it at a great distance, who run like mad to it, and devour it commonly before the people come to it'. The comparison with truffles is hard to resist, all the more so as a typical lump of ambergris has the calcified-stone appearance of a white truffle. Both ambergris and truffle are widely synthesised, to diminishing returns. If you _do_ get lucky on Blackpool Sands, a perfumier will pay you handsomely. The 3kg lump found by Ken Wilman on Morecambe Beach in 2013 was thought to be worth around £100,000, until an international team of experts decided it wasn't ambergris but a smelly rock. In 2006, a couple who came across the real deal on a beach in South Australia earned US$295,000 for their find. Brillat-Savarin suggests 60–72 grains per pound of chocolate for his cocoa. A grain is the weight of a grain of barley, internationally agreed at 64.8mg. So 15 grains make a gram. On the basis of the Wilman estimation, Brillat-Savarin's cocoa recipe will set you back between £133 and £160 in ambergris. If you have any left over, recall that in _Moby-Dick_ Ishmael notes that 'some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it'.

DARK CHOCOLATE & PX

I needed a boozy chocolate sauce for an impromptu midweek dinner. I made two, one with Pedro Ximénez sherry, and another with a good-quality Jamaican rum, and offered them both with a sundae made from chocolate brownie, vanilla ice cream and toasted hazelnuts. Indecisive, maybe, but no one objected to conducting a side-by-side chocolate-sauce tasting, and were too busy licking their spoons to notice that I'd served them a store-cupboard pudding. I had assumed the rum would prevail, with its familiar sweetness and higher ABV, but the PX was by far the favourite. This sweet, dark sherry shares many characteristic flavours with chocolate, and makes a luscious, fruity ganache with hints of molasses, caramel, raisin and fig. Use 1 tbsp PX for 150g 70% dark chocolate and 300ml single cream.

DARK CHOCOLATE, ROSEMARY & LEMON

Delicious on a slice of almond cake ( **here** ), or poured over _melanzane al cioccolato_ , a surprisingly delicious pairing of aubergine and chocolate that's popular in Sorrento. In one variation, steamed aubergines are stuffed with a ricotta mixture, then draped in a chocolate sauce and served warm; in another, fried strips of aubergine are cooled, dipped in a mixture of syrup and breadcrumbs, then layered with chocolate sauce, candied citrus and toasted pine nuts before being served at room temperature. You might say that given enough chocolate, ricotta, dried fruit and roasted nuts you'd be content with boiled Birkenstock, but the aubergine must be given its due. Fried, it takes on a silky texture, and its mellow flavour, enhanced by the subtle saltiness that comes of degorging it, makes a satisfying contrast to bittersweet chocolate. In my easy version, the aubergine slices are dipped in flour and egg then fried, which gives them a pancake-like quality, and the result is a cross between a crêpe spread with Nutella and a Neapolitan chocolate fridge cake. To serve 4, cut 12 rounds, each about 1cm thick, from as many aubergines as needed. Sprinkle lightly with salt and leave to degorge for 1 hour. Meanwhile, scald 300ml cream with 3 rosemary stalks and the pared zest of 1 lemon and leave to infuse for 2 hours. Remove the aromatics, re-scald the cream and pour over 150g 70% dark chocolate, broken up into small pieces. Leave for a few minutes, stir until dark and glossy, then stir in ½ tsp lemon oil. Set aside to cool a little. Rinse the aubergine slices, squeeze gently and pat dry. Dredge both sides with flour, dip in beaten egg, then fry in batches in a few centimetres of vegetable oil until golden. Drain on kitchen paper. To assemble, divide the slices into 4 sets of 3, then sandwich each set together using the chocolate sauce. Smooth some sauce around the sides, so you can't see the aubergine. Scatter with a mixture of candied peel, toasted pine nuts and rum-soaked raisins.

MILK CHOCOLATE, COCONUT & NUTMEG

As close to a taste of paradise as you can get with everyday ingredients. Nutmeg will add refreshing top notes of citrus, floral and pine. Make sure it is freshly grated: pre-ground is more nut- _meh_ than -meg. Follow the starting point, but use 150g good-quality milk chocolate and 300ml coconut milk – light is fine. Grate in a quarter of a whole nutmeg once the milk and chocolate are completely mixed.

WHITE CHOCOLATE

White chocolate sauce over frozen berries was a classic dessert at The Caprice and The Ivy during Mark Hix's reign in the kitchens. There were foodie types who shuddered at its artlessness, but the customers loved it. Hix uses equal amounts of white chocolate and double cream. I make it to our starting point, which is less rich, but it still tastes like clotted custard. Lindt white chocolate is a good choice: 150g with 300ml single cream will serve 4; allow 75–100g berries per serving. If you're using a bag of frozen berries, throw away the strawberries, which, once defrosted, are like cold tea bags. White chocolate sauce is also good for banana pancakes, and you may find it kinder to the pears in a _belle Hélène_ than dark chocolate. Add a little _poire_ eau-de-vie to the latter for an intense esteriness.

Chocolate Sauce → Other Directions

**CHOCOLATE AND CHURROS**

Serve a small glass of hot chocolate sauce with freshly made churros.

**PROFITEROLES**

Pour chocolate sauce over choux buns **(here)** filled with pastry cream.

**CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM**

Mix chocolate sauce with custard and churn until frozen.

**CHOCOLATE FONDUE**

Use warm chocolate sauce for dipping marshmallows and fruit.

**CHOCOLATE SPONGE PUDDING**

Pour milk chocolate sauce over dark chocolate sponge.

**CHOCOLATE CRÊPES**

Spread a little chocolate sauce onto each crêpe and roll up, before pouring over some more chocolate sauce.

**BANANA SPLITS AND SUNDAES**

**Chocolate Truffles, Tart & Icing**

A simple and highly adaptable classic ganache that retains the rich flavour and melting quality of the chocolate. Note that the previous starting point called for twice as much cream as chocolate, where this calls for equal amounts. The snap of the bar is replaced with a creamy set to sink your teeth into, especially if you also add a little butter – 1–2 tbsp soft, unsalted butter per 100g chocolate – once the chocolate and cream are combined. Cooled, the ganache can serve as an egg-free mousse or for frosting a cake: simply whip until light and fluffy.

_For 30–36 truffles, or enough ganache to fill a shallow 23cm tart case or top and fill a 20cm cake_

INGREDIENTS

300g 70% dark chocolate **A**

300ml double cream **B**

1 tsp vanilla extract – optional **C**

2–4 tbsp caster sugar or sugar syrup – optional **D**

Sifted cocoa powder or icing sugar – optional

**1** Chop the chocolate and place in a heatproof bowl large enough to hold the cream too.

**2** Bring the cream to the boil in a saucepan, heating it just until small bubbles appear at its edges (i.e., scald it). Remove from the heat. If you're using hard aromatics to flavour the cream, turn off the heat, let them infuse until their flavour in the cream has reached the required intensity, then strain and re-scald. Use bold flavourings to register against the chocolate flavour.

**3** Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and leave for a minute or two to allow the chocolate to melt. Stir until thoroughly combined and glossy.

If you prefer, you can add the chocolate to the cream.

**4** Stir in any liquid flavouring.

**5** Taste for flavour and sweetness; correct if necessary.

If you're adding caster sugar, do so while the chocolate is still warm enough to melt it. You could use a few tablespoons of syrup instead, but don't add so much that you jeopardise the set. If you find 70% dark chocolate very bitter, dissolve some sugar in the cream at step **1**.

FOR TRUFFLES

Transfer to a dish and allow to cool. For the best texture, leave at room temperature rather than in the fridge to set. When it has, scoop out the mixture with a melon baller or teaspoon, fashion into rough rounds, then roll in sifted cocoa powder or icing sugar, or dip into tempered chocolate – see **here**.

The setting takes about 2–3 hours if the mixture is poured into a dish to a depth of about 3cm. Your truffles will keep at room temperature for 3 days.

FOR A TART

Pour your ganache into a _fully_ baked pastry case ( **here** ) and allow to set at room temperature. When it has, decorate it with sifted cocoa powder, grated chocolate, chocolate curls or chopped toasted hazelnuts.

The ganache will keep at room temperature for 3 days.

LEEWAY

**A** For 300g good-quality milk chocolate, use 200ml double cream; makes about 25 truffles. For 300g good-quality white chocolate, use 75ml double cream, and gently heat it with the white chocolate in a double-boiler; makes about 20 truffles.

**B** Whipping cream will also work. Or replace all or some of the cream with crème fraîche, which will lend a refreshing sour edge. Condensed milk is fine in chocolate tarts, although it is super-sweet, and you may want to use 85% dark chocolate to compensate.

**C** Clearly, the more wet ingredients you use for flavouring (fruit purée, eau-de-vie, rum, etc.), the more the setting potential will be compromised.

**D** More sugar can be added if you prefer your ganache to be sweeter.

Chocolate Truffles, Tart & Icing → Flavours & Variations

BANANA & MILK CHOCOLATE

Of all the non-alcoholic flavourings for milk chocolate truffles, this is the best. The esters in banana recall those found in rum, or brandy, lending the chocolate an extra dimension. In place of the cream in our starting point, use sieved banana purée, or cheat and use a pouch of baby food like Ella's. A single pouch contains 50ml, so use one of those, ½ tsp vanilla extract and a pinch of ground cloves for every 75g milk chocolate. Vanilla and clove notes are both detectable in very ripe bananas, and therefore boost what would otherwise be a rather subtle banana flavour. I once made this ganache with white chocolate, supposedly for truffles, but the mix didn't set hard enough. So I took a loaf of golden syrup cake, spread the tan slices with the ganache, and served it at teatime, shamelessly, as my own ingenious invention. I'm going to hell, but on a tide of sweet banana-flavoured goo.

BLONDE

It was in 1879 that Sir William Crookes identified the fourth state of matter, plasma, or 'radiant matter' as he called it. In contrast, it wasn't until 2012 that the confectionery industry owned up to a fourth state of chocolate. 'Blonde' chocolate was discovered in 2004 when Frédéric Bau, executive chef at L'École du Grand Chocolat Valrhona, left some white chocolate in a double-boiler for ten hours, during which time it caramelised. Valrhona spent the next eight years figuring out how to produce their accidental discovery on an industrial scale. They call their blonde chocolate 'Dulcey', presumably in reference to _dulce de leche_ , the caramelised milk with which it shares many flavour characteristics. Dulcey, in flavour terms, reminds me of millionaire's shortbread when the biscuit, chocolate and toffee has been munched to a pulp. If you doubt that something can be sickly _and_ have finesse, give it a try. I used it to make mini tarts with a sweet pastry base, topped with a glossy dark ganache. Valrhona recommend pairing Dulcey with mildly acidic fruits, like apricot and mango, or with hazelnut, coffee or caramel.

BLUE CHEESE

You may be surprised at how recessive blue cheese is, subsumed into creamy dark chocolate in a ganache. Disappointed, even, that the experience isn't stranger, although the presence of chocolate _and_ cheese gives you double the excuse to dust off the port. The following makes about 10 truffles, a good sample quantity. Melt 50g blue cheese (Gorgonzola or Stilton) in 150ml double cream, gently, and stirring all the while. Pour over 150g chopped 70% chocolate, as at step **3**. Once set and rolled, these truffles are best kept wrapped in the fridge.

DARK CHOCOLATE & WATER

In a ganache, the advantage water has over cream is its neutrality – the flavour of the chocolate can express itself fully. The chocolatier Damian Allsop uses mineral water, but has recently created a seawater variant. Chantal Coady, founder of Rococo Chocolates, recommends equal amounts of boiling water and dark chocolate, in line with our starting point. (Coady stipulates a 50/50 mix of 61% and 70% chocolate, but feel free to use all 70%.) To make enough for 6 shot glasses or espresso cups (it's intense, so a little goes a long way), pour 200ml hot water over 200g chopped chocolate, leave for 5 minutes, and then thoroughly mix with a stick blender. Coady notes that the ganache will seem thin, but will set at room temperature. The water gives this ganache a short shelf-life – bacteria grow more readily in water than in cream – so keep it in the fridge once it's set, for no more than 3 days.

IRISH COFFEE

Long before Heston, Hervé and Ferran, Giles at our local pub blew our tiny minds with his signature Irish Coffee, deploying some unfathomable culinary sleight-of-hand to get the double cream to sit atop the whiskey-laced coffee, and _stay there as you drank it_. And all this without resorting to aerosol cream, which lacks the velvety texture of hand-whipped. In Giles's honour, I make this _ganache fouettée au White Lion_ when I need a quick-to-make dessert that simultaneously takes care of both coffee and _digestif_. To serve 6, make a ganache with 150g 70% dark chocolate and 150ml double cream heated with 2 tbsp sugar. At step **4**, stir in 2 tbsp Irish whiskey and 2 tsp instant coffee dissolved in 1 tsp boiling water. Leave the mixture until it reaches room temperature (30–60 minutes), then whip until it becomes lighter and fluffier (and more matt than shiny), which will take a few minutes with a hand-held electric whisk. Note that, left unwhipped, the ganache will tend to harden, so whip it as soon as possible after its cooling period. Divide between 6 small glasses. Top with as much cold whipped cream as the glass will allow and serve on a white saucer with a teaspoon. Just as you whipped it soon after cooling, eat the ganache as freshly whipped as possible, while it still has a soft-serve dreaminess. Whipped ganache is nothing if not a lesson in how chocolate likes to set.

MILK CHOCOLATE & PASSION FRUIT

A ganache that tastes like chocolate jam. Stick it in a jar with a gingham-print lid and tell your friends it comes from a rare plant, _Passiflora cacao_ , whose pods contain soft beans that yield a silky brown pulp with a fruity chocolate flavour. Or tell them the truth, which is that you pushed the insides of 8 passion fruit through a sieve to separate the juice from the seeds, then brought the juice, plus 1 tbsp honey and a pinch of salt, just about to the boil, before gradually stirring in 275g finely chopped milk chocolate. The cooked fruit juice will be thick and shiny, and 275g may seem like a lot of chocolate to incorporate. But have faith. As you stir, you'll understand where the jam notion came from. Check for sweetness, as some passion fruit are near-hydrochlorically sour. Pour into a pre-baked tart case and leave to set. As the volume of fruit juice and honey only amounts to roughly 150ml, the ganache should set relatively quickly.

PEANUT BUTTER

Hillbilly praline. Make as per our starting point, but using 100g chocolate and 2 tbsp cream, then stir in 6 tbsp smooth peanut butter once the ganache is well combined. Milk or dark chocolate work equally well. Don't use white. (You have to draw the line _somewhere_.) More ambitious cooks might like the sound of Damian Allsop's award-winning chocolate flavoured with roasted peanuts, fresh ginger and soy sauce. The use of soy sounds no more peculiar than sea salt did, ten or so years ago.

TARRAGON & MUSTARD

An idea from the chocolatier William Curley, who makes a ganache of tarragon and mustard with dark chocolate. By his own admission, it's a daring mix – the woodland notes of tarragon, underwritten by mustard's warmth, are more usually found in sauces for chicken and fish. Yet other resinous herbs, such as thyme and rosemary, are uncontroversial flavourings for chocolate. You could consider swapping the tarragon for fennel, which has a similar anise flavour, but the tarragon is brighter. I prefer the warmth mustard brings to chocolate over any chilli confection I've tasted. Curley makes the case for infusing the cream for flavoured ganaches, rather than adding off-the-shelf potions and oils, as the flavour will be purer. In summary, add 20g tarragon to 400ml whipping cream, scald it, let it cool, and then leave to infuse for 2 hours. Strain the mixture, pressing it to extract as much flavour as possible. Return the infused cream to the pan, add 60g invert sugar (e.g. liquid glucose or corn syrup), scald again and remove from the heat. Spoon out a few teaspoons and mix to a paste with ¾ tsp mustard powder, stirring this back into the still-warm cream and pouring the mixture over 450g chopped dark chocolate (Curley uses 66%, but you may have to settle for 70%). Stir to combine, then add 70g unsalted, room-temperature butter and stir again. This will make a hefty amount, so you may want to halve the quantities.

WHITE CHOCOLATE NOG

To give white chocolate the nog treatment is to give it its Cinderella moment. Combined, the chocolate and nutmeg taste like a spicy lemon curd, making each other seem fresher and lighter. For 300g white chocolate, use 4 tbsp double cream, 1 tbsp rum and about a sixth of a whole nutmeg, freshly grated – and follow the starting-point method. If you're making truffles, roll them in finely ground vanilla sugar, and top with a further tiny pinch of fresh nutmeg.

Chocolate Truffles, Tart & Icing → Other Directions

RASPBERRIES

Filled with white chocolate ganache.

AS A FILLING

Use ganache to sandwich together meringues or biscuits.

SPLIT CHOCOLATES

Made with ganache and caramel, or ganache and marzipan.

TRUFFLE CAKE

Make a chocolate truffle cake **(here)** and decorate with chocolate truffles.

TUNIS CAKE

Madeira cake covered with ganache and decorated with marzipan fruit.

MENDIANTS

Discs of ganache studded with nuts and dried fruit (also made with just chocolate).

FOR MACAROONS

Use ganache to dip or decorate macaroons.

**Chocolate Mousse**

Our previous starting point called for equal amounts of double cream and chocolate. Here the cream is replaced with eggs – roughly the same weight as the chocolate. Some make their chocolate mousse with nothing more than these two ingredients, but I like to sweeten it up a bit and dilute the chocolate with a little water or cold coffee for a lighter texture. Baked chocolate puddings can be made with this mixture, poured into buttered ramekins and cooked at 200°C for 10–12 minutes. Serve them with cream. Add some extra egg white and you could call them soufflés.

_For 6 individual mousses or 1 large mousse (makes 600ml)_

INGREDIENTS

200g 70% dark chocolate **A**

60–120ml water or cold coffee **B**

4 medium or 3 large eggs, separated **C D**

3 tbsp sugar – optional **E**

**1** Chop the chocolate and place in a heatproof bowl. Add the water or coffee and set the bowl over – but not touching – barely simmering water in a pan. When the chocolate has melted, remove and stir until you have a lovely, homogenous, shiny-brown mixture.

Cold coffee will enhance the chocolate flavour.

**2** In a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites to soft peaks. If adding sugar, whisk it in here, a tablespoon at a time.

**3** Stir the egg yolks into the cooled chocolate mix.

By the time you've whisked your egg whites, the chocolate should have cooled enough not to cook the yolks. Using the yolks is optional, but they add richness as well as a little extra volume.

**4** With a large metal spoon, fold a third of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture. Then fold in the rest. Pour into individual dishes or a large serving bowl.

The first third is folded in to loosen the mixture, making it easier to incorporate the rest without losing too much of the whisked-in air.

**5** Refrigerate for at least 2 hours (longer if you're making 1 large mousse).

The mousse will keep in the fridge for 2 days.

LEEWAY

**A** Good-quality milk chocolate can be used in place of dark. (For a honey and goat's cream variation, see **here** ; for white chocolate options, and **here**.)

**B** Replace the water or coffee with a flavoured syrup, or some of it with a spirit or liqueur. Some use cream, which will give a less acidic taste than water, but note that this will also take the edge off the chocolate flavour.

**C** It's okay to use fewer eggs (using more will likely dilute the chocolate flavour too much, and bring an unwelcome egginess). For example, Gordon Ramsay uses only 1 egg white for a chocolate mousse made with 100g dark chocolate, 300ml double cream, 50g sugar and 2 tbsp Amaretto. Whipped chocolate ganache is an option if you want to make something like a mousse without egg – see Irish coffee.

**D** Ferran Adrià pours warm cream onto chopped chocolate – à la ganache – then stirs in the unwhisked egg white, transfers the mixture to a syphon, and charges the mix into a glass. Useful if you make a lot of chocolate mousse, or you want an excuse to buy a syphon.

**E** The 3 tbsp sugar suggested will make a moderately sweet mousse. Anyone with a particularly sweet tooth might want to double that. If you're using chocolate with a low cocoa content, you might not need any extra sugar.

Chocolate Mousse → Flavours & Variations

ARMAGNAC OR COGNAC

Victoria Moore considers Cognac and Armagnac 'the town mouse and the country mouse of the brandy world'. While Cognac has 'sophistication and finesse' and is described as 'smooth and sweetly woody', Armagnac is 'not just more rustic, it is throaty. You can feel its guts, the hot fire, almost hear the stories that would be told over a glass of it.' The difference boils down, in large part, to distillation. Cognac is double-distilled, Armagnac single, each distillation smoothing out the spirit, but removing flavour. (Irish whiskey is triple-distilled, which makes it, as a rule, lighter but less complex than single malts, which are almost always double-distilled.) Moore's distinction applies equally well to the way each spirit combines with chocolate. Cognac lends its presence to refined bonbons and classic truffles, while Armagnac turns up in homely puddings, and rarely gets to spend any time alone with chocolate without wrinkly old prune bumbling in, like Charlotte Bartlett clinging to Lucy Honeychurch in _A Room with a View_. I made a couple of mousses, one with Cognac, one with Armagnac, and preferred the latter: I'm more of a country mouse than I like to admit. In either case, dipping a spoon in the mixture of just-melted chocolate and brandy, I thought of churros, and the little glass of dipping chocolate they come with. For a mousse, add 1 tbsp Armagnac or Cognac per 100g dark chocolate. Follow the starting point, but don't add the spirit to the chocolate as it melts – instead, stir it into the _cooled_ chocolate at step **3**, before you add the egg yolk. Don't bother resisting a spoonful in its luscious liquid state.

HEATHER HONEY & GOAT'S CREAM

The Mayans and Aztecs sweetened their cocoa drinks with honey. When mixing honey with chocolate, using a stronger-flavoured variety like chestnut or heather will pay dividends. Heather Hills Farm in Perthshire makes a raw heather 'Champagne of honeys', characterised by its 'assertive, full-bodied, warm smoky palate of toffee, with underlying notes of plum and coffee'. I made a honeyed milk chocolate mousse with goat's cream, which gave a rustic edge to the finished mousse. (But be warned: the next day it tasted like I'd infused the cream with a billy goat's beard.) To serve 4, use 150g good-quality milk chocolate (at least 32% cocoa solids), 100ml goat's double cream and 1 tbsp heather honey. Melt all these ingredients together, then continue from step **2** of the starting point.

JASMINE

Despite being one of the most expensive flowers to turn into perfume, jasmine is the principal aroma in Chanel No. 5, Joy and Arpège, and is present, according to _The Perfume Handbook_ , in 83 per cent of quality fragrances for women. In seventeenth-century Florence, Cosimo III de' Medici, epicurean and wholly disastrous Grand Duke of Tuscany, commissioned his head physician, Francesco Redi, to create a jasmine-scented chocolate. Redi, who was happy to share his recipes for chocolate infused with citron, lemon peel and even ambergris, guarded the jasmine version religiously. Even when the recipe did enter the public domain, it was found to be almost insurmountably tricky, requiring a vast number of jasmine buds to be layered with chocolate nibs. Picked very early in the morning, the buds would open while intermingled with the chocolate. The process was then repeated ten or twelve times to achieve the desired intensity of flavour. A similar process is used to flavour green tea leaves for the finest-quality jasmine tea, which is used, in turn, to flavour the chocolate in modern jasmine ganache. Redi was onto something: it can be hard to attain a sufficiently strong floral note. A short – if expensive – cut is to use a food-grade jasmine absolute (a form of essential oil).

PARFAIT AMOUR

Parfait Amour is a liqueur to make Baileys look butch. It's lavender-purple, with a somewhat flexible list of aromatic ingredients. _The Techno-Chemical Receipt Book_ of 1919 stipulates oils of cinnamon, cardamom, rosemary, anise, lemon, orange, clove, camomile and lavender. No mention of violet, which, along with orange, is the identifying ingredient in most commercial versions available these days. As with Blue Curaçao, its purpose is to lend colour, although its resemblance to meths might prove off-putting to all but the most ironically minded mixologists. Colour is beside the point when it comes to flavouring dark chocolate, which the combination of violet and citrus does rather beautifully. Use 2 tbsp Parfait Amour in our starting point and taste, adding more if necessary.

STRAWBERRY OR GOOSEBERRY

You can incorporate the moussey bubbles furnished by egg white into bases other than chocolate, but a little more work is needed to recreate the firm structure that chocolate provides as it sets. The following technique recalls a bavarois ( **here** ), except that whipped cream is used in place of custard. I've used strawberry as an example here. Purée 300g strawberries and set aside. Whisk 2 egg whites to stiff peaks, adding 2–3 tbsp caster sugar (depending on the sweetness of the berries), a tablespoon at a time, towards the end of whisking. Set aside. Whip 150ml double cream to soft peaks. Put 2 leaves of gelatine to soak in cold water for 5 minutes. Heat about a third of the strawberry purée until it's hot but not boiling. Squeeze out the gelatine leaves and thoroughly stir them into the hot purée, then stir this mixture into the cold purée. Fold a third of the egg white into the whipped cream, followed by the other two-thirds. Gently fold the strawberry mix into the cream mix. Divide between 4 glasses or ramekins and leave to chill in the fridge. The quantities here are negotiable. The few times I've made this, the strawberries were sweet enough to require only a small amount of sugar; if, on the other hand, I were using gooseberries, I'd cook them with a little sugar first. The 2 leaves of gelatine give a soft set, but you could add more cream or use thick Greek yogurt instead. Using 1 egg white, instead of 2, would give less moussey results. Use none and you'd have what most cooks would call a fool. Whichever approach you take, make sure the purée is strongly flavoured, so as to survive its dilution by cream and egg.

VANILLA

Adding the best-quality vanilla to ordinary dark chocolate is like refitting a high-street jacket with vintage buttons. An easy upgrade. Make a syrup with 120ml water, 60g sugar and ½ split Madagascan vanilla pod, then use in place of the water or coffee. This removes the need for adding any sugar to the egg whites. Using an infused syrup is a simple way to flavour your mousse. For more ideas, see **here**.

WHITE CHOCOLATE

If you're over the age of six, you'll probably want to offset the sweetness of white chocolate with something bitter or sour. Fruit is one option, with raspberries being the most obvious pairing. Or make some bitter, dark chocolate cases for the white chocolate mousse by melting 40g 70% dark chocolate, covering the bottom of 4 dariole moulds with cling film and painting them with 2 layers of the melted chocolate. Allow it to set, then carefully remove the cling film from the chocolate cases. Fill with white chocolate mousse, made as per our starting point, but using 200g Lindt Excellence White and 60ml single cream. These mousses may take longer to set than dark chocolate versions, and will need to be kept refrigerated.

WHITE CHOCOLATE & DOUBLE MALT

I was invited to a tasting of some very expensive limited-edition whiskies. I tried a 40-year-old Cally (£750 per bottle, for 'a medley of sultanas, soft, over-ripe bananas and honey on a cinnamon Danish', according to the tasting guide) and a 32-year-old Port Ellen (£2,400, for 'a profound smokiness... an outstandingly dark expression'). Feeling a little chatty after a few sips, I passed on my recent discovery of how good a glass of single malt is with a few squares of high-cocoa milk chocolate. The distiller looked over one shoulder, leaned in close and, in the anxious tones of a novice insider trader, said 'frozen white Maltesers'. Although I still take my dram with room-temperature, cocoa-rich, honeycomb-free chocolate, I put my distiller friend's suggestion to work in a mousse, adding some Horlicks and a little Glenfiddich to white chocolate. Slowly melt 200g good-quality white chocolate with 30ml double cream. Mix 5 tbsp Horlicks with a further 30ml (cold) double cream, then whisk it into the melted chocolate and stir in 1 tbsp single malt. Pick up from step **2** of the starting point. White chocolate, malt and aniseed is a good combination for the teetotaller, provided you give the malt its due by holding back on the aniseed: 1 tsp ground is ideal.

**Chocolate Fridge Cake**

The methods for chocolate fridge cake and chocolate mousse are similar. However, for the cake, butter is melted with the chocolate, rather than coffee; and whole egg, rather than just the whites, is whisked with sugar before everything is folded together. The effect of this cake should be to fill you with childish glee, even more so if you add glacé cherries. If you've put away childish things, there are more grown-up versions of the cake made with brandy or rum and fashioned into neat shapes. There are egg-free variations too.

_For a 17cm square or 20cm round cake tin_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

200g 70% dark chocolate **B**

200g butter **C**

2 eggs **D**

100g sugar **E**

200g biscuits, broken up **F G**

Icing sugar for dusting

**1** Chop the chocolate and place in a heatproof bowl with the butter. Set the bowl over – but not touching – barely simmering water in a pan. When the chocolate and butter have melted, remove and stir until you have a lovely shiny gloop. Set aside to cool a little.

Alternatively, carefully (i.e. in short bursts, to avoid burning) melt the chocolate and butter separately in the microwave, then mix together.

**2** In a clean bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar together until thick and pale.

This is easier with an electric whisk. If you don't have one, do your best with a hand whisk.

**3** With a large metal spoon, fold the egg and chocolate mixtures together to make a homogenous mid-brown mixture.

This can take a while. Aim for exaggerated looping movements, trying to keep as much of the whisked-in air as possible.

**4** Stir in your biscuits.

**5** Scrape the mixture into a tin lined with cling film or baking parchment (for ease of freeing the cake once it has set).

Or use a silicone mould that doesn't need lining. Or put spoonfuls in paper cases. Or fashion into a salami shape and tightly wrap in cling film, then cut into slices when set (make sure the biscuits are in pea-size pieces if this is your plan).

**6** Allow to cool a little, then ideally leave at room temperature to set. It can go into the fridge to set, but the texture won't be as smooth. If you're pushed for time, let the cake cool to room temperature before transferring it to the fridge.

If the weather – or your kitchen – is particularly warm, the cake will eventually need a blast in the cold.

**7** Dust with icing sugar, and cut into narrow bars.

Will keep for 3–4 days in the fridge. Egg-free versions will last a few more days.

LEEWAY

**A** The tin size can be varied – but the deeper the cake, the longer it will take to set. For a smaller cake, use half the quantities in a 900g (2lb) loaf tin.

**B** Regular, sweeter chocolate like Bournville will do; just omit the sugar, or use only 2–3 tbsp.

**C** Using 200g butter is fairly standard, and will create an unctuous texture in the finished cake. Nonetheless, the cake will set if you use less butter, or even none, as long as you don't change the quantity or type of chocolate. Unsalted or slightly salted butter are fine, as is salted, if you're partial to the tang it contributes.

**D** The eggs can be left out, but note that they expand the mixture without diluting the richness (you're making a whole-egg mousse, if you like). For an egg-free cake, see the mulled chocolate variation. The cake with eggs is less given to melting than the kind without. And it slices better.

**E** The need for additional sugar will depend on the sweetness of the chocolate you're using – the amount suggested here is based on 70% dark chocolate.

**F** Rich Tea, Petit-Beurre and digestives are the most commonly used types of biscuit.

**G** Add nuts, dried fruit, glacé fruit and the like with the biscuits – as much as 100g. Other options include marshmallows, Maltesers, smashed honeycomb, chopped coconut ice, cubes of marzipan, marrons glacés, boozy marinated cherries, glacé ginger, mixed peel, breakfast cereal, pretzels. You might also add 1 tbsp brandy or rum to the chocolate mixture at the end of step **1**. This is a non-judgemental cake.

Chocolate Fridge Cake → Flavours & Variations

MULLED CHOCOLATE

Yotam Ottolenghi's reworking of chocolate fridge cake calls for a flavoured chocolate mixed in with the plain, and dispenses with the eggs. Jeremy Lee's is more akin to our starting point, but contains no sugar other than that which is present in the chocolate. For want of 'decent' glacé cherries, Lee uses chopped (preferably Agen) prunes instead. I love glacé cherries in cakes. They were as innocent a fixture of my childhood as Paddington Bear and glittery hairslides. Still, I could see how prunes might match glacé cherries for juiciness. My chocolate fridge cake combines Lee's ideas with Ottolenghi's egg-free base. The result has a jingle of Christmas about it, without straying too far from the original. Chop 200g prunes into 4 pieces each and soak in port for at least 30 minutes. Melt 100g chopped Green & Black's Maya Gold chocolate with 200g 70% dark chocolate, 100g golden syrup and 120g unsalted butter. (In the absence of Maya Gold, spice up some plain chocolate with orange zest, nutmeg and cinnamon.) Pick up the starting point from step **4**, adding the drained prunes, 75g walnuts and 225g digestive biscuits broken into small pieces. Coarsely chop 25g pistachios and sprinkle over the top before the chocolate sets. Once the cake is cooled, leave in the fridge to firm up.

PINE NUT, PEEL **,** CURRANT & AMARETTI

Honey, I shrunk the chocolate fridge cake. Cut into 3cm squares – this is to scale with the plates in my children's toy tea set – it also makes for neat little _petits fours_ everyone is guaranteed to love, even if they can't quite pinpoint what they remind them of. The additional ingredients are chopped up small, so the set mixture is easily cut into pieces. In a departure from our starting point, this simply calls for chocolate and butter: there's no added sugar or egg, so the results are dense and deeply chocolatey. If you're making doll's-house portions for kids, you might want to sweeten it. For the after-dinner version, soak the currants in booze first. I use currants in this recipe, as opposed to raisins or sultanas, only because they're smaller; if you're feeling flash, you could source some Vostizza currants, from Aigio in western Greece, singled out by _Larousse_ as especially delicious, and awarded protected designation of origin status in 1993. Melt 100g chopped 70% dark chocolate with 100g unsalted butter. Stir to combine, then add the grated zests of 1 lemon and 1 orange. Stir in 25g toasted pine nuts, 1 tbsp each of finely diced glacé ginger and mixed peel in tiny dice, and 4 amaretti biscuits cut into pea-size pieces. Transfer to a 15cm square tin lined with cling film or baking parchment and leave to set at room temperature before refrigerating. Cut into neat 3cm squares.

RICE KRISPIES

A variation on chocolate fridge cake that calls for cocoa powder, rather than bar chocolate. This was the first recipe I knew by heart. Easy, because crispy crackolates called for one of everything: an ounce each of butter, sugar, golden syrup, cocoa and either Rice Krispies or cornflakes. You melted the first four ingredients in a pan, stirring the mixture together to make a fabulously fragrant chocolate syrup, then allowed it to cool a bit before stirring in the cereal and joyfully dolloping spoonfuls into paper cases. It strikes me now that you're making a form of chocolate by mixing cocoa powder, butter and sugar, although of course good-quality dark chocolate is made with the pricier cocoa butter, and both conched and tempered to yield the correct texture and sheen; most has vanilla added to it, too, so you might want to add a few drops of vanilla extract to the crispy crackolate mix.

SPECULOOS ROCHER

The 'Belgian' biscuit cake described **here** might be more indisputably Belgian were it made with speculoos, the moreish little caramelised biscuits I wish more British cafés would dish out with their espressos. The following is smart enough to serve as dessert, as long as you use a good-quality milk chocolate, such as Lindt or Green & Black's. Melt 50g chopped milk chocolate with 15g unsalted butter, stir in 50g roasted and skinned ground hazelnuts, then set aside. In another bowl, melt 100g each of chopped 70% dark chocolate and milk chocolate with 150g unsalted butter, stir to combine and allow to cool. Whisk 2 eggs with 2 tbsp caster sugar until thick and pale. Fold the egg mixture into the slightly cooled dark chocolate and butter. Form 4 chocolate truffles from the hazelnut mix and spread the rest over 4 speculoos biscuits (Lotus is the most widely available brand in the UK), then place another biscuit on top of each, to make sandwiches. Line a 450g (1lb) loaf tin with cling film and pour in a thin layer of the chocolate-butter-egg mixture. Pave it with plain speculoos. Cover with another layer of the chocolate-butter-egg mixture and lay the speculoos sandwiches on top. Cut the hazelnut chocolate truffles in half and slot four along each side, between the biscuits and the edge of the tin. Cover with yet more chocolate-butter-egg mixture. Add a final layer of plain speculoos and use the remainder of the chocolate-butter-egg mixture to top it all off. Leave the cake to sit at room temperature for a few hours before putting it in the fridge to firm up, preferably overnight.

**Flourless Chocolate Cake**

This flourless chocolate cake calls for equal weights of chocolate, egg, butter and sugar – a _quatre quarts du chocolat_. The mixture is wetter than for chocolate fridge cake and it is baked, but is other-wise similarly made, by melting chocolate and butter together, then whisking egg with sugar and folding it into the chocolate mixture. A few tweaks to the starting point and you'll have a brownie or fondant (hopefully with a runny centre): more details for both can be found in the Flavours & Variations section.

_For a 20cm round springform cake tin_ **A B**

INGREDIENTS

200g 70% dark chocolate **B C**

200g unsalted butter **B**

Flavouring – optional **D**

4 medium or 3 large eggs **E**

200g caster sugar **B F**

**1** Chop the chocolate and place in a heatproof bowl with the butter. Set the bowl over – but not touching – barely simmering water in a pan. When the chocolate and butter have melted, remove and stir until you have a lovely shiny gloop. Add any liquid flavourings (such as vanilla or rum), if using. Set aside to cool a little.

Alternatively, carefully (i.e. in short bursts, to avoid burning) melt the chocolate and butter separately in the microwave, then mix together.

**2** In a clean, separate bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar together until thick and pale. **G**

**3** Using a large metal spoon, fold the chocolate and egg mixtures together to make a homogenous brown batter.

This can take a while. Aim for exaggerated looping movements, keeping as much of the whisked-in air as possible.

**4** Grease your springform tin generously and line its base with baking parchment. Transfer the batter to the tin and bake in the centre of a 160°C oven.

Most recipes recommend using a water bath. The resulting texture can be marginally better, but it's optional. If you do want to use one, wrap the base and sides of the cake tin with a large sheet of foil to make it watertight, then place it in a larger tin and pour in enough tap-hot water to come halfway up the sides of the cake tin.

**5** After about 25 minutes, check for doneness by inserting a skewer into the centre of the cake.

If the skewer comes out wet, as it may well do, the cake isn't ready. When the skewer comes out slightly damp and with a few crumbs on it, the cake is probably perfect. If it comes out dry, you've overcooked the cake, but it will still be good to eat.

**6** When it's done, remove from the oven and gently run a knife around the edge of the cake. A few minutes later, release the clip and carefully remove the springform ring. Allow the cake to cool, then transfer to the fridge for at least a few hours before serving.

An overnight chill is ideal.

LEEWAY

**A** The cooking times given here are guidelines, as the size of tin used is open to negotiation (a centimetre or two either way). You'll need to check the cake while it's cooking to catch it at its ideal point.

**B** Some recipes (including Delia Smith's for Fallen Chocolate Soufflé) call for 2:1:1 chocolate to butter and sugar, rather than 1:1:1. Reduce the tin size accordingly.

**C** Don't be tempted to straight-swap the dark chocolate for milk or white. For thoughts on using milk chocolate.

**D** Add vanilla extract or other liquid flavourings to taste: up to 3 tbsp liquid is fine.

**E** 4 medium eggs weigh 220g, and 3 large eggs weigh 204g.

**F** About 200g sugar works well with 70% dark chocolate, but this amount can be reduced if you think it's too much. A less cocoa-rich chocolate may also require less sweetening. Granulated sugar will do – caster just dissolves more quickly.

**G** Some recipes recommend whisking only the egg yolks with the sugar. The whites are whisked to soft peaks separately, then folded into the mixture at the end of step **3**.

Flourless Chocolate Cake → Flavours & Variations

AMARETTO

Add Amaretto to a flourless chocolate cake and you may find yourself transported to the Black Forest. The almond flavour is indistinguishable from the cherry flavours used in confectionery and soft drinks. If you're ever in Switzerland, don't leave without buying a supply of Sprüngli chocolate almonds to decorate your finished cake. How good can a chocolate-covered almond be, you might legitimately ask. Suffice to say I once spent an hour pricing flights to Zurich to replace the box a friend had brought back from holiday. (Sprüngli have shops in Swiss airports, so my plan was to stock up and get straight back on the next plane home.) Then I found out you can have them delivered by airmail. Make the cake while waiting for your parcel to arrive. Use 3 tbsp Amaretto for a cake made to our starting point, added at the end of step **1**.

BROWNIES

Our starting point for flourless chocolate cake contains equal weights of chocolate, butter and sugar, but you'll find recipes for the same sort of cake that call for 10–20 per cent more sugar. Others might contain a little flour and cocoa. Incorporate all these variations into one and you'll have a fairly typical brownie recipe. Nuts and chocolate pieces are optional extras. The only major difference between the flourless chocolate cake and the brownie is the shape. A brownie must contain four right angles. Try any other sort of quadrilateral – or, heaven help us, a circle – and it won't taste the same. For a 20cm square tin (greased and lined), follow the starting point, using 250g sugar. At the end of step **3**, fold in 50g each of sifted plain flour and cocoa powder, then 100g nuts and/or chocolate chips or chunks. Bake at 160°C, starting to check for doneness after about 20 minutes, using the skewer test: if you want fudgy brownies and your skewer comes out with a bit of batter on it, you're laughing. As with flourless chocolate cake, if your brownie is on the wet side, a spell in the fridge will firm it up. Cooked for longer, it will get drier and more cake-like, and ice cream may be necessary.

FONDANT

Fondant: a flourless chocolate cake with flour in it. Simply add half the weight of chocolate / butter / sugar in flour, and leave out half of the egg white. For example, to make 6, follow steps **1** to **3** of the starting point, melting together 200g each of dark chocolate and unsalted butter. Whisk 200g sugar with 2 whole eggs, 2 yolks and 1 tsp vanilla extract, then mix into the cooled chocolate. Fold in 100g sifted plain flour. Divide the batter between 6 buttered and floured darioles, filling each to about 1cm from the top, then bake at 200°C for about 11 minutes. Once cooked, immediately slide a knife around the edge of each fondant, upend the mould onto a plate and, clamping mould and plate firmly together, give it one definitive shake to persuade the fondant to part from the metal. The fondants can be made up to a day in advance and chilled, but need to be brought to room temperature before cooking. Note that the cooking time assumes the oven has reached heat, and that the fondants are at room temperature; 11 minutes always works for me, but if you're making these for the first time, you may want to verify the cooking time by baking one before you commit to the rest.

GINGER

Death by Chocolate is a dessert you expect to find on a laminated menu, along with dirty-minded cocktails. Hardly suitable for a Michelin-starred restaurant like the River Cafe. They call their indulgent flourless cake Chocolate Nemesis. As Sam Leith points out, Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution, ready to knock anyone guilty of hubris for a loop: it was she who lured Narcissus to his watery death. The difference, I suppose, is that 'Death by Chocolate' merely presupposes your death, whereas 'Chocolate Nemesis' strongly implies that you _deserve_ to die. The self-loathing of the upmarket-restaurant-goer? Either way, in _River Cafe Green_ , Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray give a recipe for a flourless chocolate ginger cake that omits the syrup required by the original Nemesis recipe. Chocolate Ellipsis? To adapt our starting point along similar lines, once the chocolate and butter has melted at step **1**, stir in 40g peeled and very finely chopped ginger, along with any juice it has left on the board, 2 tbsp fine cornmeal and 1 tbsp sifted cocoa powder. Use only 160g sugar at step **2**.

HAZELNUT

On a spring visit to Burgundy we sat in the only bar in a drive-through village. It was tiny and wood-panelled, like the inside of a barrel. The other punters certainly looked as though they'd been marinating in brandy since 1936. We ordered two Paris goblets of chilled Aligoté, Chablis's rough-spoken young cousin, which can, as it happens, come as a refreshing change from too much good Chardonnay. Draining our glasses, we flipped a euro as to which of the village's two restaurants we'd patronise for lunch. Tails saw us sitting under lurid hanging baskets on a strip of pavement opposite the church. The hors d'oeuvres arrived: two warm salads of hazelnuts, green beans and tiny potatoes in a sweet, piquant, grainy dressing so well-judged the chef could conceivably claim mustard as his second language. A roasted, corn-fed chicken leg came with matching golden mash. Three wedges of local cheese emptied our bottle of Gamay. Dessert was a slice of chocolate hazelnut cake. As she set down the plates, our matronly waitress gave a knowing smile and uttered the third-most-understood word in the world, after okay and iPhone. 'Nutella.' We drank coffee and more hazelnut in the form of a shot glass of home-made _noisette_ liqueur, then lolled on a bench in the square like a couple of retired old men, sharing a Gitane for old times' sake and agreeing to buy the next Renault 4 that parked alongside, at whatever price the driver named. For a cake made to our starting point, fold in 100g roasted and skinned ground hazelnuts at the end of step **3**.

LIME

Add orange zest to chocolate and it is instantly identifiable – unlike the zest of other citrus fruit, even when you add enough to blunt your Microplane. Natural oils, easily found online, are often a better bet. They are considerably more intense than common shop-bought extracts, to be used by the drop rather than the teaspoon. Lime oil is particularly winning, especially with dark chocolate. Add to the melted chocolate and butter drop by drop, tasting as you go, and bearing in mind that the egg mixture will dilute the flavour to some degree. Serve the cake with a dollop of crème fraîche mixed with fresh lime zest, to restore some of the sourness and fruity top notes.

MILK CHOCOLATE

I made several flourless chocolate cakes to our starting point, using good-quality milk chocolate in place of dark, but they all had an unpleasant, rubbery texture. A bit of research revealed that flourless milk-chocolate cakes made by pastry chefs tend to include ground almonds to give a cakier texture. I tried a couple. To me, they tasted like chocolate cake made by someone who had run out of chocolate. At Tru in Chicago, they serve a flourless milk-chocolate cake with grilled-potato-skin ice cream and bacon-toffee sauce. According to its website, Tru offers an 'extensive caviar program', which caught my attention, as only a few days earlier I'd walked past a bar called 'Wine Workshop'. I am now studying for my Bacon Sandwich Baccalaureate at a white-truffle retreat in northern Oregon. For flourless milk-chocolate cake, reduce the sugar and fat in the starting point – as, compared to its dark counterpart, milk chocolate contains more of both. Melt 125g milk chocolate (minimum 32% cocoa solids) and 100g unsalted butter. Whisk 2 whole eggs and 2 yolks with 75g light brown sugar and a pinch of salt. Fold the egg mixture into the cooled chocolate, then fold in 125g ground almonds. Pour into a prepared 20cm springform tin (greased and its base lined with baking parchment) and bake at 180°C. Start to check if it's ready at 25 minutes.

MUSCOVADO

Muscovado sugar takes its name comes from the Spanish _mascabado_ , meaning 'unrefined'. It's a raw sugar, rough as a bandit's chin, and hard to find in some countries. In the US, cooks are advised to approximate the flavour and texture of muscovado by mixing 1 tbsp unsulphured molasses with 200g brown sugar. According to the London chocolatier Paul A. Young, an inveterate muscovado fan, using it in place of refined white sugar is a simple way to add flavour to a chocolate dish. Try it in a flourless chocolate cake, made to our starting point, and note the intensity of flavour the following day: hints of black liquorice minus the aniseed. Add the finely grated zest of a large orange, too, especially if you like dark, Oxford-style marmalades.

RASPBERRY & CASSIS

This variation started out as cranberry and port, a flavour combination used by Charbonnel & Walker in a favourite chocolate truffle of mine. I gave dried cranberries a luxurious soak in port and added them to the batter of a flourless chocolate cake. It wasn't particularly good. It needed fresh fruit to work, I felt, and since it wasn't the season for fresh cranberries, I turned to raspberries. By this stage I had run out of port, so I used a little crème de cassis instead. It wasn't clear if the results amounted to a chocolate cake with berries, or a berry-flavoured cake with chocolate, but it didn't matter. Exclamation marks were dancing on my palate. Make as per the starting point, but using 125g each of chocolate, butter and sugar. Add 2 tsp crème de cassis to the chocolate and butter at the end of step **1**, then fold in 75g halved fresh raspberries at the end of step **3**, and bake in an 18cm tin.
Sugar

Received opinion has it that confectionery recipes must be followed to the letter. Start fiddling – fiddling being _Lateral Cooking's_ founding principle – and you risk catastrophe. This argument would be more persuasive were it not for the likelihood of catastrophe even when you do stick to the path. Making sweets is like riding a horse: the most experienced rider sometimes ends up in the ditch. Not even a triple-tested recipe from the most reliable source can comprehensively insure you against mishap. Months of trial and error in my own kitchen have left me in awe of the perfection on display at the confectionery counter. I therefore present the first two starting points on the continuum with a couple of pieces of advice.

CARAMEL

First, accept that things may not work out as planned, and set aside some back-up ingredients in case you feel like scrubbing your pan and starting over. Second, learn the old-fashioned way of testing the stages of cooked sugar. Even if you have a specialised sugar or digital thermometer, the time-honoured test is indispensable when you're experimenting with ingredients and/or proportions. Pour 120g sugar and 2 tbsp hot water into a heavy-based pan. Ideally the pan should be pale on the inside, rather than black, so you can see the colour of the syrup as it changes. Fill a light-coloured cereal bowl with cold water and leave it within arm's reach of the hob, along with a teaspoon and a pastry brush in a mug of water. Half-fill a larger pan with cold water and keep it somewhere similarly close at hand, and stable – it will shortly be receiving your super-heated syrup pan, so you don't want it rocking or tipping over. Confectionery does tend to require this level of planning.

With everything in place, put the syrup pan over a low–medium heat and allow the sugar to dissolve in the water, giving it the odd stir. For confectionery and syrups, I prefer to use a silicone spoon, partly because they're far easier than wooden spoons to check for debris: tiny bits of food or detritus that sucrose crystals can mistake for fellow sucrose crystals and latch onto, causing unwelcome crystallisation. Something as minuscule as a speck of dust can have this effect. Likewise, from time to time you may have to brush down the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush, to prevent sucrose crystals from forming and attracting others.

Once the sugar has completely dissolved, turn the heat to medium and continue cooking the syrup without stirring. After about 2 minutes, remove ½ tsp and plunge it into your bowl of cold water. Leave it for a second or so, and if the syrup hasn't dissolved from the spoon entirely, pinch some between your thumb and finger. The first cooked-sugar stage is the 'thread' stage (106–112°C), when the syrup forms a slack line. The thread strengthens as the water continues to evaporate from the sugar solution – take care not to touch it once it's beyond this point. By the time it has reached 115–116°C ('soft-ball' stage), it will form a squashable ball, not unlike the tacky stuff used to stick perfume samples to the pages of magazines. Arrest the heating here, and the mixture can be manipulated into an icing-like substance, used to make fudge or the white fondant in peppermint creams. At 120°C – the 'hard-ball' stage – the mixture will become firmer, yielding a toffee that's chewable the moment you put it in your mouth. Next comes the 'soft-crack' stage, 132–143°C. This is the kind of challenging toffee generally considered to be a menace to your molars. As the sugar mixture's temperature rises, the longer the resulting toffee will need in the mouth before becoming chewable. When the mixture becomes a strong thread that stiffens in the water and breaks without flexing, you've reached the 'hard-crack' stage, 149–154°C, which means your sweet will be suckable. By this point, the water will have all but gone from the solution, and the sugar can get on with changing colour, from lemon juice to straw, brick-red and eventually brown.

Next comes black: the pan-shopping stage. To stop things from going too far, just as the mixture starts turning from brick to brown, remove the pan from the heat and plunge it into the larger pan of cold water. Alternatively, pour it into 6 moulds, ready for crème caramel. Or, after removing the pan from the heat, carefully – it will splatter – stir in 100ml warm cream (single, whipping or double). This will make a fabulous caramel sauce – enough, say, for 4 sundaes. As it cools, the sauce will firm up: after an hour you'll be able to spread it in the centre of a 17–20cm sponge sandwich cake. Or, instead of adding the cream, stir in 75ml warm water and use it for Vietnamese fish and pork dishes ( **here** ) or for pouring over a vanilla panna cotta ( **here** ). Diluted this way it will keep in the fridge for months. Once it's cooled, taste a spoonful, noting the transformation from simple sweetness to toasty, perfumed complexity. Sugar may get a bad press, but watching its colour and texture change with each step up in heat, it's hard not to marvel at the transformations its crystals harbour.

Replace the water with butter, cream or milk, and the sugar mixture will pass through the same stages, but not necessarily at the same temperatures. Dairy solids will also create a more complex caramel flavour than cooked sugar alone. It was long believed that toffee would never take off in Japan, on account of its alien dairy smell. But in 1914, a philanthropist called Taichiro Morinaga, who had been trained in confectionery-making in the US, launched his milk caramels and put paid to that prejudice. Today toffees are a popular gift on Hokkaido, where honeysuckle, curry and kelp flavours are available, not to mention Yubari King melon and 'Genghis Khan'. Yubari King is a variety of orange-fleshed melon that looks like a cross between a cantaloupe and a small helicopter and is said to bring luck, which is just as well considering how much they cost – about the same as a small helicopter. 'Genghis Khan' is a grilled-mutton flavour based on a locally popular dish. Mutton toffees will strike you as marginally less strange if you've ever eaten Vietnamese pork or fish claypot dishes, cooked in a caramel made with fish sauce.

Cooked sugar lends a roasted flavour and a silky succulence to just about anything, which means that you need only be limited by your imagination when it comes to flavouring caramels. Well, that and your willingness to make repeated batches, to get your brilliant idea just right. In the case of toffee, aromatics are often added with the sugar and dairy at the outset. Once you've started cooking the mixture, and the caramelisation is under way, it will be too hot to taste; by the time the mixture cools, it will be too late to make any alterations. Fudge is a little easier to play with, as extracts and nuts are generally added at the end, after the mixture has cooled a little. Try splitting an unflavoured batch and experimenting with a few variations on theme – or simply make a few entirely different flavours.

FUDGE

Like penicillin and Play-Doh, fudge is one of those accidental discoveries, made when a batch of toffee went awry. As I've noted, it's easy to get toffee wrong, although to end up with fudge you have to get it wrong in the right way. Fudge was originally the name given to an American confection of sugar, dairy and chocolate. There was a late-nineteenth-century craze for it in women's colleges like Vassar, Wellesley and Smith, where the students cooked it in chafing dishes. In _College Girls_ , Lynn Peril suggests that the difficulty of making confectionery with limited equipment was half the point. Making rarebit was easy: no kudos. Fudge-making, on the other hand, 'required luck as well as kitchen finesse'. Girls formed fudge cliques and swapped tips and tricks. There were times, testing fudge recipes, when I wondered if it might be easier to apply to Vassar and insinuate myself into a clique. I'm still waiting to hear – but in the meantime, all that trial and error helped elucidate the basic, three-stage process.

Which proceeds like this: 1) dissolve the sugar in milk or cream over heat; 2) cook the resulting dairy syrup to the soft-ball stage; and 3) let it cool a bit then beat, fast, to create much smaller crystals than the sugar you started out with. It's easy to err. Jump to the cooking stage before the sugar is properly dissolved and you'll end up with crunchy fudge, which is good for nothing but the bin. Take note: _properly_ dissolved. It's also quite possible to burn the mixture while heating it to the soft-ball stage. Beat too soon, too late, or too much and the crystals will be the wrong size. Undershoot the temperature and the fudge won't set. Overshoot by a few degrees and your mixture will become caramel. Just as fudge can be caramel gone wrong, caramel can be mutant fudge, as they can both be made with the same ingredients in the same proportions.

I stress _can_ be made with the same ingredients, as for our purposes the ingredients are a little different. The toffee starting point calls for equal weights of sugar, syrup, butter and cream. The fudge calls for (more or less) equal weights of sugar and cream with a little butter and syrup added. You can make caramel and fudge with just granulated sugar, but the syrup performs the useful task of suppressing crystallisation, both during cooking and once the toffees are made. In the case of fudge, only a small amount of syrup is used, so as not to prevent the crucial formation of tiny crystals during the final stirring stage; crystallisation is what makes fudge fudge.

MERINGUE

If you've ever made Italian meringue, you'll know that, as with fudge, you start by cooking the sugar to soft-ball stage. The syrup is then whisked into the stiff egg whites to make a robust froth, used to top pies and desserts, or to add sweetness and structure to mousses and icings, or folded through a sorbet base. For French meringue, the most commonly made variety in domestic kitchens, plain sugar (generally caster sugar) is used rather than syrup. The cognoscenti will tell you that they whisk their French meringue by hand. Cheffy bravado, you might think, but whisking it the hard way does make it easier to tell when your foam is _à point_ , whereas, with an electric whisk, you can easily whisk past the sweet spot without noticing. That said, Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, no slouches in the meringues department, recommend using a stand mixer for the billowing sort that grace their windows.

Whisked by hand or machine, meringue, like its confectionery cousins, may be simple, but it is by no means foolproof. Meringue foam baulks at too much interference, and, as anyone who has read a meringue recipe knows, the feeblest rumour of fat or grease on your bowl or whisk will prevent peaks from forming. It's worth committing the three different stages of peak to memory: a soft peak will flop over into itself; firm peaks will tend downwards like the necks of sorrowful anteaters; and a stiff peak will stand erect as a freshly gelled mohican.

Once the meringue mixture is stiff, you can get away with folding in ground nuts, ground spices or a little alcohol-based extract, but note that adding oil-based flavourings can send your egg whites back to an irreparably liquid state. Colouring requires caution for the same reason. The Meringue Girls, a bakery based in Broadway Market in East London, resort to topical application to make their pretty, candy-striped confections, applying lines of colour gel to the inside of their piping bags before the meringue is added.

An alternative, slightly less common means of flavouring or colouring meringue is to add egg-white powder to a fruit purée or juice, then whisk it up with sugar. Try the strawberry-based version and prepare to emit unguarded, ecstatic noises. This kind of meringue can be used for piping onto pies and desserts. It can also be made into nests, although they'll be on the chewy side – the water content mitigates against crispness. Another flavouring option is to replace the sugar with honey, heated to soft-ball stage then added to whisked egg whites as per the Italian method. You might, of course, consider flavouring your own sugar syrups for Italian meringue, which brings us to the next starting point on the continuum.

SYRUP

Syrup is a cakewalk after caramel, fudge and meringue. Mix equal volumes of sugar and boiling water, stir, and that's it. Simple syrup, otherwise known as 'stock syrup', is surprisingly useful, partly because the flavouring options are limitless. For a syrup made with 250ml of each ingredient, add 5 tbsp rum once the sugar has dissolved, and you'll have the best part of a classic rum baba; the coarse, open texture of a baba invites a proper drenching without succumbing to sogginess. In 'Consider the Lobster', his classic account of the Maine Lobster Festival, David Foster Wallace points out that few people would go weak at the knees for lobster were it not swimming in melted butter. Similarly, the baba is a primarily a vehicle for alcoholic sugar syrup. Other spirits were used originally, but it was rum that made the pudding a hit. My guess is that rum, made with cane juice and often enhanced with cooked sugar, makes a syrup that tastes rather like caramel, and is thus both reassuringly familiar and pleasingly transgressive. Rum makes a good base for all sorts of syrupy flavour combinations. I like the unusual pairing of rum and turmeric suggested in _Spirit House: Thai Cooking_ by Annette Fear and Helen Brierty. Make a simple syrup with 100g each of light and dark palm sugar, 1 tsp salt, 15g turmeric (fresh, peeled and finely chopped), 100ml water, 150ml coconut milk and 2 tbsp rum. Pour over coconut and palm sugar pancakes: you'll find a pandan-infused version of these.

Honey is nature's simple syrup, and before sugar was readily available it was used to elevate relatively plain items like breads and pancakes to the status of a treat. Where honey was unavailable, or unaffordable, date syrup was used as a sweetener, or the juice of other fruit boiled down to syrupy sweetness and consistency: figs, pomegranates, carob pods and mulberries were, and still are, made into molasses in Turkey, Syria and the Lebanon; and in Italy, grapes were used to make _mosto cotto_ ('cooked must') or _sapa_. Sugar, when it did become widely available, was prized for its clarity and neutrality of flavour: hard to imagine what a revelation this would have been. Conjure the flavour of a toddy and you'll recall what a different character lemon takes on when sweetened with honey rather than sugar; even the mildest honey has a complexity and bitterness to it. Sugar-sweetened, the pure, floral flavour of lemon is exposed – try the lemon cordial and see for yourself.

Sugar syrup can be used for preserving fruit, to make Italian meringue, flavour cakes and sweets, to glaze baked goods, or to create a unifying base for fruit salad. Simple syrup also lends sweetness and body to cocktails. There has, in recent years, been something of a revival in custom-made, flavoured syrups for both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, the latter an echo of the late-nineteenth-century craze for 'nerve tonics' and other carbonated drinks. Some, like Coca-Cola, were so successful that the manufacturers began selling their syrup for franchisees to dilute with fizzy water. Many of these drinks were based on old remedies; others claimed new benefits. Dr Pepper, for example, served not only as a cure for exhaustion, but also for ageing, smoking and alcoholism, so long as you drank it three times a day. A ginger ale called Clicquot Club was claimed to have 'brain-cleaning' properties. Those gullible Edwardians, I thought, as I sipped on a can of Red Bull, and waited for my wings to sprout.

SORBET

Flavoured syrups can also be used to make jellies, granitas and sorbets. Sorbet shares its etymology with Persian _shabat_ , meaning 'syrup'. The science of ices is complex, but sorbets can be easy to improvise – as easy, for example, as mixing 500ml (or 2 cups) of sweet fruit purée with 250ml (or 1 cup) of simple syrup, plus an optional teaspoon of lemon juice for vibrancy. The mix is then frozen. For the smoothest texture, use an ice-cream machine. In the absence of a machine, pour the mix into a rectangular Tupperware container or old ice-cream tub to a depth of about 3cm, put it in the freezer, and return every half-hour or so to break up the crystals with a fork.

More fastidious sorbet-makers might try to calculate the proportion of sugar in the mix in order to achieve the textural ideal. Sugar will lower the mixture's freezing point; too much will leave you with an unscoopable mush. Quite possibly a delicious unscoopable mush, but it's a confident host that serves Slush Puppies to any guests over the age of twelve. The ideal sugar content will be roughly 20–30 per cent of the total weight of the mixture. This is easy to calculate in the case of non-sweet liquids, but a little harder with fruit, where you have to account for its own sugar content. A Brix refractometer, which measures the sugar content in any given liquid, and costs no more than half a dozen tubs of fancy-brand sorbet, will solve the problem. The lo-fi means to the same end is to use a clean, unbroken, raw egg. Float it in your sorbet mix, and if a little circle of egg protrudes from the surface, the mixture should be good to freeze. (If the egg sinks, add more sugar syrup; if too much of the egg protrudes from the surface, add more purée/water/cold coffee/whatever flavour base you're using.) I have made excellent lemon sorbet using this method, but question its reliability with thicker liquids like fibrous fruit purées. Nonetheless, success seems to have wide parameters. In the summer, when there's an abundance of cheap, ripe fruits, I often just measure out a purée and mix it with half its volume in sugar syrup. I don't recall ever making a sorbet I was unhappy with.

Note that adding a dash of booze can lower the mixture's freezing point and help make the sorbet smoother. The neutral flavour and colour of vodka make it a popular choice, but you might consider treating the alcoholic ingredient as an extra layer of flavour, as in Campari with grapefruit, cider with apple or Riesling with peach. As with sugar, an excess of alcohol will prevent the mixture from freezing properly. Astute readers will have worked out that alcohol can be used in place of some of the sugar, if you're looking to cut down on the latter. It might just take a bit of trial and error to find the right balance. Fortunately, if you're not happy with the texture of your sorbet or granita, you can always let it melt, make adjustments and refreeze.

GRANITA

For those keen to limit their sugar consumption, granita is the better bet. Its crunchier texture is a result of its lower sugar content. A very decent granita can be made with notably un-sweet liquids like grapefruit juice or strong coffee, and as little as 10 per cent of the liquid weight in sugar. Its bitter edge makes coffee granita especially refreshing. In Sicily, where the heat can be oppressive even early on a summer morning, coffee granita is often served for breakfast, decanted into a pretty glass with a brioche on the side, or piled into the bun to make an icy sandwich.

JELLY

Jelly is like sorbet, but easier. Once you've created a sweet base with juice or purée you're most of the way there. All that remains is to determine the right amount of gelatine to set it to a perfect wobble. Other than taking care to read the instructions on the packet – different brands and grades will have their own setting strengths – there isn't a lot that can go wrong. To discover the simplicity of making jelly with leaf gelatine is to wonder how packet jelly became so popular. I suppose good-quality leaf gelatine wasn't always as widely available as it is today. My mother only ever bought the powdered variety, which she once used to make Turkish Delight. The smell that lingered in the kitchen was less Eastern promise than porcine threat, like being cornered by an enraged pig in a rose garden. To this day, whenever I hydrate gelatine granules I have to suppress a shudder.

In truth, my sister and I had a vested interest in our mother _not_ mastering the use of gelatine. For what seemed like years we saved tokens from packets of Chivers jelly to earn a tank of goldfish. At long last we sent off the tokens and received our fish a few weeks later by Royal Mail. In a matter of days our favourite, Georgie Best, had died. We scooped him from the surface and gave him a decent burial in the garden. Over the coming weeks the other four gave up the ghost, one by one, until we lost interest and Mum was left to flush the last one down the loo. The experience was not, however, for nothing. My sister and I learned an important lesson: what we really wanted was a dog. And no more jelly for a long, long time.

In retrospect the promotion seemed like a pretty odd idea. What was the connection between jelly and goldfish? A tenuous reference, maybe, to the days when the dried swim-bladders of sturgeon and cod were used to make isinglass, a type of gelatine popular in the nineteenth century? Marie-Antoine Carême specified isinglass for his red Champagne jelly and orange jelly layered with almond blancmange, served in scooped-out whole oranges cut into segments to showcase the stripes. Eventually isinglass was replaced by cheaper alternatives, including leaf gelatine, which contemporary jellymongers Bompas & Parr consider the finest setting agent available. Gelatine is comprised of long, thin strands of protein which, when hydrated and heated, become a tangled mass that sets as it cools, holding in suspension any liquid it is added to; heat it and it will dissolve again. As gelatine is derived from animal parts, some cooks prefer vegetarian alternatives like agar agar and carrageen, both derived from algae. However, I think they yield an inferior wobble, and a jelly without a proper wobble is like a clown without a honk in his horn.

The jolliness of jelly is valued in even the finest dining rooms, although curiously often in savoury form. The Dublin-based French chef Patrick Guilbaud riffs on oyster stout by serving a Carlingford oyster in a stout jelly with a pearl made of oyster cream. Joël Robuchon serves a crab pâté under a layer of fennel jelly, topped with caviar and presented in a caviar tin. Heston Blumenthal's exquisite 'meat fruit' is a hyperreal mock-up of a tangerine, its peel fashioned from orange jelly, stippled for verisimilitude, concealing an interior of smooth chicken liver parfait. A deliciously deadpan joke.

PANNA COTTA

If you prefer your jelly less droll, make a panna cotta. Somehow its opacity renders the wobble more dignified. It also benefits from an outstanding effort-reward ratio: a delicious panna cotta can be made in 5 minutes, then left to set. There are more time-consuming approaches – rather than just heating the cream, some recipes require it to be cooked, as the name panna cotta suggests. The River Cafe's version involves boiling double cream, then mixing it with whole milk and whipped double cream. Nearly all recipes call for some milk, to tamp down the cream's richness. Given how quick they are to make, it's worth fiddling with your panna cotta proportions until you have the recipe just as you like it. Start with 50/50 milk and cream, before upping one or the other to taste. Adjust the sweetness likewise, then work on the quantities of gelatine. Stick to one brand, and expect that you may find yourself cutting leaves into quarters. What constitutes the right amount will depend on whether you plan to unmould the dessert, in which case it will need the strength to support its own weight, not slump like a defeated sumo wrestler. If, on the other hand, you plan to serve it in individual glasses, less gelatine could be used. In either case, the set should put up a barely detectable resistance to the spoon, yielding the moment it enters the mouth.

As for flavourings, if your cream is especially good, you may prefer to add none at all. For the starting point I have used grappa, which is a traditional flavouring, and is simply added to the mixture once the gelatine has been added to the cream. Panna cotta is pretty open to experimentation. Take inspiration from cocktails and desserts, or classic custards or ice creams. Vanilla in pod form can be hard to beat, even if, when the panna cotta is turned out, the speckled top created by the seeds looks a little like newsprint – not very pretty. My solution is to pour over the cooled, glossy brown sauce made by diluting a caramel, as outlined **here** ; the result is like a crème caramel, but creamier.

**Caramel**

This starting point applies both to soft, chewable caramel and the hard sort that has to be sucked or, if your teeth are up to it, crunched. The ingredients are easily memorised: caramel takes equal weights of sugar, syrup (golden or corn), whole milk and unsalted butter. Stir in any nuts or small pieces of dried fruit at the end of step **4**, once the pan is submerged in cold water. _Be really careful with the hot mixture – don't let it come into contact with your skin and, however good it smells, do not be tempted to taste it until it has cooled_.

_For a 20cm square tin or silicone mould, to make 25 toffees_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

200g sugar **B**

200g golden syrup **C D**

200g butter **E**

200ml cream **E F**

1–2 tsp vanilla extract – optional **G**

Pinch of salt or ½ tsp sea salt for salted caramel – optional **G**

**1** Use a silicone mould as is, or line a tin with greaseproof paper or baking parchment and lightly oil it. Place a cereal bowl of cold water and a few teaspoons beside the hob if you plan to test the sugar-cooking stage in the traditional way, as outlined **here**. Pour about 2cm cold water into a large pan and leave it somewhere safe and easily accessible.

You'll be plunging your hot caramel pan into this large pan to stop the cooking, so make sure it fits. Choose a caramel pan big enough for the ingredients to bubble up – bank on the caramel tripling its starting size.

**2** Put the sugar, syrup, butter and cream into your chosen pan, preferably one with a heavy base, and place over a medium heat. Stir frequently, with a silicone or wooden spoon, to melt the sugar and butter completely.

The thinner the base of your pan, the more assiduous you'll need to be with the stirring. If the mixture separates, stir it vigorously. If this doesn't bring it together, add a few tablespoons of hot water, carefully – it will splatter – and stir again.

**3** Bring the mix to the boil. Stir continuously if you like, but strictly it's only necessary to stir every now and then, to prevent scorching, or before you take the temperature of your caramel.

The caramel can now be cooked to the texture of your choice: cook to 120–129°C (hard-ball stage) for a soft caramel; cook to 132–143°C for a firm, but eventually chewable caramel that might stick to your teeth a bit; cook to 149–154°C (hard-crack stage) for a rock-hard sucking caramel – see **here** for further elaboration.

**4** Remove from the heat as soon as the caramel reaches the desired temperature and plunge the caramel pan into the larger pan of cold water you prepared earlier.

Small quantities of flavourings can be added here. However, if you're working towards the bottom end of the temperature range, be aware that too much cold liquid may send your caramel backwards to a softer stage. To prevent this, consider pre-warming your flavourings.

**5** Pour into the prepared mould or tin and leave to set. For regular-sized pieces, score the surface when the mixture has cooled enough to hold a line, but not so much that you can't score it at all.

Start trying after 10 minutes. Hard toffee can be hammered into pieces if you don't mind irregular sizes. Caramel weeps in the open air, which is why it's common to wrap it tightly (e.g. in wax paper) or enrobe it in chocolate. Even so, most toffees will begin to soften and crystallise after a few days.

LEEWAY

**A** A 20cm square tin gives an ideal depth of caramel for cutting into cubes or rectangles. Use half the quantities for a 15cm square – a good size for flavour testing.

**B** Brown sugar in place of white will give the caramel a more pronounced flavour.

**C** Use a higher proportion of sugar to syrup – say 300g sugar to 100ml syrup – or even all sugar. Note, however, that a little syrup helps prevent crystallisation during cooking, and once the toffee is made.

**D** Use the same weight of corn syrup or liquid glucose.

**E** Use half the amounts of butter and cream. Or use only butter or only cream. The temperature ranges given in the method can still be used as a guide. It's worth noting that the overall fat content of the mixture will have an effect on the consistency of the finished caramel: the higher the fat content, the softer the caramel will set.

**F** Use the same amount of condensed milk in place of the cream. It'll be quicker, as it's already had the water cooked out of it – the reason many manufacturers use it. On the other hand, it will need more stirring, as condensed milk is very sugary and more given to burning.

**G** A great deal of flavour comes from the caramelisation of the ingredients, so you don't need any extra flavouring at all. Nonetheless, you can stir in 1–2 tsp vanilla extract, the contents of a vanilla pod, or a little salt at the end of step **4**.

Caramel → Flavours & Variations

CHOCOLATE

Chocolate toffee. What's not to like? First of all, people saying 'what's not to like?' Second, I reckon the ingredients are better left separate. It's a fine judgement, and you may well disagree. Follow the starting point, adding 50–100g chopped chocolate at step **2**. The results are pretty wonderful, but to my palate a toffee enrobed in chocolate, whether from Artisan du Chocolat, or in the more demotic form of a Rolo, has the edge. The point where your teeth have broken the crisp chocolate shell and are sinking into the soft, sweet-salty interior, which tastes almost warm by comparison, is surely one of the pinnacles of confectionery consumption, if not human experience. On a practical note, the chocolate coating also preserves the caramel and stops it from weeping – so chocolate-covered toffees will, in theory, outlast their chocolate-flavoured counterparts.

FISH SAUCE, GINGER & GARLIC

In Vietnam, the taste for salted caramel is more than a passing trend; it's the cornerstone of a popular sauce served with pork or fish. _Thit kho to_ or _ca kho to_ is usually cooked in a clay pot, although a lidded saucepan will do, as long as your ingredients fit snugly into it. The salt comes in the form of fish sauce, and the resulting tastes are no less balanced for their extremity. There are many regional variations, and you might try a different one every night and not tire of it for weeks. Some call for a mix of fish sauce and soy sauce, others specify fish sauce and rice vinegar. Catfish is the usual choice, the cooking time 30–40 minutes. I apply the same flavour principle to a dish that's considerably quicker to prepare. Make a simple mixture of caramel plus warm water, as outlined **here** , remembering that any excess will keep in the fridge for months. Slice the white parts of 3 spring onions. Slice the green parts and set them aside for a garnish. Put a little bland oil into a saucepan that will hold 2 salmon fillets snugly and place over a medium heat. Cook the spring onion whites, 1 finely chopped garlic clove and 1 tbsp finely chopped ginger until their fragrance tickles your nose. Add the seasoned fish, skin-side down, and fry for 2 minutes. Turn the fish, add 2 tbsp caramel, 1 tbsp fish sauce and 2 tsp rice vinegar. Apply the lid. The fish will be ready in about 5 minutes. Serve on white rice, garnished with slivers of spring onion greens and lots of freshly ground black pepper.

LEMON

Acidic ingredients like lemon juice, vinegar or cream of tartar were once added to toffee to prevent the re-crystallisation of the sugar as it cooked. These days, sugar syrups like golden syrup, liquid glucose or corn syrup are more commonly added for that purpose. Lemons were also used to flavour the toffee, either in essence form (6 drops to 450g sugar) or as grated zest. The Victorian writer Eliza Acton adds the grated zest of 1 lemon to her simple toffee mixture of 450g brown sugar and 90g butter (noting that more butter is normally used). Rather than using a grater, I employed the Victorian zesting method, rubbing the skin of 2 unwaxed lemons with 50g sugar cubes. The roughness of the sugar teases the oil from the tiny pores in the peel, and you're not left with any flecks of zest to spoil the smoothness of the toffee. Follow our starting point, topping up the 50g lemon-infused sugar cubes with 150g caster sugar. The resulting lemon flavour is wonderfully floral, far brighter and more complex than bottled lemon essence, which degrades quickly. Chunkily chopped, blanched almonds were once mixed into a popular, butter-free lemon toffee called hardbake. A chewier, Starburst-style of lemon sweet can be made with sugar, syrup and a little butter, cooked to a lower heat – around 118°C. Confectionery flavouring, colour and a spike of citric acid will lend it the requisite Easter-chick yellow and juicy tartness.

MINT JULEP

One Sunday I pounded a handful of mint leaves into a paste, then stirred it into a tablespoon of warmed bourbon. Once my batch of toffee had reached its destination heat, I added the mint-whisky concoction and stirred. The next day I was sitting in a railway-station café with a sensible, middle-aged colleague. Our train was delayed. I remembered I had some home-made toffees in my handbag. 'Fancy one?' I said. 'They're mint julep flavour.' 'Mint what?' she mumbled, toffee in mouth. 'Julep. It's a cocktail made with bourbon and sugar syrup and fresh mint. They drink them in the American South.' There was still no sign of the train. We were on our third round of toffees and I was still banging on about the cocktail. I had moved on to its association with the Kentucky Derby, where mint julep is the traditional drink, when a revival in my colleague's formerly drifting interest made me wonder if she was experiencing some form of sugar rush. It turned out she was into horses – that is, betting on them. The delay on the departures board grew like a reluctantly confessed betrayal. My colleague swiped the last toffee and made for the fruit machine in the corner. She stuck a pound in it. I watched as she jabbed at the lights. In short order a few coins rattled into the tray, followed by a few more, then a deluge. We had just finished counting the winnings when I looked up and realised we had missed our train. Scooping the coins into a carrier bag, my colleague led me out of the station and into a minicab that smelled of incompletely deodorised smoke. 'Take us to the best cocktail bar in town,' she said. We were in Portsmouth, but still.

PEANUT BRITTLE

A good place to start for the confectionery novice. (Butter toffees and creamy fudge, by contrast, need extra care, as their dairy content makes them prone to burning during their long cook at a high temperature.) Roast 200g blanched peanuts until golden and set aside. In a saucepan over a medium heat, bring 200g sugar, 100g golden syrup or corn syrup, and 50ml water to the boil and apply the lid. Leave for 4–5 minutes. (Applying the lid removes the need to brush down the sides of the pan during the early sugar-dissolving stage.) Remove the lid and cook to soft-ball stage (115–116°C). Add the peanuts. Continue to cook, stirring to keep the mixture from sticking and burning, and brushing down the sides of the pan with a wet brush if necessary, until the caramel starts to turn brick-red, or reaches 160°C. Immediately remove from the heat and sprinkle over ¼ tsp fine salt. Stir thoroughly. Pour the mixture into a 20–23cm square silicone mould or oiled tin and leave to cool. If you like, add a few tablespoons unsalted butter with the salt. As with shortbread and shortcrust, this will shorten the texture.

PRALINE

Praline is legion. There are pralines that are single nuts coated in rough sugar, like the rose kind mentioned **here**. There's praline that is essentially fudge, such as the pecan version **here**. Finally, there's a praline that's a variation on the peanut brittle above, made using toasted almonds or hazelnuts. Make a caramel with just 120g sugar and 2 tbsp water, as per the instructions **here**. When it has turned dark gold, add 100–200g toasted and skinned nuts. Stir to ensure the nuts are well coated, then scrape the mixture out onto a silicone mat or a lightly oiled baking tray and flatten to a depth of one nut. When the mixture has cooled and set hard, grind it to a fine powder; note that if you grind for too long, the natural oils in the nut will turn the mixture into praline paste. Keep any excess powder in the freezer, wrapped, where you won't be tempted to dip a licked finger in it, like it's some kind of toasty sherbet. Praline powder can be used in ice cream, to decorate cakes or mixed into buttercream. Praline paste is added to crème pâtissière to make _crème pralinée_ , which is used to stuff the choux buns for Paris-Brest, or to flavour ice cream. With the addition of egg white, _crème pralinée_ can be made into praline soufflés.

SALTED CARAMEL SAUCE

Make the simple caramel sauce outlined **here** , using 120g sugar, 2 tbsp water and 100ml cream. The flavour of the brick-red caramel goes a long way, and you can get away with adding at least another 100ml cream without risking excessive thinness of taste or texture. A cheat's variation is to melt together 50g each of soft dark brown sugar, golden syrup and unsalted butter, then gradually stir in 150ml double or whipping cream. No need to give it a long cook: the brown sugar will furnish the flavour. Whichever sauce you make, once the mixture is cool enough, stir in sea salt to taste, pinch by pinch. The non-cheat version has a complex caramel flavour with a pleasing bitter streak. The cheat version is sweeter, but spicier. You might add a splash of Calvados or bourbon to either. While _light_ brown sugar will do in place of dark, the results will lack the depth of flavour to qualify as caramel sauce. Add some vanilla and a few pinches of salt and call it butterscotch. Most caramel sauces will thicken as they cool, and so might need warming up to become pourable again.

TREACLE

At Christmastime in North Wales it was traditional to gather for a _noson gyflaith_ , an evening of games, stories and toffee-making. The toffee in question would be made with butter, sugar, treacle and spices – what the English would call treacle toffee. The equivalent Scottish terms are as ornery as the toffee itself: 'clack', 'claggum', 'treacle gundy' or 'teasing candy'. Another Scots version includes bicarbonate of soda, creating a dark variation on honeycomb. For treacle toffee, use 200g brown sugar, 100g each of treacle and golden syrup, 200ml water, 200g butter and ¼ tsp cream of tartar. Follow the starting-point method, heating the caramel to 149–155°C.

**Fudge**

Fudge is an exercise in sugar-crystal management. Success tastes like a caramelised butter engorged with icing sugar. It has anything between a mildly elastic and crumbly texture. As with caramel, the starting point for fudge calls for more or less equal amounts of sugar and dairy. For vanilla flavour, add the contents of a pod at the outset of step **3**, or 2 tsp extract at step **5**. Raisins, chopped nuts etc. can be added at step **5**, once you've beaten the mix for a few minutes. _Be really careful with the hot mixture – don't let it come into contact with your skin and, however good it smells, do not be tempted to taste it until it has cooled._

_For a 17cm square silicone mould or tin_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

400g sugar **B**

350ml double cream **C D E**

50g butter

1 tbsp golden syrup **F G**

Pinch of salt

**1** Use a silicone mould as is, or prepare a tin by lining it with greaseproof paper or baking parchment and lightly oiling it. Place a cereal bowl of cold water and a few teaspoons beside the hob if you plan to test the sugar-cooking stage in the traditional way, as outlined **here**.

**2** Find a robust pan deep enough to hold the ingredients as they bubble up.

Remember that cream rises when it boils. For these amounts, a heavy-based 3-litre saucepan is good. (As a rule, the mix will triple in height.)

**3** Put all the ingredients into the pan. Set over a moderate heat, stirring all the while, until the sugar has dissolved and the butter has melted.

Be especially sure that the sugar has all dissolved before moving on. Brush down the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush if you see crystals forming. Left to their own devices, these tiny clusters will attract others and ruin your fudge mix.

**4** Still over a moderate heat, bring the mixture to the boil, stirring regularly to prevent the bottom scorching, and keep cooking until it reaches the soft-ball stage (115–116°C). Remove the pan from the heat.

**5** Leave for about 15 minutes, then beat until the mixture thickens and turns matt, but is still pourable. Use a wooden spoon if you're doing this by hand.

The cooling minimises the opportunity for large seed crystals to develop. Some recipes suggest you start beating at a certain temperature. As these can range from 37–100°C, however, I find it easier to go by time. Likewise, opinions vary widely as to how long to beat for – some recipes suggest a long time, but I generally beat just until the mix starts to thicken and lose its shine. By hand, this should take about 5–7 minutes for this quantity. It's hard work, but gratifying with it. With an electric mixer it'll be a matter of a few minutes.

**6** Pour into the silicone mould or prepared tin and leave to set at room temperature. **H**

**7** Cut into pieces and store in an airtight container, preferably wrapped in baking parchment. The fudge will keep for at least 3 weeks.

LEEWAY

**A** Make a batch of fudge any smaller than this and it will be liable to burn. Even if it doesn't, there will be too little to beat at step **5**.

**B** Brown sugar often improves the flavour, especially as fudge is removed from the heat before much caramel flavour has had a chance to develop.

**C** Use the same quantity of single cream or whole milk; the less fat, the icier the texture.

**D** Reduce the cream to as little as 200ml.

**E** Some recipes stipulate condensed milk. A recipe by condensed-milk manufacturer Carnation calls for 1 × 400g tin of condensed milk, 150ml milk, 450g demerara sugar and 115g butter, made to the method here, other than specifying 118°C as the target temperature, and suggesting you beat the mixture immediately after removing it from the heat.

**F** Golden syrup (or liquid glucose or corn syrup) suppresses unwelcome crystallisation, but in this small quantity not so much as to hinder the crystallisation required at step **5**.

**G** Golden syrup can be omitted. But see **F** above.

**H** If your fudge won't set, it'll be because it wasn't brought to a high enough temperature at step **4**. Break it into bits and put in a pan with a little water, then slowly dissolve over a moderate heat and try again. If the finished fudge has a crystalline texture, it's beyond repair.

Fudge → Flavours & Variations

BEAN

In Japan a sweetened red-bean paste, _anko_ , is made with adzuki beans and sugar. Earthy in flavour, it turns up in all types of sweetmeats, classic items like pancakes and stuffed rice balls, and, less traditionally, in ice cream. Its closest relative in the West might be the mixture of peanut and sugar called _dulce de cacahuate._ Barfi, the fudge-like Indian sweet, comes in many forms, one of the most popular being made with chickpea flour, butter and sugar. Perhaps unfair of Ken Albala, then, to give fudge the 'runner's-up award for the most deranged use of beans'. Sugar, corn syrup, milk, salt, cocoa powder and bean purée are brought to soft-ball stage, and butter added, before the mixture is allowed to cool. Peanut butter and vanilla are then stirred in, and the whole poured into a tin to set. Albala's no. 1 most deranged use of beans is a fruit cake enhanced with mashed pinto beans. Fans of beetroot and chocolate cake: this is your next crazy.

BUFFALO OR YAK MILK

If the spirit of the animal is in its milk, buffalo are far gentler than their extravagant horns and stampeding habit suggest. _Mozzarella di bufala_ , that mellow daydream-bubble amongst cheeses, is made from it, as is proper Indian paneer. Both owe their bright whiteness to the absence of carotenoids that give milk from grass-fed cows its yellow tinge. (Buffalo, sheep and goats convert the carotene into vitamin A.) Buffalo milk has twice the fat content of cow's milk, which makes it rich and flavoursome. Aside from mozzarella, Laverstoke Park in Hampshire use their own buffalo milk to make award-winning Gouda- and Brie-style cheeses. They have been known to make fudge from it, too. In Nepal, Sherpas slowly cook down yak milk to make a toffee called _korani_. To my shame, Sherpa sweetmeats represent a lacuna in my cookbook collection, so I can't pass on any details, but from what I understand it's not dissimilar to _dulce de leche._ A boon on your granola bar when you're halfway up Everest.

CHOCOLATE

The word 'fudge', as applied to confectionery, dates from late nineteenth-century America, but there it refers to a chocolate candy, as opposed to the caramelised-dairy confectionery the term denotes in the UK. By the early twentieth century, the chocolate variety was all the rage at women's colleges like Vassar, where fudge parties were held in the dorms, and girls would cook it over a chafing dish. A recipe by a Vassar student of the time calls for 2 glasses of sugar, ¼ cake (about 50g) chocolate, 1 glass of milk and a little butter. Another contemporary recipe stipulates 1 cup (200g) dark brown sugar, ½ cup (120ml) milk, 2 tbsp butter, 2 cups (480ml) New Orleans molasses, 4 squares of chocolate, grated, and 1 tsp vanilla. The mixture is then cooked to a hard-ball stage, which would make more of a soft treacle toffee than a fudge. But it's best not to split hairs with a woman presiding over a pot of boiling sugar. I find confectionery tricky enough with my modern pan, silicone mould and digital thermometer, so I tip my toque to anyone prepared to make fudge in a chafing dish. Nonetheless, at the turn of the twentieth century, these portable braziers were popular enough to inspire a slew of cookbooks, including Fannie Merritt Farmer's indispensable _Chafing Dish Possibilities_. 'Anything constructed upon a chafing dish,' announced the _Los Angeles Herald_ in 1909, 'brings with it an element of sociability and cheerfulness that is hard to attain in any other way. Long life to it and its pretty schoolgirl champions.' A Brazilian chocolate-fudge sweet called the _brigadeiro_ is simple enough to cook over a spirit lamp. Whisk 4 tbsp cocoa powder with 1 × 400g tin of condensed milk, eliminating any lumps, then add 1 tbsp butter and cook over a medium heat for about 10 minutes, by which time the mixture should pull away from the sides of the pan. Pour into a silicone mould, or onto oiled foil, and allow to cool and set. Once it has, fashion it into small balls as you would ganache for truffles, then roll them in chocolate sprinkles. If, however, you simply want to flavour your fudge with chocolate, beat in 100g warm melted chocolate at step **5**.

COCONUT & ORANGE

_Cajeta_ is a type of fudge popular in Mexico and Central America. It's most often found in spreadable form, like _dulce de leche_ , but it's also given a harder set for individual candies. The Costa Rican astronaut Franklin Chang-Rodriguez packed _cajeta_ for his space missions, and a celebratory _cajeta espacial_ – space fudge – was named in his honour. The flavours were coconut and orange – not because these are widely grown in Costa Rica (although they are), but because NASA's take-off and re-entry suit-helmet combos are coloured white and orange. In the absence of a photograph of space fudge, it's anybody's guess whether the candy itself was white and orange. To make the distinctly plain brown coconut fudge popular in the Caribbean, follow the method given at **E** under Leeway, but use light brown sugar in place of demerara, and coconut milk in place of the 150ml milk. Coconut ice is made in a very similar way to fudge – put sugar, milk and butter in a pan and bring them to the soft-ball stage, before mixing in desiccated coconut, then beating the mixture and transferring to a tin to set.

COFFEE & WALNUT

If you find yourself in Italy, with no time to spare for an espresso, save yourself about twelve seconds by knocking back a 'Pocket Coffee', a bite-size dark chocolate shaped like a treasure chest and filled with a bittersweet ristretto. Frank C. Mars was thinking along the same lines when he invented the Mars Bar – the confection we in the UK refer to as a Milky Way. After drinking a chocolate-malt shake in a diner, he got to wishing he could have something similar to hand whenever he wanted a nutritious snack. Forswearing the billions I would have made trademarking it, I dedicate the following coffee and walnut fudge to all human beings. Pocket Coffee Cake! Unlike the real thing it won't leave smears of frosting on your car keys. Dissolve 2 tsp instant coffee in 1 tsp boiling water and stir into the sugar and dairy mix at step **5** (before you start beating), then add a handful of chopped walnuts a few minutes into the beating. If you prefer a stronger coffee flavour, use 50/50 white and light brown sugar, and dissolve 1 tbsp instant coffee in the 1 tsp water. The notes of caramel in the brown sugar match and enhance similar flavour compounds created in coffee when the beans are roasted.

GINGER

Although 'fudge' is a nineteenth-century American coinage, there are methods of cooking sugar and dairy together that pre-date it by some way, Scottish 'tablet' being a case in point. Despite the similarity of the recipes, tablet has a notably different texture to fudge – harder, grainier, more brazenly sugary. A Glaswegian assault on your tooth enamel. In the first Scottish cookbook, published in 1736, flavour variations for tablet include ginger, orange, rose, horehound, aniseed and cinnamon. Horehound is related to mint, and from the 1600s was a popular flavour for throat lozenges, which are still available today. The herb is notably bitter; the wild-plants expert Kay Young writes that few people like the flavour, and those that do consume it only rarely. Hardly a ringing endorsement. Try Catherine Brown's ginger variation from _Classic Scots Cookery_ instead. She says tablet is harder than fudge – it has a bite to it. Her standard tablet recipe calls for 800g sugar, 175ml milk, 175g butter and a 400g tin of condensed milk. The night before you make your tablet, line a 22cm square tin with foil, then with cling film, and put it in the freezer. The next day, melt the butter in the milk before adding the sugar and melting that too. Add the condensed milk and cook to the soft-ball stage (115–116°C), removing it from the heat and beating it immediately, but 'not too much'. Mix in 50g chopped preserved ginger before pouring the tablet into the lined tin. Leave it to set for 30 minutes before covering with cling film and returning the tin to the freezer for 1½ hours. Remove it from the tin, leave for 10 minutes, then score and break into small cubes. For her orange variation, Brown suggests using orange juice in place of milk, and adding the finely grated zest of 1 orange to the mix before pouring it into the tin.

PECAN

The evening started, as had the previous three, at The Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans. We had a couple of margaritas, listened to the band, chucked some money in the hat. Then we walked east over Elysian Fields, wandering past the candy-coloured houses and trees festooned in glass beads until we came across a white structure half-hidden in palm trees. We had a few drinks in what might have been a courtyard, or a part of the building that had lost its roof: I don't recall. The walls were thick with ivy, and somewhere inside was a dark room like a train carriage, crowded with drinkers. Then on to another bar, more music, fried catfish, before ending the evening back in the French Quarter at Lafitte's candlelit Blacksmith Shop. 'How do you feel?' asked my husband the next morning. 'Like a puddle of fudge,' I replied. So he went out and came back with one. A praline, NOLA-style, is a flat dollop of crystallised sugar studded with pecans, quite different from the French kind. The method is the same as for our starting point for fudge, but the freshly beaten mixture is poured onto marble in little pools to set. Use 400g light brown sugar, 150g butter and 150ml cream and follow the starting point, resting the mix for just 10 minutes at step **5**, then beating in 200g toasted chopped pecans, ½ tsp sea salt and 1 tsp each of bourbon and vanilla extract. Drop small puddles onto a silicone mat or sheet of baking parchment and leave at room temperature to dry. Aunt Sally's, which has sold fresh hand-made pralines in the French Quarter since 1935, offers standard, triple-chocolate, café au lait and Bananas Foster versions.

**Meringue**

A simple whisked mixture of sugar and egg white. The type outlined in the method below is French meringue. Italian meringue can be made with the same ingredient proportions as French, but water is added to the sugar, and the mixture is heated to form a syrup (soft-ball stage). This is whisked into the egg whites at soft-peak stage. For Swiss meringue, the mixture of sugar and egg white is warmed in a double-boiler; it's used mainly for buttercream icings. Details for both Italian and Swiss meringue are given in the Flavours & Variations section. Meringue can pose a challenge to the experimental cook – care must be taken with additional ingredients, which can deflate the foam.

_For 6–8 individual meringues, or a 20cm round_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

4 egg whites, at room temperature **B**

½ tsp cream of tartar or lemon juice **C**

200g sugar **D E F**

**1** In a clean glass or metal bowl, whisk the egg whites until foamy. Add the cream of tartar or lemon juice and whisk to soft peaks.

If your eggs are not at room temperature, place them in warm water for 5 minutes before cracking them into the bowl.

**2** While whisking, add 1 tbsp sugar and continue to whisk until it has dissolved.

If you're unsure how long this takes, rub a little of the mixture between your fingers. If it still feels grainy, continue whisking. (I usually give each tablespoon of caster sugar a count of ten. Naturally, granulated sugar will need a bit longer.)

**3** Add the rest of the sugar, tablespoon by tablespoon, while continuing to whisk, until all is included, dissolved, and the meringue is shiny and stiff.

For a meringue pie topping, see **G** under Leeway; for a mallow-y pavlova, see **H**.

**4** Transfer the meringue to a piping bag and pipe into shapes (concentric circles or kisses), or dollop spoonfuls onto a silicone mat or parchment-lined baking tray. Leave a couple of centimetres between individual meringues. For a large meringue, dollop spoonfuls into a rough round, and use the back of a spoon to fashion a nest shape.

**5** For individual meringues, bake at 100°C for 1¼ hours, 1½ hours for large. When cooked the meringue should lift off the silicone or parchment easily. Turn off the oven but leave the meringue in there for a few hours or overnight, until the oven is cold.

**6** If you're serving the meringue with cream, assemble the dessert close to serving time, to forestall sogginess. Unfilled meringues will keep in an airtight container for 2–3 weeks.

LEEWAY

**A** This quantity is also good for a roulade, made in a Swiss roll tin of about 30cm × 23cm. The tin will need to be lined with enough baking parchment to overhang the edges slightly. Bake at 160°C for about 20 minutes, until the meringue feels firm. Carefully turn it out onto another piece of baking parchment and leave to cool before filling; use the parchment to help roll it up.

**B** The whites of large or medium eggs will be fine.

**C** The acidic ingredient helps to stabilise the mixture, and is preferable but not essential. Cider vinegar or white wine vinegar could be used too. A copper bowl has the same effect, rendering the acidic ingredient redundant.

**D** You can use anything between 45g and 60g sugar per egg white. The more sugar you use, the firmer the structure of the meringue and the crisper it will be.

**E** Some recipes recommend folding in the last half of the sugar all at once with a large metal spoon, instead of tablespoon by tablespoon. Heston Blumenthal whisks in half the sugar weight in caster sugar, then folds in the other half in icing sugar, which makes dissolving a non-issue.

**F** For a light brown, toffee-flavoured meringue, use golden caster sugar. For a stronger flavour, replace half of the white sugar with the same weight of soft dark brown sugar. Meringues made with brown sugar will soften more quickly than those made with white.

**G** For topping a pie or pudding, sift ½ tsp cornflour per egg white into the stiff meringue at the end of step **3**, and briefly whisk again to incorporate. If using on a pie, start piping at the crust edge, making sure the meringue touches it, then dollop a large blob in the middle and swirl it around until the top is covered.

**H** To give a chewy, marshmallow texture to the meringue for a pavlova, fold in 1 tsp white wine vinegar (or lemon juice), 2 tsp sifted cornflour and 1 tsp vanilla extract at the end of step **3**. Bake at 130°C for 1 hour.

Meringue → Flavours & Variations

ALMOND

What's the difference between a dacquoise and a macaroon? Nine points, if you're a Scrabble player. More washing-up, if you're a cook. Dacquoise is a variation on meringue that involves ground nuts. In one of its most common incarnations, discs of dacquoise are sandwiched with flavoured buttercream or whipped cream, like a gâteau where the sponge is replaced by meringue. Almond and hazelnut, either used separately or in combination, are the classic nuts, but these days anything goes. Dorie Greenspan uses a mix of almond and coconut, and between the layers uses white chocolate ganache and roasted pineapple. To make a classic dacquoise, adapt our starting point, using the same weight of ground nuts as sugar and 1 tsp cornflour per egg white. Having whisked in half of the sugar, tablespoon by tablespoon, whisk the mixture to stiff peaks, then gently fold in the other half of the sugar mixed with the ground nuts and cornflour. Pipe the mixture into thin discs (draw circles on the baking parchment if you want to make them the same size) and then bake at 100°C for 1 hour. The _Meringue Cookbook_ gives a recipe for a savoury pecan meringue to serve on sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving. If you've baulked at marshmallow used for the same purpose, note that this recipe doesn't include sugar. Whisk 6 egg whites, gradually adding ¼ tsp salt, until stiff. Then fold in 125g chopped pecans or walnuts. Spread the meringue over warm mashed sweet potatoes and bake at 190°C for 10–15 minutes until the peaks are brown.

CARAWAY

A classic flavour for meringue, says _The Oxford Companion to Food_. The German (or Latvian, or Dutch, depending on who you believe) liqueur called kümmel is typically flavoured with caraway and aniseed. Kingsley Amis recommends you get a bottle in for Christmas, as a relief to the stomach after all that plum pudding. The first sip should be as clean, chilly and exhilarating as a lungful of air on a mountaintop. The flavour is more complex, savoury-sweet, reminiscent of almost-burnt bread crust with a hint of menthol and aniseed. Fold in 2 tsp kümmel (or the same amount of ground caraway seeds) at the end of step **3**.

CHOCOLATE

Belongs to another era. Like step aerobics, and g-string leotards over tights. Not my cup of tea. But if it's yours, use 2–3 tsp cocoa powder per egg white, mixing the sifted cocoa into the sugar to be added in increments at steps **** and ****.

COCONUT

I came into the kitchen to see the digital clock on the cooker blinking, as if coming round from a disorientating dream. This could mean only one thing: we'd had a power cut overnight. I opened the freezer to find four drawerfuls of freezer bags softly slumped like Claes Oldenburg sculptures. A _feijoada_ for six, pea soup for four, two dozen sausages, home-made burgers, sweet potato chips, frozen redcurrants, two blocks of puff pastry and a handful of kaffir lime leaves rimed with ice as if at sun-up on a frosty morning. There was no choice but to get cooking. Necessity is the mother of confection: there was also a large quantity of raspberries, five egg whites and two cartons of double cream. I'd always wanted to make a vacherin glacé – and now not only did I have the necessary ingredients, but also the freezer space, since the perishables were lined up on the kitchen table and the tubs of melted ice cream had gone in the bin. First, I made a French meringue with coconut, whisking 5 egg whites and 300g sugar to stiff peaks, then stirring in 25g desiccated coconut. Most of the meringue I piped into 2 × 20cm rounds, then shook over more coconut. The remainder I piped into decorative twigs, sprinkling them with crumbs of freeze-dried raspberry. While the rounds of meringue baked, I made a sorbet with the raspberries. At this point I could get dressed and pop out for a couple of fresh tubs of vanilla ice cream. After letting it soften a little, I added a deep layer of the ice cream to one of the meringues, topped it with the raspberry sorbet and positioned the second meringue disc on top. All that remained was to invite some non-judgemental friends round to polish off everything else. Our main course, it has to be said, was eclectic: Brazilian bean stew with pea soup and beefburgers. But the vacherin redeemed matters, piped with Chantilly cream and decorated with raspberries and meringue twigs, so vast and festive-looking you half-expected Jayne Mansfield to jump out of it.

COFFEE

The roasted nature of coffee and cocoa means they have many flavour notes in common, but make your sweet meringue roulade with coffee, and roll it around a creamy, bitter chocolate ganache, and you'll tease out the differences in the most satisfying way. Mix 1 tbsp instant coffee into 1½ tsp boiling water and leave it to cool, then fold in at the end of step **3**. Bake in a parchment-lined 30cm × 20cm Swiss roll tin at 180°C for 20 minutes. For the ganache, follow the starting point **here** , using 150g 70% dark chocolate and 150ml double cream. Spread the ganache over the meringue and carefully roll up your roulade before it sets too hard. Keep back a few spoonfuls of each mixture and fold the meringue into the ganache for an instant mocha mousse – simple enough to qualify as a cook's treat. Coffee meringue is also excellent served with fresh cream and either raspberries or cherries.

HONEY

Honey can make an exquisitely flavoured meringue. Cooking honey really accentuates its flavour, so even a mild variety like clover will yield a definite character. Honey also turns baked goods brown, so avoid it if that's not the look you're after. For use in meringues, you'll need to cook honey to the soft-ball stage (115–116°C), as you would for an Italian meringue (see below). Once cooked, the mixture will be soft, not crisp, so is best used as a topping for pies and desserts rather than meringue nests. Use 5 tbsp honey per egg white, adding it in a steady stream once the whites have been whisked to stiffness with cream of tartar. Keep whisking until the meringue has cooled and become thick and glossy. Use as is to ice a cake, or, for a toasted topping on a tart or dessert, bake at 180°C for 10 minutes, assuming whatever is underneath can take the heat.

ITALIAN MERINGUE

Italian meringue is made with sugar syrup cooked to either the soft-or hard-ball stage. It's mainly used to top pies or cakes, folded through mixtures to make extra-light mousses and buttercreams, or added to ice creams and sorbets to lend them an extra airiness, and a softer texture (once frozen) thanks to its sugar content. Italian is also the type of meringue used in baked Alaska. Apply the same proportion of sugar to egg white as for French meringue (45–60g sugar per egg white); in this case, I use 60g per egg white. Cook 180g sugar and 75ml water to the soft-ball stage (115–116°C). Whisk 3 egg whites until stiff (adding ¼ tsp cream of tartar once frothy), then continue whisking as you trickle in the hot syrup. Avoid pouring the sticky liquid onto the whisk or the sides of the bowl and keep whisking until the mixture is cool. This will furnish enough to top a 20–23cm round tart or a 20cm baked Alaska. Some cooks flavour the syrup for Italian meringue: try fennel, cardamom, coffee, coconut or any type of tea.

MARSHMALLOW

Can be made in two basic ways. The first is a hybrid of an Italian meringue (above) and a jelly. It has a more robust structure than the type made without egg white. Sprinkle a 20cm square silicone mould or non-stick tin with a 50/50 mix of caster sugar and cornflour, or with toasted coconut. Put 6 leaves of gelatine to soak in cold water for 5 minutes. Then dissolve them in 75ml hot (not boiling) water with 2 tsp vanilla extract. Whisk 3 large egg whites to soft peaks, then make a syrup by cooking 225g sugar and 75ml water to the soft-ball stage (115–116°C). Trickle the hot syrup into the egg whites while whisking. Slowly pour the gelatine mix into the meringue while whisking, and keep on whisking until the mixture is cool. Scrape the mixture into the prepared mould or tin. Smooth it over, then cover with whatever you sprinkled underneath. Alternatively, for an eggless version, also 20cm square, use an electric whisk to mix 200g sugar with 75ml water in a large bowl for 3 minutes. Soak 5 leaves of gelatine, then squeeze out the water and dissolve them in 75ml hot (not boiling) water. Mix into the sugar and whisk for another 10 minutes, by which time you should have a sticky, frothy white mixture. Add 1 tsp vanilla extract and give the mixture another quick whisk to incorporate. Line your mould or tin and finish the marshmallow in the same way as for the egg-white variation. Naturally, marshmallow can be flavoured with something other than vanilla.

MUSTARD

The sort of off-the-wall suggestion that can make vintage branded-recipe pamphlets so entertaining. 'Crown o' gold Meat Loaf', included in an ad for French's mustard, was probably devised because French's also make cream of tartar. Imagine the benighted home economist, sweating under the directive to combine the two ingredients. To make the meatloaf, mix 115g fresh breadcrumbs with 675g minced beef, 4 egg yolks, 5 tbsp tomato ketchup, 3 tbsp finely diced green pepper, 2 tbsp finely diced onion, 2 tbsp French's mustard, 1½ tbsp horseradish sauce and 1½ tsp salt. Lightly pack into a 23cm springform tin and bake at 160°C for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, whisk 4 egg whites until foamy, add ¼ tsp cream of tartar, then keep whisking until very stiff. Gently fold in 4 tbsp mustard. Remove the meatloaf from the oven and swirl the mustard mixture on top, then return it to the oven for 20–25 minutes, by which time the top should be golden and crisp. Incidentally, the recipe also included a 'Friendly Warning' – not, I was disappointed to find, that your husband may leave you for Betty in the typing pool if you insist on serving him such bizarre concoctions, but that French's mustard is made with a very particular blend of spices, vinegar and mustard seeds. Use another mustard and you risk not achieving the 'best results'.

ROSEWATER & PISTACHIO

A perfect, delicately flavoured end to a Middle Eastern feast. And extremely pretty with it. For a meringue made with 4 egg whites and 200g sugar, fold in 1 tsp rosewater at the end of step **3**. Scatter over some finely chopped pistachios (around 25g) and some crystallised rose petals before baking the meringues. The results are as billowy and winsome as embroidered bed linen, if rather nicer in the mouth.

STRAWBERRY

Brent Savage, chef at the Bentley in Sydney, makes a lemon-flavoured meringue by adding egg-white powder to lemon juice and sugar and whisking. A similar process can be used to make a strawberry meringue – but take note, the water content in the fruit mitigates against crispness. For a crisp strawberry-flavour meringue, use freeze-dried strawberry powder (about 5g for every egg white, mixed with the sugar and added at step **3**). Using a purée base makes for more of a soft meringue, suitable for filling cakes or topping pies and desserts. It's best made using a stand mixer, but a powerful hand-held electric whisk will do. Pour 125g strawberry purée into the bowl of a stand mixer, sprinkle over 11g egg-white powder and whisk on low until dissolved. Continue to whisk as you add 200g caster sugar, a tablespoon at a time, then whisk on high to reach firm peaks. Fill the bottom of 6 sundae glasses with raspberries, ideally tossed in mango purée, follow with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, then pipe some of the pink meringue on top and blast it with a blowtorch. Miraculously, the meringue replicates the flavour of the freshest, sweetest strawberries imaginable, like the northern Norwegian type described by Alexander Masters as 'dense with the sort of sweetness you normally only read about in children's books, force-fed by twenty-four hours of sun.'

Meringue → Other Directions

RICE MERINGUE PUDDING

A rice pudding topped with meringue.

ITALIAN MERINGUE BUTTERCREAM

Use Italian meringue to lighten buttercream for filling and icing cakes.

MERINGUE KISSES

Pipe mini-meringues to make meringue kisses, then serve with quenelles of ice cream or sorbet with berries.

ETON MESS

QUEEN OF PUDDINGS

A layer of custard mixed with breadcrumbs, topped with jam and meringue, then baked.

LEFTOVER MERINGUE

... can be folded into melted chocolate to make a mousse, or added to the fruit purée for a sorbet to lighten its texture.

LECHE MERINGADA

For this classic Spanish drink, milk infused with lemon zest and cinnamon is poured over meringue, then chilled or frozen.

**Syrup & Cordial: Simple Syrup**

As the name suggests, simple syrup is a mixture of water and sugar, made to a 1:1 ratio in our starting point (1ml water weighs 1g). To thicken the syrup, add more sugar. It's a doddle to flavour. Simple syrup can be used to flavour, sweeten and add body to cocktails, to soak puddings like babas or gulab jamun, to flavour and moisten cakes (especially Genoise,), be diluted to make a soft drink or cooked a little and added to egg whites to make Italian meringue.

_For 320ml (every 25g sugar and 25ml water makes 40ml syrup)_

INGREDIENTS

200g sugar **A B C D**

Aromatics – optional **E F**

200ml boiling water **G**

**1** Put the sugar (and aromatics, if using) into a heatproof bowl. Pour over the boiling water and stir to dissolve.

If you want the syrup cold and ready to use, dissolve the sugar in as little boiling water as you can get away with, then top up with ice-cold water. Some prefer to heat the sugar and water in a pan, the advantage being that you can keep simmering it until you achieve the desired thickness. You'll need to remove any hard aromatics with a fine strainer or a sieve lined with muslin or a clean J-cloth.

**2** Your plain syrup can be stored somewhere cool, in a sterilised jar or bottle for up to a month. After a week, the flavour may start to deteriorate.

After a month, it is likely to start clouding, which means it's time to throw it away. Add 1¼ tsp vodka (to 320ml syrup) to give it a few extra months' shelf-life in the fridge. The more aromatics you add, the more the shelf-life is compromised, so best not to make much more flavoured syrup than you will use in a week.

LEEWAY

**A** Some cooks use two or three times the amount of sugar, which will obviously give thicker and sweeter results. Many cocktails are made with a 2:1 syrup, but try it to taste.

**B** For fruit salads, or for poaching fruit, use a 1:2 volume of sugar to water.

**C** Use brown sugar if you don't mind the colour or more pronounced flavour. For more on brown sugar syrup.

**D** Replace 1 tbsp of the sugar with the same amount of liquid glucose or corn syrup to prevent the syrup crystallising.

**E** Sour mix, or bar mix, is a classic syrup used for whiskey sours and Collins cocktails. It's made with equal amounts of water, sugar and lemon juice. Stir in the lemon juice once the syrup has cooled. A sour mix for margaritas is made in the same way, with lime juice in place of the lemon.

**F** If you're using acidic ingredients like lemon juice or tamarind, opt for a non-reactive pan – i.e. not aluminium, unlined copper or cast iron.

**G** Experiment with liquids other than water, e.g. nut milks.

Syrup & Cordial → Flavours & Variations

BROWN SUGAR

Make a simple syrup with muscovado and you'll end up with something like treacle. The Japanese make a similarly potent-tasting syrup called _kuromitsu_ , using black sugar ( _kurozatō_ , an unrefined sugar made from cold-pressed sugarcane juice, with a molasses-like flavour). You might be presented with a miniature bottle of _kuromitsu_ on the side of, say, cold arrowroot noodles, a little like soy in a sushi set. Syrup made with a lighter brown sugar like demerara will be kinder to other flavours, and is thus more suitable for cocktails. Demerara syrup abets rum and bourbon, so bear it in mind when making the syrup for your rum babas. Cocktail expert Dale DeGroff recommends it for Irish coffee, as it contains notes of butterscotch and vanilla lacking in other brown sugars. If you're out of pancake syrup, a brown sugar syrup will be a welcome stand-in – consider enhancing it with a few pinches of mixed spice and/or curry powder. A ratio of 4 parts sugar to 1 of water will give a thick pouring consistency.

CHOCOLATE

Making your own chocolate syrup will not represent much of a saving over buying a bottle in the supermarket, but it will taste good, and the list of ingredients is reassuringly short and familiar. Furthermore, because the cocoa will thicken the syrup after it's been cooked, there's no need to rely entirely on sugar for body, and you can therefore sweeten to taste – I find 150g works well. Mix 100g cocoa powder to a paste with 150g sugar, 250ml water and ¼ tsp salt. Bring to the boil over a medium heat, whisking constantly. Simmer for 3–4 minutes, then whisk in 1 tbsp vanilla extract. Allow to cool, by which time it will have thickened further. Pour into a sterilised bottle; it will keep in the fridge for up to a month. Dilute it with milk for a shake, or mix a little with Irish whiskey and cream to make a liqueur. (Segnit's Irish Cream is a touch chocolatier than Bailey's, if less Irish.) Or use it to make the American soda-fountain classic, 'egg cream'. Pour ice-cold milk into a tall glass until it's about a quarter full. Top it up, slowly, with seltzer water (which is plain old tap water, carbonated) or soda water, then add a tablespoon of your chocolate syrup and stir. It's a lot nicer than it sounds. Or looks. It's brown and frothy with a head of white foam, and tastes like a chocolate milkshake spritzer. Sometimes it's served with a pretzel stick, dunked or used as a stirrer. The perfect comfort drink if your prom-date has stood you up.

LEMON CORDIAL

Lemon squash was the worst thing about my childhood. Even at six I knew that it was the only drink to be actually improved by the alien note of old plastic imparted by a few hours' storage in a lidded Tupperware cup. In a warm car. Lemons should sue for defamation. Never buy shop-bought lemon squash again. Making your own takes all of 10 minutes, plus the day it takes the lemons to infuse. For your pains you are rewarded with a drink that teleports you to the lemon groves of Sorrento, even if you're trying to break up a squabble in a soft-play centre. Thinly slice 2 unwaxed lemons and place in a bowl with 350g sugar, 350ml boiling water, and 1 tsp each of citric and tartaric acids. Leave to steep for 24 hours, then strain and funnel into sterilised bottles. It can be used immediately or kept somewhere dark and cool for up to 3 months. Once opened, the cordial will keep in the fridge for a week. Dilute to taste with still or fizzy water.

MUSCAT MARMALADE

A Spanish version of oranges in caramel, made with a syrup mixture of marmalade and Moscatel, a sweet wine from Spain with flavours of orange, tangerine, apricot jam and honeysuckle. In a saucepan, slowly dissolve 250g marmalade in 125ml Moscatel. Once the lumps have disappeared, pour the syrup into a jug, add another 125ml Moscatel and cool. Pour over the segments of 6 large oranges and chill before serving. Don't bother making this if you were planning to strain out the peel; marmalade without the shred is like Tarantino minus the violence. Try the same syrup on strawberries.

ORGEAT

The sweet syrup Orgeat owes its name to the Latin for barley, _hordeum_. Pearl barley was one of the original ingredients, but is no longer, just as it's gone from barley sugar sweets. Old recipes vary considerably, but most include bitter almond flavouring and orange flower water, perhaps embellished with rose or lemon essence, or a nip of brandy. Commercial versions are these days likely to be made with corn syrup and synthetic flavourings, more suited to a tarted-up coffee from a motorway service station than a highball in a tiki bar. Happily, you can make your own in a snap, using bought almond milk. Dissolve 200g sugar in 100ml warm, unsweetened almond milk, then mix in another 100 ml cold almond milk, ¼ tsp good almond extract and 1 tbsp orange flower water. Keep in the fridge – it'll be good for 5 days. Orgeat's most popular application is in the Mai Tai, signature cocktail at Trader Vic's. Load plenty of ice into a shaker and add 2 tbsp each of dark rum, amber rum and fresh orange juice, plus 1 tbsp each of lime juice, Cointreau and Orgeat. Shake, then strain into a highball glass full of ice. Garnish with a spring of mint, or a plastic monkey holding a sparkler and a rainbow-coloured parasol. For something more restrained, try the curiously un-Japanese 'Japanese'. Shake 4 tbsp Cognac, 1 tbsp Orgeat and 2 dashes of Angostura over ice and strain into a Champagne saucer with a wisp of lemon peel. Teetotallers might consider the milkshake devised by the gardener Bob Flowerdew – mix 1 part Orgeat with 7 parts whole organic milk and finish with a sprinkle of nutmeg.

RASPBERRY VINEGAR

Sugar syrup plus vinegar is called a 'shrub'. For a simple version, make a fruit vinegar, like the raspberry kind described , and mix it with simple syrup to taste, taking care to keep it on the sharp side. Dilute with cold fizzy or still water and serve over ice. Shrub could be twinned with the French _citron pressé_ , served as a tall glass of ice with freshly squeezed lemon juice and, probably, a slice or two of lemon. The sugar is served on the side, with a long spoon, so you can sweeten to your taste. In the US, shrubs were drunk by field workers and were sometimes known as 'harvest drinks'; it was thought that their acidity made them more refreshing than plain water. Having fallen into obscurity, shrubs have in recent years staged a modest comeback, even if the new recipes tend to be far more sugary, and are often mixed with alcohol. Best drunk after you've parked the combine harvester in the barn for the night.

ROSEHIP

As drunk by the Ethiopian athlete Abebe Bikila while running the marathon at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Bikila was not expected to compete, having undergone an appendix operation a few weeks before the race. Not only did he decide to run, he entered the stadium alone, way ahead of his nearest competitors, winning gold and breaking the world record. Haile Selassie rewarded him with a white VW Beetle. In the UK, during the Second World War, rosehip syrup was promoted for its high vitamin C content. At first it was used as a substitute for oranges, but as rationing increased it began to stand in for all fruit. Then, as now, rosehips were abundant in the wild. The flavour of rosehip syrup is usually, and unhelpfully, described as 'fruity'; some specify notes of red-apple skin, others cranberry. The foraging writer John Wright detects a distinct note of vanilla. Apart from being watered down in a drink, rosehip syrup is also used undiluted, as you might pomegranate molasses. The Norwegian cook and writer Signe Johansen drizzles a little over goat's cheese with smoked salt, sliced radishes and a flutter of chervil. To make the syrup, wash 1kg rosehips and either roughly chop them or give them a few pulses in the food processor. Put them in a non-reactive pan with 2 litres of boiling water and bring back to the boil. Remove from the heat and allow to infuse for 30 minutes before straining through a jelly bag or a sieve lined with muslin or a clean J-cloth. Reserve the first batch of pink liquid, then repeat the process with the strained-out rosehips, this time using just 1 litre of boiling water. The rosehips will be thoroughly depleted by now, so you can discard or compost them. Pour both batches of liquid into the same pan and reduce by a half. Remove from the heat and add 1kg sugar (or more to taste). Stir to dissolve, then return to the hob and bring to the boil for 5 minutes. Pour the cooled cordial into sterilised bottles and store somewhere cool and dark for up to 3 months. Once opened, keep in the fridge and use within a week.

TAMARIND

In countries where tamarind is popular, such as Mexico, Thailand, Jamaica and the Lebanon, it's often used as Europeans might use citrus juices – in ice lollies, cordials and cocktails, or mixed with honey and hot water to make a toddy. Give it a go, as long as you don't mind the unprepossessing shade of corduroy brown. The flavour is less neutral than lemon. Tamarind syrup has a scorched, medicinal quality, and is fruity, with maple and sherry vinegar overtones; unsweetened tamarind tastes like a prune sucking a lemon. Tamarind syrup is available in Middle Eastern groceries, but it's easy enough to make your own. Dried tamarind comes in the form of a compacted brick. Soak 200g in 400ml boiling water. Once cold, untangle the fruit and mash it into the water. Strain thoroughly, squeezing as much flavour as you can out of the tamarind, then measure the volume of the strained tamarind water, pour it into a pan and boil for 2 minutes. Turn off the heat and stir in the same gram weight of sugar as you had millilitres of tamarind water. Stir until the sugar has dissolved. Mexican cooks might add a pinch of ancho chilli powder to their tamarind syrup. Pour the cooled syrup into sterilised bottles and store somewhere cool and dark for up to 3 months. Once opened, keep in the fridge and use within a week.

VIOLET

According to a thirteenth-century handbook written by an Egyptian pharmacist, violet syrup is good for chest pains and coughs, rhubarb syrup strengthens the liver, and a syrup of asparagus juice and honey will crush bladder stones (and your spirit too, I'd suggest). Pour 1 litre boiling water over 500ml violet flowers and leave to steep for 8 hours (or up to twice as long if it's more convenient), then strain. Measure the resulting blue liquid, and put it, along with an equal volume of sugar, in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of just-simmering water. Stir until the sugar dissolves. According to _The Italian Confectioner_ (1861), by W.A. Jarrin, this makes a syrup 'more perfect than that done on the fire', by which Jarrin means the flavour is better preserved. Contemporary makers of violet syrup still favour this method. Once the sugar has dissolved, add drops of lemon juice until the syrup turns from blue to purple. Pour the cooled syrup into sterilised bottles and store somewhere cool and dark for up to 3 months. Once opened, keep the bottle in the fridge and use within a week. The petals of carnations and pinks can be treated in the same way.

Syrup & Cordial → Other Directions

PLÁTANOS CALADOS

Guatemalan dish of plantain cooked in cane-sugar syrup.

JALEBI

Spirals of deep-fried dough steeped in saffron syrup.

ESPRESSO MARTINI

Vodka, espresso and simple syrup.

KALBURABASTI

Turkish semolina pastry stuffed with nuts and covered in syrup.

GULAB JAMUN

Deep-fried dough balls made with milk powder and soaked in rosewater syrup.

KEIRAN SOMEN

Japanese version of egg threads, presented in neat bundles tied with seaweed.

ICE TEA

Brewed, chilled tea sweetened with simple syrup.

LOUKOUMADES

Deep-fried bun dough soaked in honey syrup and garnished with chopped nuts.

FIOS DE OVOS

Portuguese dessert of egg threads boiled in a sugar syrup.

**Sorbet & Granita: Strawberry Sorbet**

Sweeten a purée, juice or other flavoured liquid and you're ready to freeze it into sorbet or granita. Whether you end up with a scoopable sorbet, a crunchy granita or something in between will depend, in part, on the amount of sugar – granita, for instance, is less sweet – and in part on the freezing method. Use an ice-cream machine and the constant churning will aerate the mixture and minimise the crystal size. The results will be smooth verging on creamy. Use the still-freezing method, whereby the sweet mixture is placed in the freezer and removed regularly to be stirred, and you'll be hard pushed to achieve the same smoothness. Ultimately, I'm not sure crystal size matters as much as flavour. The vibrancy of home-made sorbet or granita is what lingers in the mind.

_For a stand-alone dessert to serve 4–6_

INGREDIENTS

550g strawberries **A B**

150g sugar **B C D**

150ml boiling water **C**

Pinch of salt

1 tbsp lemon juice – optional **E**

1½ tsp vodka – optional **F**

1 whisked egg white – optional **G**

**1** Hull and purée the strawberries. You should have about 500g.

500g approximately equates to 500ml or 2 cups.

**2** Make up a simple syrup by dissolving the sugar in the water.

These amounts will make about 250ml (approximately 1 cup) simple syrup. Note that this combination – 500ml sweet base mixed with 250ml syrup – is also used in many of the Flavours & Variations.

**3** Add the syrup to the purée, along with the salt – and the lemon juice, if using.

Bear in mind that freezing mutes flavour and sweetness.

**4** Chill the mixture in the fridge.

For the smallest ice crystals possible, chill the mixture thoroughly before transferring it to the ice-cream machine or freezer.

**5** If it's a sorbet you're after, churn the mix in an ice-cream machine. If you are still-freezing, you'll end up with something between a sorbet and a granita, as long as you stir it enough. Pour the mixture into a plastic container, to a depth of no more than 3cm, and transfer to the freezer. Set a timer for 30-minute intervals and keep checking until it starts to ice up at the sides. When it has, break it up using a fork or blender. Repeat at least twice, until the mixture is all ice crystals. After your last stir, leave it to harden in the freezer for a few hours.

**6** Remove still-frozen sorbet or granita from the freezer and put in the fridge for at least 10 minutes before serving, to soften.

Machine-made ices should be more readily scoopable.

LEEWAY

**A** Other sweet fruit purées and juices can be substituted. Lemon, lime and other naturally un-sweet fruits need to be treated differently – see **here**.

**B** Some cooks add granulated sugar directly to the fruit, rather than making a syrup, in the name of greater intensity of flavour. Conversely, if you need to stretch out the fruit, use a bit more syrup.

**C** Sorbets should be about 20–30 per cent sugar, granitas 10–20 per cent. My rough calculation goes as follows: strawberries are about 5 per cent sugar, so in 500g purée there will be 25g sugar; adding 150g sugar and 150ml (or g) water yields a mixture weighing 800g (500g + 150g + 150g) and containing 175g sugar (25g + 150g). 175/800 = a sugar content of 21.9 per cent.

**D** Invert syrups make a softer, more scoopable ice. Try replacing 1–2 tbsp simple syrup with golden syrup, which is sweeter than granulated sugar. Corn syrup or liquid glucose – both less sweet than sugar – can also be used.

**E** Lemon juice adds an extra taste dimension; wine vinegar can also be used – balsamic famously enhances the flavour of strawberry.

**F** The finished ice can be softened by adding 1 tbsp spirits (typically 36–40% ABV) to 1 litre of the mix (i.e. twice the quantity here), or 2 tbsp if you're using a liqueur or vermouth with an ABV of around 17–22%. Vodka is often used for its neutral flavour. Once out of the freezer, sorbets containing alcohol soften more quickly.

**G** The texture of sorbets can be lightened with an egg white whisked to soft peaks. Either add it towards the end of the churning or, if you're using the still-freezing process, in an electric mixer at the first breaking-up, whisking for at least 15 seconds. The addition of lots of egg white, or Italian meringue, will yield something closer to a spoom – a kind of frothy sorbet.

Sorbet & Granita → Flavours & Variations

BLOOD ORANGE

'King of the sorbets', according to a board outside the wonderful Soho ice-cream parlour Gelupo. Judge for yourself, but only when blood oranges are in season, as the juice in cartons is invariably dull by comparison. Inconveniently, for the UK at least, blood oranges tend to be most widely available when the year is young – not exactly prime sorbet-making season. (That said, you won't find a better dessert to follow a hefty oxtail stew with mashed potatoes.) Use 250ml simple syrup for every 500ml juice (or 1 cup of syrup for every 2 of juice). I like to use the sugar in cube form, rubbing each one over the whole citrus fruit to tease out the oil from the zest, before making the syrup with it. Weigh out the sugar cubes first, then add the boiling water to the pile of orange-zesty sugar and proceed as per our starting point.

CHOCOLATE & ANGOSTURA

Cocoa sorbet is chocolate in airy summer linens, the warm melt of cocoa butter swapped for soft, chilly ice crystals. Heaven, and, like the similarly bitter coffee sorbet, fabulously refreshing. It's easy to flavour it further by infusing the sugar syrup with citrus zests and spices, or simply by adding a liqueur or instant coffee. Try Angostura bitters, with its notes of nutmeg and citrus; I find the combination almost has a menthol quality. Mix 35g cocoa powder to a paste with 75ml cold water. Top up to 250ml with boiling water and stir to form a smooth liquid. Add 1 tsp vanilla extract and a pinch of salt. Mix with 250ml simple syrup. Add 1 tbsp Angostura bitters and freeze as per the starting-point method.

CIDER

Wine and Champagne are common flavourings for sorbet, but cider, being more refreshing, has the edge. Use 500ml (or 2 cups) cider, 250ml (or 1 cup) simple syrup and 1 tbsp lemon juice as per our starting point. A dry, tannic cider will remain dry and tannic even after mixing with sugar, so you might consider a medium variety, even if you'd sooner show up in a novelty jumper than be seen ordering it in the pub. In some recipes, the apple flavour is augmented by swapping water for juice in the syrup, or adding a little cooked apple purée or a shot of Calvados. Vanilla ice cream is the natural accompaniment, but you might also serve your cider sorbet with cold, thick natural yogurt, whose malic acid content gives it the subtlest hint of green-apple flavour. At The Ethicurean restaurant in Somerset, scrumpy and mint sorbet is served with a finger of Cheddar, like soft-serve ice cream with its antenna of flaky chocolate.

LEMON

The first book to be dedicated to the sorbet, Filippo Baldini's _De' Sorbetti_ , was published in Naples in 1775. Baldini divides his flavours into the aromatic (including chocolate, cinnamon and pistachio) and the acidic (lemon, citron, sour cherry and strawberry). Lemon sorbet, he tells us, is good for a fever or a weak stomach. I make lemon sorbet guided by the egg test, as outlined **here** ; try making a few batches and you'll note how widely individual lemons can vary in flavour. Finely grate the zest of 3 unwaxed lemons into a bowl. Add 200g sugar and 250ml boiling water and stir to dissolve. Juice the zested lemons and add the strained juice to the bowl. Leave to cool before slipping in a clean, uncooked egg in its shell. Pour in enough water so there's a small circle (1.5cm diameter) of egg showing above the liquid; mine needed about 125ml, making the sugar content approximately 30 per cent. Chill, then freeze. Lemon and fresh fennel sorbet was popular in Naples, and known as _sorbetto di caroselle_ – carousel sorbet – according to Vincenzo Corrado, writing in 1778.

PASSION FRUIT

Marvel at the passion fruit. The shell is polystyrene-light, while its fragrance has the force of a cannonball. Scooping out the seeds, and tugging at the fibres, recalls the preparation of molluscs. Having scraped out two for a sorbet, with at least a dozen more to go, I found wonder giving way to boredom. Then invention. It's not cheating too egregiously to supplement a few passion fruit with orange juice. Dissolve 150g sugar in 150ml warm orange juice, then add 500ml more, cold. Stir in the contents of 6 passion fruit and proceed from step **3**. Whether or not you include the seeds is your call. Their crunchiness is of a piece with the icy dessert, although since they're hard to detect amid the ice crystals, they don't contribute the 1980s porn-star leopardskin effect they would in a smooth jelly.

PEACH

The cookbook of The Inn at Little Washington, in Virginia, includes a dish called Peaches Five Ways. Leaving aside the fact that we have, surely, reached peak 'X Ways' (my husband recently threatened to serve 'Wall's Viennetta Three Ways' for dessert), peach sorbet does sound good served with peach and vanilla ice cream, sliced peaches, peach purée and a spritz of peach schnapps. Peach is the stone fruit most often made into sorbet, although I find it a bit mild and mealy. The chef and deli-owner Glynn Christian reports that the texture and sweetness of tinned fruit in syrup can make it perfect for sorbets, singling out lychee for special mention. Fresh or tinned, use 500g peach purée to 200 ml simple syrup and 1 tbsp lemon juice – you might use the syrup from the tin, as long as it's sufficiently tasty and sweet – then freeze as per our starting point.

RASPBERRY & ELDERFLOWER

A combination inspired by, of all things, a premium raspberry yogurt from the supermarket. It was rich, spicy and somehow as darkly flavoured as that plump, glossy blackberry would be if you could only reach it without tearing a hole in your jumper. The list of ingredients revealed that the yogurt contained elderberry concentrate. I made a note to make elderberry syrup when the season allowed, but, in the meantime, tried raspberry with commercial elderflower cordial. Elderflower shares a heady muscat flavour with the berry it prefigures, but has a fresher, sharper character. It gives raspberries a distinct whiff of the hedgerow, as if you've picked the first crop from your garden. Elderberry, by contrast, gives them a late-summer ripeness. Follow the starting point, using 500g seedless raspberry purée, 250ml simple syrup and 4 tbsp elderflower cordial. Lemon will probably be redundant, as elderflower lends its own sharp edge.

WATERMELON MOJITO

I struggled home with an enormous watermelon, squeezed into my wetsuit and snorkel mask, looked in vain for my machete, took off the mask, found the machete and murdered the watermelon, flooding the kitchen floor in sticky red liquid. I juiced what was left, then strained the watermelon juice. All this took an hour. I made a simple syrup, stirred it into the juice with a generous squeeze of lemon, and went about freezing the mixture, setting the timer to remind me to take it out and break it up regularly. On tasting the sorbet, I realised that I had essentially dismantled a watermelon and reassembled it into a form largely indistinguishable from the watermelon I had started with, if a bit sweeter. Chilled slabs of watermelon are instant sorbet. Make a mint simple syrup and add 250ml (or 1 cup) per 500ml (or 2 cups) watermelon juice, balance with 2 tsp lime juice and 1½ tsp white rum, and you'll have the basis of a watermelon mojito sorbet that is, on the other hand, well worth the effort.

Sorbet & Granita → Other Directions

SORBET IN GAZPACHO

... or cucumber and yogurt soup.

GRANITA WITH CREAM

VARIOUS FLAVOURED SORBETS

Served in bite-size boules.

SGROPPINO

Vodka, lemon sorbet and prosecco.

TROU NORMAND

A palate cleanser of apple sorbet in Calvados or eau-de-vie.

BRIOCHE FILLED WITH SORBET

SORBET 'ALASKA'

A scoop of sorbet on a slice of cake, covered in Italian meringue and baked.

VACHERIN GLACÉ

Layers of meringue, ice cream, sorbet and whipped cream.

**Jelly: Orange Jelly**

Mix fruit juice (orange being the example here), purée or other flavoured liquids with sugar to taste, add gelatine, pour into a mould – a single large, or individual serving sizes – and leave to set. Alternatively, jelly can be served in a pretty dish, in which case the set can be a bit looser, as, not being turned out, it won't have to bear its own weight. The following quantities are for turned-out individual desserts. Improvising with jelly largely involves getting to know your chosen brand of gelatine.

_For 4 individual jellies_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

4 leaves of gelatine **A B C D E F**

4 tsp sugar **C G**

600ml orange juice (straining is optional)

2 tsp lemon juice **C**

**1** Soak the gelatine in cold water for 5 minutes.

**2** In a non-reactive pan, over a medium heat, warm the sugar in the orange juice, stirring to dissolve, then remove from the heat.

You may prefer to warm only the minimum amount of juice needed to dissolve the sugar, and the gelatine at step **3**, say 100ml. This way you retain a fresh, rather than cooked-fruit flavour. No need to use a pan; warming the juice in a microwave will be fine.

**3** Squeeze the water from the gelatine and add the gelatine to the hot (but not boiling) juice. Stir to distribute and dissolve before stirring in the lemon juice.

**4** Strain the jelly mix into a jug, or directly into moulds or glasses. For coloured strata, or to distribute fruit pieces evenly throughout, work in layers, letting each one set sufficiently before pouring on the next.

**5** Cool, then refrigerate to set.

Bank on at least 4 hours for individual jellies. More acidic jellies can take substantially longer. You can speed up the process initially by using the freezer, but it's wise to set a timer, say at 15-minute intervals, to remind you to check that ice crystals are not forming. Or see **H** under Leeway.

**6** If using moulds, give them a quick dip in hot water, then invert onto a serving plate. **I**

You may need to run a knife around them too.

LEEWAY

**A** Many old-fashioned jelly moulds were made to take a pint (about 570ml). If you're unsure of the size of your mould, fill it with water to the level you want, then pour the water into a measuring jug. A very large jelly will need proportionately more gelatine, so the set is strong enough to support the weight of the jelly when it's turned out.

**B** The quantity given is for the most widely available gelatine in the UK, manufactured by Dr Oetker. Use powdered gelatine or agar agar instead, but consult the instructions on the packet.

**C** Salt and acidic ingredients can soften the set. Sugar can toughen it.

**D** Booze can strengthen the set, although Heston Blumenthal notes that there's a tipping point; larger amounts of alcohol can weaken it.

**E** The gelatine set gets stronger with time. If you're not planning to serve your jelly for a few days, you might risk a bit less gelatine.

**F** Pretty much all fruits can be used, but pineapple, kiwi and papaya all contain an enzyme that prevents jelly from setting and needs to be denatured by simmering or steaming for 5 minutes before use. Tinned pineapple or pineapple juice in a carton will already have been cooked, briefly, during the canning or pasteurisation process.

**G** Add more sugar to taste or leave it out completely.

**H** Speed up the set by resting your container of warm jelly mix in a larger vessel full of ice, and stirring to cool. When the mix starts to clot, pour it into the moulds and transfer to the fridge. Even so, it will need at least a couple of hours to be unmouldable. Jelly may be fun, but it isn't fast.

**I** If you're not happy with the texture of your finished jelly, chop it up and gently melt it. Dilute it further if it was rubbery; add more gelatine if it was too soft. I wouldn't want to do this more than once.

Jelly → Flavours & Variations

BELLINI

Hear the words 'alcoholic jelly', and you may picture gangs of teenage boys pulling moonies in provincial town centres. It's a tradition that goes back a long way. Henry VIII liked his jellies boozy. Not hard to picture him unconscious outside the kebab shoppe after a tavern-crawl with Cardinal Wolsey. Rescue your jelly from the frat house by avoiding vodka and lurid colours. The greater challenge lies in adjusting a well-known cocktail to the change of context: what tastes right in the glass is unlikely to be sweet enough as a dessert. The Bellini is a case in point. The combination of peach juice and fizz will seem strikingly thin and tart in jelly form. The answer is a simple syrup, used in place of the modest quantity of granulated sugar in our starting point: 150ml syrup added to 600ml peach juice and 1 tbsp lemon juice represents, in effect, the adjustment needed to keep things as they are. The results are pleasingly authentic, right down to the bubbles, trapped in the jelly as if from a celebration long ago. Dissolve 7 leaves of gelatine in 150ml hot (not boiling) simple syrup and add to the peach juice, preferably in a jug, then chill for an hour – don't allow it to set. To preserve the bubbles, add 300ml fizz to the peach juice by slowly pouring it against the side of the jug, just as you'd pour beer to prevent a head from forming. Stir gently, then transfer, carefully, into 8 glasses or moulds and leave in the fridge to set.

BLACKBERRY & APPLE

Being free at the point of delivery, blackberries are perfect for the novice jelly-maker. Get it wrong and you can bin it and start again. Or, if you've been over-enthusiastic with the gelatine, you can always spread your over-set blackberry jelly on toast or in a peanut butter sandwich. Purée 250g blackberries with 250ml good-quality apple juice, 2 tbsp sugar and 1 tbsp lemon juice. Strain and measure. Warm enough additional apple juice to make the blackberry mix up to 600ml, and use it to dissolve 4 leaves of gelatine. Add the gel-juice to the strained blackberry mix and pour into 4 moulds.

COFFEE, CITRUS & CINNAMON

Coffee jelly is a big deal in Japan. As it is in the Philippines, where chilled cubes are served in a glass dish, bathed in cream or condensed milk. The variations on coffee jelly found in nineteenth-century British cookbooks could be applied to any of the starting points on the sugar continuum, from caramel to panna cotta: roasted coffee beans with lemon, orange zest and cinnamon; coffee, lemon and vanilla; and coffee, coriander seed and cinnamon. The last is made up with cream, which might make it an intriguing twist on coffee panna cotta.

CRÈME DE MENTHE

Culinary over-elaboration, believed Agnes Jekyll, should be discouraged: 'games of dominoes played in truffles over the chicken cream, birds' nests counterfeited round the poached eggs, jazzing jellies and castellated cakes show misdirection of energy,' she writes. 'Not that an occasional exception may not prove the rule – let it be made on behalf of _gelée crème de menthe_ , an emerald-green pool, set in a flat glass bowl, reminiscent of Sabrina, fair in her home below translucent waves, or of Capri caverns, cool and deep; whilst the delicate aroma of peppermint will recall to Presbyterian minds those Sabbath indulgences practised by young and old at kirk in far-off Highland glens.' Jekyll goes on to recommend making a quart of lemon jelly, using a calf's foot or leaf gelatine, then, while it's warm, adding a handful of 'those large green peppermint geranium leaves, thick as a fairy's blanket, soft as a vicuna robe, and to be found in most old-fashioned gardens'. As an alternative, she offers 3–4 drops peppermint essence, some green colouring and a glass of crème de menthe.

GINGER

Not a jelly you come across too often. Nonetheless, I have my opinions. The ginger flavour should be warm, spicy and sweet enough to stand up to the warm chocolate sauce it cries out for. The jellies should be made in proper, individual moulds, the sort that have ridges, so the sauce can form runnels. The set should be soft, but not so much that it is swiftly undone by the warmth of the sauce. Other than that, you're free to do as you please. Make a spiced ginger syrup by simmering 50g sliced fresh ginger, a few parings of lemon zest, a 5 cm cinnamon stick, 2 cloves and 175g light brown sugar in 300ml water for 5 minutes. Leave to infuse for about 1 hour. Strain, add 1–2 tsp lemon juice and dissolve 2 soaked leaves of gelatine in the warm reheated syrup. Pour into 2 moulds to set. For the chocolate sauce.

LIME

All those years I spent in the US, and no one offered me a Jell-O salad. They're as good as unheard of in the UK, although the herbalist Hilda Leyel (1880–1957) gives a recipe for a grapefruit jelly to serve with chopped eggs. Jell-O salad is less restrained. As the name suggests, it's a salad set in packet jelly. A classic is lime jelly with cottage cheese, sliced cabbage and stuffed olives. Or there's cherry jelly with cranberry sauce, celery, chopped nuts and sour cream. Jell-O salads are often set in ring-shaped moulds, giving them the appearance of a colossal Murano-glass paperweight. Or something Carême might have created if he'd lived in Cleveland, Ohio, during the early 1950s. Try one, for curiosity's sake, or _pour épater_ some of your more strait-laced guests. Alternatively, omit the cottage cheese, cabbage and olives and enjoy this very pale lime jelly on its own. Combine equal volumes of strained lime juice and simple syrup, then use 1 leaf of gelatine for every 100ml of the juice-syrup mix and proceed as per the starting point (acidic bases take more gelatine to set). To make the lime flavour more complex, flavour the sugar syrup with pared lime zest. Grapefruit and lemon jellies can also be made to these quantities.

MILK

Milk jelly was once considered excellent food for invalids. Nineteenth-century recipes recommend boiling a calf's foot in water for the gelatine. Once defatted and strained of sediment, the results are mixed with sugar, milk and egg white. Today we might call it a skinny panna cotta. Junket, another milk jelly, is simpler to make. Add rennet to warm milk and leave it to set. A contributor to _Chambers's Edinburgh Journal_ in 1853 describes the preparation of junket thus: 'You put some loaf sugar and nutmeg in a large glass or china bowl with perhaps a little wine or brandy. You then milk a cow, preferably an Alderney, into the bowl until three-quarters full, then add as much rennet to the warm milk as needed to curdle it.' The trick, as with jelly, is to ensure the correct amount of setting agent – rennet, in this case – is used. Heston Blumenthal's recipe calls for 625ml whole milk and 3 tbsp caster sugar. Heat it to 37°C, then add 1 tsp vanilla extract, pour into a serving bowl and add 1 tbsp rennet. Stir for no more than 3–5 seconds. Do not so much as move it after this, and in 10 minutes it will be softly set. In Devon they slather this with clotted cream. Some berries would be a good accompaniment, too. Once cut, the junket will separate into curds and whey.

RHUBARB

Texture is often the reason cited for food aversions. The fungal squeak of mushroom, the slippery curd of cottage cheese, the ligamental stringiness of celery and rhubarb. A jelly gives the rhubarb-agnostic the chance to try it minus the fibre. Pairing it with apple juice enhances rhubarb's fruitier, less vegetal flavours. Gently simmer 400g chopped rhubarb with 400ml apple juice, 100ml water and 4 tbsp simple syrup until the rhubarb is cooked. Strain and then measure out 600ml of the liquid, adding more apple juice if you're short. Stir the soaked gelatine into the warm juice until completely dissolved. The acidity of rhubarb means that more gelatine is needed to give a set that can be turned out: I find 5 leaves work well. Or use 4 and serve in a glass topped with a layer of vanilla panna cotta for a smooth, summery adaptation of rhubarb and custard.

Jelly → Other Directions

SAKURA

Japanese cherry blossom set in jelly.

LAYERED JELLY AND PANNA COTTA

HESTON BLUMENTHAL'S SALAD

... of pear and chicory, with cubes of sherry-vinegar jelly.

JAMBON PERSILLÉ

Cooked ham set in jellied stock.

LIGHTLY SET FRUIT-SOUP JELLY

Decorated with tiny meringues and berries.

LEMON HONEYCOMB MOULD

A lemon bavarois that separates, when chilled, into jelly, mousse and cream layers.

PIMM'S JELLY WITH FRUIT

**Panna Cotta: Grappa Panna Cotta**

As with jelly, the aim with panna cotta is to achieve the ideal wobble. In large part this entails getting to know the peculiarities of your chosen brand of gelatine, and learning a little about the peculiarities of gelatine _per se_. For instance, cream takes less gelatine to set it than a more watery jelly base would. Once you've found your perfect wobble, flavouring is a relative cinch. Grappa, a classic flavour, is the example I've used here. Presenting panna cotta has its challenges. Arguably it's easier to make it look elegant when it's presented in a glass, but then you don't get to see its shimmy.

_For 6 × 100ml or 4 × 150ml moulds or glasses_

INGREDIENTS

3 leaves of gelatine **A B C D E F**

300ml cream **F G**

4 tbsp sugar **H**

300ml milk **F G**

1–2 tbsp grappa **D I**

**1** Put the gelatine to soak in cold water for 5 minutes.

**2** In a pan over a medium heat, warm the cream and stir in the sugar until dissolved. Allow the mix to get hot, but not to boil.

No need to use a pan: heating the cream in a microwave will be fine, as long as you don't overheat it.

**3** Remove the pan from the heat. Squeeze the water out of the gelatine and stir it into the hot cream until dissolved, then stir in the cold milk.

**4** Stir in the grappa (or other liquid flavouring).

**5** Strain into a jug, or directly into moulds or glasses.

**6** Cool, then refrigerate until set. Allow a minimum of 4 hours.

**7** If you're turning them out, give the moulds a quick dip in hot water, then invert on a serving plate.

You may need to run a knife between the mould and the pudding to loosen it.

LEEWAY

**A** Cream needs less gelatine to set than watery fruit juice. As gelatine brands differ, however, it's tricky to give a hard-and-fast formula. The quantity given is for the most widely available gelatine in the UK, platinum grade, manufactured by Dr Oetker. Their instructions suggest 4 leaves will set 570ml liquid, but I find 3 give this quantity of unmoulded panna cotta the right wobble.

**B** Use powdered gelatine or agar agar, but consult the instructions on the packet.

**C** Salt and acidic ingredients can soften the set. Sugar can toughen it.

**D** Booze can strengthen the set, although Heston Blumenthal notes that there's a tipping point; larger amounts of alcohol can weaken it.

**E** The gelatine set gets stronger with time. If you're not planning to serve your panna cotta for a few days, you might risk a bit less gelatine.

**F** Use any sort of cream. Or all cream and no milk, if you like, but you may want to experiment with reducing the gelatine a fraction.

**G** Use half cream and half fruit juice (instead of the milk) for a pastel-coloured, fruit-flavoured panna cotta. When set and turned out, there is likely to be a thin and rather fetching layer of juice on top.

**H** Less sugar can be used – or more, but see **C** above.

**I** Alternative flavouring options include infusing the cream and milk with a vanilla pod or other hard aromatics, such as coffee beans, citrus zest or cinnamon sticks. Once it's achieved the desired strength of flavour, strain, then follow the method from step **1**.

Panna Cotta → Flavours & Variations

APPLE & MAPLE SYRUP

If you're sticking with natural ingredients, apple can be a hard flavour to sustain. The best results undoubtedly come from freshly juiced apples. The flavour is more vibrant than pasteurised shop-bought juice, with a stern tannic foundation. Alternatively, farmers' markets will often sell different varieties of apple juice – you might sample a few to see which has the boldest flavour. To garnish the turned-out panna cotta, I make a sharp apple jelly with some of the remaining juice and a squeeze of lemon, slice it into 1cm cubes, and scatter it around with pieces of candied walnut. It's a delightful autumnal dessert. Follow the starting point, using 300ml double cream, 300ml apple juice, 3 tbsp maple syrup (in place of the sugar) and 3 leaves of gelatine.

DATE

A friend came back from California raving about the date shakes. Inspired, I set to work on a panna cotta. The first indication that I had created something transcendental came when I tasted the dregs in the blender. It was caramel. Not the sugary goo from the centre of a chocolate bar – not that I'm knocking it – but natural caramel, coaxed from a tree by golden sunshine. Mixed into the milk and cream for a panna cotta, it tasted like a particularly classy flavour of Angel Delight, so much so that the next time I made it I couldn't resist insinuating some sliced banana into the set. It was good, in a nursery-nostalgic sort of way, but better without. I tried something more Moroccan – a side of chilled orange segments steeped in orange flower water and a pinch of cinnamon. The orange provided a refreshing contrast to the rich, sweet pudding. For the panna cotta, remove the pits from 200g medjool dates and gently simmer for 15 minutes in 400ml milk, 350ml double cream, 1 tsp date syrup (or brown sugar), ½ tsp vanilla extract and a pinch of salt. Blend until smooth and stir in 4 soaked leaves of gelatine while the mixture is still warm. Pour into 8 moulds or glasses. Incidentally, I like to leave this mixture unsieved, which means the panna cottas lack their usual silky texture.

GOAT'S CHEESE & MILK

Savoury panna cotta: strange, but not unprecedented. One of chef Simon Rogan's signature dishes is a sous-vide squab served with a nettle panna cotta and a Sichuan pepper emulsion. Michael Wignall at Gidleigh Park makes a dish called 'umami', combining broth, chicken cooked in a soy-laced master stock, chicken-skin crackers and a garlic panna cotta. Goat's cheese panna cotta might seem conservative by comparison. You'll be in for a gruff surprise if you use goat's cream – it can take on a distinctly farmyard flavour if cooked a day or more in advance. But goat's cheese and milk are a deal easier to find in the shops than goat's cream, and work just as well. Less gelatine is needed on account of the thickness of cheese. Whisk 200g soft goat's cheese with 200ml goat's milk until the cheese has dissolved. Warm another 200ml goat's milk and add 2 soaked leaves of gelatine to it. Stir the mixtures together, then pour into 4 moulds and refrigerate for at least 4 hours to set. Serve as a cheese course with sliced ripe figs and a drizzle of honey.

NESSELRODE

Carême's celebrated creation, for Russian foreign minister Count Karl von Nesselrode, is essentially a bavarois, a custard mixed with whipped cream and whisked egg whites, and set with gelatine. The custard is flavoured with Maraschino and mixed with a sweet vanilla-chestnut purée. The whole thing is studded with candied fruit soaked in more alcohol. International diplomacy must have been a festive business in Imperial Russia. I adapted the Nesselrode principle for panna cotta. Which is to stretch the term, although there is panna in the custard it contains, and it is cotta. To distribute the solid ingredients throughout the pudding, you'll need to make it in layers. You might consider dispensing with the chestnut altogether, and using pieces of dried pineapple instead – texturally more appropriate, and sufficiently bright in flavour to smooth over any diplomatic crises. Roughly chop 3 tbsp raisins and steep for 1 hour in enough Madeira to cover them. Make 575ml crème anglaise and, when cooled, stir in 1 tbsp Maraschino (or kirsch, which is more alcoholic, but will do). Finely slice 4–6 cooked chestnuts and cut 2 tbsp candied fruit into fine dice. Add the soaked, drained raisins, mix all the fruit and nuts together and divide into 4 portions. Stand 4 individual moulds in a container of cold water. Warm 150ml of the Maraschino custard and dissolve 1 soaked leaf of gelatine in it. Mix in a portion of the fruit and nuts, then divide between all the moulds. When the surface is fairly set, repeat three times, building up the layers. Transfer to the fridge and leave to firm up for a few hours.

PIÑA COLADA

Clearly, it was authenticity we were after. Not for us the zip-wire park, the Plantation Experience with working windmill, the glass-bottomed boat tour with complementary rum punch. We wanted the real Antigua. Things had got off to a promising start. The shrieks were clearly audible from our room on the second floor. The Copper & Lumber Store in Nelson's Dockyard was once a warehouse for shipbuilding materials, but is now a 'Historic Inn'. Despite the dismal note of heritage tourism that expression implies, it retains a genuine air of salt and creaking timbers. We ran downstairs to find the receptionist standing on a chair while a blue land crab the size of a bulldog scuttled across the floorboards. 'Get a box,' instructed my husband, unhelpfully. We were joined by the hotel chef. For what might have been five minutes my husband and a short man in a toque chased the crab as it pinballed from swivel chair to metal filing cabinet, until Chris the local taxi man walked in, picked the crab up under its armpits, and set it down on the pavement outside, where it clattered away to tell its crab friends about its raw yet strangely vivifying brush with humankind. Our authenticity-hunger duly satisfied, we could get on with the business of behaving like everyone else. Twenty minutes later we were sitting on the terrace of a chain hotel, watching the sun go down over an icy piña colada. Like the drink, this panna cotta must be boozy, rich and cold. Remember to use pasteurised pineapple juice from a carton, which is cooked, and so won't inhibit setting, as fresh pineapple juice would. Follow our starting point, but dissolve the 3 soaked leaves of gelatine in 300ml (non-light) coconut milk and 50ml double cream (coconut cream is a bit too powdery to use for panna cotta), warmed with 3 tbsp sugar. Stir in 250ml chilled, pasteurised pineapple juice and 3 tbsp rum. Any rum will do, but the darker it is, the more pronounced the flavour.

VANILLA & ENHANCED VANILLA

I tried a number of different vanillas in simple shortbread biscuits and failed to detect much difference between them. Panna cotta is the better vector: the mild flavour of cream withdraws, valet-like, in the presence of stronger flavours, where baked flour and butter assert themselves. Madagascan vanilla has the most familiar flavour, while Tahitian, being lower in vanillin, the pod's characteristic flavour compound, has a subtler, sweeter, fruitier and more floral character, like a Gauguin adolescent in a wraparound skirt (or cherries and anise, to be more literal about it). Mexican vanilla is earthier and spicier. Joël Robuchon adds a single coffee bean to 2 vanilla pods to flavour 500ml cream. Most cooks use small quantities of vanilla to enliven other flavours in sweet custard and panna cottas; Robuchon pulls off an ingenious inversion, bringing to mind those dainty variations on shades of cream sold by paint manufacturers. Vanilla with a hint of arabica. Try enhancing yours with wildflower honey, black tea, cinnamon, anise, tangerine peel or almond extract. For vanilla _tout seul_ , use a pod, not extract, whenever budget and availability allow. To flavour 600ml milk you'll need 1 pod _at least_. As to a maximum, it's hard to say – Wolfgang Puck serves a fifty-bean ice cream, and although it's safe to assume he's making more than half a litre, it does sound tantalising. If using vanilla extract or paste, use 1–2 tsp.

VIN SANTO

When my twins were tiny, my social life was restricted to having people over for dinner. Days spent laundering mounds of very small vests left neither time nor energy for much cooking, so I stuck to a handful of simple menus. One was charcuterie and olives, gathered on a pram-push to the nearest deli, with home-made focaccia. Then roast pork stuffed with garlic and herbs, roast potatoes and a dark-green salad in a lively vinaigrette. To finish, a glass of _vin santo_ with _cantuccini_ biscuits. One evening, realising we had worked our way through a case of _vin santo_ in the six months since the babies were born, I found the remnants of a bottle in the fridge. So I made a panna cotta with it, because making panna cotta requires little more effort than arranging biscuits on a plate. Make as per our starting point, but replace the grappa with 2 tbsp _vin santo_. When I turned them out, the panna cottas were as wobbly as an hour-old foal, but none the worse for it. I served them beside neat stripes of crushed _cantuccini_ with a pinch of salt mixed into them. The effect was not unlike a cheesecake on a Tuscan sabbatical. The flavour of _vin santo_ was unmistakable, in the deep rumour of dried fruit (in _vin santo_ , the grapes are dried for months before vinification) and the oxidised quality, tempered by the cream. According to the wine expert Stephen Brook, producers 'look askance' at the practice of dunking _cantuccini_ in their _vin santo_ , preferring we try it unaccompanied. I'm happy to comply. When I run out of biscuits.
Custard

The practice of throwing custard pies dates back as far as 1909, when, in the film _Mr Flip_ , the great boss-eyed silent comedian Ben Turpin is believed to have been the first person ever to be 'pied'. Quite how the custard pie should have come by its comic reputation is open to debate. Perhaps it's because it encapsulates so much of what Anglo-Saxon culture finds funny in one easily transportable pastry case: the hint of bodily disgust in its spare-tyre tremble, the inherent comedy of French words forced through the rectifying mangle of English pronunciation. 'Custard' is a corruption of _croustade_ , meaning 'pastry case,' which makes 'custard pie' something of a tautology.

It was for similar reasons that I never gave custard much thought. It was the vaguely silly yellow stuff poured from a dented metal jug onto school steamed puddings. However, once I began to learn how many and various its versions were worldwide, and got the hang of making it myself, I rather grew to respect it. Among other things, custard can offer an excellent neutral basis for flavour experimentation.

Custard is a pact between liquid, egg and low-to-moderate heat. Of the three, low-to-moderate heat is the non-negotiating party. Custard is ill-suited to high temperatures; it will split, or weep, or become coarse and gritty. The liquid and egg come to the table with a more open mind. The liquid used in custard is usually milk or cream, but custard-making principles can apply equally to fruit juice or leftover coffee, or to non-liquid ingredients like the cream cheese in cheesecake, or the butter and zest that chaperone the juice in lemon curd. Egg leaves less room for interpretation, but custard can be made with whole eggs, or the yolk or white alone. But the heat is immutable: it must stay low-to-moderate whether it's applied in the oven, on the hob or in a steamer.

CUSTARD TART

The custard continuum starts with custard tart – baked custard in a pastry shell – then moves through crème caramel to crème brûlée. The pastry and caramel demand a moderate degree of skill. The custards are as simple as can be. All three are made to the same method. If you're new to custard-making, it's perhaps best to start with an unadorned baked custard. To serve 4, beat 3 eggs with 5 tbsp sugar in a jug. Stir in 750ml warm milk and pour the mixture through a sieve into a buttered ovenproof dish. Other than keeping the heat low, the single most useful thing for the custard-maker to remember is the following rule of thumb: 1 egg will set 250ml milk. Stick to this ratio and you'll be all but guaranteed a soft, wobbly custard. Grate some nutmeg over the top and bake in a water bath at 140°C until just set. (By 'water bath', I mean a roasting tin or similar, large enough to contain the custard dish, with hot water poured in until it reaches halfway up the outside of the custard dish). Start checking after about 30 minutes. The custard is ready when it's set but for the slightest wobble in the middle. Baked custard used to be a popular dessert, but is considered a little ordinary these days. Perhaps because it's in contrast to other flavours and textures that custard really comes into its own: crème brûlée is made by its cracked hat of burnt sugar; Portuguese _pastéis de nata_ would be _nada_ without their espresso-size cups of flaky pastry. In the same vein, you might consider a large baked custard as the centrepiece of a pick-and-mix pudding – _grand-aïoli-_ style. Place the custard dish on a plinth with a big silver spoon and encircle it with a tureen of damson compote, a bowl of salted chocolate crumbs, a plate of lemon-scented madeleines and another stacked high with snappy ginger biscuits, a bouquet of small paper cones filled with grated white chocolate, and a small handful of whole nutmegs and their tiny grater. Let your guests dip and scoop and grate as they please.

Or just roll up your sleeves and make a custard tart. The pastry case of custard tarts does more, incidentally, than provide a crisp contrast to the soft filling – it also protects the heat-sensitive custard from the direct heat of the oven, which means the water bath can be dispensed with. Even so, the cooking temperature for most custard tarts is kept low – between 120°C and 150°C (as this is too low for the pastry to cook, the case is baked before the custard goes into it). There are recipes that stipulate higher temperatures – as much as 200°C – but this will generally be because the tarts have been filled with a cold custard mixture. The high heat is solely to warm the custard, and is reduced after 10 minutes or so. Fritz Blank argues that the quiche Lorraine made by the late Hungarian-American chef Louis Szathmáry owed its excellence and authenticity to the hot blast he gave it initially, followed by a relatively cool 160°C for 15–20 minutes. With typical eccentricity, Chef Louis, as Szathmáry was better known in his adoptive Chicago, also called for cooled beurre noisette to be vigorously stirred in to the custard before cooking.

CRÈME CARAMEL

From custard tart to crème caramel: the only difference in the custard used for these two classic dishes is the ratio of egg to milk. For the crème caramel, or indeed any custard that you can upend on a plate without it collapsing, you'll need 2 eggs per 250ml milk. The firmness of an upendable custard will not only be apparent in the mouth; it's audibly different to the sort made with 1 egg per 250ml, making a delightful gulping sound when you scoop out a spoonful.

An egg sets 250ml milk in a container; 2 eggs set the same amount of milk for a firm, unmouldable custard. Once you've committed this rule to memory, you're free to start improvising. Furthermore, you can work on the basis that each white or yolk counts as half an egg. If, for example, you want to make a custard that sets in its dish, you could use 2 egg whites for 250ml milk (remembering that, if you whisk them, whites will soufflé up when cooked). By the same logic, 4 egg yolks per 250ml milk will make a rich, unmouldable crème caramel with a velvety texture. Desserts like this are popular in Portugal and Spain, where they were historically associated with nunneries. Some say that egg yolks were donated to religious foundations by local vintners, who used the albumen to clarify their wines; others that the nuns stiffened their wimples with egg whites. Either way, the holy sisters mixed the yolks with sugar syrup, rather than milk, to make such delicacies as _tocino de cielo_ and _ovos-moles_.

I ate something similar at a restaurant in Lisbon called Tasca da Esquina. It was as yellow and shiny as a fresh egg yolk itself: a crème that had no need for caramel. It had the texture of a warm candle, and tasted like the sort of bland, bleary happiness that descends on the threshold of sleep. If bland happiness isn't your bag, you can always flavour the syrup, as in the Portuguese _pudim abade de Priscos_ , made with lemon, cinnamon, bacon fat and port. Or use cream, in which case you'll be making something more akin to a crème brûlée.

CRÈME BRÛLÉE

Try a crème brûlée and a crème caramel side by side and you'll understand the respective differences egg yolks and whites, or combinations therein, make to a cooked custard. Crème brûlée, made with yolks only (2 yolks per 250ml cream is standard), has none of the resistance to the teeth that whites lend to crème caramel, which is usually made with whole eggs (2 per 250ml milk). Whites make for quite a rubbery set, yolks something softer – the reason why eating a crème brûlée pings the same bell in your pleasure centre as closing the door of a Mercedes, when the car you drive is a Toyota Yaris.

By the same token, chefs often primp everyday custard-based dishes, like tarts and bread-and-butter pudding, by replacing the whole eggs with oodles of luxurious yolks. Marcus Wareing's famous custard tart uses 9 yolks for 500ml cream, making it, in effect, a crème brûlée set in pastry. Princess Diana's favourite dessert, according to her former chef Darren McGrady, was a bread-and-butter pudding made, like Wareing's custard tart, with a crème-brûlée custard in place of the normal stuff, poured over buttered bread and Amaretto-plumped raisins. No wonder she fell for a heart surgeon. A less extravagant option than using yolks only is just to up the yolk-to-white ratio. Nigel Slater makes a crème caramel with 3 whole eggs and 2 yolks in place of the standard 4 eggs. You get the picture.

It's worth noting that all the custard recipes on the continuum call for the milk or cream to be heated before it is added to the yolks. You'll find recipes elsewhere that don't stipulate this, but the technique applies in _Lateral Cooking_ – firstly because warming the dairy allows you to infuse it with hard aromatics like vanilla pods, cinnamon sticks or citrus zest, and secondly because it helps the custard reach its thickening temperature faster. This is the reason crème anglaise is invariably made with warm milk; a shorter cooking time is a boon when you're craned over the hob, stirring vigilantly, tapping your foot as you wait for the magic to happen. Sieving is nearly always called for at some point. It makes for a smoother custard, partly by intercepting any stringy bits, aromatic debris from infusing the milk, or flecks of hardened yolk. The last have a tendency to form if you let your yolks and sugar sit together for too long without whisking. Any custard that can be easily sieved should be sieved. Not every recipe for pastry cream calls for it to be sieved, but tiny lumps form in it so readily that it's worth the effort. Some cooks even sieve the cream cheese and egg mix for cheesecake. (I tried it once, for some reason expecting it to be fun. It wasn't. It was like sieving cream cheese, whose only benefit was in providing a fresh synonym for swimming in treacle. Don't bother: it isn't necessary.)

CRÈME ANGLAISE

You'll note that the methods are indeterminate, tending to vague, when it comes to cooking times. Frankly, custard is ready when it's ready. Custard couldn't give a hoot if you're glued to the radio, rapt at the heart-rending climax of the afternoon drama, or poised to nab a bargain on eBay. Its cooking time will depend on the quantity of custard, the material your dish is made of, the material your water bath is made of, the caprice of your cooker and the temperature of the custard mixture when you put it in the oven. The only answer is to start checking it as early as it _might_ be ready, remain vigilant thereafter, and be prepared to spring it from the oven the moment you think it is. Earning your stripes as a custard-maker means learning to make an accurate judgment by eye. In the case of baked custards, I find this falls somewhere between 'unsure' and 'unsure I'm unsure'. Custards continue to cook after their removal from the heat, so it's best to err on the side of impatience. If you're sure it's cooked, it's probably overcooked.

Crème anglaise is ready when it reaches 80°C. If you don't have a thermometer to hand, take it off the heat when it's just become thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and hold the line when you run a finger through it. The same rule applies to the custard for crème brûlée, which can be made on the hob rather than in the oven. Delia Smith's recipe for 'proper custard' is, in fact, a hob-cooked crème brûlée custard, as it's made entirely with cream. Most crème anglaise recipes are rather less rich, calling for whole milk, or milk topped up with a _little_ cream, and relying on a little more yolk – 1 per 100ml – for richness. A small quantity of flour is optional for crème anglaise, with yolks alone making for a silkier texture. Flour bolsters the thickening effect of the yolks, but the main reason it's added is for heat protection. Cautious cooks might use a double-boiler to the same end, but if you use a heavy-based pan and are able to keep the heat low, you can make your anglaise directly on the hob and it won't be as painfully slow.

Nowadays, crème anglaise is almost exclusively considered a sauce, but in the nineteenth century it was often served as a dessert in its own right, chilled, and flavoured with bitter almond, chocolate, liqueurs or lemon zest. Ferran Adrià gives a recipe that should, in my opinion, revive the custom: a white-chocolate custard served in a soup bowl and topped with toasted pistachios. You can make something similar by following our starting point for crème anglaise, but halving the quantities, omitting the vanilla (as the white chocolate will furnish that flavour) and replacing the milk with whipping cream. When the custard reaches 80°C, or is thick enough to trace a line through on the back of the spoon, pour it over 225g finely chopped white chocolate and leave for a few minutes before whisking until smooth. Divide between 6 dishes and sprinkle with the toasted nuts. Devour it by the ladleful and kid yourself you could have worked at El Bulli.

I make _petits pots au chocolat_ the same way; the oven-baked sort is too apt to disappoint. Stir hot, slightly creamy custard into chopped dark chocolate, as you would for ganache, and it turns into a perfectly smooth, luxurious chocolate goo. Crème anglaise is also the starting point for bavarois. Bavarois is otherwise known as Bavarian cream, but it's far foxier to lift one eyebrow and purr _bav-arrr-WAH_. It's a pouring custard, essentially, containing gelatine, and with whipped cream and/or whisked egg whites folded into it. Bavarois sets into a light mousse: smooth and melt-in-the-mouth, yet firm enough to turn out of a mould or be cut into slices.

ICE CREAM

A third reason you might want to make more custard than you need: freeze any leftover crème anglaise and you'll have gelato. Don't worry if your custard is only milk-based: many gelati are made this way. The results will be denser, as milk doesn't retain air whipped into it like cream does. Texture's loss, however, is flavour's gain: the advantage of the extra density will be a greater intensity on the palate. If it's ice cream you had actually set out to make, our starting point here is just a few tweaks away from crème anglaise, calling for a mixture of cream and milk, and more sugar. In most custards, the quantity of sugar can be increased or decreased to taste, but in ice cream it has structural implications. The higher sugar content helps create smaller ice crystals, resulting in a smoother texture. Reduce the sugar too much and your ice cream will be crunchy. The method for making custard for ice cream is the same as for crème anglaise, but once the desired thickness is achieved, the custard is cooled, chilled, then frozen. The finished (but as yet unfrozen) custard can be augmented with whipped cream (adding more air), fruit purée, or any number of flavourings: the suggestions **here** are only there to stimulate the infinite gelateria of your imagination.

PASTRY CREAM

Pastry cream, the next starting point on the continuum, is similarly sweet to ice cream, but is always made with milk, rather than cream, as the thickening is supplied by flour. Flour gives crème pâtissière the heft to support layers of pastry or fruit. As with so many custards, it's usually worth making a double batch. Most sweet soufflés have a pastry-cream base. Flavour the custard as you fancy, whisk in some French meringue, transfer it to prepared soufflé dishes and bake in the oven. The recipe for pastry cream given here can also be used to make 'pudding', the soft, dense, Angel Delight–style American dessert, although admittedly a version on the modestly sweetened side. The few puddings I've tried in America have been enough to lift me from my dining chair on a wave of hyperglycaemic euphoria.

CREMA FRITTA

With _crema fritta_ we reach continuum's end. It's made with even more flour than pastry cream, meaning that the quantity of egg can be reduced. _Crema fritta_ – literally, 'fried cream' – is a custard robust enough to cut into slices when cold. It's then coated with breadcrumbs and deep-fried. In Venice _crema fritta_ is sold as a street snack during _celebrazioni_. The custard is often flavoured with lemon, either on its own or in combination with vanilla, or _rosolio_ , a local liqueur derived from rose petals. Traditionally it's cut into diamond-shapes, rolled in ground nuts, then fried and served with a fruit compote. And it's not limited to Venice: served as a dessert course, _crema fritta_ was all the rage in San Francisco in the 1950s. Elsewhere in Italy _crema fritta_ is just as likely to be served as part of a savoury course. Anna Del Conte recalls a meal in the Marche region where she ate slices of it alongside salami and prosciutto. Some sources maintain it's an essential part of a traditional Bolognese _fritto misto_. Hard to imagine, I know. I once made a custard flavoured with lemon and vanilla and fried the pieces in olive oil. The first thing to note is that cutting custard into diamonds is a very pleasant culinary experience – up there with peeling the skin from an avocado half in one go. Fried and allowed to cool, the pieces of _crema fritta_ were reminiscent – unsurprisingly, given what goes into them – of both pancakes and béchamel, which serves to suggest how well they might go with hot or cold meats.

A Chinese variant on the theme of fried custard, _chi ma kuo cha_ , is made with eggs, flour, water and a little milk. The golden slices are sprinkled while still hot with a mixture of crushed, toasted sesame seeds and sugar. Making _chi ma kuo cha_ I was reminded of churros. As you'll know if you've ever breakfasted in Spain, churros consist of a stiff batter of flour and water, extruded into ridged lengths, deep-fried and dusted with a shake of sugar. They're usually served with a dipping cup of thick hot chocolate – which would, come to think of it, make an inauthentic and utterly irresistible accompaniment to a few warm slices of sesame-sprinkled, fried Chinese custard.

**Custard Tart**

This starting point makes a common-or-garden custard tart: 2 eggs will give a just-set texture to 500ml milk, 3 something more definitely sliceable. Variations on the custard tart include pumpkin pie, quiche and cheesecake. You'll find that a fair few of them skip the heating stage. It's fine to put cold custard in the oven: it just might take a little longer to cook. If you prefer a baked custard without the pastry, see **C** under Leeway.

_For a deep 20cm tart to serve 8_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

1 deep 20cm tart case made with shortcrust pastry **B C**

500ml milk **D E**

1 vanilla pod **F**

3 eggs **G**

50g sugar **H**

Freshly grated nutmeg – optional **I**

**1** Make the pastry case and blind-bake it, as described **here**.

**2** Pour the milk into a saucepan. Slice open the vanilla pod and scrape the seeds into the milk. Put the pod in too, then bring the milk just up to the boil over a medium heat. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 10 minutes – 1 hour before removing the pod.

**3** Reheat the milk until it's just beginning to bubble.

Or heat it, if you have skipped step **2**.

**4** In a heatproof bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar together.

Don't leave the eggs and sugar together unwhisked for too long, or solid specks of yolk will begin to form.

**5** Gradually stir the warm milk into the egg mixture.

This process is called tempering.

**6** Strain the custard through a sieve into the blind-baked pastry case and bake at 140˚C for 30–50 minutes. **J**

Judge if it's ready by gently agitating the tin, starting at the shortest possible cooking time. When the custard is set, but still a bit wobbly in the middle, remove from the oven.

**7** Grate over a little nutmeg, if you like. Serve warm or at room temperature.

LEEWAY

**A** For a deep 25cm tart, make twice the quantity of the custard filling.

**B** The pastry used for custard tarts can vary considerably. Delia Smith opts for a basic shortcrust with lard and butter; others use yolk-enriched sweet pastry ( **here** ) with flavourings, rough puff or filo.

**C** Omit the pastry for a small, plain baked custard. Simply strain the mixture into a buttered ovenproof dish, place in a water bath and bake as opposite. If you want to turn it out of its dish, follow the proportions for crème caramel by adding an extra egg.

**D** Cream – any sort – can be used in place of some or all of the milk. Semi-skimmed or skimmed milk make too thin a custard, although they are fine mixed with some cream.

**E** Crème fraîche or sour cream can be used in place of all or some of the milk to give a refreshing lactic tang.

**F** Other hard aromatics like cinnamon sticks or star anise can be infused in the same way. If using vanilla _extract_ (or any other liquid flavouring), skip step **2**, then add to taste at the end of step **5**, starting with 1 tsp. At this stage the custard will still be warm enough for a bit more sugar to be dissolved in it, if necessary.

**G** You can get away with 2 eggs (1 will set 250ml milk), but 3 is pretty standard. As with most custards, yolks can be substituted for whole eggs – use 2 yolks in place of each egg. For his award-winning custard tart, Marcus Wareing uses 9 yolks for 500ml whipping cream and 75g sugar.

**H** The 50g given here is a modest quantity of sugar; some recipes double it.

**I** Nutmeg can also be grated into the custard at step **5**.

**J** The Flavours & Variations section includes custard tarts cooked at 180°C or higher, but these have a little flour added, which stabilises the custard at this heat.

Custard Tart → Flavours & Variations

CORIANDER SEED

You don't need to toast the seeds, but you do need to crush them. Don't use shop-bought ground coriander, as it's unlikely to have the more feminine quality of the freshly crushed seeds. Pellegrino Artusi's recipe for custard tart gives the option of flavouring it with vanilla _or_ with crushed coriander seeds. I'd suggest combining the two. Crush 1 tbsp coriander seeds and add to the milk with the split vanilla pod at step **2**.

ELDERFLOWER

Not quite custard as we know it, but a fourteenth-century recipe collection called _The Forme of Cury_ (from _cuire_ , the French for 'to cook') includes a recipe for a tart called _sambocade_ , made with curds, breadcrumbs, sugar, egg whites and washed elderflower blossoms. For a simpler, silkier elderflower custard, use cordial. It's always worth making your own cordial, but on the assumption you lack the time and/or elderflowers, here's a version based on the perfectly decent kinds you can buy in the supermarket. For 500ml milk, add 3 tbsp elderflower cordial and ¼ tsp vanilla extract at the end of step **5**. Check for sweetness and intensity of flavour and adjust accordingly.

LEMON

_Tarte au citron_ was the first posh pudding I learned to make. At roughly the same time I also got the knack of a neat little courgette timbale to serve as an appetiser. Did I ever get some mileage out of those two recipes. I cooked them for all of my friends, and when I ran out of them, I made more friends, rather than add any new dishes to my repertoire. Years later, when I moved from the tiny flat in West London where I'd learned to cook, I dismantled my dining table and found a large piece of petrified lemon tart jammed to its underside. The list of suspects ran to many pages. There's no need to heat the cream for this custard. For a shallow 20cm tart, use 2 eggs, 2 egg yolks, the juice and finely grated zest of 2 lemons, 125g sugar and 125ml cream. Mix everything together except the zest. Strain the mixture, then stir in the zest and pour into your blind-baked tart case. Bake in a 140°C oven for 25–30 minutes. Once cool, sift over a fine veil of icing sugar.

NEW YORK CHEESECAKE

A proper New York cheesecake should be deep enough to need its own psychoanalyst. Its European forebears were made with strained cottage cheese, but with the invention of Philadelphia cream cheese in the 1880s, Americans devised a bigger, better cheesecake of their own. Originally made in a pastry case, then on zwieback crumbs (zwiebacks are the sweet, almost weightless crackers that for some reason are called 'French Toast' in British supermarkets), these days the base of a New York cheesecake is usually crushed Graham crackers, which are a _bit_ like digestive biscuits. The filling is a sort of custard, but the thickness of the cream cheese means that fewer eggs are needed to set it. For a cheesecake to serve 12, press your chosen base evenly into the bottom of a 22–23cm springform tin encased in foil. (If you're using a biscuit base, judge how many biscuits you need by paving them unbroken over the bottom of the tin, before crushing them into a fine crumb and mixing with half their weight in melted butter.) Mix 1kg room-temperature, full-fat cream cheese with 300g sugar, 150ml sour cream, 1 tbsp vanilla extract, the zest of 2 lemons, 4 tbsp plain flour and 3 large eggs for only as long as it takes to combine everything. Scoop the mixture onto whatever base you've chosen, then bake in a water bath at 160°C for 1¼ hours. Remove the finished cheesecake from its water bath and foil and allow it to cool before leaving in the fridge to chill and firm up for 4 hours or, better, overnight. You don't have to eat it all in one go. Well wrapped, it can be frozen for a month, although the texture when defrosted will not be quite as good. For a smaller cheesecake, halve the quantities, use a 15cm springform tin, and reduce the baking time to 50 minutes.

PANETTONE BREAD & BUTTER PUDDING

Think of bread-and-butter pudding as custard tart with the crust on the inside. Slice 300g panettone and allow it to dry out. Buttering the slices is optional. Arrange them in a greased ovenproof dish. How you like your pudding will determine the size of the dish and the position of the panettone: if you're partial to the soggy part, you'll want more of the slices immersed in the custard; if you prefer the crispy bit, ensure there's plenty sitting proud. Pour over a custard made by beating together 150ml double cream, 250ml warm whole milk, 2 eggs and 2 tbsp caster sugar, then bake at 140°C. Start checking for a wobbly set from 25 minutes. When it's cooled slightly, sprinkle with icing sugar. Finely grated citrus zest and/or a tot of Marsala, Amaretto or vanilla extract can be added, but the panettone's own flavour infiltrates the custard and is pretty glorious without enhancement. In place of panettone, try buttered bread, brioche or croissants – or challah ( **here** ), which is said to make an outstanding variation. You may want to add a handful of two of dried fruit soaked in rum, brandy or fruit juice.

POOR KNIGHTS OF WINDSOR

Synonymous with French toast or _pain perdu_. The connection with the Poor Knights, military pensioners put up at Windsor Castle following the Battle of Crécy in 1346, is unclear, but you might read a certain almshouse dignity into the pudding's enterprising use of humble ingredients. My dad called the same thing eggy bread or gypsy toast. Whatever you call it, you might think it a bit of a stretch as a variation on custard tart – but, as with the panettone pudding on the previous page, it calls for the same kind of simple custard, with the bread standing in for the pie crust. Beat the milk and egg together (1–3 tbsp milk per egg) and add a pinch of salt before pouring the mixture into a wide, shallow dish. Soak slices of bread in the custard, then shallow-fry in clarified butter or oil: how thick you slice the bread, and how long you soak it in the custard, are as much a matter of taste as the depth of browning you give it. Some add a little sugar, vanilla or cinnamon (or all three) to the custard, as you might to crème anglaise. There are recipes that call for a tot of sherry or brandy, and some cooks like to drizzle maple syrup, or sprinkle icing sugar, over the finished pudding. In Portugal and Brazil, an eggy bread called _rabanada_ is eaten at Christmas with a festive port- or wine-flavoured syrup.

PUMPKIN

Classic American pumpkin pie is only a variation on a standard custard tart. But can the British ever learn to love its peculiar taste? You can add enough spice and sugar to sink a clipper, and yet still – that weird migrainous headiness, like a vegetarian lobster bisque. The thanks _I'd_ be giving were that I only had to eat it once a year. Still, it's not only North Americans who go for pumpkin-flavoured custards. In Thailand, a sugary version is baked in scooped-out pumpkins and served in slices. In Japan, Beard Papa, the Osaka-based bakery that specialises in pastry-cream-filled choux buns, includes pumpkin in its range of flavours. For American pumpkin pie, mix 1 × 400g tin of condensed milk with 1 × 425g tin of unsweetened pumpkin purée, 2 large eggs, 2 tsp pumpkin-pie spice (or 1 tsp ground cinnamon, ½ tsp each of ground ginger and nutmeg, and ¼ tsp each of ground allspice and cloves) and a pinch of salt. Pour into a deep 23cm unbaked tart case and bake at 200°C for 10 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 175°C. Start checking after 40 minutes and remove when the filling is just set. Serve at room temperature. Note, incidentally, that this pie goes into the oven with the pastry unbaked, and that the oven temperature is at the very upper limit for dishes involving custard.

QUICHE LORRAINE

Clucking at the distinctly non-U practice of using grated cheese in quiche Lorraine, Elizabeth David speculates that it might be a corruption of the older tradition, endemic to that part of France, of adding fresh white cheese ( _fromage blanc_ ), to the cream used in tarts. I have to admit I prefer my quiche made as follows. Assuming you have blind-baked your deep 20cm tart case ( **here** ), fry about 150g bacon lardons (I'd opt for smoked) until they're beginning to turn golden, then remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper. Coarsely grate 75g Gruyère. Scatter the cooked lardons over the tart base. Briefly mix 200ml each of crème fraîche and double cream with 3 eggs, ½ tsp salt and two-thirds of the cheese. Pour the custard over the lardons, sprinkle over the rest of the cheese and bake at 150°C until the custard has golden-brown patches and the centre is almost set: about 35–40 minutes.

SAFFRON

Flavour your custard with saffron and it will turn an ochre of such richness it will look as if you've used two dozen egg yolks. Moreover, saffron has a depth and peculiarity of flavour to match its colour. Its intensity seems to egg certain chefs on to excess: it's the J.P. Morgan Palladium Card of haute cuisine. At his restaurant in Santa Fe, James Campbell Caruso serves a saffron baked custard filled with morcilla (the rich Spanish black pudding), roasted peppers and fried sage. Mark Hix gives a recipe for individual, all-butter, puff-pastry tarts deep-filled with saffron custard. He uses single cream, which will be rich – but why not max out the saffron card and make it double? Or clotted? Clotted cream and saffron is as classic a Cornish combination as cider and amphetamines. Or there's _om ali_ , an Egyptian baked custard embedded with shards of baked filo or puff pastry, toasted nuts and dried fruit. Some mix saffron into the custard, others might use rosewater or orange flower water. A sort of moneyed bread-and-butter pudding. To flavour 500ml milk/cream use a generous pinch of saffron strands – let's say 15, although, to paraphrase Leona Helmsley, counting saffron stigmas is for the little people.

STOCK

_Chawanmushi_ is a popular Japanese savoury custard, usually made with dashi, but other home-made stocks can be put to similar ends. Like many Asian custards, it's steamed until set. I would categorise it as a baked custard, but in Japan it's considered more of a soup, partly because it's one of the few dishes eaten with a spoon as well as chopsticks. The inventive cook, suggests Shizuo Tsuji in _Japanese Cooking_ , will be brimming with variations. Slices of fish paste, slivers of lemon zest, parboiled bamboo shoots, gingko nuts or lily root might be set into the soy and mirin flavoured, egg-enriched stock, aside from more familiar ingredients like mushroom and carrot. Nobu opts for warm scallop and tops it off with a spoonful of caviar and a little pared lime zest. _Chawanmushi_ means 'teacup', which is what it's served in. Refreshing cold versions are offered during the summer. Typically, allow 200ml stock and 1 egg for each cup.

TARRAGON, LEEK & SOUR CREAM

Tarragon and sour cream make a terrific summer pairing in a savoury tart. Like Nancy and Peggy, the Amazon half of Arthur Ransome's _Swallows and Amazons_ , they're a cool twosome with enough character to offset the sweet goody-goodiness of pea, leek, asparagus or crab. If you don't have sour cream or crème fraîche, or if you're intolerant of cow's milk, goat's cream is another great match for tarragon. Next time it's sunny, and you'd rather be picnicking than wrangling pastry in a warm kitchen, do without the tart case. Once cool, the crustless quiche will be firm enough to divide into pieces. Slice 2 leeks and soften then in a little butter. Meanwhile, beat 2 eggs, 250ml sour cream, 2 tsp finely chopped tarragon and a pinch of salt in a jug (no need to heat the mixture). Scatter the soft leeks and a handful of fresh peas in a watertight 20cm tart tin. Pour the custard over the vegetables (through a sieve if you like) and bake at 140°C until just set – it'll take about 35 minutes. Rush to your riverbank or roundabout to eat your quiche while it's still warm, maybe with a cool salad of little gem leaves and baby radishes, tossed in a lemony dressing.

YOGURT

Fine to replace some, or all, of the dairy in your custard with yogurt, but beware of super-low-fat varieties, which are too watery to give a good result. You can make a baked custard using plain old Greek yogurt in place of the milk; flavoured with a little vanilla and lemon zest, the effect is very similar to a cheesecake without its biscuit base. This is a mildly adapted version of Sam and Sam Clark's recipe. No need to scald the yogurt: just whisk 350g Greek yogurt (not low-fat) with 3 egg yolks, 50g caster sugar, 1 tbsp plain flour, 1 tsp vanilla paste and the finely grated zest of 1 lemon and 1 orange. In a separate bowl, whisk 3 egg whites to stiff peaks, then whisk in 25g more caster sugar, continuing to whisk until the mixture is glossy. Fold into the yogurt mix and pour into a watertight 25cm round tin resting in a water bath. Bake at 180°C for 20 minutes, then remove and sprinkle over a handful of roughly chopped pistachios. Return to the oven for a further 20 minutes, until the top is golden. Lift from the water bath immediately, then cool, chill and serve with seasonal fruit.

Custard Tart → Other Directions

ONION & THYME TART WITH GRUYÈRE

SEA URCHINS

Filled with savoury custard and baked.

DELIA SMITH'S GOOSEBERRY TART

... using a custard made with crème fraîche and a splash of balsamic vinegar.

COCONUT CUSTARD PIE

The custard is made from sweetened coconut, coconut milk, egg yolks, sugar and vanilla.

BUTTERMILK PIES

The custard substitutes buttermilk for the milk or cream. Serve with a blueberry sauce.

BLACK-BOTTOM PIE

Biscuit base topped with chocolate custard, rum custard, whipped cream and grated chocolate.

KEY LIME PIE

Custard made with condensed milk, egg, lime zest and juice on a biscuit base.

**Crème Caramel**

There is negligible difference between the custard in a crème caramel and a custard tart. Both are made with whole eggs and milk – but for our crème caramel, we use 4 (rather than 3) eggs per 500ml milk, to make sure the custard is strong enough to support its own weight when turned out. In some contemporary recipes, a more luxurious texture is achieved by replacing some of the milk with cream, and some of the whole eggs with yolks.

_For 6 crème caramels made in 150–175ml ramekins or darioles_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

500ml milk **B**

1 vanilla pod **C**

4 eggs **D**

4 tbsp (60g) sugar **E**

FOR THE CARAMEL

120g caster sugar

2 tbsp boiling water

**1** To make the caramel, put the sugar and boiling water in a heavy-based pan over a medium heat. Keep a beady eye on it, stirring intermittently as it starts to colour.

**2** When it's turned brick-red, immediately pour into the ramekins and swirl around to coat the bases evenly. Transfer to a large roasting tin or similar and set aside.

Don't be tempted to pour in too much caramel; it will only stick to the bottom of the dishes. Better to stir a few tablespoons of warm water into any remaining caramel and serve it on the side.

**3** Pour the milk into a saucepan. Slice open the vanilla pod and scrape the seeds into the milk. Put the pod in too, then bring the milk just up to the boil over a medium heat. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 10 minutes –1 hour before removing the pod.

**4** Reheat the milk until it's just beginning to bubble.

**5** In a heatproof bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar together. Don't leave the eggs and sugar together unwhisked for too long, or solid specks of yolk will begin to form.

**6** Gradually stir the warm milk into the egg mixture.

**7** Strain the custard through a sieve into a jug, then divide between the dishes.

**8** Pour enough tap-hot water into the tin to come halfway up the sides of the ramekins, then cover the tin with a loose tent of foil.

The foil will prevent the top of the custard becoming overly brown and thick.

**9** Bake at 140˚C. After 30 minutes, remove the foil and check the set of the crèmes. Keep checking until they are almost set, with a slight wobble in the centre.

**10** Remove from the oven and carefully lift the ramekins out of the water bath. Cool, on a rack if possible, then chill.

**11** To serve, run a sharp-pointed knife around the edge and upend onto plates.

If the caramel seems stuck, place the dishes in a roasting tin, add 2–3mm boiling water and leave for 1 minute to loosen.

LEEWAY

**A** For a large crème caramel, cook this quantity in a 1-litre dish: try to find one wide enough for the custard not to be much deeper than 5cm. Bake for about 1 hour, checking to see if it's ready from 50 minutes.

**B** Some use 50/50 milk and cream for additional richness. You can use coconut milk rather than cow's, but it will tint your crèmes a melancholy grey.

**C** Other hard aromatics like cinnamon sticks or star anise can be infused in the same way. If using vanilla _extract_ (or any other liquid flavouring), skip step **3**. Add them to taste at the end of step **6**, starting with 1 tsp. Grated nutmeg can also be added here. At this stage the custard will still be warm enough for a bit more sugar to be dissolved in it, if necessary.

**D** Whole eggs can be replaced with 2 yolks for a more unctuous texture.

**E** The 60g given here is a modest quantity of sugar. Many recipes – especially more recent ones – double it.

Crème Caramel → Flavours & Variations

BAY LEAF

In recent years bay leaf has been restored, to some extent, to its former status as a standard flavouring for custards. Elizabeth David thought that bay tasted like vanilla and nutmeg – which are the standard custard flavourings – so the suggestion in a 1929 edition of _Homes & Gardens_ to mix a small amount of bay with brandy should by rights give your custard an egg-nog-like quality. Traditionally bay was used in mixtures with lemon or orange zest. With a potato peeler, pare off 3 strips of lemon or orange zest (well scrubbed, if not from unwaxed fruit). Put in a pan with 3 fresh bay leaves (or 5 dried) and 500ml milk. Scald and leave to infuse for about 30 minutes. Other classic combinations with bay include bitter almond and brown sugar, or cinnamon. If the latter appeals, seek out some _tejpat_ , also called Indian bay leaf. It's a similar colour and shape to the European laurel, if unrelated, and has a notably cinnamon-like flavour. When I opened a packet and breathed in, I instantly thought of toasted hot cross buns.

COFFEE

Cult burgeristas The Shake Shack sometimes sell a coffee custard with doughnut pieces in it. Too rich for me, but it's a fun idea. To my mind the bitterness and complexity of coffee make it one of the most satisfying, which is to say least monotonous, flavourings for custards. Instant coffee works very well, even if you disdain it in a cup. Add 1 tbsp to the hot milk at the end of step **3** and check for strength and sweetness. On the other hand, Richard Olney makes the custard for his crème caramel using 'very strong, freshly made drip coffee'. Mix it 50/50 with milk and follow our starting point, using either ½ vanilla pod or ½ tsp vanilla extract to round out the flavour.

JACKFRUIT

In south-east Asia, jackfruit, like mango and papaya, is used in savoury dishes when unripe. Given the chance to mature, it has an insistently chewy texture, a whiff of old-fashioned, powdered Parmesan from a plastic shaker, and a flavour like slivers of mango wrapped in Bayonne ham. It's often cooked with coconut milk, then puréed, which restrains its ruder side and makes it a popular flavouring for custards. David Thompson has been known to garnish his turned-out jackfruit custard not with caramel but with the seeds of the fruit, boiled and sliced, along with grated fresh coconut and a banana fritter.

ORANGE

In France and Spain it's not uncommon to make a baked custard cup with orange juice in place of milk or cream. Follow the crème caramel method, leaving out the vanilla and doubling the sugar. Aside from sweetening the juice, the sugar adds body, too. For all its ease of preparation the combination of caramel and orange yields a satisfyingly complex blend of bitter, sharp and sweet. More unusually, chef Simon Hopkinson makes the custard for his orange crème caramels by whizzing the carefully pared zest of 4 large oranges with 5 tbsp sugar in a food processor, then scalds it with the milk and leaves it to infuse for 1 hour. The zest releases an abundance of essential oils, so this way you'll get a bold, true orange flavour.

ORANGE FLOWER WATER

Gertrude Stein's lover Alice B. Toklas had a voice 'like a viola at dusk', according to the poet James Merrill. She also made a mean crème renversée: crème caramel by another name. The Toklas method was to use evaporated milk for the custard, flavoured with orange flower water. It was said to be particularly good with chocolate sauce. A century earlier, Eliza Acton did away with all the crème nonsense and called the dish French custard, infusing the milk with a few petals of orange blossom – 'very superior', she notes, 'to that derived from the distilled water'. I'd have liked to see her say _that_ to Gertrude's face. In the absence of blossoms, use 2 tsp orange flower water for 500ml milk.

PANDAN

Pandan is a commonly used flavouring for steamed custards in south-east Asia. Raw pandan smells somewhat alarmingly of ammonia, but when heated it releases the same flavour compound as cooked basmati rice. Fresh leaves are less widely available than the kind of bottled essence that's the colour of a dragon's underbelly and is found in Asian supermarkets. Pandan is often paired with coconut; the combination tastes like freshly baked coconut cake. For 500ml full-fat coconut milk (a standard tin contains 400ml), use 4 leaves, raked with a fork to bring out their oils. The pandan flavour works very well with the burnt sugar, but for an authentic approach, pour the plain custard into cups or ramekins and steam, covered, checking from 20 minutes to see if set.

SAUTERNES

Nigella Lawson singles out a Sauternes custard she ate at Quaglino's as one of the best things she tasted in her twelve years as a restaurant critic. It was served in the manner of a crème caramel, with Armagnac-soaked prunes. To make something like it, adapt our starting point by replacing the milk with 150ml Sauternes and 350ml whipping cream, and 2 of the eggs with 4 yolks, also adding 1 extra tbsp sugar. You'll need to warm the Sauternes separately from the cream, and whisk it into the eggs before the cream is added. For another layer of flavour, consider the entry in the _International Dictionary of Food and Cooking_ on 'crème bachique': a custard flavoured with Sauternes and cinnamon.

**Crème Brûlée**

King of custards. Crème brûlée owes its fabulous texture to a mixture of egg yolks and cream. Only 4 yolks are used for 500ml cream, so the set is loose – you couldn't turn it out of a dish. The custard is made to the same method as crème caramel, although unlike crème caramel it can also be cooked on the stove-top, using the same ingredients as below, but following the directions for crème anglaise. I tend to favour the oven method, which is less prone to overheating or overcooking. Without its brûlée roof, the dessert becomes _petits pots de crème_ , often served, at least in restaurants, in dinky porcelain 'churns'.

_For 4 individual crèmes made in shallow crème brûlée dishes or 150–175ml ramekins_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

500ml double cream **B**

1 vanilla pod **C**

4 egg yolks

4 tbsp (60g) sugar **D**

Pinch of salt

Caster sugar for the brûlée top

**1** Pour the cream into a saucepan. Slice open the vanilla pod and scrape the seeds into the milk. Put the pod in too, then bring the cream just up to the boil over a medium heat. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 10 minutes –1 hour before removing the pod.

**2** Reheat the milk until it's just beginning to bubble.

**3** In a heatproof bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar and salt.

Don't leave the eggs and sugar together unwhisked for too long, or solid specks of yolk will begin to form.

**4** Gradually stir the warm cream into the egg mixture.

**5** Sit your crème brûlée dishes or ramekins in a large roasting tin or similar. Strain the custard mixture through a sieve into a jug, then divide between the dishes. Pour enough hot water into the roasting tin to come halfway up the sides of the dishes. **E**

**6** Bake at 140°C, checking for set after 20 minutes for shallow crème brûlée dishes, 30 minutes for ramekins.

The crèmes are done when they are almost set, with a slight wobble in the centre. Remove immediately from their water bath and leave to cool, preferably on a rack.

**7** Once cool, chill the crèmes.

They can be kept, covered, in the fridge for a few days.

**8** Sprinkle each crème with a thin layer of caster sugar and apply a blowtorch. Or put them under a hot grill, close to the heat, and keep watch. Re-chill until ready to serve.

LEEWAY

**A** A simple rule of thumb: 1 egg yolk and 1 tbsp sugar per 125ml cream. If you're making a large crème brûlée, note that the quantity here, made in a 1-litre dish, will take about 40 minutes to cook.

**B** Some of the cream can be replaced with milk: 50/50 is common and works well. Watch it, though: skimp too much on the cream and the custard will lack the proper luxuriousness.

**C** Replace the vanilla pod with other hard aromatics. If you're using vanilla extract (1–2 tsp) or any other liquid flavourings, stir them in at the end of step **4**. Beware of adding too much liquid – it will jeopardise the gentle set.

**D** Use more or less sugar. I find between 2 tsp and 1 tbsp per crème ideal.

**E** Joël Robuchon dispenses with the water bath, baking his crèmes at 110°C for 45 minutes. He also cold-infuses sweetened whipping cream and milk with 4 vanilla pods in the fridge overnight – great if you _really_ hate cleaning milk pans.

Crème Brûlée → Flavours & Variations

BANANA

Bananas _and_ custard is an English nursery classic. Using banana to flavour a silken crème brûlée, on the other hand, is to give it an elocution lesson. It works so well because the banana's tropical, spicy, floral notes have much in common with vanilla, which is itself strongly associated with custard in all its variants, but particularly with crème brûlée. You'll get the best result from ripe, even over-ripe bananas, which will have developed sufficient richness and complexity of flavour. Remember that some of their sweetness will also leach into the cream, so you might want to keep any additional sugar in check. Follow the starting point, omitting the vanilla. Treat the sliced banana like a hard aromatic by adding it to the cream at step **1**, tasting to check how the flavour is developing: 1 banana can flavour up to a litre of milk; 2 will give a deeper, faster result. When it tastes good and banana-y, strain and continue.

BRANDY ALEXANDER

Brandy Alexander, the sweet, viscous cocktail of Cognac, crème de cacao and cream, was the chief agent of loss in John Lennon and Harry Nilsson's notorious eighteen-month 'lost weekend' of 1973–75. (How on earth did Lennon stay so thin? I'd look like Mama Cass after a week on the stuff.) Midway through Lennon and Nilsson's binge, Gilbeys of Ireland launched Baileys Irish Cream, which is the same sort of thing, except with Irish whiskey instead of brandy. Crème de cacao, incidentally, tastes a bit like Tia Maria with the coffee taken out. Crème brûlée is suitable for all sorts of cocktail flavourings where a fair amount of cream is used; milk-only would be to profane the memory of John and Harry's nights at the Rainbow Bar and Grill. Add 2 tbsp Cognac, 1 tbsp crème de cacao and ½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg to the custard mixture at the end of step **4**.

CHAI SPICE

The sine qua nons of chai spice are cinnamon, cardamom and clove, but you might also add star anise, aniseed, black pepper and/or saffron to your blend. Whole spices will give a more complex, pleasing result. A chai-spice custard is ideal for un-brûléed _petits pots de crème_ , which look all the more delightful primped with little silver- or gold-leaf decorations, as found on kheer and other milk puddings served at Indian celebrations. Condensed milk can be substituted for some of the cream or milk, but check the sweetness before reaching for additional sugar. Infuse 500ml cream/milk with 10cm cinnamon stick, 2 cracked cardamom pods and 3 cloves to the required strength. Strain the mixture and proceed from step **2**.

CINNAMON

Before vanilla became easily available, the British enjoyed their custard flavoured with cinnamon. The Spanish and Portuguese still do. Most of their custard tarts are cinnamon-flavoured, with or without the addition of citrus zest. Portugal's famous _pastéis de nata_ are flavoured with cinnamon and lemon, as is Spanish _crema catalana_ , although the latter comes in a cinnamon and orange version too. _Crema catalana_ is often considered interchangeable with crème brûlée. This might be true of modern versions, but not of many older recipes, like the one from the Fundació Institut Català de la Cucina passed on by Claudia Roden, which calls for milk, rather than cream, and adds cornflour. The Iberian mix of spice and citrus looks a bit basic compared to the recipe given by Hannah Glasse, the eighteenth-century English cookery writer, for an all-cream baked custard flavoured with cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, orange flower water, rosewater and the sherry-like tipple, sack. In her _New System of Domestic Cookery_ , published in 1806, Mrs Rundell adds bay to a cinnamon-nutmeg base and finishes it with peach-water and either brandy or ratafia, the almond-flavoured liqueur. For a straight cinnamon custard, infuse 500ml cream/milk with 2 × 10cm cinnamon sticks or 1 tsp ground cinnamon at step **1**.

GINGER

A mixture of gingers can give a layered result. Root ginger (the only kind, incidentally, used by Wolfgang Puck in his ginger crème brûlée) has a clean, citrusy character. Puck warms 2 slices of fresh ginger in 500ml cream and lets it steep for 15 minutes. Stem ginger lends a confectionery sweetness, thanks to its sugar content, and a very slightly soapy edge. Use 2–3 nuggets, sliced – bash them about a bit to release the flavour faster. On its own, ground ginger makes for an unpleasantly dry, peppery custard, but ¼– ½ tsp added to a crème brûlée flavoured with fresh or stem enhances the gingeriness of the other. Alternatively, a few pinches of mixed spice will give a flavour more reminiscent of gingerbread. Chef Philip Johnson serves a chilled ginger custard with pumpkin cheesecake and maple ice cream: a festival of custards. Consider using brown sugar for ginger crèmes, adding it to taste – it might take a little more than you would use for, say, vanilla.

RUM

There's a German cake called _Rahmapfelkuchen_ in which a simple rum-flavoured custard is baked over a cake batter mixed with raisins and apple slices. Sounds good to me, bar the raisins, which are to rum custard what midges are to the Scottish Highlands. (I got so fed up, as a kid, picking raisins out of Wall's rum-and-raisin, that I took to something no child should ever have to contemplate: turning down ice cream.) Swirl a tot of dark rum around your palate and you'll understand how natural a companion it is for custard, with its notes of vanilla, roasted coffee, orange zest, banana, nutmeg and caramel. I had been looking forward to making a rum crème brûlée, and had all the cream and yolks at the ready, but my bottle of Gosling's Black Seal – a Bermudan black rum with a deep, dark sweetness like the fudge sold in hell's gift shop – had become mysteriously depleted. All I had in any useable quantity was a half-bottle of Mount Gay, the golden Barbadian rum that smells like apricots steeped in a smoky single malt. Heaven mixed with ice-cold soda water and a spritz of lime, sipped at dusk on the maple-burl sundeck of one's 85-foot sailing yacht. But how would it register in a custard? I decided to enhance the Mount Gay with a measure of black rum's dark spiciness by infusing the custard with half a vanilla pod and a thick twig of cassia. Under its caramel roof the crème tasted like a rum-and-coke float. Pleasantly disconcerting how the paleness of the custard belied the deep, dark flavour: a nun with a piratical heart. Use 3 tbsp rum for 500ml cream.

STRAWBERRY

Custards, when combined with red-berry purées, can turn a rather disheartening shade. Anyone expecting the Barbie-pink of school custard, or the pastel prettiness of cheap ice cream, will be in for a shock. The colour will be closer to what upmarket paint manufacturers might call Dengue Flush. Or Gravestone Rose. A few drops of cochineal or red food colouring will make things easier on the eye. If you can't bear to fake it, take heart that the flavour will still be intensely pink, especially when the custard has been made with cream. Make a crème brûlée with it and it'll taste like a strawberry yogurt that's been to finishing school. Start by puréeing and straining 250g fresh, hulled strawberries, and measure out 200ml. Whisk 3 tbsp sugar with 4 egg yolks. Stir 300ml double cream into the yolk mixture, followed by the strawberry purée. Divide between 4 ramekins and continue from step ****of the starting point. Your custards should be just about set with a slight wobble in the centre. Cool and chill, then brûlée or top with a little whipped cream.

TRIPLE CRÈME

Vanilla is apt to barge in and dominate the room. I wanted to make something that tasted of cream, rather as _fior di latte_ ice cream lets the milk do the talking. The primrose-yellow clotted cream I remembered from childhood holidays in Cornwall would be just right for my _petits pots de crème_ : rich, with an almost savoury moreishness. Strangely, however, this was almost entirely absent from the clotted cream I picked up in the supermarket, possibly because it had been pasteurised in a way that the recklessly microbial cream of childhood memory didn't have to be. Still, it had a pleasantly nutty and mild cooked flavour that I thought I could enhance with the tang of crème fraîche. Made by adding bacteria to cow's-milk cream with a fat content of at least 30 per cent, crème fraîche is then left at a warm-ish temperature for about 12–16 hours to allow it to thicken and develop its characteristic flavour. Just as yogurt can be made by adding a small amount of live yogurt to milk, so you can make crème fraîche by adding a small amount of live yogurt to either double or whipping cream. This mixture of two creams is then added to a third type of cream – a good organic double. Follow the starting point, using 50g clotted cream, 100g crème fraîche and 350ml double cream gently warmed with 4 tbsp golden caster sugar. The result is an almost idealised cream flavour: Cadgwith tea rooms, circa 1982.

**Crème Anglaise**

A.k.a. custard. I use the French term to distinguish it from the other custards on the continuum. Compared to crème brûlée, this crème anglaise contains slightly more egg yolk and sugar – 1 yolk and 1 tbsp sugar per 100ml of milk/cream. Whole eggs can be used, but they make for a frothier – i.e. not particularly custardy – sauce. The same can be said of the addition of flour or cornflour; you lose the silkiness. The addition of starch means that you don't have to be so vigilant with the heat: leave out 1 egg yolk and whisk in 2 tsp cornflour at step **3**.

_For 575ml, enough for a sauce to serve 4–6_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

500ml milk **B**

1 vanilla pod **C**

5 egg yolks **D E**

5 tbsp (75g) sugar **F**

Pinch of salt

**1** Pour the milk into a saucepan. Slice open the vanilla pod and scrape the seeds into the milk. Put the pod in too, then bring the milk just up to the boil over a medium heat. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 10 minutes –1 hour before removing the pod.

**2** Reheat the milk until it's just beginning to bubble.

**3** In a heatproof bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar and pinch of salt.

Don't leave the eggs and sugar together unwhisked for too long, or solid specks of yolk will begin to form.

**4** Gradually stir the warm milk into the egg mixture, then pour into a clean pan.

**5** Cook the custard over a low–medium heat, stirring continuously and taking care not to let it boil, until it's thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Use a double-boiler or diffuser if your hob is too fierce. The time your crème anglaise takes to thicken will depend on the pan you're using, and the heat of your hob. Bank on around 10 minutes for this quantity. Be as patient and watchful as a cat.

**6** Strain through a sieve into a jug. Serve warm or cold.

Cover the surface with cling film, greaseproof or parchment paper to prevent a skin forming.

LEEWAY

**A** Leftover custard can be used as the base for ice creams, _petits pots au chocolat_ , bavarois and fruit fools, so err on the side of excess and expand your custard repertoire. You can scale up the recipe easily – 1 egg yolk and 1 tbsp sugar for every 100ml milk.

**B** For richness, substitute cream for some or all of the milk. Remember, though, that richer is not always better. Many chefs use a 50/50 mix of milk and cream. Note that vanilla, especially if you're using a pod, will itself create an impression of richness.

**C** If you're using vanilla extract (1–2 tsp) or any other liquid flavourings, stir them into the jugged custard at step **6**. You can skip step **1**.

**D** Add a few extra yolks for a fuller texture and a deeper shade of yellow.

**E** If you're short of eggs, use 1 whole in place of 2 yolks, but remember that the results will be frothier. Egg-free custard is made using cornflour in place of the eggs – custard powder consists of cornflour, colouring and vanilla flavouring.

**F** Sweetness is a matter of taste: I've encountered everything from 30g to 150g per 500ml milk.

Crème Anglaise → Flavours & Variations

BONE MARROW

A restaurateurs' favourite. At Dell'anima in New York's West Village, they spread bone-marrow custard on bruschetta and top it with gremolata, the garnish of lemon, garlic and parsley usually served with the better-known bone-with-a-hole dish, osso buco. While the flavour of bone marrow is mildly meaty, some chefs use it to enrich their desserts, for instance adding a little to vanilla-flavoured baked custards. Whether for sweet or savoury ends, put 1kg clean sliced veal or beef shank bones to soak in cold, salted water for half a day. Transfer to a pan and cover with fresh water, then bring to the boil and simmer for about 20 minutes, or roast them at 230°C for 15–25 minutes. When they are cool enough to handle, remove the marrow from the bones. This should yield at least 50–60g, enough to flavour or enrich a custard made with 500ml milk. Whisk it into the custard while it's still hot. Any remainder can be frozen.

CALVADOS

The hints of apple and dried fruit in Calvados are the clinchers in the custard served at The Delaunay with their apple _Scheiterhaufen_ , a Germano-Austrian bread pudding whose name roughly translates as the sort of pyre or stake-like structure reserved for condemned women. Anyone who baulks at a third course that sounds excremental and celebrates the burning of innocent homeopaths will, I'm afraid, be missing out. Order it in Vienna and you'll receive something pretty similar to English bread-and-butter pudding, usually with the addition of fresh fruit – apple slices are common. Calvados custard is also good with mince pies, Christmas pudding or made into an ice cream to serve alongside Normandy buckwheat crêpes and apple slices fried in butter. Stir 2 tbsp Calvados into a finished custard made with 500ml milk or cream.

CARAMEL

Tapped from their moulds, the crème caramels of my childhood quivered primrose on their plates, their tops a glossy, semi-translucent amber. I fell every time for their fragrance of hot caramel, only to put a spoonful in my mouth and discover the texture was not to my liking. I've come round to it since, but reserve a special place in my repertoire for custard _flavoured_ , as opposed to topped, with caramel; it doesn't look as enticing, but tastes terrific. Caramel used to be a pretty popular flavouring, probably because it was cheap. It's now back in vogue, mainly thanks to the wild popularity of the salted variety. Boil 4 tbsp sugar and 2 tbsp water together. When the mixture turns a golden, toffee-ish colour, carefully – it will splatter – pour into 500ml _hot_ milk and stir until dissolved. Follow the starting point from step **3**, adding 1 tsp vanilla extract at step **6**. For salted caramel custard, stir in about ½ tsp salt flakes, also at step **6**, then add pinch by pinch to taste; salinophiles may like to keep going to a full teaspoon. A simpler (if slightly inferior) toffee-ish flavour can be achieved by using brown sugar in place of white, rather than making a caramel – as for the butterscotch pudding.

CHICKEN STOCK & LEMON

Egg plus lemon and a light stock equals avgolemono, a Greek sauce, or, further diluted, soup. The egg thickens the chicken stock. The lemon keeps things interesting. To what extent is debateable. As a soup, it's okay, if a little unexciting – avgolemonotonous. It's far better as a sauce, especially when served with globe artichoke, asparagus, stuffed vine leaves or meatballs. Its sweet-and-sour taste and silky texture make it a low-fat alternative to mayonnaise, or even hollandaise if it's made thick with a tasty, unctuous stock. Whisk the finely grated zest and juice of 1 lemon into the egg yolks (instead of the sugar in the starting point) and slowly add the warm stock. Pour into a pan and simmer over a low heat until the mixture thickens. As with any custard, you can play faster and looser with the heat if the mixture has been stabilised with a little starch: flour and cornflour are sometimes used, and for the soup version, a small quantity of semolina, rice, vermicelli or tiny pasta shapes, like orzo, will do the same job. Similar egg and lemon mixtures are found across Europe and the Middle East – for example, Spanish _agristada_ , Turkish _terbiyali_ and Syrian _beddah b'lemuneh_. If you've been to Greece, or a Greek restaurant, you've probably been served avgolemono in one form or other. Visitors to Rome, on the other hand, are likely to have tasted pretty much everything the city has to offer before they get around to ordering _tagliatelle alla bagna brusca_ , an obscure pasta dish that incorporates an avgolemono-like sauce. The name translates as 'noodles in a brutal bath', which sounds like a caption penned by a photographer specialising in mafia crime scenes. It is, in fact, a Jewish dish, cooked, in order to preserve the rules of the Sabbath, on a Friday and served the next day at room temperature. Some sources identify _bagna brusca_ as the precursor of the cold pasta salad – the sort of gluey, impacted fusilli sold in supermarket chiller cabinets. The brutal bath begat the clammy tub.

CHOCOLATE

What do chocolate cheesecake, chocolate crème brûlée and chocolate ice cream have in common? They're guaranteed to disappoint. Ooh, you think. Cheesecake and chocolate! Twice as good as just cheesecake. And then it turns out to be half as good. You're on safer ground with _petits pots au chocolat:_ so chocolate-y and so _petit_ you'll be left wanting more. Pour a warm custard made as per our starting point, using 50/50 milk and cream, over 150g chopped good dark chocolate. Leave for 1 minute, then stir until it turns a uniform, glossy brown. Pour into pots and, when cool, top with a dollop of whipped cream. Some pâtissiers call this mixture chocolate _cremeux_. Stick to the vanilla stipulated in the starting point, or substitute the appropriate hard aromatics, extracts or liqueurs to make mocha, chocolate-orange, chocolate-mint or chocolate-cinnamon versions. My favourite chocolate custard confection, however, has to be the chocolate sponge with chocolate custard that was served in my school dining room. No monstrous theme-restaurant portion of Death by Chocolate or Double Chocolate Mental Cake has ever given me as much satisfaction. The sponge was dry, slightly salty, and as square as a geography teacher. The custard, poured, or rather dislodged, from a dinged aluminium jug, was a shade of brown that said institutional way before it said chocolate. It should have been called 'sensible chocolate pudding'. And yet this was its secret. Against the plainness of the sponge, the chocolate flavour had a job to do – that is, to make it a treat. Relive my youth by making the chocolate cake, baking all of the batter in a 20cm square tin for 25 minutes. Don't bother to ice it. Make the custard by whisking 3 tbsp sifted cocoa powder into the egg yolks and sugar at step **3**.

COCONUT

Hugely popular in Thailand, where coconut custards are typically steamed. They're usually made with coconut milk, lots of sugar and some freshly grated coconut. In Brazil, a similarly sweet coconut custard is made with 6 egg yolks, 400g sugar, 250ml coconut milk and 125ml water. They call it _baba de moca_ – baby's dribble. Toasted coconut is an excellent variation, made by toasting 8 tbsp unsweetened desiccated coconut, adding it to the 500ml milk at step **1** , and heating it gently, then giving it about an hour to infuse. Remember to strain it. You want your custard to be silky.

EGG NOG

A bavarois is a crème anglaise lightened by whisked egg whites, whipped cream or both, and set with gelatine. I make an egg-nog-flavoured bavarois and pour it into a pre-baked, sweet-pastry tart case for a suitably festive-tasting alternative to Christmas pudding. The first time I made it, both my father-in-law and my husband complained that it wasn't boozy enough. A year later I doubled my initial 3 tbsp rum, but have a suspicion that they were still sneaking into the kitchen and pouring an extra capful over their slices. If 6 tbsp makes my loved ones sound like closet tipplers, take note that _Good Housekeeping_ magazine recommends 10 tbsp for the same quantity of cream, a proportion that might not sit so easily with the tricky bit of crochet on the following page. Maybe best to start low, and add incrementally to taste. Note that bavarois also contains raw egg, so all in all it's pretty much off-limits to anyone who's very young, very old, frail, pregnant, who can't drink, won't drink, is avoiding carbs or hasn't got room for a pudding. It might just be you, in your lopsided paper hat, alone with your booze pie and a party popper. Make a custard to the crème anglaise method, using the yolks of 3 eggs (save the whites for later), 300ml double cream, 75g sugar and 1 tsp vanilla extract (or a pod, if you prefer). While the custard is still warm, stir in 3 soaked and squeezed leaves of gelatine. Then add 3 tbsp each of brandy and dark rum and ¼ nutmeg, grated. Whisk the reserved egg whites to firm peaks and fold into the cooled custard mixture. Whip 150ml double cream and fold that in too. Pour into little glasses, or into a deep 20cm blind-baked tart case ( **here** ), or over a ginger-biscuit base of the same size. Grate more nutmeg over the top. You can omit the brandy and use twice the rum, or vice versa – pretty much anything goes.

HONEY

The National Honey Board in the US suggests making a honey custard for French toast, fried in butter and served with a scattering of pecans. As a rule, pouring custard is usually a yolks-only affair, but _Pleyn Delit_ , a modern collection of medieval recipes, includes a dish that might have been named by Edmund Blackadder: _strawberyes with crème bastard_. Use 4 egg whites per 500ml milk, flavour with 4 tbsp honey, 4 tsp sugar and a pinch of salt, and pour over rinsed, hulled, slightly sweetened strawberries. I made my _bastard_ with a mild honey and the result was ghostly white and blandly sweet – like custard stripped of its essential custardiness, or one of those obsolete tinned milks with carefully vague names like Magic Topping.

**Ice Cream**

The previous point on the custard continuum, crème anglaise, can be frozen to make ice cream, but you may find it a little lacking in sweetness. The only difference, in fact, between the starting points for crème anglaise and ice cream is the higher sugar content in the latter, plus the addition of some cream mixed in with the milk. (Make this with milk only and you'll have an Italian gelato.) You may also prefer to double the quantity of vanilla, as flavours become muted in the freezing process.

_For about 550ml – the same amount as a premium tub_

INGREDIENTS

350ml milk **A B**

150ml cream **A B**

1–2 vanilla pods **C D**

5 egg yolks **B E F**

100g sugar **G**

Pinch of salt

**1** Pour the milk and cream into a saucepan. Slice open the vanilla pod(s) and scrape the seeds into the milk. Put the pod(s) in too, then bring the milk just up to the boil over a medium heat. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 10 minutes–1 hour before removing the pod(s).

**2** Reheat the milk until it's just beginning to bubble.

**3** In a heatproof bowl, whisk the egg yolks, sugar and salt together.

Don't leave the eggs and sugar together unwhisked for too long, or solid specks of yolk will begin to form.

**4** Gradually stir the warm milk and cream into the egg mixture, then pour into a clean pan.

**5** Cook the custard over a low–medium heat, stirring continuously and taking care not to let it boil, until it's thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Use a double-boiler or diffuser if your hob is too fierce. The time your custard takes to thicken will depend on the pan you're using, and the heat of your hob. Bank on around 10 minutes for this quantity.

**6** Cool as quickly as possible, straining the custard through a sieve into a bowl set in a larger bowl or sink full of iced or cold water. Stir regularly to encourage cooling and prevent a skin from forming. Transfer the custard to the fridge as soon as it's no longer warm, placing a circle of greaseproof paper or baking parchment on top – again, to prevent a skin from forming.

Chilling before freezing will help to create smaller ice crystals, and therefore a softer texture, in the finished ice cream.

**7** The chilled custard can be frozen in an ice-cream machine. Alternatively, still-freeze the custard by pouring it into a plastic container (20cm square or thereabouts will be ideal for this quantity). Cover the surface with cling film, apply the lid and freeze for about 1½ hours, or until the ice cream is frozen around the edges. Remove and mash/whip with a fork, or use an electric whisk, to break up the ice crystals. Replace the lid and return to the freezer, repeating the process two or three times at hourly intervals until an ice-cream consistency is achieved. Add any solid flavourings when the custard is well into its churn, but still soft enough for them to distribute easily, or, if you're using the still-freezing process, on the final stir.

Still-frozen ice cream should be removed from the freezer and left at room temperature for 20–30 minutes to soften before serving (maybe less if it contains alcohol). Precisely how long it needs will depend on the ingredients and the respective temperatures of your freezer and room.

LEEWAY

**A** All milk or all cream is fine.

**B** For richness, use extra egg yolks, or more cream than milk.

**C** If you're using vanilla extract (1 tbsp) or any other liquid flavourings, stir them in at the end of step **5** when the custard has cooled a bit.

**D** If you're using alcohol rather than vanilla as a flavouring, 2 tbsp spirit or 3 tbsp fortified wine (or liqueur of around 20% ABV) are the suggested maximums for the quantity here. The more you add, the more you compromise the ice cream's ability to freeze.

**E** Some cooks would use 6 egg yolks, others fewer. The more yolks, the richer and more egg-flavoured the ice cream will be.

**F** Egg-free ice cream can be made with a cornflour-based custard. Alternatively, seek out recipes for Philadelphia-style ice cream. That's Philadelphia the city, by the way, not the brand.

**G** Some might add another 25g sugar. Reduce the sugar too much and the ice cream will lose its smoothness, as sugar promotes smaller ice crystals. Replace 25g of the sugar with 1 tbsp golden syrup for an even softer set.

Ice Cream → Flavours & Variations

ALMOND

Bitter almond is a particularly good flavouring for an ice cream to accompany stone-fruit puddings like plum crumble, or to fill choux buns topped with flaked almonds and a shake of icing sugar. Add 1 tsp almond essence or 2 tbsp Amaretto at the end of step **5**. Burnt almond is a variation that used to be very popular for ice cream. _That'll_ be a good recipe for my book, I thought – anyone can burn stuff. It turned out to a bit more complicated than that. Indeed, it was considered fancy enough to serve at Abraham Lincoln's second inauguration ball in 1865. In early versions, blanched, chopped almonds were added to melted sugar, and the mixture caramelised. Once cooled and set, it was ground, mixed into a vanilla-laced custard, and frozen. These days we'd probably call this praline ice cream: add at least 100g praline powder at step **7**. Another old recipe suggests layering it with orange sorbet in an ice-cream mould, and serving in slices with bitter-almond angel cake. By the time Fannie Merritt Farmer's classic _Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_ was published, in 1896, the recipe had become a deal simpler – Farmer just adds blanched almonds to a caramel custard. Not really burnt almond at all. Boiled almond. Which has a less than presidential ring.

BROWN BREAD

Brown-bread ice cream dates back to at least 1768, when M. Emy included a recipe in his _L'Art de bien faire les glaces d'office_ , and it remains very popular in Ireland. But best not make this for anyone who goes white-lipped at the sight of toast crumbs in the butter. Spread 150g de-crusted slices of brown bread with 50g butter. Sprinkle over 100g sugar (white or brown) and, if you like, an additional 1 tsp mixed spice, 1 tsp cinnamon, or both. Cut the sugary, buttered bread into pieces, place on a baking tray and toast in a 180°C oven until crisp, dry and ready to be blitzed into breadcrumbs. Fold the duly blitzed crumbs into the custard towards the end of step **7**. Historically, the custard for the ice cream was enhanced with noyau, an almond-flavoured liqueur, or a cherry-flavoured kiss of Maraschino, but these days it's more likely to be flavoured with vanilla, with the optional addition of a jigger of rum. A more unusual recipe calls for lemon juice and a large quantity of sugar to be mixed in with the cream-soaked crumbs, recalling the filling for treacle tart.

CREAM CHEESE

Alain Ducasse serves a cream-cheese ice cream with a berry compote and crunchy topping, but it's so glorious you might want to serve it with nothing else. It is to vanilla ice cream what d'Isigny is to butter. Follow the starting point, using 50/50 milk and cream, 3 egg yolks, 150g sugar and no vanilla. Once the custard is thick, and while it's still warm, thoroughly whisk in 100g soft cream cheese and 1 tsp lemon juice; chill, then freeze in the usual way. To make the crunchy topping, rub 75g unsalted butter into 100g plain flour, then stir in 150g caster sugar and 50g ground almonds. Spread out the mixture on a greased baking tray and bake at 180°C for about 15–20 minutes until crisp and golden brown. Leave to cool. Spoon some berry compote into 4 serving glasses and top with a scoop of the ice cream, along with a scattering of the crunchy topping.

LEMON

In her 'Very Good Old Fashioned Boiled Custard', the Victorian food writer Eliza Acton infuses milk with lemon zest for 30 minutes and stirs in a wine glass of good brandy at the end. When Acton was writing, lemon vied with vanilla as the most popular flavour for ice cream. In the modern gelateria, sadly, lemon is relegated to the sorbet section. Revive the tradition at home by making the wonderful, and wonderfully simple, lemon ice cream I came across in John Thorne's _The Outlaw Cook_. Thorne attributes the recipe to several writers, but makes his own adjustment, meaning the ice cream doesn't require regular stirring as it freezes. Stir the juice and finely grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon with 70g sugar until the sugar dissolves. Stir in 180ml single cream, transfer to a container so the mixture is 2–3cm deep, and place in the freezer. That's it: 3–4 hours later it should be ready. The ice cream will need 5–10 minutes at room temperature to soften before serving. I can't think of another dish that lays the components of lemon flavour so bare – with the simple lemon, herbal and floral notes successively revealing themselves as the ice cream starts to melt in your mouth. Then the sourness rises and your palate is refreshed for another hit. Other excellent recipes for basic fruit, sugar and cream (i.e. custard-free) ices include strawberry and balsamic in _Ices_ , by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir, and redcurrant in _Lola's Ice Creams and Sundaes_ , by Morfudd Richards. Note, however, that these versions are frozen in the usual way, rather than simply being placed in the freezer and left alone.

MASTIC

Popular in Greece and Turkey, where it's used to flavour ice cream and milk puddings, mastic comes from the _Pistacia lentiscus_ tree. It's a relative of the cashew but has more in common, flavour-wise, with the pine nut, or the note of resin in retsina, reminiscent of the evergreen smells that waft onto Corfu's pine-fringed beaches in summer. (Lawrence Durrell couldn't get enough of retsina, insisting that you could drink gallons of the stuff without fear of a hangover. Also that it made you 'high-spirited' rather than drunk. I love retsina too, but not enough to test his theory properly.) Crystals of mastic resin are easily available online. Freeze 2 pea-size crystals for 20 minutes, then grind with 1 tsp sugar using a pestle and mortar. Stir into the custard at the end of step **5**, then chill and freeze the ice cream as per our starting point. Mastic ice cream is often served with fruit compotes, but as its pine note is so evocative of Christmas trees, try serving it with mince pies or plum pudding.

MINT

In the US, the mint-choc combination crops up in a 'grasshopper', a cocktail of crème de menthe, white crème de cacao and cream just as likely to appear on the dessert as the drinks menu. Grasshopper pie has a chocolate-biscuit crust and a bavarois filling flavoured with crème de menthe. Anything grasshopper-flavoured will, in colour, probably be the shocking green we Brits associate with mint, which makes it all the more surprising to discover that peppermint ice cream is often coloured reddish-pink, or red and white, Stateside. If you're curious to try this sort, add about 6 tbsp crushed red-coloured, mint-flavoured boiled sweets towards the end of churning, or, in the case of still-freezing, on the last whisking. If the sweets alone don't furnish enough peppermint flavour, gradually add ¼ tsp peppermint oil to the chilled custard at step **6** until it acquires the right intensity (peppermint flavours vary widely in strength). Use garden mint for a less punchy, more nuanced flavour: add 75g chopped leaves and stalks to the 500ml milk and cream once warmed, then leave to infuse for 10 minutes. Strain and continue from step **2**.

OLIVE OIL

In a hotel on the outskirts of Ronda, next to an old Arab bathhouse at the foot of the gorge, I sat in the garden, fanned by the breeze through the palm trees, nibbling on cubes of manchego and sipping a watermelon juice the colour of the inside of my eyelids. Time passed, slowly, in the Spanish fashion. A clock tower, somewhere, tolled its assent to a sundowner. I ordered some fino. It came in a frosted glass with a dish of self-satisfied olives. I watched the shadow of a horse elongate in a parched field. And then my husband said, come on. We're going to dinner. What's wrong with eating here? I said. We're on holiday, he said. We've got to _try_ places. Our respective positions, vis-à-vis _trying places on holiday_ , constitute the sort of impassable philosophical gorge without which our marriage would, no doubt, be unpleasantly cloying and consensual. Said positions being a) accepting the foreclosure of possibility involved in making any sort of decision, in favour of actually maybe just sitting still for a second and enjoying yourself (mine) vs. b) caving in to the neurotic guidebook-fuelled fear of missing out and quite possibly ruining the evening for everybody (his). I relented. Resentfully. The thing about staying at the foot of the Ronda gorge is: going out to dinner involves _scaling a cliff-face_. There are steps – but about five hundred of them. Fine, I thought. If you're going to unseat me from paradise and make me walk a vertical mile for a dinner of uncertain quality, that dinner better be damn good. We arrived at my husband's chosen restaurant. The walls were covered with bullfighting posters and car-boot-sale oil paintings of flamenco dancers straining out of their boleros. We were the only diners. The Spanish eat late, said my husband. It's a quarter to ten, I said. A plate of _pata negra_ arrived. It was dark as a blood clot and pin-striped with fat. Not bad. Next, an unseasonal oxtail stew, excused by my hoof uphill. Not bad either. And then dessert arrived. A rectangular palette of four ice creams: one flavoured with yogurt, one with cream cheese, another with something I've forgotten, and a fourth with an olive oil that made each spoonful taste of fruit and grass and pepper, like a picnic suspended in cream and frozen in time. When I eventually put down my spoon I realised that the restaurant was full to the very last table, as if the empty room had been a desolate dream. Whisk 75ml olive oil into the cooled custard before you chill it. You may need to whisk it again before you freeze it. Clearly, you need an oil with a particularly pronounced, complex flavour – if, when trying a drop on your index finger, you're thinking more 'oil' than 'olive', choose again.

PARMESAN

The Parmesan ice-cream sandwich is one of Ferran Adrià's most celebrated ideas. The ice cream, which is savoury, contains no sugar or egg, just cream and cheese, and is served between two Parmesan tuiles with a dab of lemon marmalade. Conversely, an eighteenth-century cookbook, _The Complete Confectioner_ , by Frederick Nutt, gives a recipe for a _sweet_ Parmesan ice cream, calling for 6 eggs, 275ml sugar syrup, 550ml double cream and 75g grated Parmesan. The finished custard is sieved before being cooled, then frozen. What better friend for an over-ripe fig?

PASTIS

I use pastis to make ice cream and serve it as a coupe with a sharp blackcurrant sorbet. Not for the faint-hearted: as strident a pair as rival madames in a magistrate's court. Add 1–2 tbsp pastis at step **6**, tasting after the first tablespoon and then adding more to taste. Naturally, any aniseed spirit will do. If you have several to hand, try them one by one and see if you have a preference. The differences will be subtle, but more distinct when tried side-by-side than you might imagine; like gin, the various brands of pastis, ouzo and arak each rely on proprietary blends of spices, flowers and aromatics. Note, however, that sambuca is a liqueur, and so will be much sweeter – it's made with the essential oil of fennel, meaning it retains a natural fragrance of the herb, according to the legendary London-based bartender Salvatore Calabrese.

PISTACHIO

The test of a good gelateria. If the pistachio ice cream is no good, go elsewhere. If you're self-sufficient in your ice-cream needs, consider buying a jar of pistachio paste: it will cost more than the equivalent amount of raw nuts, but the hard work of roasting (essential for intensifying the flavour) and pounding is done for you – you'll need about 100g. If the paste proves tricky to find, try grinding 100g shelled, skinned, roasted unsalted nuts with a few pinches of salt. Place in a pan with 350ml milk and bring up to boiling point, then leave to infuse for an hour. Add the 150ml cream and 2 tsp mild honey to the pistachio milk and scald again, then proceed from step **2**. At the end of step **6**, stir in more cream – 250ml whipping or double – then chill and freeze as per the starting point. Note that in commercially produced ice cream, pistachio flavour is almost always supplemented with vanilla or almond essence, which is like dabbing Eau de Guerlain behind your ears and then spraying yourself with Right Guard. A far better and more natural enhancement is a little freshly grated nutmeg.

SESAME

At Roka, in London, I ate an astounding cherry blossom and black sesame dessert. It arrived on a grey ceramic half-pipe like a prop from a miniature skate park. Under a roof of jelly the colour of old Sellotape sat a narrow block of black-sesame ice cream, surrounded by chippings of smoke-coloured marshmallow and sheets of shattered sugar. Amid this peculiarly Japanese scene of dereliction lay four pink cherry blossom macaroons, two of which were topped with scarlet domes of cherry jelly that looked like red egg yolks and were just as runny when you cut into them. It was without doubt the oddest dessert I'd ever seen. But the flavour wasn't entirely unfamiliar: the nutty sesame and sharp cherry recalled the classic childhood combination of peanut butter and jelly, but with greater subtlety. Toast 6 tbsp black sesame seeds in a dry frying pan for a few minutes, taking care not to let them burn. Leave to cool, then grind using a pestle and mortar. Make up a vanilla ice cream as per our starting point, adding the ground seeds at the end of step **6**. Chill and freeze as normal. Alternatively, ready-toasted sesame seeds are available in Japanese and Chinese groceries, or you could try your luck with ground-up Sesame Snaps for a golden sesame praline.

SWEETCORN

There are offbeat ice-cream flavours, like asparagus or garlic, that must be eaten to be believed. Not so sweetcorn. Anyone who's gnawed on a hot, sugary cob slathered in creamy butter will see the potential. Leave out the vanilla for this one if you like. Cook 250g fresh or frozen kernels in 500ml milk for 15 minutes. (Don't use tinned if it's a sweet custard you're after – the sulphurousness imparted by the canning process is incontestably savoury.) Check the milk for depth of flavour, then proceed from step **2**, straining the milk through a sieve onto the egg mixture; taste for sweetness. Retaining the kernels and stirring them into the finished ice cream is an option. Or, if you don't fancy that, add them to cornbread, or mix them with a thick batter to make fritters.

Ice Cream → Other Directions

ICE-CREAM CAKE

Softened ice cream mixed with glacé fruit, nuts and/or chocolate, layered on sponge cake and frozen then decorated.

ON A WARM WAFFLE

See here

ICE-CREAM LOTI

Singaporean ice-cream sandwich, made with multi-coloured sweet bread.

COKE FLOAT

Add a scoop of ice cream to a fizzy drink, milkshake or cocktail.

ICE-CREAM SANDWICH

ICE-CREAM BOMBE

Three layers of different-flavoured ice cream surrounding a grated-chocolate centre.

ICE-CREAM TRUFFLES

Roll small scoops of ice cream into balls and dust with cocoa powder.

**Pastry Cream**

Add a little flour to the custard for ice cream and it becomes pastry cream, otherwise known as crème pâtissière (or 'creme pat' if you're in the restaurant trade). It's used for millefeuille, pastry horns, Boston cream pie, choux pastries, fruit tarts and Danish pastries. In the US it's eaten by the spoonful as a pudding called 'pudding'. Fold whipped cream into pastry cream to make crème diplomat, which has a lighter texture, although will dilute any added flavourings unless the cream is flavoured too.

_For about 600ml – enough to fill 12×15cm éclairs, 24 profiteroles, 8 choux buns or a 17–23cm sponge sandwich cake_

INGREDIENTS

500ml milk **A**

1 vanilla pod **B**

100g sugar **C**

5 egg yolks **D E**

20g cornflour **F**

20g plain flour **F**

Pinch of salt

2 tbsp unsalted butter – optional **G**

**1** Pour the milk into a saucepan. Slice open the vanilla pod and scrape the seeds into the milk. Put the pod in too, then bring the milk just up to the boil over a medium heat. Remove from the heat and allow the flavour to develop for 10 minutes – 1 hour before removing the pod.

**2** Add half the sugar to the milk and heat until it's just beginning to bubble.

**3** In a heatproof bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, the rest of the sugar, the flours and salt.

**4** Gradually stir the warm milk into the egg mixture, then pour into a clean pan.

**5** Cook over a low–medium heat, stirring continuously until the mixture comes to the boil. Simmer, stirring frequently, until thick and firm – about 2 minutes – then remove from the heat.

**6** Pass through a sieve if you think it needs it.

**7** Leave to cool a little, stir in the butter or any liquid flavourings, then cover with cling film or a light dusting of caster sugar to prevent a skin from forming. Pastry cream will keep in the fridge for up to 3 days.

LEEWAY

**A** Semi-skimmed milk is acceptable. Skimmed is too thin.

**B** If you're using vanilla extract (2 tsp) or any other liquid flavouring, rather than a vanilla pod, skip step **1** and stir it in gradually at the end of step **5**.

**C** The 100g given here is a standard quantity of sugar. Increase or decrease it to taste.

**D** Make a less unctuous pastry cream using whole eggs in place of some of the yolks – say 2 eggs and 2 yolks per 500ml milk.

**E** Some cooks use only 4 yolks for this quantity of milk, others as many as 6.

**F** Some recipes call for only cornflour, others only plain.

**G** There are chefs who add anything from a few tablespoons to 75g whipped, unsalted butter to the warm pastry cream to lend it a very soft texture. With 250g butter added, crème patissière becomes crème mousseline.

Pastry Cream → Flavours & Variations

ANISEED

Liquorice ice cream is fit for the gods, but the spectacle of my husband's mouth suddenly blackening reminded me of poor Wikus in _District 9_ , after he's vomited his first gobbet of alien plasma. Unless you're doing the catering for Comic-Con International, probably best to use aniseed or pastis rather than actual liquorice to flavour custards. And don't take any nonsense from self-proclaimed aniseed-o-phobes. Just spring it on them by using it as a pastry-cream filling for profiteroles, retaining the classic chocolate sauce, as suggested by David Lebovitz. Add 1 heaped tsp lightly toasted aniseed in place of the vanilla at step **1**, and leave to infuse for at least 30 minutes. Then strain and continue from step **2**.

BUTTERSCOTCH

I have a rigorously unresearched feeling that butterscotch is a less popular flavouring than it was when I was a kid. In any case, if you make it from scratch, for a pastry cream, 'pudding', ice cream or crème anglaise, you'll be reminded just how permanent a place it deserves in our affections. Like vanilla and chocolate, it's a flavour that it takes some effort of contrariness to dislike. In the US it's still a big deal, especially in the South, where butterscotch custard pie is a traditional favourite. It's not uncommon to augment the butterscotch with vanilla, whiskey or a little bit of both. The 'scotch' in 'butterscotch' has nothing to do with whiskey, incidentally: it's thought to be etymologically related to 'scorched'. The 'butter' in 'butterscotch', on the other hand, has everything to do with the butter traditionally used in butterscotch confectionery, and butter is often added to pastry cream after its final sieve (but while it's still warm). The characteristic butterscotch flavour comes from the type of sugar used. Simply substitute soft dark brown sugar for the standard white stuff, and add ½ tsp vanilla extract at the end of step **5**. Don't forget a pinch of salt – in fact, make it two pinches.

CHESTNUT

Go ahead and boil, peel and purée fresh chestnuts yourself, but the pre-cooked, vacuum-packed sort are almost as good. Or, if you have a French deli to hand, simply open a tin of _crème de marrons_ , which is not only pre-cooked and pre-puréed but pre-sugared to boot. In Japan, chestnut is a popular flavouring for sweets. A manufacturer called Kobe-Fugetsudo makes a custard-filled waffle that to Western eyes looks like a sun-tanned monkfish suffering a particularly nasty attack of gastric reflux. There's a choice of vanilla, green tea or chestnut pastry cream, the latter including a whole chestnut, which pokes out like a lolling tongue. The Italian-American chef Mario Batali gives a recipe for _sformato di castagne_ , a savoury custard made with puréed, cooked dried chestnuts and a mixture of fontina, Parmesan and nutmeg. For a more classic, sweet pastry cream, gradually whisk in 100g chestnut purée towards the end of step **5**.

HAZELNUT

The Spanish make a simple dessert, similar to pastry cream, called _natillas de avellanas – natillas_ being the diminutive of the Spanish word for cream, _nata_ , and thus roughly translating as 'little cream'. Or 'creamy-weam'. ( _Avellanas_ are hazelnuts.) It's essentially a pastry cream with brandy, vanilla and finely ground, blanched hazelnuts added at the end. _Salsa di nocciole_ is a similar Italian dish described in _The Silver Spoon_ : 100g toasted, skinned, ground hazelnuts are folded into 500ml pastry cream with 3 tbsp brandy. Imagine _that_ as a cake filling. As a shortcut, and for smoother results, you could replace the hazelnuts and brandy with 2 tbsp Frangelico liqueur.

MALTED MILK

Momofuku, David Chang's restaurant chain, has moved to trademark Cereal Milk™, made with a mixture of toasted cornflakes, milk, brown sugar and salt. Brown-bread ice cream works on a similar principle, with the grilled, sugared breadcrumbs lending a moreish flavour of toasted cereal. It's a firm favourite in Boston, where the breadcrumbs are sometimes omitted in favour of the breakfast cereal Grape Nuts, those tiny nuggets of wholegrain wheat and malted barley that look like gravel in a model-railway siding and make the leftover milk in the bowl taste like cold Horlicks. Which takes us back to intellectual property law. A century ago, Horlicks had a go at its own language-grab, objecting to a product called 'Hedley's Malted Milk' in a landmark case (Horlicks v. Summerskill, 1917). The judge ruled that, as Horlicks never referred to 'malted milk' without appending the brand name, it was merely a descriptive term, and not a trademark – which is, in turn, perhaps a reason why the brand has taken on the status of proprietary eponym, like Coke or Viagra. Feel free, in that case, to call your malted-milk pastry cream malted-milk pastry cream. It's a mighty flavour in its own right, but is often added as a secondary flavour to shakes – banana, strawberry, chocolate, peanut and (less commonly these days) orange, ginger or egg nog. Like vanilla, it lends strength to other flavours' arms, but it also has nutritional value, and is less limited to pairings with sweet stuff. _The Practical Druggist New Dispensatory_ of 1908, for example, includes the recipe for a Hot Oyster Malt, a mixture of Horlicks, oyster bouillon and celery salt, with an optional topping of whipped cream. No danger of anyone trying to trademark that. For a malted-milk pastry cream or pudding, whisk 50g Horlicks into the yolks, flour and sugar at step **3**.

TEA

Green tea is a common flavouring for pastry cream in Japan. It might seem novel to western palates, but in the early nineteenth century cookbooks like _The Italian Confectioner_ by W.A. Jarrin included recipes for both green- and black-tea ice creams. In _The Art of Cookery_ , from 1836, John Mollard suggests infusing a pint (about 570ml) cream with coriander seeds, cinnamon and lemon zest for 10 minutes, before adding 150ml strong green tea and sugar. The mixture is then strained onto 6 egg whites and returned to the hob until thickened. Mollard serves this cold, pudding-style, with ratafia biscuits, but amaretti, being similarly almond-flavoured, would make a fine substitution. For a pastry cream flavoured with matcha green tea, use 8–10g powder. Skip step **1**. Instead make a paste with the tea and a little of the scalded milk at step **4**, then thoroughly stir in the remainder of the warm milk and add to the yolks, flour and sugar. For an Earl Grey custard, treat 25–50g loose leaves as you would a vanilla pod – add them to the pan of milk and scald. Leave to infuse for a few minutes, tasting for depth of flavour. Beware of leaving it too long, for fear of imparting a tannic quality. You don't want your custard tasting of old nails.

TOASTED WHITE CHOCOLATE

Gourmands turn their nose up at white chocolate on the basis that it isn't really chocolate at all – just a cloying confection of cocoa butter, milk solids and sugar. But it comes into its own in custard, primarily because it tastes overwhelmingly of vanilla. Follow our starting point, stirring in 100g chopped good-quality white chocolate at the end of step **5**, while the pastry cream is still hot. Or try the version of Ferran Adrià's dessert **here**. In recent years, several recipes for toasted white chocolate have been doing the rounds. Its fake-tan complexion gives it the look of Caramac, Nestlé's caramel-flavoured condensed-milk bar, but it tastes far more refined. You're essentially making toffee with highly luxurious cocoa butter. Ideally, use a white chocolate with a minimum 30% cocoa-butter content; 20% cocoa butter will work, but the result will be a bit chalky. Break 100g into fragments, scatter over a parchment-lined baking tray, and toast in a low oven (120°C), pushing the pieces around from time to time to make sure they melt and brown evenly – this will take about 35–45 minutes. Stir the soft toasted chocolate into the hot pastry cream at step ****and pipe into puff-pastry horns.

Pastry Cream → Other Directions

FILLED DOUGHNUT

MILLEFEUILLE

BOSTON CREAM PIE

Yellow butter cake sandwiched with pastry cream and topped with a chocolate glaze.

GÂTEAU BASQUE

A cake filled with pastry cream and boozy cherries.

BOUGATSA

Greek filo parcel filled with pastry cream flavoured with vanilla, rosewater or orange flower water.

FRENCH FRUIT TART

A sweet-pastry case filled with pastry cream and fruit, then glazed.

DANISH PASTRY

BANANA CREAM PIE

**Crema Fritta**

The custard for _crema fritta_ contains more flour and a little less egg than pastry cream. When it cools, it achieves a firm-enough set to be cut into shapes and deep-fried; in more elaborate versions, grated marzipan and crushed macaroons are mixed into the custard before it is left to set. The unfried custard recalls the thick roux used to make croquettes, or the thick mixture of cooked milk and semolina used to make gnocchi alla Romana. In Italy _crema fritta_ is sometimes eaten as part of a _fritto misto_. The French call it _crème frite_ , the Spanish _leche frita_ , and _The Oxford Companion to Food_ an 'ice-cream fritter'.

_For a 20cm square dish, to serve 4–6_

INGREDIENTS

Flavourings, such as vanilla, citrus zest, liqueurs – optional **A B**

500ml milk

2 eggs **C**

50g sugar **D**

100g plain flour

Pinch of salt

Beaten egg **C** and breadcrumbs **E** for coating

Vegetable oil for frying **F**

Icing sugar for dusting

**1** If using a vanilla pod, citrus zest, other hard aromatics or ground spices, pour 400ml of the milk into a pan, add the flavourings and warm to just below boiling point over a medium heat. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 10 minutes –1 hour. Then discard or strain out flavourings.

Any liquid flavourings are added later, at step **5**.

**2** Heat the milk until it's just beginning to bubble.

**3** In a heatproof bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, flour, salt and the remaining 100ml milk to make a paste.

**4** Gradually stir the warm milk into the egg mixture, then pour into a clean pan.

**5** Cook over a low–medium heat, stirring continuously until it comes to the boil. Allow to simmer, stirring frequently, for 5 minutes until very thick and firm. Remove from the heat. Gradually stir in liquid flavourings, if using.

**6** Pour into a greased 20cm square dish. Leave to cool and set at room temperature.

Give it at least 2 hours. Once cool, it can be kept in the fridge for up to 2 days.

**7** When ready to cook, cut into batons or diamonds and dip in beaten egg, then breadcrumbs. Heat the oil in a deep-fryer or large pan to 180°C and deep-fry in batches until golden and crisp. Serve as they are, or dust with icing sugar.

If you are new to deep-frying.

LEEWAY

**A** Limit any liquid flavourings to 1 tbsp. You don't want to jeopardise the set.

**B** In Spain, the typical flavouring is cinnamon, with either orange or lemon zest.

**C** Some recipes call for egg yolks only. Use 4 yolks per 500ml milk and dip the batons in the beaten whites (instead of whole egg) before crumbing and frying them.

**D** The quantity of sugar in some variants can be double the amount here. Pellegrino Artusi's recipe, on the other hand, calls for as little as 20g sugar for 500ml milk. If, like Artusi, you're serving your _crema fritta_ in a savoury context, it's a good idea to keep the sweetness down.

**E** Ground almonds can be used for coating, instead of breadcrumbs.

**F** The typical Venetian method is to fry the pieces in lard before giving them a shake of icing sugar and orange flower water. Marcel Boulestin uses a vanilla pod for flavouring, fries the cut pieces in clarified butter and serves them with a chocolate sauce.
Sauce

SABAYON

Sabayon sits at a junction of the custard and sauce continuums. Heat is applied with the same caution as for crème anglaise or brûlée, but sabayon differs in being whisked rather than stirred, and using substantially less liquid to egg. Hence its home among the sauces.

Something else that sets sabayon apart from other custards is that, being made with alcohol, it once had a reputation as a pick-me-up. It was said to be good for a cold, quite the thing to restore a flagging lady at the end of a ball or gird the loins of a groom on his wedding night and, in stark contrast to current advice, excellent for pregnant women. In Italy, schoolkids and _paesani_ would stop by the caffeteria on their way to school or the fields, and set themselves up for the day with a shot of froth. In the classic recipe, egg yolks are whisked with sugar and wine in a double-boiler until the mixture thickens into a foamy mass. Left for too long, a sabayon will eventually return to its liquid state, which is why it's usually made to order in restaurants, and was historically prepared tableside, whipped up by a red-faced waiter. It takes some effort; there will never be a ready-made version. Sabayon is inconvenience food, which is part of its charm.

Bear this in mind if you're making it at home for guests. If you have an eat-in kitchen, and your hob sits against the wall, they will have a view of your back for a full eight minutes. An electric whisk takes the strain off your forearm but presents its own challenges. First, the noise is liable to put a damper on free-and-easy dinner conversation. Second, my whisk has a cord only just long enough to reach one of the burners on my hob – the most ferocious one – which means interposing a rather rickety diffuser between the pan and the flame, added to which the metal bowl resting over the pan of simmering water can't help but rotate as I beat the mixture. It's precarious. Invariably I resemble the cover of a cookbook illustrated by Ralph Steadman: _Fear and Loathing in the Preparation of Dessert_.

If you're worried about maintaining a steady low temperature, you can always add a bit of flour to stabilise the mix, as you would with other custards. This makes the double-boiler unnecessary, even if Delia Smith does both, whisking a teaspoon of cornflour into her four-egg-yolk zabaglione before cooking it over a pan of simmering water. The notion of a floury sabayon is not new. In a learned mid-nineteenth-century Italian journal, I came across a _sambajon casalingo_ , 'housewife's sabayon', made with chestnut flour.

A make-ahead option, if you're happy to eat your sabayon cold, is to carry on whisking over chilled or iced water after your sabayon has been optimally frothed over heat. This will make it more robust. Folding the results into whipped cream will add more texture, as well as tamping the sweetness (in a good way) and lending the flavour greater length. Sabayon's shortcoming can be its abruptness. The cream sabayon is a versatile mixture used in professional kitchens to make a number of classic desserts. It can be flavoured and frozen to make a parfait, or poured over macerated fruit and then brûléed. When combined with fruit purée, it makes a mousse, whose bubbles can be preserved with a touch of gelatine.

That's not to say that the more conventional cream-free sabayon lacks versatility. It may be served as a dessert, a sauce or a short drink. I use the French term for its elasticity – ask for zabaglione and you can expect to be served a dessert made with Marsala. Sabayon, on the other hand, can be made with any alcoholic drink you fancy, as well as fruit juice, flavoured milk, chicken stock and so on. Sabayon made with melted butter, on the other hand, is essentially hollandaise.

HOLLANDAISE

Like sabayon, hollandaise is classically made in a double-boiler, but instead of sugar and booze, you whisk the egg yolks with lemon juice or a vinegar reduction before adding the butter slowly as you continue to whisk. Hollandaise sauce has a reputation for being difficult, but it needn't be. As long as you watch the heat, just as you would a custard, and don't try to rush things, you'll be fine. Even though it pays to treat it like one, hollandaise isn't a custard, but an emulsion of fat and water, as are all the sauces on this continuum. Emulsions are temporary pacts between molecules who prefer their own company. Agitation – by stirring, whisking or shaking – forces the molecules together, but shortly after the agitation stops, they will separate again. This can be forestalled by a mediating ingredient like egg yolk, whose protein molecules have hydrophilic 'heads', which form bonds with water, and hydrophobic 'tails', which repel it in favour of oil – thus forming a stable molecular bridge between the two otherwise immiscible substances. Other ingredients can be used as the emulsifier, but egg yolk is particularly effective.

As with sabayon, an electric whisk will make quicker work of emulsifying your hollandaise, and will save your arm. A blender or food processor makes it almost foolproof. I say almost, as in my experience the tricky thing with hollandaise is serving it warm. It is strikingly resistant to reheating, and is therefore best made immediately before serving. It can be kept warm in a double-boiler, for a short while at least, and I've read of some cooks using a Thermos, but by far the safest bet is to use the blender method a few minutes before you're ready to serve. For example, you might lay some cod loins on foil, season them, scribble them with mild olive oil, wrap the foil and cook them in a 180°C oven for 12 minutes. Slide a tray of lightly oiled asparagus spears into the oven at the same time as the fish, then melt the butter for the sauce. About 3 minutes before the fish will be ready, use the warm butter to make your hollandaise in the blender. Stir in some chopped herbs and serve everything together. When they're in season, I might also put some Jersey Royal potatoes on to simmer before preparing the fish. The sauce elevates the simple meal to a level of luxury that seems indecent, given that the whole thing is done in quarter of an hour. Hollandaise is named after a country famed for its dairy produce, just as its oily cousin, mayonnaise, is said to owe its name to Mahon, the capital of olive-rich Menorca. But it was the French, not the Spanish, who made mayonnaise a fixture of the chef's repertoire, and the Americans who made it a store-cupboard staple. Its admission into the mainstream came with the late-nineteenth-century drop in the price of edible oils, caused by the increased cultivation of oil-producing crops in California and Florida. Around the same time, advances in fresh-produce distribution systems encouraged a new fashion for salads. By 1907, Edward Schlorer, a Philadelphia grocer, had discovered how to make his wife Amelia's home-made mayo shelf-stable; by 1920, Mrs Schlorer's Mayonnaise was successful enough to warrant an ad campaign and recipe booklet. Hellmann's was trademarked in 1926. The versatility and convenience of the bottled sauce were a great draw, and not only for salads. Being easier to spread than cold butter, it soon became the natural choice for the sandwich-maker. And in 1837, the wife of Hellmann's salesman Paul Price invented chocolate mayonnaise cake. It contained no eggs or fat other than the amounts included in the mayo, and it was thickened with dates and walnuts. Like all oil-based cakes, the result was agreeably moist, and versions of the recipe are still popular today.

MAYONNAISE

Home-made mayonnaise is a world apart from the sort that comes in a jar. It is oilier, shinier, more flavourful, and more indicative of its origins. It tastes of oil and eggs. Hellmann's tastes of Hellmann's. Many manufacturers use deodorised oil to achieve the desired blandness. Novice mayo-makers might start out with similarly recessive sunflower or rapeseed oil. Whichever you choose, taste a little of the oil on a teaspoon first, as its flavour will be amplified by the emulsion. As little as 10 per cent strong olive oil, in combination with something less characterful, can remind you of the days when you didn't care for olives much. Go as far as 30 per cent and the bitterness can catch the back of your throat. Colour is another factor. A richly verdant extra virgin olive oil might look appetising in a white-china dipping bowl, but it will give your mayo a distinctly queasy complexion.

Before you start whisking (or flick the switch of your blender) you might consider whether it's worth making your mayonnaise from scratch at all. Certainly, if you plan to add strong flavours – say for a prawn cocktail sauce – it might be just as well to use the jar variety. Home-made mayo can be exquisite, but its subtleties can be hard to detect once you've mixed in tomato ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice.

For at least my first eighteen years I'm not sure I ate mayonnaise other than as a constituent of cocktail sauce. My introduction to mayonnaise in unadulterated form came when I moved to London and started buying my lunch from a café in a precinct of totalitarian drabness just off Shepherd's Bush Green. The café was run by a man who had longness covered – long face, long limbs, faraway look in his eyes. He resembled a greyhound, all the more so on cold days, when he wore a woollen waistcoat. I would order an egg sandwich and with sombre scrupulousness he would apply mayonnaise to two slices of processed white bread, covering every last millimetre without, somehow, wasting a millilitre. Next he would guillotine a peeled boiled egg in a stainless-steel slicer, which may or may not have had a few extra wires strung across it to make the rounds even thinner, then lay them neatly over the bread in one layer with no overlap. A sprinkle of salt from pinched fingers. The top slice of bread overlaid and pressed lightly. The whole cut on the diagonal and wrapped in a paper bag with the corners twisted like a hanky on a bald man's head. They were always exquisite, Mr Greyhound's egg sandwiches.

Eventually I got a better job in a ritzier part of town and had to put up with pre-mixed, chopped egg mayo piled to such depths that the slices of (seeded, brown, _high-quality_ ) bread stood no hope of touching unless you pressed down so hard that all the filling oozed out the sides. It wasn't right. I missed Mr Greyhound. I like to think he graduated from Shepherd's Bush to a Japanese prefecture, where he won fame for the precision of his egg sandwiches, married a poetess and lived out his days in a wooden house by a river lined with cherry trees.

BEURRE BLANC

As I've said, all the starting points on the sauce continuum are emulsions, but note that the next, beurre blanc, contains no egg. You might even think of beurre blanc as eggless hollandaise. And to lose egg is to lose the domestic kitchen's star emulsifier – the main reason beurre blanc is that much harder to prepare. Why not stick with simple hollandaise? The answer is texture. Both sauces taste as good as their butter content suggests, but beurre blanc is silkier.

To make a classic beurre blanc, you start with a reduction of shallots, wine and vinegar, then add the cold butter, cube by cube, while whisking constantly over a low heat. Some recipes call for the wine or vinegar to be reduced to almost nothing before the butter is added, but in our starting point a fair bit of reduced wine is retained – I think it makes for a more interesting flavour, and suspect it helps the sauce emulsify. Beurre blanc originated in the Loire, and is classically made with white wines from the region, but the flavour can be varied by changing the reduction, either by using a different liquid or adding aromatics to it. Dry white vermouth lends a heavily aromatic quality without departing too far from the original, while a survey of restaurant menus will yield a rainbow of beurres beyond blanc – Chartreuse, Pernod, Tabasco and, a long way from the Loire, the combination of ginger and soy. Cream is another common addition: a little added to the reduction, and then reduced a bit further, also aids emulsification, and helps prevent the sauce from separating too easily. Many restaurants prepare their beurre blanc this way, so as to keep it ready for use throughout service.

VINAIGRETTE

As hollandaise is to mayonnaise – a hot buttery version of the cold oil-based sauce – beurre blanc is to vinaigrette. Hollandaise and mayonnaise stay emulsified, but in beurre blanc and vinaigrette the alliance is temporary: when left to sit, they separate. In bottles of pre-mixed dressing the oil lies imperiously atop the vinegar, like it knows it's the more expensive of the two. A determined shake and they're recombined.

A simple vinaigrette can be made with just oil and vinegar: three or four parts oil to one of vinegar. Place an oil and vinegar dressing next to an otherwise identical version with mustard added and you'll notice the droplets of oil are considerably bigger in the two-ingredient version, which will split much faster. A crushed garlic clove can help stabilise matters, but few ingredients create as strong an emulsion as egg yolk. Use mustard, garlic _and_ yolk and your emulsion becomes a thick, creamy dressing, as you'll know if you've ever combined these ingredients to make a proper Caesar salad from scratch. Tomato purée, cream and silken tofu are less common emulsifiers that can, nonetheless, take a dressing in an interesting direction.

Vinaigrettes are often knocked up as a bit of an afterthought, but a good one will pay dividends. In my experience, a little sweetness nearly always gives an everyday vinaigrette a leg up to memorability. A grated shallot adds a quality that's just about worth grating a shallot for – and some say onion juice works wonders. It's also worth trying sherry vinegar where you might normally use balsamic or red wine vinegar, or a combination of vinegar and lemon juice, rather than one or the other. Small quantities of Marmite or anchovy, that secret ingredient in so many delicious sauces, will contribute a note of umami.

The one thing worth remembering about leafy salads is that to dress them properly with vinaigrette they must be tossed using your hands. Start by adding less dressing than you think you'll need, then add more in increments until every leaf has a fine coating. You may find you need to include a nail brush in your _batterie de cuisine_ , but quite apart from perfectly dressed salads, you'll find this technique furnishes exquisitely oil-softened skin. It's certainly the closest I'll ever get to a manicure.

Practice – seasoned with judicious experimentation – makes perfect. The aim, as with all sauces, is to create something rich _and_ sharp, with some body to it. An emulsion of oil and vinegar is the usual way to go, but you might alternatively cut a dollop of nutty tahini paste with lemon juice. Puréed avocado, silken tofu or fruit juices reduced to a syrupy consistency can also take the oil's part. Remember to taste your dressing on whatever you're serving it with – dip a leaf in it, or try it on a spoonful of your warm lentil salad. Knowing your dressing tastes good on its own is about as useful as being able to line dance in front of the bedroom mirror.

I've been making vinaigrettes since childhood. It's one of the first jobs my mother was prepared to delegate. In recent years I have taken to making my own mayonnaise and hollandaise with reasonable frequency. Following the principles laid out in the sauce continuum, however, has introduced sabayon and beurre blanc to my repertoire too. Restaurant culture has taught us to associate classic sauces with pricey ingredients and elaborate preparations – and yet homely dishes like fishcakes and spinach, salmon and broccoli or lamb chops with a baked potato can benefit enormously from a saucier's flourish. And the satisfaction-to-effort ratio is high. As Charles Senn puts it in his _Book of Sauces_ (1915), 'The skill and knowledge of a cook is shown in no other part of the culinary art so prominently than in the way in which his or her sauces are prepared. To be able to make a perfect sauce is indeed the height of the art of cooking.'

**Sabayon**

A sabayon can be served as a sauce – sweet or savoury – or in larger portions as a dessert, the most famous example being Italian zabaglione. Sabayon is a custard, meaning it must be either be cooked over a low heat, say in a double-boiler, or have a little starch added to protect the mixture from the heat – just ½ tsp cornflour will suffice for the quantity below, added to the yolks from the get-go. To enrich the sabayon, turn off the heat at the end of step **2** and whisk in 25–50g cubed, cold, unsalted butter, one piece at a time. The mixture may appear to loosen initially, but it will thicken up as you add the fat.

_For 4 servings of sauce or zabaglione_

INGREDIENTS

4 egg yolks

4 tbsp sugar **A**

Pinch of salt

60ml sweet white wine for the sauce, or 120ml Marsala for the dessert **B**

**1** Place all the ingredients in a large heatproof bowl and whisk for 1 minute – the mix will expand in volume and become pale.

If you're using an electric whisk, the bowl will need fairly high sides, so the sabayon doesn't spatter your apron and the kitchen walls.

**2** Place the bowl over – but not touching – barely simmering water and whisk its contents to the ribbon stage.

Ribbon stage is when the mixture that drops from the whisk holds its shape for a few seconds. For the quantity here, this will take 5–7 minutes using an electric whisk, a bit longer – about 10 minutes – if you're braving it by hand.

**3** Serve immediately, while still warm, or remove the bowl and keep whisking until the mixture cools – a process you can expedite by resting your bowl of sabayon in a larger bowl of cold or iced water.

LEEWAY

**A** Use less sugar – 1 tsp per yolk will still work. In fact, sugar isn't essential, and can be skipped altogether to make savoury versions.

**B** While Marsala is the wine used for zabaglione, you can try the dessert with any sweet wine you fancy: Madeira, port, sweet sherry, Moscato, Sauternes, etc. For the sauce, the sweet wine can be replaced with all sorts of liquids, sweet or savoury – see Flavours & Variations.

Sabayon → Flavours & Variations

CHAMPAGNE

Next time you're serving Champagne and there's a fairweather drinker among your guests – the type who accepts a glass so as not to appear ungrateful, then restricts their intake to a hamsterish sip – whip it away before they feel obliged to knock back the rest. You now have the key to one of the most delicious sabayons known to humanity. What elevates it is the yeastiness yielded by Champagne in the company of whisked egg yolks. The results are reminiscent of brioche dipped in a lightly mulled Muscadet. Best to keep the sugar low – 1 tsp per egg yolk. Champagne sabayon often serves as an eiderdown for strawberries, but poached apricots can kick them out of bed, and the ensemble looks darling in a Champagne saucer sprinkled with Angostura bitters, served with a cigarette wafer and a store of Dorothy-Parkeresque wisecracks. Savoury Champagne sabayon (omitting the sugar entirely) is a classic seafood dressing. Try it spooned onto oysters grilled on the half-shell: add some of the salty oyster liquor to the Champagne, and whisk a little butter into the sauce at the end. In the absence of Champagne, cava has the right biscuity yeastiness. At Cinc Sentits in Barcelona, they serve a cava sabayon layered in a shot glass with warm maple syrup, chilled cream and a pinch of Majorcan salt, which had me springing in the air like the tiny live shrimp flogged from wooden boxes by old ladies outside the Boqueria market.

CHERRY BEER

Trebor used to make the most terrific sour-cherry boiled sweets. They must have had a pH of about 1.5. One suck and your eyes were slits; three sweets and you were in A&E with a perforated palate. Like so much in life, they're just not the same now. I get some of the same kick from _kriek_. A decent Belgian _kriek_ , or cherry beer, is made by flavouring lambic beer with _Schaarbeekse krieken_ , a local variety of Morello cherry. Lambic differs from other kinds of beer in being the product of spontaneous fermentation. It's made in large vessels in the open air, allowing, in place of cultivated brewer's yeasts, naturally occurring yeasts in the atmosphere and on the ingredients to do the work. The cherries (or raspberries) are added to the beer for a second fermentation, as much as a kilo of fruit per five litres of beer, so the flavour is pingingly intense. If you're expecting anything along the lines of a beer alcopop, advises writer Pete Brown, you're a long way off. Alcopops are predominantly sweet, and their flavours closer to the toy-town fruitiness of confectionery. A lambic beer is both sour and bitter, with naturally fruity flavours. Beware, however, that the popularity of _kriek_ among the hordes of beer fans that flock to Brussels means you'll have to watch out for cheap, sweetened, ersatz varieties. The combination of pronounced fruit and sourness in the real thing makes for a sabayon that's full of flavour without being too sweet. A treat on dark-chocolate ice cream.

COFFEE

The molecular gastronomist Hervé This divides sabayons into two categories – the sumptuously flavoured and the gentle. Coffee and lobster are filed under the first category. Sauternes, rum and vanilla under the second. Like Delia Smith, the not-so-molecular gastronomist, This likes to add 'a dash of starch' to the ingredients, to prevent lumps. For a simple coffee sabayon, use 1 tbsp instant coffee dissolved in 60ml hot water and then cooled in place of the wine in our starting point. Raymond Blanc's version is more elaborate. He creates a faux _café crème_ by filling a chocolate espresso cup (complete with chocolate saucer) with coffee sabayon and finishing it with a _crema_ -style froth of kirsch sabayon. The base for both flavours is prepared using 2 egg yolks, 25g caster sugar, 1½ tsp lemon juice and 60ml Muscat or other sweet wine, taken off the heat once it's ready and whisked until cold. Then 75ml cream, whipped to soft peaks, is folded in. For the coffee sabayon, fold 40g _ristretto_ coffee into 250ml of the finished sabayon, then fold 1 tsp kirsch into the remaining 50ml for the _crema_ topping.

MARSALA

On an island in the Tiber I ate a zabaglione to make the Visigoths spare Rome. It had been folded into cream, frozen, spooned onto cubed pandoro and sprinkled with tiny wild strawberries. The dish was finished with a few drops of a balsamic vinegar that tasted so deep I imagined the chef wearing a vial of it on a chain around his neck. Zabaglione is usually made with Marsala, the fortified Sicilian wine. Typical tasting notes for Marsala include toasted almond, citrus, vanilla, caramel and honey. Over the centuries, other wines have been used to make similar preparations. The sixteenth-century cook Bartolomeo Scappi called for the sweet Madeira known as malmsey, in a butt of which poor Clarence, according to Shakespeare, was drowned on the orders of his brother, Richard III. Worth bearing in mind if you have any left over, and some very small rivals to bump off. In malmsey you may detect notes of chocolate, toffee apples, toasted nuts and posh marmalade; Scappi supplements this with cinnamon, and suggests adding butter at the end of whisking. Pellegrino Artusi opts for sherry, and suggests further fortifying your fortified wine with a dash of rum. Mario Batali uses _vin santo_ and no sugar, but does add butter, cream, salt and pepper, serving it with grilled asparagus. Essentially, all sweet wines seem to be viable for zabaglione, but if you're using a non-sweet variety, it's safer to call the result a sabayon. Wolfgang Puck makes a version with Merlot and serves it with berries tossed in sugar and lemon.

MILK & HONEY

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, 'Depart... Unto a land flowing with milk and honey.' And Moses was like, well, okay, Lord. But, hello, cholesterol? Is the milk, like, skimmed? Biblical scholarship suggests that the 'milk' probably represented a generic promise of fatty things; the 'honey', sweet stuff like pomegranates, dates and grapes. Still, literalists might like to make James Martin's sabayon of almond milk and honey: use 3 egg yolks, 50g light brown sugar, 4 tbsp honey and 75ml almond milk, whisking them all together in a double-boiler until thick and moussey. Then add 25ml Amaretto and continue to whisk for 2 minutes. Martin spoons the slightly cooled sauce over room-temperature berries, then puts the dishes under a hot grill for a further couple of minutes until lightly golden.

MUSTARD

Mustard and fish is less common a combination than you might think. In Sweden gravadlax is served with mustard sauce, and mustard seeds bob about in tubs of rollmops, while in Bengal fish is cooked with both mustard oil and seeds, but otherwise it's rare. Rosamond Man and Robin Weir maintain that fish has the greatest potential of all the mustard pairings they tried for _The Mustard Book_. For the record, they include recipes for chocolate biscuits made with mustard, mango and dill mustard iced fool, and a banana, apple and mustard chutney, so the fish claim is not made lightly. Marco Pierre White makes a savoury sabayon flavoured with coarse grain mustard, which he serves with fish. First, he reduces 400ml fish velouté by half and lets it cool; meanwhile he makes a sabayon with 4 egg yolks, a few drops of water and 4 tbsp clarified butter. The sabayon is then mixed with the velouté, 4 tbsp whipped cream and 2 tsp coarse grain mustard to a pouring consistency.

ORANGE

Buy four large oranges at the time of year they're supposedly at their best. Peel one and find that its membranes could be used to surface the nose-cones of re-entry capsules. Remove the other oranges from the fruit bowl, isolate them like disobedient children, and ignore them for three days. On the fourth day, throw them away. Realising that you have nothing for pudding that night, retrieve them from the bin and rinse off the coffee grounds. Juice 1 orange and add 1 tbsp each of Cointreau and water (the water helps prevent the eggs curdling). Using a sharp knife, fillet the segments from the other 2 oranges. Make it a point of pride to remove the pith and as much of the membrane as possible while wasting the minimum of flesh. Divide your filleted orange supremes between 2 small plates. Proceed as per the starting point, making a sabayon with the juice mixture, 2 egg yolks and 1 tbsp sugar. Spoon it over the segments, followed by the lightest dusting of ground mixed spice. Don't skip the Cointreau; it provides the bitter-marmalade, supercharged oranginess I think the dish needs.

Sabayon → Other Directions

THOMAS KELLER'S LEMON SABAYON TART

Made using a sabayon enriched with butter and flavoured with lemon juice, poured into a tart case and baked.

AS A BASE FOR PARFAIT

Whisk the sabayon until cool. Whip cream to soft peaks and fold in, along with a purée or liquid flavouring, then freeze.

SABAYON ICE CREAM

Fold whipped cream into sabayon and freeze.

POUR OVER BERRIES AND BRÛLÉE

EGG-YOLK CHOCOLATE MOUSSE

Whisk the sabayon until cool. Fold it and some softly whipped cream into melted chocolate, then chill until set.

AS A SOUFFLÉ BASE

Fold in egg whites whisked to soft peaks and bake.

**Hollandaise**

Turning melted butter into hollandaise miraculously banishes its greasiness. Mixing up the following quantity by hand isn't too painful, but I would nearly always choose the machine method over the stove-top. There are those who consider this cheating and call the results 'butter mayonnaise'. I've never had any complaints. Fold in whipped cream before serving to create a sauce mousseline: use half the butter's weight in whipping or double cream – 125g for the quantities below. Alternatively, fold in 2 egg whites whisked to stiff peaks for a frothy, lighter sauce.

_For 4–6 servings_

INGREDIENTS

4 egg yolks **A**

Pinch of salt

4 tsp lemon juice, warmed **B**

250g unsalted butter, melted and still warm (but not hot) **C D**

White pepper

STOVE-TOP METHOD

**1** In a heatproof bowl set over, but not touching, barely simmering water, whisk the yolks and salt with 2 tbsp warm water for 30 seconds. Still whisking, add the warmed lemon juice.

**2** With the heat on very low, add a small quantity of the warm butter and whisk in thoroughly to make a nice thick emulsion, then continue to add butter in increments, avoiding adding the solids at the bottom as best you can.

I add butter by the tablespoon for the first 4 tbsp, then the rest in thirds. Whisk after each addition of butter until the mixture is re-thickened. If the sauce splits, try adding a little water or an ice cube and giving it a good whisk before continuing. If that doesn't work, start again with a new egg yolk and re-incorporate the split sauce as if it were just butter.

**3** Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more lemon juice, salt and/or pepper as required. **E**

A little water can be added if the sauce is too thick.

**4** Use immediately, or keep warm in a covered dish over barely simmering water or in a Thermos for up to 1 hour.

MACHINE METHOD

**1** Whizz the yolks, salt, 1 tsp warm water and warm lemon juice in a blender or food processor for a few seconds.

Note that if you're making a smaller quantity than this, you'll need a small bowl in the processor so the blades can reach the ingredients.

**2** With the machine running, drizzle in the warm butter through the tube, slowly to start with, avoiding adding the solids at the bottom as best you can.

**3** Check for seasoning, adding more lemon juice, salt and/or pepper as required. If necessary, thin by blending in a little warm water in small increments.

**4** Use immediately, or keep warm in a covered dish over barely simmering water or in a Thermos for up to 1 hour.

LEEWAY

**A** A hollandaise made with a higher ratio of egg yolks to butter is less likely to separate, but may taste a little eggy.

**B** A vinegar reduction is sometimes used in place of the lemon juice. Put 2 tbsp each of white wine vinegar and water, 1 bay leaf and 4 black peppercorns in a non-reactive pan and simmer until reduced by about two-thirds (leaving about 4 tsp liquid). Strain and leave to cool slightly. If you make hollandaise (or beurre blanc) frequently, make a larger batch of this reduction and store it in a labelled jar in the fridge, where it should keep for a few months. Some cooks add further flavour to the reduction with mace, tarragon or shallots.

**C** Use clarified butter if you like, but with the dairy solids and water removed, the hollandaise will be thicker and, ironically, less buttery-tasting. To thin a hollandaise made with clarified butter, whisk in a splash of water at the end.

**D** If the butter is hot rather than warm, the finished sauce risks being too thin.

**E** Some cooks also like to add a pinch of cayenne or a dash of Tabasco.

Hollandaise → Flavours & Variations

BLOOD ORANGE

Sauce maltaise, the variation on hollandaise classically served with asparagus, calls for blood oranges. According to Jane Grigson, it's even better made with Sevilles. The advantage of blood oranges, however, is that they stick around a little later in the year than Sevilles, and so might just still be available at the beginning of the British asparagus season. Try your maltaise à la Grigson with a piece of fine white fish, or alongside Sevilles' seasonal coevals like purple sprouting broccoli. Whether or not to include the zest is a matter for debate; some find the bittiness, not to mention the bitterness, incongruous in the lusciously textured sauce. New Orleans chef John Besh serves crab cakes with a variation on hollandaise, flavoured with an aromatic reduction of locally grown satsuma juice, white wine vinegar, fresh ginger, shallots, peppercorns, coriander seeds, thyme and bay. Maltaise sounds relatively simple by comparison. Add the finely grated zest of 1 orange to the egg yolks at step **1**. Juice the bald orange and set 2 tsp aside; warm the rest of the juice with 1 tbsp water and pour onto the yolks while whisking in a double-boiler, before proceeding from step **2**. Once the sauce is made, check for seasoning, and add the set-aside juice.

BROWN BUTTER

Sauce noisette is a hollandaise in a serious mood. Some of the butter is browned first, contributing a caramelised flavour quite distinct from the tang of the standard sauce. This makes it unsuitable for brunch dishes – not, I hasten to add, for gustatorial, but moral reasons. Eat bacon, brioche and beurre noisette before noon and where will the day end? Deep-fried popcorn foie gras, three bottles of Château d'Yquem and a fist-fight. There are straightforward ways of preparing noisette, but consider for a moment sauce Kientzheim, which Hervé This serves on poached fish or grilled meat: you won't find a better sauce named after a village on the D28 in Alsace. Brown your butter, intermittently adding small splashes of orange juice, milk or water to prevent it from burning (an idea This credits to Pierre Gagnaire). Allow to cool, then whisk it into a mixture of egg yolk, lemon juice, mustard and salt. You'll note that the method is more akin to making mayonnaise than hollandaise, in that the egg is not heated. Alice B. Toklas uses the same technique for her 'hollandaise au beurre noisette', although in her case the 'noisette' refers to hazelnuts, not browned butter. She finishes the sauce with vinegar, rather than lemon juice, and serves it with salmon. The typical method for beurre noisette hollandaise is to brown about 15 per cent of the butter, make the sauce with the other 85 per cent, and then whisk or blend in the warm, liquid beurre noisette at the end.

CHILLI

The British partiality to chilli might seem recent, but as far back as 1860 Eliza Acton was advocating cayenne as an addition to all sorts of preparations, including the hollandaise-like Dutch sauce. Acton's sauce mixes egg yolks, lemon, butter, water, salt, cayenne and nutmeg, but unlike most hollandaise recipes, all the ingredients are placed in the pan at the same time – although she does note that it might be safer to use a double-boiler and stir constantly. Dutch sauce was the suggested accompaniment to boiled eels or boiled calf's head. Cayenne has recently lost ground to chipotle as the variety of chilli most commonly specified for hollandaise, perhaps because the latter's smokiness is so apt to pep up classic brunch dishes; chipotle hollandaise is pretty terrific on a hot corn-on-the-cob too. Use ¼ tsp cayenne for a 4-yolk hollandaise. Or add 2–3 tsp chipotle paste with the yolks at step **1** and substitute lime juice for lemon.

COURT BOUILLON

Returning to New York from a business trip to Paris, 'Diamond' Jim Brady, the nineteenth-century railroad magnate and gourmand, told Charles Rector, the proprietor of a restaurant he frequented, about an exquisite dish he had eaten at a place called Au Petit Marguery. So unforgettable was this Sole Marguery, draped in a hollandaise made with the light fish stock called court bouillon, that Brady was moved to an ultimatum: unless Rector learned how to reproduce the dish, he would take his business elsewhere. And Brady's was not the sort of business you could afford to lose. Once he had digested his breakfast of bread, eggs, muffins, grits, pancakes, fried potatoes, chops and steaks washed down with orange juice, he would stave off mid-morning hunger pangs with a few dozen clams or oysters. Diamond Jim, the Mr Creosote of the Gilded Age. Rector duly took his son out of Cornell University – or so the story goes – and dispatched him to Paris in pursuit of the recipe. Poor Rector Jnr took a job in the Au Petit Marguery kitchens, where he slaved for fifteen hours a day until he got the hang of the sauce. He then booked himself onto a ship home, and was met at the docks by Diamond Jim himself, who drove the kid back to Rector's and stayed to polish off no less than nine helpings. It's said that when Brady's body was examined, after his death from a heart attack in 1917, he had a stomach six times the size of an average adult's. Ironically, the version of sauce Marguery recorded in _The Rector Cookbook_ (1928) is considerably lighter than the classic hollandaise, being less reliant on butter. Rector uses 4 tbsp white wine and 240ml reduced fish stock, whisking in 3 egg yolks, then adding 110g butter over a gentle heat, as you would for hollandaise. The sauce is then seasoned, strained and finished with 1 tsp chopped parsley. More elaborate versions of sauce Marguery involve shrimp, oyster and mussel essences.

DILL

I was lying in bed, stroking the fur cuffs of my peignoir, dictating my brunch. Potato rösti, made to a depth such that the surface would be crisp and golden brown, the inside soft and white. On top of that, a layer of dark orange, dry-smoked salmon, a perfectly poached egg, and finally a ladleful of thick yellow hollandaise flecked with dill. Then came the bombshell. _Someone_ had forgotten to buy the smoked salmon. I flounced to the kitchen, rejecting all offers of bacon, and made the dill hollandaise anyway. We had it on poached eggs with home-made, skin-on chips. In my opinion, dill is the ideal herb for hollandaise: its evergreen briskness lifts the warm fug of butter. Add 2–4 tbsp finely chopped dill to the sauce. Some cooks infuse a vinegar reduction (as at **B** under Leeway) with the dill, although this way you miss out on the flecks, indispensable to my eye.

MINT

Sauce _paloise_ is a well known, if seldom seen, variant of béarnaise (itself a variation of hollandaise) in which the tarragon is replaced with fresh mint: a shoo-in with _entrecôte frites_ , or lamb chops and sauté potatoes. Diana Henry serves it with roast lamb, and I like it with a hearty casserole of lamb and beans. Vegetarians might try serving it with pea or broad bean fritters. Make a reduction of white wine vinegar (as described at **B** under Leeway), adding 1 tbsp finely chopped mint along with the other aromatics, then follow the starting point for hollandaise, stirring 2–4 tbsp freshly chopped mint into the finished sauce.

OLIVE OIL

A good variation – just don't call it hot mayonnaise. Choose a mild olive oil, more golden-coloured than forest green; 3 egg yolks to 200ml warm olive oil. Make as per our starting point, adding the oil in increments, in the same way as you would butter.

PASSION FRUIT

Passion fruit is such a tart. The overpowering perfume, the leopardskin pulp. Dilute the flavour and its tutti-fruttiness gives way to a beautiful balance of floral and sulphurous notes, while its acidity does the job that lemon (or a vinegar reduction) normally does in hollandaise. In Hawaii, where the fruit is popular (albeit in its yellow form, as opposed to the purple-skinned variety commonly available in the UK) passion-fruit hollandaise is a favourite. It's an edible lei for crab cakes, poached or roasted white fish or wild salmon and seared tuna. Use sieved passion-fruit pulp in place of the lemon juice – each purple fruit should yield 1–2 tsp.

TARRAGON & SHALLOT

Restricting béarnaise to _steak-frites_ is to cramp its style. Robert Carrier drapes it on mussels deep-fried in breadcrumbs. Simon Hopkinson reminds us that béarnaise works wonders on lamb, turbot, and even baked potato. In the novelisation of _The Prisoner_ , Number Six rustles up a béarnaise to serve with _oeufs à la Beaugency_ – poached eggs on artichoke hearts – complaining as he does so about the poorly equipped kitchen. No garlic press, no mouli. Jarred spices. Anyone would have thought he was in rural Wales in the late 1960s. Reduce 2 tbsp very finely chopped shallots, 3 tbsp tarragon vinegar and 1 tbsp water to about 1 tbsp liquid. Strain, cool a little, and add to the yolks in place of the lemon juice, then follow the starting point. Once all the butter is incorporated, stir in 2–3 tbsp finely chopped tarragon leaves. Sauce Choron is the blushing bride of béarnaise. Many recipes call for 1 fresh, skinned, seeded and diced tomato to be folded in at the same time as the chopped tarragon.

**Mayonnaise**

A semi-solid emulsion of egg and oil flavoured with mustard and lemon juice or vinegar. Home-made mayonnaise is creamier and less gelatinous than shop-bought. You should also find it less vinegary and sweet, and the flavour of egg will be more apparent. It's particularly delightful fridge-chilled on freshly fried _frites_ , the sort sold in paper cones in Belgium and the Netherlands. Whip 100–150ml double or whipping cream and fold it in for a mayonnaise Chantilly, a lighter, airier version traditionally served with, say, poached salmon, rather than in an egg-mayo sandwich. Mayonnaise is very stable, and thus welcomes the addition of all sorts of ingredients once made.

_For 350ml_

INGREDIENTS

2 egg yolks **A**

1–3 tsp Dijon mustard **B**

A few pinches of salt

300ml oil **C D**

1–3 tsp lemon juice or wine vinegar **E**

A few pinches of pepper – optional **F**

HAND METHOD

**1** Whisk the yolks with the mustard and a few pinches of salt.

The yolks need to be at room temperature. If your eggs have been in the fridge, sit them in warm water for 5 minutes before cracking and separating them. Be moderate with your seasoning. You can always adjust it later.

**2** Add the oil slowly, the first teaspoon or two drop by drop, whisking continuously. Once the emulsion is established, begin adding the oil a teaspoon at a time, then a tablespoon at a time, and finally in a slow, steady stream. When all the oil is added, give the mixture a good 30-second whisk.

**3** Whisk in the lemon juice or vinegar and seasoning to taste.

**4** Store, covered or in a lidded jar in the fridge, for up to a week.

MACHINE METHOD

**1** Put the yolks, mustard and salt in the bowl of a small blender or food processor, then pulse.

**2** With the machine running, drizzle in the oil through the tube, starting slowly.

**3** Once all the oil is in and the mayo is emulsified, remove the lid, add the lemon juice or vinegar and seasoning to taste, then reseal and whizz again.

**4** Store, covered or in a lidded jar in the fridge, for up to a week.

LEEWAY

**A** Famously, 1 egg yolk can turn a great deal of oil into mayonnaise, but a more typical quantity is 150–250ml per yolk. No need to add all of the oil; stop when you have as much mayo as you need, or it's as thick as you like it.

**B** The mustard is for flavour – it's fine to leave it out.

**C** The more oil you use, the thicker the mayo will be. Thin it, once made, by whisking in a little water.

**D** Oil-wise, use sunflower, rapeseed, groundnut or a very mild olive oil. Be cautious of using too much characterful olive, walnut or hazelnut oils – most cooks dilute these with something blander and cheaper.

**E** Some cooks add the vinegar or lemon juice to the yolk mixture at the start, but it's better for the stability of the emulsion to add them at the end.

**F** Some recipes include a little white pepper; others suggest black pepper.

Mayonnaise → Flavours & Variations

BACON

Given how easy it is to accumulate bacon fat, it seems foolish not to try it in place of oil in a mayonnaise. It's become commonplace – either out of sheer contrariness, or the immunity of youthful waistlines to saturated fat and carbohydrate – to pile one unashamedly rich ingredient on another. Deep-fried double blue-cheese burger. In a clotted-cream brioche. With bacon mayo! Avoid such Babylonian gluttony and set off your bacon mayo with something bracingly bitter. The combination of bitter leaves and salty pork fat recalls a Lyonnais-style _frisée aux lardons_ , the classic French salad of curly endive, bacon bits and poached egg, or the old Italian habit of dressing radicchio with hot lard and cheese shavings. I like bacon mayonnaise on a salad of endive, toasted hazelnuts and apple. It's also good spread on a toasted panino, stuffed with a mixture of grilled and raw radicchio, and very thin slices of chilli pecorino. You can use all bacon fat in your mayo, but if you haven't been hoarding your drippings, 1 tbsp mixed with 125ml bland oil will give a definite bacon flavour. Obviously the fat will need to be in liquid form, and strained. Taste the mayo before adding any extra salt: it may not need it. Finish with 1 tsp sweet paprika and a splash of red wine vinegar at step **3**.

CHEESE

We know things won't work out between Annie Hall and Alvy Singer when she orders pastrami on white with mayonnaise. Alvy looks like he's swallowed a dill pickle sideways. It's the ultimate solecism, on a par with asking for your entrecôte _bien cuite_. Not only will Annie's sandwich be hopelessly stodgy without the wry astringency of mustard, but it will probably be non-kosher too, since mayonnaise is not _kashrut_ unless the egg yolks have been checked for blood spots. She would have been no better off ordering a Reuben sandwich, involving as it does the proscribed combination of meat and cheese. If all this makes no odds to you, I recommend getting wise to the blue Reuben, which substitutes tangy blue-cheese mayo for the Russian dressing. The inevitable surfeit of Stilton makes Christmas a good time to experiment with blue-cheese mayo – try it in a deli-style sandwich with plenty of thinly sliced turkey. One Boxing Day, for want of sauerkraut, I used a coleslaw instead, made with thinly sliced, raw Brussels sprouts. Classically, blue-cheese mayonnaise is served with Buffalo wings, or thinned and poured over a bacon and spinach salad. Add about 50–100g flavourful cheese to your finished mayonnaise, blending or mashing depending on whether you want a smooth or more textured dressing.

CURRY

For all their insouciance towards Indian food, the French do like their curry flavour. Curry mayonnaise is a mainstay of the _supermarché_ aisle. Danes are partial too, according to Jane Grigson, who notes that curry mayo is often served with pickled herring, meat and salads, _grand-aïoli-_ style. If you're making it from scratch, she advises, use groundnut or corn oil. Brits consume most of their curry mayonnaise in the form of coronation chicken, a recipe as tenacious as the monarchy itself. Rosemary Hume's original version, created for the Queen's coronation lunch in 1953, has remarkable depth of flavour. Chopped onion is softened in a little oil with curry powder, then simmered with red wine, tomato purée, a bay leaf, slices of lemon, seasoning and water to create an aromatic paste, which is strained before being mixed with mayonnaise and apricot purée. It's finished with lemon juice and a little whipped cream. Danish curry mayo is quicker to rustle up: 1 tbsp curry powder and 4 tbsp double cream are added to 350ml mayonnaise, along with lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste.

GARLIC

If only the Spanish had snuck a spoonful of allioli onto every plate of sausage and chips, Benidorm might still be a cute little fishing village. Your average 1960s Costa-del-Sol-bound package-holidaymaker was not fond of garlic and oil, and nothing is garlickier or oilier than allioli. The sauce originated in Catalonia, where the garlic alone emulsifies the olive oil. These days most allioli is made with eggs in the (less tricky) mayonnaise fashion – as is its Provençal equivalent, aïoli, revered enough in France to earn a superlative and a place at the centre of a meal – _le grand aïoli_. My first encounter with a _grand aïoli_ was not, sad to say, at a hundred-foot table in the village square, attended by dapper farmers with moustaches like broom-ends, but at a swanky French restaurant in Knightsbridge. My friend had disappeared behind the sort of multi-level stand normally used for _fruits de mer_. Here it held bowls of blanched green beans, new potatoes half-hatched from their skins, hard-boiled eggs, the yolks stippled and minutely fissured like cold butter, whip-slim carrots with bushy green tops, radishes, a rag-tag militia of rough-cut bread soldiers, and, at the top, a whole globe artichoke. In France _le grand aïoli_ – or _l'aïoli monstre_ , as it's sometimes called – is traditional for a summer lunch or on Christmas Eve. It's also a perfect appetiser for a weekend dinner, as so much of it can be pre-prepared. I'd follow it with a slow-roast leg of lamb, partly because the next day you can pile slices of cold meat, vegetables and a dollop of aïoli into a sandwich as a hand-held memento of the night before. Some recipes stipulate crushing the garlic and whisking it with the egg yolks before adding the oil, but as garlic varies so much, I tend to crush it into a paste and then add it in increments to the finished mayonnaise, tasting as I go. For an aïoli made with 300ml oil, use somewhere between 2 and 6 cloves, depending on their size and intensity. Also consider smoked, roasted or black garlic. Wild garlic is an option too, as long as you blanch and dry it before blending it with the oil, which you then strain through a fine sieve and use as you would any other oil.

GREEN GODDESS

Green goddess dressing is a mixture of mayonnaise, tarragon vinegar, onion, anchovy, chives, parsley and tarragon, thought to have been invented at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It's very vinegary, and modern versions tend to replace much of the vinegar with sour cream. Avocado is another recent addition, which at least ensures the dressing ends up being the right colour. The story goes that sometime around 1920 the chef at the Palace, Philip Roemer, created the sauce for the great English actor George Arliss, a guest at the hotel while he was appearing in a play called _The Green Goddess_ (hopefully Arliss was staying somewhere less eager to please when he appeared in _The Seagull_ ). For the original, wince-inducing version, mix the following into 350ml mayonnaise: 125ml tarragon vinegar, 1 spring onion, very finely chopped with 10–12 anchovy fillets, 4 tbsp finely chopped parsley, 2 tbsp finely chopped tarragon and 8 tbsp snipped chives. For the milder, less astringent version, replace the vinegar with sour cream and 2 tbsp lemon juice.

GRIBICHE **,** REMOULADE & TARTARE

_Gribiche_ sounds like a toadying courtier in a Molière play. It is, in fact, one of a family of piquant, bitty, mayonnaise-based sauces that includes remoulade and tartare, and might contain chopped cornichons, capers, shallots, hard-boiled egg white and _fines herbes_ (chervil, chives, parsley and tarragon). _Gribiche_ is made by emulsifying cooked, sieved egg yolks with mustard, oil and lemon juice or vinegar, but the proportions and method are the same as for our mayonnaise starting point. It won't stiffen as much as raw-egg mayonnaise, and is more liable to split, but can easily be stirred back together. _Gribiche_ was classically served with boiled tongue or _tête de veau_ , but it's excellent with cold roast beef, boiled eggs and fried fish, as you might expect of a sauce so similar to tartare. Hard-boil 2 eggs, remove the yolks (saving the whites for later) and sieve them, then whisk into the mustard, season, and proceed as per the starting point. When the mayonnaise is finished, stir in your reserved egg whites, finely chopped, along with 1 tbsp each of finely chopped capers and shallots and 1–2 tbsp finely chopped _fines herbes_. For remoulade, mix 2 tsp Dijon mustard and 1 tsp anchovy paste into 2 raw egg yolks at step **1**, then add 1 tbsp each of chopped capers, gherkins, parsley, tarragon and chervil to the finished mayonnnaise. (This is a more elaborate remoulade than the version used to dress celeriac, which is outlined under mustard below.) Tartare is essentially the same as remoulade, minus the anchovy and with the juice of half a lemon added with the green bits.

MISO

Henry Adaniya quit his upscale restaurant in Chicago to sell hot dogs in Hawaii. Not any old hot dogs. The menu at Hank's Haute Dogs includes a seafood dog with daikon relish and miso mayo. The chef Masaharu Morimoto makes an intriguing miso mayo for shrimp tempura, flavouring a shop-bought sauce with lemon juice, white miso, orange zest, chilli paste and orange liqueur. There are as many types of miso as there are blossoms under the cherry tree, but for uses like this the lightness of white miso recommends itself. Mix 1 tbsp white miso paste, 2 tsp wasabi paste, 2 tbsp lime juice, 2 tbsp water and 1 tsp soft light brown sugar until smooth. Add to 350ml mayonnaise.

MUSTARD

Or Dijonnaise, as Maille and Hellmann's call it. Remoulade, the classic dressing for shredded celeriac, is also a mustard mayonnaise, although the same term can refer to one of the piquant, bitty mayos listed under _gribiche_ opposite. Add 3–5 tbsp Dijon mustard to 350ml mayonnaise. I like to use a mix of smooth and coarse grain mustard for celeriac remoulade, for visual interest as much as anything.

PRAWN COCKTAIL

Prawn cocktail has pretty much shaken off its naff reputation, and chefs need no longer seek refuge in euphemisms like sauce bagnarotte. Or Marie Rose, which evokes all the sumptuousness of something that's been rotting in the Solent for five hundred years. Of course, the reason for all the anxious rebranding in the first place was that so many prawn cocktails would only have been improved by burial at sea. I had forgotten quite why I loved prawn cocktail so much until I visited Gothenburg a few years ago: it's not so much the sauce as the prawns. There they were sweet, mildly briny and as chewy as a mermaid's upturned nose. I asked the waiter where they were from, expecting him to frown in gentle bemusement and say, why, Gothenburg Bay, as if the very idea of importing seafood was unthinkable in Sweden. 'Greenland,' he said. Still, the Swedes clearly know where to buy their prawns _from_ , as did the Brits, before warm-water prawn farming flooded the market with disgusting, squelchy sea-bugs with a chemical base note that makes them taste if they've been double-dipped in a verruca bath. If a weekend in Gothenburg is out of the question, find a good fishmonger, or use crab instead. For the sauce, use 2 parts mayonnaise to 1 part tomato ketchup, adding dashes of Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice to taste. Season with salt, pepper and cayenne. A dram of brandy or vodka will perk it up. Related dressings include Louie, Thousand Island and Russian, all three of which include the same finely chopped additions – tomato, pickles and shallots.

QUINCE & GARLIC

Allioli de Codony is garlic mayonnaise enhanced with quince purée. Claudia Roden cites it in _The Food of Spain_ , along with an allioli flavoured with apple or pear. Typically, both are served with grilled or roasted meats and boiled potatoes. Poach or roast 250g quince (or 2 small apples – Cox's or Granny Smith – or pears) in their skins until very soft. Peel, core and mash the cooked flesh into a purée. Whisk it into 350ml mayonnaise, together with 3–4 crushed garlic cloves and 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil.

RED PEPPER

_Rouille_ ('rust') is a mayonnaise-style sauce made with garlic, red chilli and maybe some saffron too. It's popular on the French Mediterranean coast, where it's served with bouillabaisse, grilled fish or boiled eggs. In its most famous incarnation, _rouille_ is spread over croutons of garlic-rubbed French bread and lowered, along with pinches of grated Gruyère, into a similarly rust-coloured _soupe de poissons_. If you're unlucky, you'll be served the sort of sissy _rouille_ – mild metal fatigue, rather than rust – in which the chilli has been replaced with benign red pepper. Some recipes stipulate a basic mayonnaise-style approach, adding 1 de-seeded red chilli and 2–4 garlic cloves, pounded to a paste, with 1 tbsp tomato purée for flavour (instead of the usual mustard), and red wine vinegar and lemon juice to lend the sauce some backbone. Other recipes replace the egg yolk with mashed potato or breadcrumbs, as in Greek _skordalia_.

SEA URCHIN

Long before umami was on everyone's tongue, anchovy was used to add a savoury quality to all manner of sauces. For example, fish sauce, which in south-east Asia is made predominantly with anchovies, can be stirred into bought mayo to furnish one of the many layers of flavour in Vietnamese _bánh mì_ sandwiches. Rather more glamorously, Michel Roux makes a sea-urchin mayonnaise to accompany shellfish by adding the sieved coral of a dozen sea urchins to a mayonnaise made with 2 egg yolks, 1 tbsp Dijon mustard, 250ml groundnut oil and 2 tbsp lemon juice. Whip 100ml whipping cream to soft peaks then carefully fold it in, along with 1 tbsp Grand Marnier and a few drops of Tabasco. Serve with cold crustaceans.

SEAWEED & WASABI

Japan may not be the first country you associate with mayonnaise, but maki-makers will have piped a combination of wasabi and mayo onto their nori before rolling it up. At The Hand and Flowers pub, in Marlow, Tom Kerridge adds seaweed to wasabi mayo and serves it with oyster fritters. Seaweed and wasabi mayo is a treat with fish _fritto misto_ , served with plenty of lemon wedges, so you can flit between salty, hot and sour seasonings. The type of seaweed Kerridge stipulates is gutweed, _Ulva intestinalis_ , so called because it resembles Shrek's entrails. In Japan the stuff is specially cultivated. In the UK you can collect it on your wellies if you go for a walk along the beach. The forager John Wright notes that sampled direct from the rockpools it tastes of nothing but salt. Dried in the oven or by the sun, crumbled into nori-like flakes or deep-fried in shreds, it takes on more typical green-vegetable flavours. Kerridge gives 50g raw gutweed a thorough rinse and then blends it in a food processor with 120ml rice vinegar, 2 egg yolks and 1 tsp wasabi paste, then slowly adds 250ml vegetable oil until the mixture emulsifies. Kerridge suggests heightening the flavour of the mayo by adding the oyster liquor to it at the end.

TUNA

_Vitello tonnato_ has a face for radio. Even on the most exquisite Milanese dinnerware, the pallid combination of veal and tuna mayo will still look like a faded colour photograph from a 1950s cookbook. Capers, the typical garnish, are hardly redcurrants in the looks department. Who cares, though? It's so delicious it won't be around long enough to offend anyone's aesthetic sensibilities. The veal is sometimes replaced with pork or chicken; some cooks prefer to roast the meat, while others poach it. Either way, the dish is usually served at room temperature, or better still, chilled on a sweltering day. In the absence of a chi-chi beach club, or deck of a yacht, find the nicest spot in the garden and set yourself up with a glass of something pink. The following should be enough for a kilo or so of meat. In a blender or food processor, mix 250ml mayonnaise with 1 × 160g tin or jar of good-quality tuna (including the oil), 4 anchovy fillets, rinsed, and 1–2 tbsp lemon juice. When the mixture is smooth and creamy, stir in 2–3 tbsp rinsed and dried capers. Some like to loosen the sauce with a bit of the cooking liquid, if the meat was poached. Slice the cooked meat very thinly, arrange on a plate and evenly pour the sauce over it. Alternatively, Marcella Hazan recommends assembling _vitello tonnato_ in lasagne-like layers of meat and sauce. She advises that the finished dish can be kept in the fridge for up to a week.

**Beurre Blanc**

An eggless hollandaise, in essence – meaning that, minus the thickening effect of egg yolk, a beurre blanc will be thinner than a hollandaise made with the same quantity of butter. Nonetheless, it'll still be thick enough to hold its shape on the plate, assuming it hasn't been sitting around for too long. Beurre blanc usually accompanies fish, but vegetarians should not miss out. I would happily eat it on nothing more complicated than steamed purple sprouting broccoli on fluffy white basmati rice. Here the ratio of reduction to butter is 75ml to 250g – not unlike that for vinaigrette.

_For 6–8 servings_

INGREDIENTS

1 large shallot (or 2 small ones) **A**

250g chilled unsalted butter **B C**

4 tbsp white wine vinegar **A D**

150ml dry white wine **A D**

Salt

Squeeze of lemon juice – optional

**1** Finely chop the shallot. Cut a third of the butter into 1cm cubes and the rest into 2cm cubes.

**2** Place the shallot and vinegar in a small, non-reactive saucepan and reduce, simmering until there is almost no liquid left. Add the wine and reduce by half. **E**

**3** Over a low heat, start adding the butter, small cubes first, one at a time, while whisking the reduction constantly. When each cube has _almost_ melted, add the next until all the butter is used.

This process is called 'mounting'. Lift the pan off the heat every now and then to keep the temperature down. The sauce should thicken as you add more butter. If it starts to look like melted butter, keep whisking, but take it off the heat and add more cold butter. If that doesn't save it, one option is to melt the rest of the butter and use your split sauce to make hollandaise.

**4** Season and strain.

If you opt not to strain, leaving the shallot in situ, make sure you chop it very finely and that it's soft before serving the sauce. This may mean starting with a little more liquid for the reduction and simmering it for a little longer.

**5** Stir in the lemon juice, if using, and serve warm.

Ideally, beurre blanc should be served straight away. It can be kept for a short time in a double-boiler, but is given to splitting. Others recommend keeping it in a Thermos flask. You'd be wise to warm your dinner plates, to help retain the heat when served.

LEEWAY

**A** Treat the reduction as an opportunity to flavour the sauce. Besides wine and vinegar, stock, cream and fruit juices can be used, enhanced by other aromatics alongside or in place of the shallot.

**B** Most recipe books recommend unsalted butter, but, according to Richard Olney, Breton salt butter is the authentic choice. Paul Gayler claims that lightly salted will give slightly thicker results. If you do use salted butter, avoid adding any extra salt until you've tasted the sauce.

**C** Add as much unclarified butter as you like, since it contains what it needs to self-emulsify. Clarified butter won't do the job.

**D** There is wide variation in recipes for the syrupy reduction. It can be made with wine only, or vinegar only, or a combination of the two. Some cooks dilute it with water. In this version, the butter is added to a relatively large amount of liquid in the pan; in other versions, there is virtually no liquid.

**E** To help prevent the sauce from splitting, add 2 tbsp double cream to the reduction at the end of step **2** and warm it before the butter goes in. Or add some cream when the butter is fully incorporated and then gently heat through.

Beurre Blanc → Flavours & Variations

APPLE

Fish have a sour tooth. Lemon is an obvious favourite, but mackerel loves gooseberries, and prawns dream of assignations with unripe mango. An apple beurre blanc is paired with halibut, salmon and scallops; it will be safe with most fish, or you could make the leap from surf to turf and try it with slices of stuffed pork loin. Make a reduction with 4 tbsp cider vinegar and 150ml apple juice, then follow the starting point, garnishing with some neat matchsticks of a tangy, crisp apple at the end. The cellular, snow-crunch texture of apple is particularly pleasing next to the softness of fish and has an enlivening, condiment-like effect on most vegetables.

CHIVE

Newcomers to beurre blanc might like to practise on their wives. With the addition of a few tablespoons of finely chopped chives, it can elevate a weekend breakfast of poached eggs on toast into something approaching brunch. As noted at **E** under Leeway, the most foolproof way to make the sauce is to add a tablespoon or two of cream to the reduction, and reduce the mixture a little further before adding the butter. Considered heretical, according to the cookery teacher James Peterson, but also 'virtually impossible to detect'. It'll be between you and your maker. There are, in fact, recipes that call for 250ml cream, with a couple of tablespoons of reduction and 225g butter – but with as much cream as butter, is it still a beurre blanc?

GREEN PEPPERCORN

According to Anne Willan, until the mid-twentieth century beurre blanc was hardly known outside of the northern Loire and southern Brittany. It owes its fame to the celebrated Parisian chef Mère Michel, who whisked it up in prodigious quantities, night after night, to accompany the typical Loire dish of poached pike. Green peppercorns – that is, fresh, undried black peppercorns – were similarly unfamiliar in Europe until the 1960s, when the Malaysians began preserving and exporting them. On arrival in Paris they caused a sensation, especially in a sauce to accompany steak, or cooked with duck. In Asia, green peppercorns are popular additions to stir-fries and curries. They're not quite as fiery as black peppercorns, but share their fruitiness, albeit with a whisper of bay leaf. Their notable absence nowadays is perhaps down to their overexposure on the rectangular black plates of the 1980s; they are therefore ripe, in their unripeness, for a revival. Try 2 tbsp brined peppercorns, drained and stirred into the sauce after the last of the butter has been added. You can also buy dried green peppercorns: they look like the petrified peas that roll out when you clean underneath the fridge. Use 3 tbsp, very coarsely cracked, again added just after the last of the butter. Steak is the obvious partner, but green peppercorns are very good with fish, especially a piece of wild salmon.

LAVENDER & ROSEWATER

You'd be hard-pressed to think of a flavouring for beurre blanc that hasn't been tried already. Robert and Molly Krause's combination of lavender and rosewater is one of the most unusual I've encountered. It comes from their _Cook's Book of Intense Flavors_. It's served with glazed, charcoal-grilled Portobello mushrooms. A reduction is made of dry white wine and shallots, dried lavender buds and black peppercorns, which is then mixed with the butter and plenty of rosewater. The Krauses advise adding the rosewater in increments, until a clear but not overwhelming rose flavour is achieved.

LEMONGRASS & LIME LEAF

Asian ingredients in a beurre blanc? As incongruous as shadow puppetry at the _Comédie Française_. But try it, and I defy you to demur. Some substitute rice vinegar for the white wine; others flavour their reduction with typically Eastern aromatics, like lemongrass and lime leaf. Finishing these beurres blancs with a splash of soy sauce is not unheard of.

MUSCADET & OTHER WHITE WINES

Most recipes for beurre blanc call for white wine, but Champagne can't hurt. Sake is excellent. Chef Jean-Paul Moulie goes so far as to suggest using _sweet_ white wine for a sauce to pair with sole or scallops. But to be strictly authentic, it's probably safest to use one of the Loire region's dry white wines to make the reduction. There are plenty to choose from, such as flinty Muscadet, Vouvray or Sancerre – made with Melon de Bourgogne, Chenin Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc grapes, respectively. You can use just white wine for the reduction and no vinegar, if that's more to your taste. The classic Loire Valley partner for the sauce is poached pike. Rarely seen on British menus nowadays, pike was so prized in medieval England that it cost ten times as much as turbot. Consumption declined in the Victorian era, however, when the improvement of transport networks helped to make sea fish more readily available.

RED MULLET LIVER

Jane Grigson gives a 'can't fail' recipe for a beurre blanc to serve with red mullet, which calls for the liver, a well-known delicacy, to be left intact in the whole, scaled fish while it's grilled. When the fish is done, the liver is removed, chopped and added to the freshly made sauce. To make enough for 4 servings, reduce 4 chopped shallots and 150ml dry white wine until the liquid has almost gone and the shallots are soft. Add 3 tbsp double cream to the pan and bring to a vigorous boil. Add 125g lightly salted butter, bit by bit, until you have a rich amalgamation. (Grigson advises that if the beurre blanc looks like it's splitting, remove it from the heat and thoroughly whisk in 1 tbsp cold water.) Once all the butter is incorporated, season, add a squeeze of lemon juice and stir in the chopped liver.

RED WINE

The definition of a gloomy Monday is a snap-lock container full of red-meat leftovers, but no gravy. In such situations, a beurre rouge is your friend. Instead of the white wine in a standard beurre blanc, red wine, or a mixture of red wine and red wine vinegar, can be used for the reduction. Anne Willan recommends a Pinot Noir or Gamay. If the resulting sauce is too sharp, smooth its edges with a teaspoon or two of redcurrant jelly. Arthur Potts-Dawson makes a beurre rouge for a dish of smoked eel, beetroot and celery leaves, starting the sauce by adding cubed beet to the shallot, followed by black peppercorns, red wine and red wine vinegar. Once his reduction is syrupy, he adds a little cream and then the butter. Note that he strains the sauce before serving.

SNAIL

When Miss Piggy orders escargots, she asks the waiter to 'hold the snails'. I might sympathise, were it not for the charming way the rubbery little gastropods are served, in their special recessed dishes, each snail bathing in its pungent, emerald measure of butter, ready to be prised out with a deft choreography of snail fork and tongs. The ritual was enough to get me over my aversion to its problematic part, i.e., eating the snail. The aromatics from classic snail butter might be borrowed for a beurre blanc to serve with grilled lobster on the half-shell. It's a comparable experience, even down to the accompanying claw crackers and picks. The sauce is also excellent with the earthy tones of trout. Add 3 finely chopped garlic cloves with the shallot for the reduction, then proceed as per the starting point, adding 4–6 tbsp finely chopped parsley at the end.

WHITE CURRANT

It's fitting that the Dutch should have been the first to grow currants as a common garden plant during their Golden Age of painting – hold a stem to the light and the berry has the soft translucence of a pearl earring. These days, sadly, you're more likely to come across white currants in art galleries than greengrocers. They are generally sweeter than redcurrants, which is not to say they aren't tart, but it's a little easier to appreciate their flavour. Historically, fresh currants were used more as a herb than a fruit. At Ravintola Aino, a traditional Finnish restaurant in Helsinki, roasted Arctic char is served with a white-currant beurre blanc, in keeping with the fundamental principles of berry combination: redcurrants with lamb, white currants with fish.

**Vinaigrette**

The simple salad dressing usually made with 1 part vinegar to 3 or 4 parts oil. Jane Grigson would sometimes go as high as a 1:5 ratio; conversely, you'll find the odd recipe that calls for 1:2, in which case the sharpness is often offset with sugar or honey.

_For 150ml_

INGREDIENTS

2 tbsp wine vinegar **A B C**

1 tsp mustard **D E**

Salt and pepper

1–2 tsp honey or sugar – optional

1 garlic clove, crushed – optional

120ml oil, such as sunflower or olive **F**

SHAKING METHOD

**1** Put everything but the oil in a securely lidded container and shake to combine.

The oil is left out so the salt (and sugar, if using) can be easily dissolved in the vinegar.

**2** Add the oil, replace the lid and shake vigorously.

Check for seasoning and flavour: a vinaigrette is better tasted on whatever you'll be using it for, rather than on a spoon.

**3** Ideally, make your dressing at least an hour ahead so the flavours have a chance to mingle.

Whisk to recombine if necessary.

WHISKING METHOD

**1** Combine the vinegar, mustard and seasoning – plus the honey or sugar and the garlic, if using – with a whisk or fork.

**2** Gradually whisk in the oil until the dressing is thick.

Check for seasoning and flavour: a vinaigrette is better tasted on whatever you'll be using it for, rather than on a spoon.

**3** Ideally, make your dressing at least an hour ahead so the flavours have a chance to mingle.

Whisk to recombine if necessary.

LEEWAY

**A** Choose from the following vinegars (listed in order of increasing acidity): rice, cider, Champagne, white wine, red wine, sherry.

**B** Lemon juice is a common alternative to vinegar. It is more acidic but tends to be used in much the same proportions. You might add some finely grated zest too. Very delicious on warm broccoli served with roast pork.

**C** Experiment with several acids and oils in one dressing. A mix of lemon juice and wine vinegar makes a particularly good dressing.

**D** Mustard will help thicken the dressing, but if you don't fancy that tang, sieved boiled egg yolk, a raw egg yolk, some cream, silken tofu, mayonnaise or tomato purée will help the emulsion form.

**E** Most vinaigrette recipes call for Dijon, but other mustards can be used – coarse grain, a few pinches of strident English powder, Creole, or your own, home-made flavoured mustard.

**F** Olive, sunflower, groundnut, corn, canola, rapeseed, avocado or grapeseed oils all work well. If you're using walnut or hazelnut oil, you might want to cut it with a milder-flavoured oil.

Vinaigrette → Flavours & Variations

BALSAMIC

You're about as safe buying an inexpensive bottle of balsamic vinegar as you are a Rolex from the guy with the watches hung inside his overcoat. There is a lot of deceptive labelling abroad. Price is often – but not always – the best guarantor of quality. Considering the effort involved in reducing grape must to a syrup, then allowing it to ferment, oxidise and slowly evaporate, as, over a minimum of twelve years, it's transferred to ever-smaller casks made of different woods, if the vinegar seems cheap then it's probably a fake. A litre of dark, viscous balsamic will have started out as no less than a hundred kilos of must. Vinegar aged for twelve years will be labelled _balsamico tradizionale_ ; twenty-five years or longer, _tradizionale extra vecchio_. The latter will set you back about the same as a bottle of good vintage Champagne, and you'd be as wise to make a vinaigrette with it as a Buck's Fizz with Krug. If the price tag is more in keeping with, say, a pint of cider, you're probably looking at a very ordinary vinegar that's been boiled down, then sweetened and coloured with caramel in an industrial vat the size of the medieval hilltop village it's pretending to be from. Somewhere between the extremes of artisanal and industrial balsamic lies 'balsamic vinegar of Modena', a blend of wine vinegar, cooked must and (sometimes) caramel, nothing special on its own but decent in a vinaigrette. Use more of it than you would wine vinegar in our starting point: 1 part balsamic to 2–3 parts oil, and hold off adding any sweetness until you've tasted the vinaigrette, as the balsamic will contribute its own.

BEEF DRIPPING

In colonial America, when salads were the privilege of those with kitchen gardens, melted butter alone was considered enough of a dressing. Similarly, as mentioned under bacon **here** , bitter leaves were once commonly dressed with melted lard in Italy. For the most part, with the growing popularity of oils and demonisation of saturated fats, the practice has died out. Tom Kerridge bucks the trend by making a dressing of 150g slowly melted beef dripping, 3 tbsp Cabernet Sauvignon vinegar, 4 tbsp snipped chives and 4 tbsp finely chopped spring onion greens, poured onto a salad of tomato, red onion and sourdough croutons that have been tossed in dripping before being toasted. The salad is finished with lemon thyme leaves and toasted nigella seeds.

PEANUT & LIME

For about fifteen years, until I moved house and finally replaced my fridge, I kept my perishables in a salad crisper held together with duct tape: less of a storage compartment for fresh produce than the space under the culinary carpet into which hearts of cos and softening quarters of tomato were swept. Once in a while I would either tip the whole thing into the compost bin, or, if the contents were edible, make a cheerfully inauthentic _gado-gado_. This wonderful Indonesian dish usually includes cooked potato, green beans, hard-boiled eggs, sliced tomato and cucumber, shredded Chinese cabbage, beansprouts and prawn crackers – a distant cousin to salade Niçoise. Quite how distant might be measured in teaspoons of _bumbu kacang_ , or peanut dressing. Replace the oil in vinaigrette with peanut butter and cut it with the standard quantity of acid – a 50/50 mixture of lime juice and rice vinegar is ideal. Use soy sauce for the salt element and sweeten with brown or palm sugar, which you'll need to dissolve first in the acid. As the resulting dressing will be too thick to pour, _bumbu_ should be thinned with water or coconut milk. As with tahini sauce – tahini, lemon juice, garlic, salt and water – the sweet spot is elusive. It can take a fair bit of water to achieve pouring consistency, and yet it's easy to overshoot and end up with something too runny. Augment the _bumbu_ dressing with one or more of the following: shrimp paste, sliced spring onion, chopped peanuts, crushed garlic, fresh chilli pounded to a paste, or chilli sauce.

RASPBERRY & HAZELNUT

Is it because salads are the food of the fashionable that they date so quickly? I assert my right to drizzle raspberry vinegar and hazelnut oil on my warm goat's cheese salad without fear of the flared nostril. Good-quality fruit vinegars are harder to find than they are to make. In a glass jar, steep 1 litre (about 500g) raspberries, cranberries or blackberries (patted dry) in just enough white wine vinegar to cover the fruit (about 500ml). Or you might try pineapple with cider vinegar. Cover and leave somewhere cool for 3–10 days, tasting intermittently for strength. When you're happy with the flavour, strain the vinegar through a jelly bag or muslin-lined sieve into a non-reactive pan, allowing it to drip through overnight, then boil for 10 minutes, pour into a sterilised bottle and seal. To sweeten the vinegar, if desired, weigh it, and, as it comes to the boil, add between a quarter and a half of its weight in sugar, then skim off any scum as it simmers. Store in a cool, dark place and use within a year. Once open, keep in the fridge. If you're short of vinegar-making time, try adding a little fruit liqueur to a dressing; crème de cassis, mûre or framboise or will lend a little sweetness too. Cassis vinaigrette is a revelation on an avocado, mozzarella, pink grapefruit and quinoa salad.

SALSA VERDE

There are many variations on salsa verde. Its typical aromatics affiliate it to the extended _gribiche_, remoulade and tartare family, except that its base is always a vinaigrette. Salsa verde is served with warm poached meats (classically _bollito misto_ ), cold roasts, fried fish, or with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. Make it thick and knobbly and spread it on a chip butty made with sweet potatoes and good white bread. You can whizz the ingredients in a blender, especially if, contra the chip-butty idea, you want the sauce quite smooth. Or pound it in a pestle and mortar, if you have one large enough, or simply go at it on a chopping board with a big knife. To make enough for 4 servings, mash 1 hard-boiled egg yolk and scrape it into a small bowl with 4 tbsp red wine vinegar, a grinding of pepper and some salt. Very finely chop 1 small shallot and 6 rinsed, salted anchovy fillets and add to the yolk mixture. Roughly chop 2 tbsp rinsed salted capers and add those too, then slowly whisk in 120ml extra virgin olive oil. To finish, chop a large handful of parsley very finely and stir it in. Check for seasoning. Consider adding other herbs, like mint, tarragon, thyme and basil, using anchovy paste instead of fillets, lemon juice rather than vinegar and garlic instead of shallot. Some cooks thicken their salsa verde with mashed potato or soaked breadcrumbs, but if you're aiming for piquant freshness, stick with the heaps of parsley.

SESAME & SOY

Sesame and soy dressing is the reason Chinese chicken salad is an American classic. The saltiness makes everything taste juicy, the sesame lends a pervasive muskiness, and fresh ginger adds zing. The dressing is typically used on Chinese cabbage, carrots, red cabbage, cooked chicken and spring onions, all shredded. The garnish consists of cold deep-fried noodles, roasted peanuts and coriander leaf. As the flavour of sesame oil goes a long way, the usual vinaigrette proportions can be altered to 1 tbsp sesame oil, 1 tbsp groundnut oil, 2 tbsp rice vinegar, 2 tbsp light soy sauce, 2 tsp English mustard, 1–2 tsp grated ginger and 1 crushed garlic clove. Add sugar (or honey) and chilli to taste.

STOCK

Let's have lunch, said my husband. It was Sunday. We had just walked past the Zuni Cafe, the late Judy Rodgers' legendary restaurant in San Francisco. With no reservation, I was expecting the same reaction as Patrick Bateman gets in _American Psycho_ , when he calls the most happening place in Manhattan and requests a table that night at 8.30. Hysterical laughter. As luck would have it, Zuni had a table. Rodgers' signature dish was chicken salad. Chicken salad? How good could that be? Very good, it turned out. The bird itself was wood-roasted and had the oddly dry moistness and deep umami that separate the epic chicken from the everyday. What elevated it to ineffable was the bread salad it was sitting on. Rodgers described it as 'a scrappy extramural stuffing', which is a modest way of describing something that makes life that little bit more worth living. In _The Zuni Cafe Cookbook_ , the instructions run to four and a half pages, so here's an approximation for 2–4 people. While your chicken is roasting, put 1 tbsp currants to soak in 1 tsp red wine vinegar and 1 tbsp water. Turn 250g stale, white, open-crumbed, de-crusted bread into large croutons by tearing it into large pieces, brushing with olive oil and then grilling, turning now and then, until lightly golden and crisp on both sides. Transfer to an ovenproof dish and drizzle with a Champagne or white wine vinaigrette, made to a 3:8 ratio with mild olive oil. Do this unevenly, so the degree of dressing will vary from bite to bite – and save some of the dressing for later. In the oven or a dry frying pan, toast 2 tbsp pine nuts. Soften 2–3 thinly sliced garlic cloves and 4 finely sliced spring onions (including some of the green) in a little olive oil, then add to the croutons, along with the drained currants, pine nuts, garlic and spring onions. Unevenly drizzle over 2 tbsp home-made chicken stock – just enough to imbue the salad with the rich, unctuous meatiness that gives the dish its defining depth of flavour – then put the croutons into the oven with the chicken for its final 5–10 minutes. Turn off the oven and remove the chicken, leaving the salad in for another 5 minutes before transferring it to a salad bowl. Sprinkle over some of the juices from the chicken's roasting tin, add several handfuls of washed and dried salad leaves (rocket, red mustard and frisée are recommended) and more vinaigrette, then serve on a warm platter with the jointed chicken. It's a warmer-weather alternative to roast chicken and the trimmings, although you may find yourself hankering after it year-round.

WALNUT & ROQUEFORT

In a French restaurant in Clerkenwell, not so long ago, I ordered a chicory, pear and Roquefort salad. I peered under a chicory leaf. And another. No Roquefort. I made a mental note never to revisit the place and set about my unintentionally vegan lunch. And discovered where the Roquefort was: in the dressing, and all the better for its modesty. Roquefort can be like the party guest you only gradually realise is a bit of a bully. Too much and by the end of the meal your mouth will taste like the interior of the Combalou caves. Bitter chicory can take Roquefort down a peg, but I'm all for keeping it subtle from the outset. For a dressing, you'll need to recalibrate the typical proportions of a vinaigrette (1:2 vinegar to oil) to allow for the cheese's fattiness and saltiness. For 2 servings, I recommend 100g cheese, 2 tbsp white wine vinegar, 4 tbsp walnut oil and a grinding of pepper.

YOLK

Raw egg yolks make a wonderfully creamy dressing that will hold its emulsification. This is a maximalist dressing: thick, full of flavour and best used on robust leaves that can take its weight – radicchio, frisée and spinach. Mix 1 yolk with 3 tbsp white wine vinegar, 2 tbsp water, 2 tsp sugar, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp mustard powder, 1 tsp treacle and ½ tsp each of Worcestershire sauce, dried oregano, garlic granules and chilli powder. Once all is combined, slowly add 125ml mild olive oil and shake or whisk to emulsify.
Pastry

HOT-WATER PASTRY

If you're good with your hands and you've never made hot-water pastry, put down this book immediately and rectify matters. Its combination of pliancy and firmness means you can work this pastry, like clay, into a deep, free-standing pie crust – hence its disarmingly archaic alias 'hand-raised pastry'. Although I have taken to calling it 'holiday-home pastry', the kind you make when you discover that the kitchen in your adorable wisteria-smothered cottage in Nether Whateversop contains three dozen takeaway menus but no cooking pots. The recipe stipulates an approximate weight ratio of 1:1:3 hot water, melted lard and flour; as the water and fat are absorbed, they react with the flour to yield a strong, slightly sticky texture, as happens when you prepare polenta or semolina halva. The hot water stretches the gluten strands, so the pastry you end up with is the opposite of shortcrust. Longcrust. It's an incredibly satisfying pastry to make, in part because handling the warm, pliable dough is such a tactile pleasure, in part because it's amongst the most impeccably behaved pastries in the repertoire – easy both to roll and mould.

Working freehand is by no means obligatory. You can achieve a greater regularity of shape by moulding the pastry to the inside of a muffin or springform tin. I've gone with this for the starting point. Or you can do as they do in Melton Mowbray, and use a 'pork pie dolly', a wooden implement a bit like a large, minimalist chess piece around (as opposed to inside) which the pastry is formed. A jam jar will serve much the same purpose, but lacks the benefit of a handle to help ease the pastry from the mould. Once your pastry vessel is constructed, filled and lidded, you can turn your thoughts to decoration. At the very least you'll want an evenly crimped perimeter with a pair of steam-emitting central nostrils. If there's any leftover pastry, you might want to add a few leaves, or anything from heraldic escutcheons to species-identifiable songbirds. Get in the habit and you may find yourself wandering around the V&A with pie-tinted spectacles.

The robustness of hot-water pastry demands a similar heft from its fillings. Pork pies are as stout as John Bull, with their chewy mixture of chopped and minced pork and bacon that conceals, in the case of gala pie, a mysteriously elongated cross-section of boiled egg. Scotch pie, which is individual-sized and usually filled with minced mutton or beef, comes into its own in the manner of its construction. The roof of hot-water pastry is laid a little lower than the high point of its sides, creating a kind of parapet where mashed potato, baked beans or thick gravy can be held without spillage – thus obviating, with a typically Scots mixture of ingenuity and thrift, the need for a plate.

STRUDEL

Delicate strudel might not seem the obvious next step on the pastry continuum, but it's also made by adding warm water to flour (in this case, 1:2). A little fat (oil or butter), egg yolk and lemon juice are added before it's given a good knead. Minor as these tweaks may look on paper, they're enough to create a daintiness that derives, paradoxically, from the pastry's strength: it can be rolled and pulled so thinly without breaking precisely because of its cohesiveness. As with hot-water pastry, its strength comes from the effect of heated water on flour. Strong or 00 flours are often recommended for strudel, because they contain more gluten than the standard flour used for pie doughs. Strudel dough is kneaded, like bread, which stretches the strands of gluten even further. Recipes invariably call for a little lemon juice, wine or vinegar, all of which relax the gluten and make the dough easier to shape. I once tried a batch without the acid. Every time I rolled it out, it pinged back to its smaller self. The Sisyphean strudel.

Like hot-water pastry, strudel pastry demands moderately skilled handiwork, but of quite a different sort. Most recipe writers – even those who don't pander to their readers by making a religion out of convenience – will tell you to forget making strudel pastry from scratch and buy a box of filo instead. Even Claudia Roden says there's no reason to make it, before letting on to the best reason of all: home-made strudel is better. If you're up for the challenge, bear in mind that the skill in strudel-making lies not in the preparation of the dough, which is straightforward, but in coaxing a modest amount of it into an enormous semi-transparent pastry tablecloth. You'll need a table or kitchen island to work on, so you can coax the pastry towards then gently over the edges. A Hungarian grandmother will prowl her strudel-in-progress like a championship snooker player, assessing the dough and the best angle to approach it. Some work their strudel on baking parchment taped to the table, but a floured cloth is traditional, and easier to wrangle when it comes to the rolling stage. For, once you've made your diaphanous sheet, more hurdles await you. The strudel must still be rolled around its filling and transferred to its baking tray, like a patient from gurney to hospital bed. You make strudel for the same reason you play the wire-loop game at the church fête: because you can't resist the challenge.

If you don't have great form as a pastry-maker, take heart. Strudel, unlike most other pastries, enjoys being handled, so you can take your time. Shortcrust favours reptilian levels of cold-bloodedness. With strudel, warm hands are not a problem. Rings, knuckledusters and press-on fingernails are. To stretch the pastry, you must slide your fists underneath without ripping it (I find a wooden spoon is a useful substitute for fists). Quite how cooperative you find the dough will differ from batch to batch: sometimes it feels so resilient you can almost pick it up by one edge and flap it thinner, as if shaking out a duvet cover. By tradition, the final product should be thin enough to read through. If a few tears and holes develop as you pull, don't worry; they won't matter when the strudel is rolled up. Nor should you be overly concerned about the aesthetics of the finished pastry. _Strudel_ means 'whirlpool' in German, so let it be wild and whirly, not all neat and buttoned up. It's not a Swiss roll.

Apple, cherry, apricot and ground poppy seeds are classic fillings, although beyond its heartland – essentially, the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic – few of us will have tried anything other than the apple variety. For Nora Ephron, cabbage strudel, which she regularly bought from Mrs Herbst's Hungarian Bakery on Manhattan's Third Avenue until it closed in 1982, held such Proustian significance that she insisted she could remember little else about her first marriage. You feel for her ex-husband – until you try the strudel in question. I attempt to recreate it by shredding a whole, medium-size white cabbage and an onion, mixing in a few pinches each of salt, caraway seeds and white pepper, dotting with 50g butter, and covering the dish with foil. Bake, giving the mixture the odd stir, for an hour at 180°C. Let it cool, then roll it in strudel pastry (made to our starting point) and bake for a further 30–40 minutes at 190°C, until the strudel is golden brown. As Ephron points out, cabbage strudel is traditionally served with soup or roast pheasant, but I would happily eat it on its own with a cold glass of Grüner Veltliner and _The Good Soldier Švejk_.

If you're short on space, or would like to practise your dough-stretching technique across more modest expanses than the full tablecloth, strudel dough can be put to similar uses as filo. Fashion your dough into squares, lightly dust with flour and work with one at a time, keeping the others at room temperature, wrapped in cling film. It's a time-consuming process, for sure, but you'll eventually have enough for something along the lines of baklava, or the Greek spinach and cheese pie _spanakopita_ , or a multi-layered dish of your own invention. The pastry won't be as thin as shop-bought filo. But it will be good. Be generous with the butter between each sheet, mind. It helps ease the praise from your guests' mouths.

Neither strudel nor filo dough are more than a gluten strand away from the dough used to make cannoli, the Italian dessert made from a circle of pastry, folded around a mould to make a tube and, once fried, filled with sweetened ricotta and candied fruit. Cannoli dough might be made using Marsala or white wine in place of water, and I've seen recipes where a little cocoa is added. Meanwhile, in South America, there are empanadas and pasteles made with a cannoli-like dough laced with cachaça. Like cannoli, they are deep-fried and emerge from the hot oil with a shiny, pimply surface that looks positively teenaged.

Unlike pasta, which should be as smooth as a baby's skin. Complexions aside, pasta and strudel pastry have much in common. See, for example, Jane Grigson's tip, to chill offcuts of strudel pastry and grate them into soup 'as a pasta'. In one of Jacob Kenedy's lasagne recipes, apple, sultanas and sugar take the place of the classic ragù and béchamel, to make a kind of layered strudel. In Hungarian cuisine, similar desserts might include sweetened cottage cheese and egg noodles between the layers.

PASTA

Pasta sits between strudel and shortcrust on the pastry continuum. The dough can be made like strudel, using water and flour with optional additions of oil or egg, but the more common method, and the starting point for pasta in this book, is simply to combine flour and egg. The dough is made – that is, kneaded, rested at room temperature and fashioned into thin sheets – pretty much as it is for strudel, but the ratio of egg to flour is the same as the fat-to-flour ratio for shortcrust, 1:2. A medium egg weighs about 55g, a yolk 25g, so most recipes stipulate 1 egg or 2 yolks per 100g flour.

Once your dough is rested, you can roll it out by hand, especially if you're only making a few portions. A pasta machine will give you a thinner, finer result, and is certainly welcome when you have large amounts to make, but it's worth bearing in mind that machines and fine artisan flours are not what make great pasta; making lots of pasta makes great pasta. Pasta-making is fun, inexpensive, and yields a texture that's much better than most of the pasta you can buy. Furthermore, it's tweakable in all sorts of exciting directions. The same dough can be used to make Chinese egg noodles and dumpling wrappers, and there are potentially unlimited variations in flavour.

Flavoured pasta does have its detractors. I declare myself a mild sceptic, but novelty, in my view, is a self-regulating condition. You might buy the ludicrous tagliatelle striped like banker's braces, or the linguine flavoured with blood/shrimp roe/rosewater, but when it comes to suppertime, you're naturally drawn to plain old Barilla instead. In many cases, it has to be said, the flavouring is more detectable to the eye than the tongue. Squid ink is a case in point. Spinach pasta makes mild metallic reference to the cooked leaf, sometimes with a hint of nutmeg if enough is added, but the effort involved in puréeing the spinach and incorporating it into the dough is more at the service of colour and texture than flavour. If you're tempted to flavour pasta, first ask yourself – is it worth it? Are your saffron or basil or flecks of diced Jelly Tots likely to be masked by the sauce? Might it not be easier, and more effective, to flavour your pasta after you've cooked it, as the Hungarians do by tossing noodles in butter and caraway seeds? If you're determined to put your flavour into, rather than onto, your pasta, I'd advise you to do a practice run with a small batch, using 50g flour and 1 egg yolk. There's a Jean-Georges Vongerichten recipe for curry tagliatelle that goes particularly well with mussels, but it's the exception. In my experience, the most interesting pasta variations are made with grains other than plain white wheat, rather than flavourings.

SHORTCRUST

Shortcrust pastry can be flavoured, but you have to be careful that any additions don't detract from the texture. Ground nuts, or gluten-free grains like corn, can work percussive wonders in the mouth, but will make the dough much harder to handle. Citrus zest and spices are a safer bet – used in modest amounts, their flavour won't come at the expense of the lovely shortness you want. Shortcrust pastry is made with twice as much flour as butter, plus the minimum amount of water, or egg, needed to bring these together into a dough. The less water that is used, the less unwanted gluten will develop. The more you prevent gluten from developing, the crumblier and more melt-in-the-mouth your pastry will be. Thoroughly rubbing the fat into the flour is another way to restrict gluten formation, effectively by waterproofing the grains. I would advise you to delegate rubbing-in duties to your food processor, which will make for a finer texture, and therefore more waterproofing. Tip your finely crumbed mix into another bowl and spritz with just enough cold water to make a dough – add the water while the mixture is still in the food processor and it's all too easy to over-wet it.

SUET PASTRY

Pastry can be made shorter still by swapping butter for lard, which contains no water. Use a 50/50 butter and lard mix for an optimal balance of flavour and texture. Suet, another fat that can be substituted for the butter, makes for a delicious if unfashionable pastry – one that's equally effective in sweet and savoury recipes, and is as comforting as a pair of moccasins with integral socks. Fresh suet is best, if you're lucky enough to have a butcher that sells it. Otherwise the boxed stuff is fine. Elizabeth Nash, writing in 1926, claimed that suet pastry was good for children, being 'wholesome, nourishing and easy to digest', and best mixed with self-raising or wholemeal flour. It used to be common in jam roly-poly and steak and kidney pudding; mixed to the same proportions as shortcrust, it was often fashioned into dumplings that were tossed into stews for the last 20 minutes of cooking. I find suet pastry ideal for pasties, or topping pot pies, when I don't have time to make rough puff. The chef Jesse Dunford Wood uses it to top his Cow Pie, out of which pokes a stub of marrow bone, in lieu of an open-throated funnel-bird. The marrow melts and stays warm and irresistibly scoopable in the pie-coddled bone. It's so rich even Desperate Dan would be slumped cross-eyed in the corner were he desperate enough to eat it all up.

SWEET PASTRY

_Pâte sablée_ is another variation on shortcrust pastry, but most recipes call for much more butter than standard shortcrust, a fair amount of sugar, and egg, or just a yolk, to bring the dough together. It's often flavoured with vanilla or lemon zest. _Sablée_ is used for fruit tarts, _petits fours_ and biscuits. While nothing can outclass it in a strawberry tart, for most other sweet pastries it's fine to supplement a standard shortcrust with half the butter weight of icing sugar, stirred into the breadcrumb-like mix before the water or egg is added. I usually make more than I need, as any surplus can be shaped and baked as biscuits: the ingredients and method sit between biscuits and shortbread. _Larousse_ 's _sablée_ recipe, by the way, is identical to the starting point for biscuits – that is, pretty restrained. Rich isn't always better. My grandmother made her apple pies with plain unsweetened shortcrust, and they were unimprovable.

ROUGH PUFF

You might think of rough puff pastry as a shortcrust where you got bored before you'd properly rubbed in the butter. Puff pastry gobbles up a lot of butter – anything between 75 and 100 per cent of the flour weight. John Henry Walsh notes that puff pastry appeals to 'those who consult only their palates, without attending to the interests of their bodies or purses'. A pure-butter puff, he reckons, can only be bettered by including a little lard in it.

To make the classic, French, un-rough puff, you need to start with a _détrempe_ – an envelope of pastry with little or no butter in it – then roll out cold butter into a sheet called a _beurrage_ , lay it over the _détrempe_ and fold it up. Between rests in the fridge, the rectangle of dough is subjected to multiple folds, turns and rollings-out, a process known in cookery school as 'lamination'. Croissants are made roughly the same way, except that in their case the _détrempe_ is a bread dough.

On a pâtisserie course I was taught to make proper puff pastry by the _détrempe-beurrage_ method and use it in a millefeuille, the classic multi-storey confection of pastry and whipped cream. As I swept away a surfeit of icing sugar, it was no longer so easy to conceal that my millefeuille was roughly 985 feuilles short. Casting a stern eye over the class's efforts, chef clapped his hands and said, 'Now you need never make puff paste again. What you can buy in the supermarket is far superior.' Which may be true, but I urge you to have a go at least once, on the off chance you discover a hidden talent for this odd combination of pâtisserie and origami.

With characteristic hauteur, chef didn't teach us rough puff, which avoids the effort involved in making two separate components in favour of one shaggy dough, brought together with a fair amount of cold water and a little coaxing. Once chilled, rough puff is rolled, folded and turned just like standard puff. Four turns might do for a pot-pie topping or turnovers, but six will yield _palmiers_ or _vols_ that look like they have a bit of _vent_ in them. Make a few batches of sausage rolls, and you may find a good rough puff easier to pull off than a good shortcrust – and by good I suppose I mean impressive, as the loveliness of puff's texture is so much more apparent. I've only given the method for rough puff pastry, with notes under Leeway for anyone who fancies trying their hand at the haute version.

A last word on the absence of choux from the pastry continuum. The choux technique has much more in common with those on the cornbread, polenta and gnocchi continuum, especially gnocchi – indeed, little nuggets of choux dough are piped into boiling water to make gnocchi Parisienne. If you've never made choux but have prepared polenta, or made semolina halva or gnocchi alla Romana, the process will be familiar: you'll find the starting point for choux **here**.

**Hot- water Pastry**

Used for hearty, lidded pies with dense fillings like pork or game. The pastry can be fitted into a tin, around a mould or shaped by hand (hence its other name, hand-raised pastry). It has a chewy, slightly flaky texture. Flavoured versions aren't entirely unknown – grated nutmeg or mace might be added – but they are very rare, which means there's no Flavours & Variations section here. It is common, however, to sweeten hot-water pastry: sift in a tablespoon or two of icing sugar with the flour.

_For 6 individual, decorated pies made in a 6-hole muffin tin_ **A B**

INGREDIENTS

375g plain flour **C**

¾ tsp salt

125g lard, diced **D E F**

125ml hot water **F G**

Beaten egg to glaze

**1** Sift the flour into a bowl and mix in the salt. Make a well in the centre.

**2** Put the lard in a small pan with the hot water and melt over a medium heat.

**3** Pour the hot lard and water mixture into the well in the flour and quickly stir together with a wooden spoon, then knead the hot dough lightly for a minute – no longer, or it will become greasy.

**4** Shape the dough while it's still warm. If you're not quite ready, cover the bowl with cling film to keep the dough pliable.

**5** Apportion the pastry to base/lid/decoration (two-thirds for the bottoms, and the remaining third for the tops and some decoration), then roll it out to a thickness of 3–4mm. Cut out 6 circles for the bases of your pies and press into your greased muffin tin.

Alternatively, you can create the pie shapes freehand, or use a pie dolly or jam jar as a mould.

**6** Fill with whatever robust ingredients you fancy. **H I**

**7** Cover with pastry lids and make a hole in their centres to emit steam. Brush with egg. Bake at 180°C, being guided by the filling for the cooking time.

Small pork (or vegetable) pies will take about 50–60 minutes.

LEEWAY

**A** Double the quantities to make a large pie with lid and decorations. Hive off a third of the pastry for the lid and decorations. Grease a 20cm round springform tin well before lining it with the pastry. It's common to remove the springform ring, gently, some way into the baking time, and egg-glaze the pie all over before returning it to the oven to brown. It's not essential, but if you do plan to do this, make sure the crust sits within the springform ring, so the springform can be removed without decapitating the pie. If the top is in danger of burning, tent loosely with foil.

**B** Hot-water pastry can be used for tart cases, but it will have a flaky, chewy texture.

**C** Use strong white or 00 flour.

**D** Dripping, vegetable shortening or butter can be used in place of lard. Unless it's clarified, butter contains some water, so if you're making a large batch of pastry, use approximately 10 per cent extra butter and 10 per cent less water.

**E** Some modern recipes call for more fat, say 150g for 300g flour.

**F** Others call for less lard, water or both, but add an egg or two.

**G** The recipe in _Larousse_ calls for milk rather than water: hot-milk pastry.

**H** For pork pies, put 350g none-too-lean pork shoulder and 150g unsmoked streaky bacon in a food processor with 1 tsp sage and 1 tsp thyme – both finely chopped –½ tsp ground mace, 1 tsp salt and ½ tsp white pepper. Whizz until coarsely chopped, remove about half and whizz the rest until minced, then combine the two halves. Divide the filling between the pies, then cover with pastry lids and bake as outlined at step **7**, removing the pies from the tin 30 minutes into their baking time and placing them on a baking tray. Give them an all-over egg wash and return to the oven for 25–30 minutes.

**I** For a vegetarian alternative, use butter in place of the lard in the pastry and fill the pies with a samosa-like mix of diced cooked potato and carrot, shredded cabbage and peas, flavoured with spices and chilli. These pies will only need about 35–45 minutes in the oven.

**Strudel**

Pulled and stretched until it's about 40-denier, then rolled around a filling. There are no Flavours & Variations for strudel pastry, as all the modifications apply to what goes inside. Apple, cherry or apricot are the classics, often mixed with a little dried fruit or chopped nuts and some bread or cake crumbs to soak up stray fruit juices. Common savoury fillings include cooked cabbage or ragù. Once the dough is stretched, it should be filled and rolled immediately, so consider preparing the filling before you start, if it will take longer than the dough's 30-minute resting time. And if your pastry-pulling is going badly, take Egon Ronay's advice. Screw it up and start again.

_For a strudel to serve 6–8_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

250g strong white or 00 flour **B**

A few pinches of salt

125ml warm water

1 tbsp bland oil **C**

1 tsp lemon juice **D**

1 egg yolk **E**

Melted butter for brushing

**1** Sift the flour into a bowl and mix in the salt. Make a well in the centre.

**2** Mix the water, oil, lemon juice and egg yolk together, then pour into the well. Bring together to make a slightly sticky dough, adding more water in small increments if needed.

**3** Knead well, until the sticky dough becomes unsticky but soft. You should be able to do this without flouring your work surface, but it's okay to use a little flour early on if necessary.

**4** Brush the dough lightly with oil and leave under a warm, upturned bowl for 30 minutes.

**5** Cover a large area (a kitchen island or table where the edges of the pastry can hang over at least three of the sides is ideal) with a clean cloth or baking parchment, lightly floured. Roll out the pastry on the cloth or parchment until it's fairly thin, then carefully start to stretch from the inside outwards, using the backs of your hands (remove any jewellery if you can). Keep going until the pastry is paper-thin and evenly stretched. Trim off any thick edges. Paint with melted butter.

**6** To assemble your strudel, you can either dot the filling all over the pastry sheet, or fashion the filling into a plump ridge along one of the long edges of the sheet, leaving a margin of a few centimetres, to be flipped over the filling before you roll. **F G**

**7** Use the cloth or paper to help you roll up the strudel. Carefully transfer it to a lightly greased tin – in a horseshoe shape if you like, or if the size of the tin compels it – and brush with more melted butter. Make sure the short ends are neatly tucked under.

**8** Bake for about 30–40 minutes at 190°C until golden and crisp.

Brush the strudel with butter once more when it's baked, and dust with icing sugar if the filling is sweet.

LEEWAY

**A** For a good practice quantity, use 125g flour, a pinch of salt, 4 tbsp water, 1 tsp oil, ½ tsp lemon juice and 1 egg yolk. It'll stretch out to the size of a tea towel, and make enough for a side dish, lunch or dessert for 4.

**B** Plain flour will do.

**C** Melted butter can be used in the dough instead of oil.

**D** Vinegar – wine, cider or white – can be used instead of lemon juice.

**E** The egg yolk (or whole egg, as called for by some recipes) will make the dough softer, but also richer, crisper and browner when cooked. Nonetheless, it can be omitted.

**F** For a classic apple strudel, peel and core about 750g sharp-tasting eating apples and slice them into wedges. Cut the wedges into small pieces and mix with the finely grated zest and juice of 1 lemon, 50–100g sugar, 25g breadcrumbs and 1 tsp ground cinnamon. Some cooks add finely chopped nuts, additional spices or mincemeat.

**G** A savoury filling (white cabbage) is given **here**.

**Pasta**

Our starting point for egg pasta is pretty standard and uses only flour and egg. The weight ratio is 2:1, the same as it is for flour and butter in shortcrust pastry. An egg-free option is given at **G** under Leeway. The previous starting point, for strudel, can also be used to make pasta.

_For 2 as a main course where pasta is the primary constituent_ **A**

INGREDIENTS

200g 00 flour **B**

A few pinches of salt **C**

2 eggs or 4 egg yolks **D E F G H**

**1** Sift the flour onto a pastry board or into a large bowl and mix in the salt. Make a well in the centre and add the egg. Work into a dough using the tips of your fingers, then knead for 5–10 minutes until smooth.

**2** Cover with cling film or a clean tea towel and leave to rest at room temperature for at least 30 minutes, or in the fridge if you're not using it for a while.

**3** Roll out the dough using a pasta machine or a rolling pin on a floured surface, aiming for a thickness of about 1.5mm, then cut as desired.

John Wright recommends scattering flour liberally, as if someone else is doing the clearing up. Ideally the rolling surface should be dusted with a gluten-free flour like semolina or cornflour, as they're less likely to turn sticky or make your pasta tough.

**4** Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil. Add the pasta. Ribbons and sheets will take 2–3 minutes, but test a piece in advance of the rest if you're unsure.

For lasagne, some cooks pre-cook the pasta sheets for a few minutes before layering them in the baking dish, but you needn't if the sauce between the sheets is moderately wet, and the lasagne is going to be baked for at least 30 minutes.

**5** Dry any excess pasta at room temperature, allowing air to flow around it (a clothes-drying rack is ideal for ribbons).

It can take as long as a couple of days to dry thoroughly. Once it has, store in an airtight container and use within 6 months (this applies to plain egg pasta – variations involving other ingredients may need to be used sooner).

LEEWAY

**A** A dough made with 100g flour and 1 egg will roll out to about 30cm square, using a rolling pin.

**B** Although 00 flour is usually specified, pasta can be made with strong white or plain flour. See the Flavours & Variations section for notes on other types of flour.

**C** Salting the dough: Giorgio Locatelli and the authors of _The Silver Spoon_ do it. Marcella Hazan and Valentina Harris don't. Pick your team. Note that salted cooking water will effectively salt the pasta.

**D** For a yellower, richer dough, use 4 yolks rather than  eggs per 200g flour.

**E** Some cooks supplement the eggs with a little oil: about 1 tsp per 200g flour and 2 eggs.

**F** Our starting point stipulates an egg-to-flour weight ratio of 1:2, but you can use as many as 8 yolks to 200g flour. According to Jacob Kenedy, this will make 'a decadent pasta'. It's not right for stuffed pasta, however, since more yolks make for reduced elasticity and a 'crisper' pasta.

**G** If you're out of eggs, make eggless pasta: 200g plain flour, 120ml warm water, 2 tsp olive oil. Make a well in the centre of the sifted flour and add the water and oil. Knead for 10 minutes and then continue from step **2**. Egg shortage or not, I think this is the better option for wholemeal flour.

**H** Elizabeth David's version of ravioli Caprese calls for butter rather than eggs, which she says makes the dough easier to roll out than egg pasta. Rub 50g butter into 225g flour and a pinch of salt, then gradually add enough boiling water to bring the dough together. Knead, then roll.

Pasta → Flavours & Variations

BUCKWHEAT

In Valtellina, northern Italy, and over the border in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, buckwheat is traditionally used to make _pizzoccheri_ , short pasta ribbons often served with a dish of the same name that comprises potato, cabbage, cheese and sage. To make the pasta, follow our starting point, but use 1 part buckwheat flour to 2 parts wheat flour (00, if you have it), and for every 1 egg or 2 yolks add 1 tbsp warm water, beating them together before adding to the flour. Once rolled out, cut the dough into ribbons about 8cm × 1cm. Cook wide strips of savoy cabbage and 1cm slices of potato in salted water for 5 minutes, then add the _pizzoccheri_ and continue to simmer until the pasta is al dente. When everything is cooked through, drain and layer with grated cheese in a pre-heated baking dish, finishing with a drizzle of garlic butter, some finely chopped sage and a bit more cheese. Cook in a 180°C oven for 20 minutes. The authentic cheese to use in _pizzoccheri_ is Valtellina Casera DOP, but fontina mixed with some Grana Padano or Parmesan is a good non-local substitute. Not all recipes call for egg in the pasta – in some a simple dough is made with water, like the buckwheat noodles.

CHESTNUT

Anna Del Conte recommends chestnut pasta alongside rabbit in a _dolceforte_ (sweet and sour) sauce. She uses 125g 00 flour to 100g chestnut flour and 2 large eggs – a slightly higher ratio of flour to eggs than usual, because chestnut flour is less thirsty than wheat. Giorgio Locatelli's milder-flavoured version calls for 200g 00 flour and only 50g chestnut, plus 1 tsp olive oil and the yolks of 7 eggs; he serves it with wild mushrooms. If you could eat your words, this would taste like a Robert Frost poem.

CHOCOLATE

Chocolate pasta is perfect for the person who prefers making food to eating it. The dough is lovely to handle, silky and easy to cut into tagliatelle; the trim, mahogany-coloured noodles look very classy coiled on a white plate. But the pleasure stops there. The flavour is vague, until the bitterness of cocoa asserts itself like a parting insult. Take the hint. There are so many nicer things to do with flour, eggs and cocoa. My husband, ever the optimist, gave the chocolate noodles a second chance and tried another helping with some sugar sprinkled on it. 'That's much better,' he said. And it was, in the way that something unpleasant plus sugar is nicer than something horrid without it. Add 20g cocoa powder to each 200g flour.

CORN

A dough can be made with fine cornmeal, wheat flour, egg and a little warm water. Not that I've ever seen an Italian recipe for _egg_ pasta that calls for corn. Don't let that put you off. Substitute 25 per cent of the 00 flour in our starting point with fine cornmeal. As is often the case with egg pasta involving gluten-free flour, a splash of water added with the egg will help to create a bit of stickiness, the better to bring the dough together. I cut the rolled-out dough into strips and then into 2–3cm squares with a fluted pastry wheel. (If you don't have one in your kitchen drawer, check your kids' dough-cutter set.) After a brief boil in salted water, it was clear that the sweet and chunky little stamps would flatter a hearty, salty sauce. And there's nothing heartier or saltier than _cacio e pepe_ , the Roman pasta dish that makes carbonara look like a tossed salad. For 1 serving, coarsely crush 1 tsp whole black peppercorns with a pestle and mortar and set aside. Cook enough corn pasta for a single serving for 2 minutes and drain it (retaining 50ml of the cooking water), then set aside. In the pasta pan, melt a knob of butter over a medium heat and toss in the crushed pepper. After 30 seconds, add the reserved pasta-cooking water and bring to a simmer. Add the pasta, stir, then add 2 tbsp finely grated Parmesan. Remove from the heat and stir in about 4 tbsp finely grated pecorino, a tablespoon at a time, stirring gently after each spoonful has melted. The result should be a cheese sauce that is midway between thick and runny. Grind over a little more black pepper and serve.

CURRY

There's a recipe for curry-flavoured pasta in _Simple to Spectacular_ by chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and food writer Mark Bittman. Curry is one of the few pasta flavourings that really seem to work. Vongerichten and Bittman keep their accompaniments simple; with curry fettuccine, for example, they recommend a light tomato sauce, some prawns or a little rich brown chicken stock. I toss curry fettuccine in a little salted butter and serve it in a tangled pile with a poached egg on top, scattered with a few toasted cumin seeds. Use 2 tbsp curry powder per 200g flour.

GRANO ARSO

When did you last look at a field of smouldering wheat stubble and think: supper? In Puglia they make a flour from it, the char lending colour and a deep, smoky flavour. _Grano arso_ is enjoying something of a resurgence in Italy. You might find it fashioned into _cajubi_ , twisted pasta shapes served with a dried-pea sauce; _cecatelli_ , 'little blind ones' (so-called for their resemblance to tiny, empty eye sockets); or _orecchiette_ , the ear-shaped pasta traditionally served with _cime di rapa_ or turnip tops. _Strascinati_ , which look a little like pumpkin seeds, are also often made with _grano arso_ , and served with cherry tomatoes, courgette flowers and ricotta. In the absence of _grano arso_ , try toasting some of the flour you use in your home-made pasta, as in the toasted rye variation.

NETTLE

Add a pinch of Sichuan pepper to your nettle pasta dough to make people think they've been stung. Nettle pasta is comparable to the spinach variety and is made the same way. A carrier bag full of young nettles will suffice for 500g flour. John Wright, forager extraordinaire, claims that the plastic carrier bag is the accepted standard measure for nettles. Sticklers for precision may prefer to weigh out 100g leaves. Use 4, rather than 5 eggs, to allow for the water you won't be able to squeeze out of the nettles. Mix ½ tsp salt into the flour. Wash the nettle leaves, then simmer them for 10 minutes. Squeeze out as much water as possible and then chop very, very finely. Add to the dough as you work in the egg. Wright uses nettle pasta to make ravioli, filled with a mixture of chopped cooked nettles, sautéed chopped pig nuts or pine nuts and wild garlic, all bound with an egg.

PARMESAN & PARSLEY

Oretta Zanini de Vita describes a Puglian speciality called _semola battuta_ ('beaten flour') in which grated Parmesan and finely chopped parsley are added to durum-wheat semolina and eggs, then kneaded together to form a dough. Chickpea-size pieces are pinched out, rolled and simmered in a clear broth. At Easter, the broth would have traditionally been made with turkey. De Vita notes that a similar, if softer, dough is put through a potato ricer to make a _stracciatella_.

PORCINI

_Code di topo_ ('mouse tails') pasta is made in Lazio with powdered porcini mushrooms – which, I suppose, makes for an authentically murine shade. Porcini powder is widely available to buy, but if you have a coffee/spice grinder, you can mill your own from dried porcini pieces. With your own store of powder you can dress as a fairy and prance around the kitchen, sprinkling magical mushroom dust on everything. Use your porcini dust as a steak rub, in cobbler dough ( **here** ), for a savoury custard tart or mix it with breadcrumbs and Parmesan for an umami-rich crust. For porcini pasta, add about 10g powder per 200g flour.

SAFFRON

In far-off days when it was more plentiful than fresh eggs, chefs added saffron to their pasta to replicate the sunset orange of egg yolks. Sardinian _malloreddus_ , the small shell-like gnocchi, and _ciciones_ ('little chickpeas') are created from a dough made of warm, saffron-infused water and semolina flour. Saffron pasta is not to everyone's taste. In the mid-1800s Francesco Chapusot, chef to the English ambassador to Turin, complained that saffron gave Neapolitan pasta 'a detestable odour'. Tentative cooks can always add a few strands to the cooking water for plain pasta. Some people do a similar thing with red wine to make their pasta pink. Great if you can't think of anything better to do with red wine. For each 200g flour, grind about 20 saffron strands to a powder. Soak in 1 tsp warm water for 30 minutes before beating into the egg. This will be enough to give your pasta a rich yellow colour, but for a detectable saffron flavour, you'll need to use double the number of strands.

SPELT

Compared to wheat, spelt tastes richer, is higher in protein and more fibrous. Its tough hull protects the grain from pollutants and insects, meaning fewer chemicals and pesticides need be used in its cultivation. Whereas the hull of modern wheat is discarded in the field during harvest, the hull of spelt is left on until the grain is milled, keeping it fresher and more nutritious. Those who find it hard to digest wheat can often tolerate spelt. Which is not to say that spelt is gluten-free – its gluten content, while lower than wheat's, is the reason it makes such excellent pasta and bread. (Spelt also rises faster than wheat, making it good for a one-rise loaf.) In other words, spelt is teacher's pet. It comes in white and wholemeal forms, both of which can be substituted for wheat flour in our starting point, although the wholemeal type will benefit from more moisture – add 1 tsp bland oil or a little water along with the egg.

SPINACH

Why, I used to wonder, go to the trouble of making regular pasta look less attractive, for no noticeable improvement in flavour? Then I made some of my own, and saw how the subtle variation in flavour is really rather lovely when freshly made. Once you've mastered puréeing the spinach and mixing it into the dough, try the same with different leaves. Rocket is a reliable variant; fancy Italian pasta-makers L'Origine use radicchio. Or have a go at resolutely un-fancy nettle pasta (opposite). Aliza Green advises that any vegetable, cooked until soft and puréed, should work. Try artichoke, asparagus or even a combination of butternut squash, apple and prune if you like, with the proviso that outlandish variants may at some point overlap with off-the-shelf baby food. Start with 1 part purée to 4 parts flour – e.g. 25g puréed spinach to 100g flour, plus 1 egg. Or 50g spinach works well if you want a stronger colour and flavour. Add a little extra flour to make the dough kneadable if it seems too wet.

SQUID INK

Some serious people take a dark view of squid-ink pasta. Peter Kaminsky says it's the sort of cliché Italian kitchens resort to when their skill falls short of their ambition. Marcella Hazan considers it 'deplorable'. On the other hand, Tarquin Winot, sulphurous narrator of _The Debt to Pleasure_ by John Lanchester, hosts entirely black meals in his entirely black room at Cambridge University. The menu includes squid-ink pasta with grated truffles, _boudin noir_ on black radicchio, black-dyed crème brûlée for dessert and Black Velvet to drink. Almost without exception, cephalopods release ink as a defence against predators, clouding their view and, as has been recently discovered, anaesthetising the olfactory nerves of crabs and eels. You may think your olfactory nerves have been anaesthetised eating squid-ink pasta. Its flavour is often entirely undetectable. The food writer Colman Andrews reckons that cuttlefish ink is richer in flavour than squid. Cuttlefish ink is easy to find, while squid ink isn't, so you'll have to go out of your way to make a direct comparison yourself. Make ink pasta as per the eggless version given at **G** under Leeway, using only 90ml water and 30ml ink.

TOASTED RYE

Ivan Orkin, proprietor of Ivan Ramen in New York, became something of a celebrity in Japan after opening his ramen shop in Tokyo. His ramen are made with a mixture of toasted rye flour, plain flour and bread flour; the toasted rye element accounts for 10 per cent of the total flour weight. The same proportion makes a very good egg pasta. It'll be surprisingly dark, considering the small amount of rye, with a mildly toasted flavour. Pasta made entirely from rye is the colour of milk chocolate and tastes like pumpernickel bread. Accordingly, it's often served with the kind of ingredients you'd expect between two slices of rye. The innovative chef Wylie Dufresne grates pastrami over his.

WHOLEWHEAT

In the Veneto, a wholewheat pasta called _bigoli_ , similar to _bucatini_ in that it resembles lengths of electrical cabling, is traditionally made using a contraption that resembles a wooden goat designed by Oliver Postgate. Twist its horns and pasta is extruded through its nose. A superior talking-point for your kitchen now that everyone has a bright-red retro food mixer. _Bigoli_ are usually served with a sauce of slow-cooked onion, anchovies and sardines that wouldn't taste half so good with white pasta. _Lane pelose_ ('hairy wool') is, as the name suggests, a similarly fibrous variety of fettuccine, made with wholemeal flour and bran. Wholewheat pasta comes into its own with strong, rustic flavours, like garlic, chorizo, coarse Italian sausage or purple sprouting broccoli. As noted at **G** under Leeway, I think this pasta is better made with warm water and oil than with egg. Either way, you may need a little more water or egg than with white flour.

Pasta → Other Directions

**ROTOLO**

Large pasta sheets are rolled around a filling (like a Swiss roll), then either poached or sliced and baked in a sauce.

**MAKOS TESZTA**

For this Hungarian pasta dish, crushed poppy seeds, sugar, butter and salt are stirred through freshly cooked tagliatelle.

**ORIGLIETTAS**

Sardinian dessert of ribbons of deep-fried dough (made with 250g flour, 1 tbsp fat and 10 egg yolks) soaked in honey.

**MEZZALUNE**

**PASTA FRITTATA**

**SPAETZLE**

The dough is made with a little water or milk in addition to the egg.

**TORTELLONI**

**TUNA CASSEROLE**

A US store-cupboard standard made with pasta ribbons, tinned tuna, tinned soup and grated cheese.

**Shortcrust, Sweet & Suet Pastry**

This rich and crumbly pastry is made with a simple ratio of 1:2 fat to flour and a minimal amount of liquid (water or egg). For suet pastry, see **D** under Leeway, and for sweet pastry, see under **I**.

_For a shallow 22cm or deep 20cm round tart_ **A B**

INGREDIENTS

200g plain flour **C D E**

¼ tsp salt

100g cold unsalted butter, diced **D E F G**

Cold water **H**

Egg – optional **H**

**1** Sift the flour into a large bowl and mix in the salt.

**2** Add the fat and cut it in with a knife or pastry cutter, or rub lightly through your fingertips, until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

This 'waterproofs' the flour, suppressing gluten formation. A food processor will make a better job of it, if you have one.

**3** Using as little as possible, gradually add cold water (or egg, or a mixture) to bring the crumbs together.

**4** Form the dough into a disc, smoothing out any cracks that appear at the edges, wrap in cling film and leave in the fridge for at least 30 minutes or up to 3 days. Or wrap well and freeze for up to 3 months.

If you're not lining a round tin, form the dough into a square or rectangle or whatever shape suits your end.

**5** Roll out the disc of dough a few times, then make a quarter turn and do the same until the pastry is the ideal thickness (3–5mm) and width. You may need a fine veil of flour to prevent the rolling pin from sticking to the pastry. Some cooks prefer to roll out the dough between two sheets of cling film. For tarts, ease the pastry into the prepared dish, allowing the edges to overhang rather than trimming them to fit. Prick the base all over with a fork, and chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

The chilling helps prevent shrinkage. Pasties and double-crust pies can be filled and baked without a second spell in the fridge.

**6** To blind-bake, cover the pastry with foil or baking parchment, weigh down with pie weights (or dried beans) and bake at 190°C for 20 minutes. Remove the foil or parchment and weights and return the tart case to the oven for 5–8 minutes, then carefully trim off the overhanging pastry.

If your filling is particularly wet, egg-wash the tart case before returning it to the oven for a few minutes to seal. Once the tart case has cooled, it's ready to be filled and baked again – or just pour in a filling that needs no further cooking, like chocolate ganache or a bavarois ( **here** ).

LEEWAY

**A** For a tart 15cm across, use 100g flour and 50g fat; 250g flour and 125g fat will make a tart 25cm across and about 4cm deep.

**B** The quantities here will make 4 pasties.

**C** Plain flour is best. Strong white flour will do at a pinch. Self-raising can be used, but McDougalls advise that it makes for a softer, crumblier texture.

**D** Suet pastry is made with the same proportions of ingredients, and by the same method, but using suet as the fat and adding enough water to bring fat and flour together into a soft dough. It's best to use self-raising flour (or add 1 tsp baking powder per 100g plain flour), to stop the pastry being too dense.

**E** You can reduce the fat by as much as a quarter: 75g fat to 200g flour is about as low as you can go. Elizabeth Nash recommends self-raising flour for low-fat pastry.

**F** Conversely, you can increase the fat by up to 50 per cent. _Larousse_ gives a recipe for an enriched shortcrust calling for three-quarters of the flour weight in butter.

**G** Most recipes favour butter, although many chefs recommend a 50/50 combination of butter and lard, the former for flavour, the latter for texture. Vegetable shortenings, some full-fat margarines and duck or goose fat can also be used.

**H** Use the minimum amount of cold water needed to bring the dough together; you can use egg instead, or a mixture of the two.

**I** There are many variations on sweet pastry. The following is only a tweak away from our starting point. Stir in about three-quarters of the butter weight in icing sugar (75g for the quantities here) at the end of step **2**. Make a well in the centre, add 1 large egg and bring the dough together, adding a little cream, milk or water if necessary. Chill the dough for at least an hour before rolling it out and blind-baking as above.

Shortcrust, Sweet & Suet Pastry → Flavours & Variations

ALMOND

Never work with animals, children or almond pastry, they say. Even with a good amount of gluten-rich wheat flour mixed in with the ground almonds, lining a tin with it is a slog, as it's so coarse and crumbly. It's fairly common to add some ground almonds to sweet pastry, even if the amount is so small it doesn't get any specific mention in the recipe title. The resulting pastry can be made easier to handle by freezing it and then grating and pressing it into its tin. Or simply chill it, roll it out and accept that a little paving and patching may be necessary. Next time you linger at a pâtisserie window, admiring the Linzertorte within, check if its apparently immaculate lattice roof conceals a multitude of joins and imperfections. Linzertorte is an Austrian jam tart made with a spiced almond or hazelnut sweet pastry. Some recipes call for 50/50 ground almonds and plain flour, but I find this difficult to work with, and prefer something more like 30/70; note that the pastry case is not blind-baked. For a 20cm tart, I use 90g ground almonds and 160g plain flour, 125g unsalted butter, 45g sugar, ½ tsp ground cinnamon and ¼ tsp ground cloves. Bring the dough together with a beaten egg rather than water. Once chilled, use what you need to line a shallow tart tin, leaving the rest in the fridge. Prick the pastry in the tin, then chill in the fridge while you roll out the remaining pastry and cut it into ribbons for the lattice. Fill the tart with jam – you'll need the entire contents of a standard (450g) jar – and set about your latticework. Chill the pastry any time it starts to get tacky and difficult. Transfer the Linzertorte to a pre-heated baking tray and bake in a 180°C oven for 30–35 minutes. Use any leftover pastry for a bonus of rough jam tarts.

ANISEED & SESAME

Every October, _El Señor de los Milagros_ ('The Lord of Miracles'), an image of Christ weighing almost a tonne, is paraded through the streets of Lima by devotees in purple habits, accompanied by vast crowds sustained by an elaborate confection called _turrón de Doña Pepa_. Doña Pepa was a freed, seventeenth-century Angolan slave, said to have created her _turrón_ after joining the procession and being cured of paralysis in her arms. Eating a slice is liable to paralyse your pancreas. _Turrón de Doña Pepa_ is a stack of yolk-heavy sticks of shortcrust pastry, flavoured with aniseed and sesame, drenched in sugar syrup and then decorated with multicoloured sprinkles like one of those pits of plastic balls in children's play centres. The recipe is said to have come to Doña Pepa in a dream. If aniseed gives you nightmares, you can always leave it out. In more recent versions, the syrup flavourings vary widely: they might include molasses, quince, orange zest and clove; or apple, lime, prune, cinnamon, clove and allspice. Add 1 tbsp sesame seeds and 1½ tsp aniseed to our starting point.

BUDGIE FEED

That is, your own mix of fragrant seeds – too good for Joey. Works with both savoury and sweet dishes. Smooth, simple fillings like custard are best, giving the flavours of the seeds their due, and maximising the textural contrast. For pastry made with 200g flour, try a mix of 2 tbsp each of poppy and mustard seeds and 1 tsp nigella seeds; 2 tsp celery seeds in place of the nigella is great for poultry (celery seeds were once a standard pastry seasoning for chicken pot pie).

CARAWAY

Caraway develops hints of citrus zest when cooked. It can lift the heaviness of all types of pastry, but is particularly welcome in rich and robust varieties like suet. Try a little in a steamed marmalade roly-poly. One of caraway's classic pairings is pork, which is perhaps why it tastes so good in a hot-water pastry made with lard. Both Jeremy Round and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall use it in standard shortcrust, the latter for an onion and Gruyère tart. Stay your hand, however: you want about 1 tsp for a batch of pastry made with 200g flour.

CHEESE

Easy-cheesy. Roll out shortcrust pastry, sprinkle it with cheese, fold and re-roll. For cheese straws, cut into strips, sprinkle with more cheese and bake on a lightly greased tray at 190°C for 12–15 minutes. Aside from its savoury uses, cheese pastry is traditional in apple (and, less commonly, pear) tarts and pies. I use it for jam tarts; the salt-sweet combination is irresistible. Delia Smith makes red onion and goat's cheese tarts with cheese pastry, supplementing grated Cheddar with mustard powder and paprika. (Mustard will enhance the cheesiness of pastry as much it does béchamel.) Dried thyme is another good addition – 1 rounded tsp per 200g flour. The nimble-fingered can use cheese pastry to encase large, stuffed green olives. Press out circles, form each into a cup in your palm, and swaddle each olive as if it were a baby pink from its bath. Bake at 190°C for 10–15 minutes. Make as per the starting point but add half to two-thirds of the butter weight in grated Parmesan, or Parmesan mixed with Gruyère or mature Cheddar, and stir it in once the butter is rubbed in.

CHOCOLATE

Recently I was flicking through the yellowing newsprint in my recipe scrapbooks when I realised I had never once tried to make the dish that I most wanted to eat, a chocolate-pastry tart filled with vanilla custard and pears. The main reason for this was the spiritual torment of rolling out chocolate pastry. Reading Dan Lepard's _Short and Sweet_ finally shed some light on what to do about it: as powdered flavourings soften the gluten in the flour, the higher gluten content of strong white flour makes it better able to withstand them. I tried a batch and made the pear tart, which wasn't half as nice as the scrapbook picture had led me to imagine. Most recipes substitute between 15 and 20 per cent of the flour weight with cocoa; you'll also need to add some sugar to counter the bitterness. Mix 250g strong white flour with 50g cocoa powder, 50g icing sugar, 150g unsalted butter, a pinch of salt, 1 egg yolk and just enough ice-cold water to bring it all together. It's still a soft dough, so it's likely to need extra time in the fridge before rolling out.

CINNAMON

Cinnamon pastry encases apple pie as naturally as a tweed jacket does a farmer's check shirt. Sara Paston-Williams takes it in a more unusual direction; she makes her cinnamon pastry with lard and uses it for blackcurrant tart. Cinnamon pastry works in savoury contexts, or in cuisines where the sweet-savoury borders are less rigorously policed. Try it with Moorish ingredients like pigeon and almond. Replacing a quarter of the flour weight with ground nuts can lend extra bite and flavour: 1½ tsp ground cinnamon will flavour a batch of pastry made with 200g flour – consider adding a little sugar too.

CORN

To sweeten pastry slightly without adding sugar, substitute fine cornmeal for 20–30 per cent of the flour weight. It lends a crisper, pleasantly gritty texture, too, reminiscent of shortbread made with rice flour. In Italy this kind of pastry is popular in _crostate_ , which can be roughly translated as 'open tarts'. For some Italians a _crostata_ is a smart confection of glossy jam imprisoned in neat lattice pastry; for others it's a rough round of pastry with fruit plonked in the middle and the outer edge hoisted up over it, pleated along the way – a tart for want of a tart dish. The neatly criss-crossed variety, you imagine, would take a dim view of its rustic namesake. Sloppy _crostate_ are equally suited to savoury fillings, even if they're less common than sweet. Try a thick ratatouille with Gruyère, or butternut squash, spinach and blue cheese. Whatever you fill it with, guard against excessive wetness.

CREAM CHEESE

Cream cheese gives pastry a pleasing tang and a texture that's flaky without being puffy. The fat-to-flour ratio in many recipes is high, so you'll need a cool room to roll it in, and a fridge shelf on standby for a possible mid-roll chill. I find it easier to roll this between two sheets of cling film. Turnovers are a good place to start if you're unfamiliar with the flavour of cream-cheese pastry. Apricot jam is hard to beat as a filling and is also a standard for _rugelach_ , the Jewish cream-cheese pastries that are perfectly at home in the company of croissants and Danish pastries, but considerably simpler to make. Start by creaming 100g each of butter and full-fat cream cheese with 2 tbsp icing sugar and ½ tsp vanilla extract. Beat in 150g plain flour and bring the mixture together to make a dough. Divide in half and flatten each half into a disc, then wrap in cling film and leave in the fridge for a few hours or up to a couple of days. Roll out each disc to a 22cm round, then spread _thinly_ with jam up to a centimetre shy of the edge, leaving a circle about 5cm in diameter uncovered in the centre. Scatter over a mixture of sugar, ground cinnamon and finely chopped walnuts. Cut into 12 wedge-shaped slices, as you would a pizza, then roll up each triangle from the wide end to the tip and transfer to a non-stick baking tray, with the tips tucked underneath. Paint with egg wash, sprinkle with granulated sugar and bake at 180°C for 20–25 minutes. Cream-cheese pastry is put to daintier use in tassies: bijou tartlets usually deep-filled with sweetened chopped pecans, but also ideal receptacles for savoury fillings like crab mayonnaise, providing you leave out the icing sugar.

HAZELNUT

The Irish chef Denis Cotter uses a hazelnut shortcrust for his chanterelle and sea spinach tart. With the addition of a little sugar, the same pastry can be used for sweet tarts. Try it with whatever jam you have to hand for a variation on Linzertorte ( **here** ), or with a chocolate ganache filling ( **here** ). Replace 15–25 per cent of the flour weight with roasted ground hazelnuts; the proportion is lower than for almonds because hazelnuts are stronger in flavour.

LEMON

Go ahead and match your shoes and handbag. Lemon pastry is lovely in a lemon tart. If that's a shade too obvious, follow Heston Blumenthal and mix the zest with vanilla seeds. The resulting pastry is fit for the most luxurious lemon tart, with a filling the shiny yellow of a drenched sou'wester. Lemon pastry is also great for baked cheesecakes, Italian-style sweetened ricotta pies and crab tart. The finely grated zest of 1 lemon will flavour enough pastry for a 20cm tart shell, although double that amount if you want the lemon to zing. Some chefs add a few drops of lemon juice to bind the pastry, as the acidity is believed to reduce shrinkage.

OLIVE OIL

The sweet Swiss-chard tart _tourte aux blettes_ is a classic of Niçoise cuisine. The dish begs plenty of questions: about the advisability of mixing greens with sugar, whether Parmesan ever has a place in a dessert, and how many sackfuls of chard leaves are needed to fill an entire pie. That the pastry is made with oil, as opposed to a hard fat, might also strike you as peculiar. Diana Farr Louis explains that olive oil pastry, while used occasionally in Spain, Provence and Italy, is a much bigger deal in Crete. The method bears close comparison with strudel dough. Flour is kneaded with oil, wine and warm water, then rested at room temperature before being rolled out thinly. At the 1986 Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, Janet Laurence presented the results of a test using various cooking oils to make pastry. She reported that oil pastry is less given to shrinking but, unlike a pastry made with hard fat, is best used immediately after it has been made, as the longer the dough rests, the greasier it becomes.

ROSE

Popular throughout the Middle East and Maghreb, _ma'moul_ , crumbly biscuits stuffed with dried fruit and nut pastes, are indispensable night-time sustenance during Ramadan. In some versions, the pastry is made with yeast, _mahleb_ (an almond-like flavouring extracted from cherry stones) and mastic (a resin used to flavour gum and alcoholic drinks, particularly in Greece). This simple version is essentially a shortcrust made with semolina, wheat and sheep's butter, flavoured with rosewater. Use 75 per cent fine semolina and 25 per cent plain flour if possible, but all plain flour will do. As a rule, round _ma'moul_ are filled with dates, oblong with pistachio, and domed with walnut. Use 150g fine semolina, 50g plain flour, 100g butter, 1 tbsp rosewater and 2–3 tbsp milk, following the same method as for shortcrust (some like to add a little sugar too). Divide the pastry into 20 pieces and roll into walnut-size balls. Authentic _ma'moul_ are made with a special mould, like a very deep wooden spoon with a star-shape or spiral design carved into the cavity. Press the pastry into the mould and tap sharply to eject. In the unlikely event that you don't have a _ma'moul_ mould, indent each ball with your thumb to form a cup. Fill with a thick purée of dried fruit. Work the pastry over the fruit to enclose it completely and place your uncooked _ma'moul_ , seam-side down, on a lightly greased baking tray, gently pressing each one with the tines of a fork. Bake at 160°C for 20 minutes. Sprinkle with icing sugar when cooled.

TURMERIC

The Jamaican patty is a Cornish pasty with a perma-tan. The record is uncertain, but it's thought that English settlers brought pasties with them to the Caribbean, where they absorbed African and Indian influences, including the ground turmeric that lends them their sunny complexion. Authentic patty pastry is neither puff nor flaky, as is sometimes assumed, but a form of shortcrust made with suet, lard, butter or a mixture. The confusion may arise from the small amount of baking powder, unusual in a pastry recipe, which is often added to provide a little lift and promote browning. Stir ½ tsp baking powder, ½ tsp ground turmeric and ½ tsp curry powder into each 200g flour. The patty filling is usually beef mince combined with breadcrumbs and onion, an aromatic combination of hot chillies, thyme, spring onion, garlic and curry powder, and perhaps some nutmeg and paprika. To deprive a patty of its pre-baking egg glaze would be like venturing onto Seven Mile Beach without a basting of Ambre Solaire. _Not_ advised.

VANILLA

A simple way to make lightly sweetened pastry taste sweeter. To flavour a dough made with 200g flour, use the seeds scraped from 1 split vanilla pod, 1½ tsp extract or 1 tsp paste.

Shortcrust, Sweet & Suet Pastry → Other Directions

CYLINDER OF BAVAROIS BETWEEN SWEET PASTRY DISCS

See here

SALMON EN CROÛTE

WELSH CAKES

Welsh cake dough is made with a 1:2:4 ratio of sugar, butter and self-raising flour with sultanas / currants and an egg. Roll out to 6–8mm, cut out rounds and cook on a greased griddle until golden.

YORKSHIRE MINT PASTIES

Shortcrust pastry filled with mint, raisins, currants, brown sugar and nutmeg.

SUET ROLY-POLY

Suet pastry filled with jam or marmalade and baked or steamed.

SWEET PASTRY RAVIOLI

SUET DUMPLINGS

Make a dough from 100g self-raising flour, 50g suet and 75ml water. Divide into 8, roll into balls and cook in simmering soup or stew for 20 minutes.

APPLES BAKED IN PASTRY CAGES

**Rough Puff Pastry**

Involves a higher ratio of butter to flour – 4:5 – than shortcrust's 1:2, and, some would say, more work, although not if you count all the shaping and blind-baking shortcrust can require. There are no Flavours & Variations here, although I have seen recipes for chocolate rough puff, and a version calling for oil in place of the butter. Notes on making highfalutin puff can be found **here**.

_For a rectangle about 30cm × 20cm – enough for a large pie lid_ **A B**

INGREDIENTS

250g plain flour **C**

A few pinches of salt

200g cold unsalted butter, diced **D E**

100ml ice-cold water **F**

**1** Sift the flour into a large bowl and mix in the salt.

**2** Add the fat and cut it with a knife or pastry cutter, or rub lightly through your fingertips, stopping some way short of a breadcrumb texture, while the dough is still shaggy and has visible strands of butter in it.

**3** Pour the water evenly over the shaggy dough, then tip out the dough onto a cold surface and compact it with a rolling pin or your hands, aiming to fashion it into a rectangle about three times longer than it is wide, and 1cm thick.

Forming it into a cohesive block might take a bit more water and a light kneading. If you find that the pastry is sticking, you may want to lightly flour the surface, pastry and rolling pin.

**4** Take the short ends and bring them almost together in the middle, leaving a small gap which, when you fold these over once more, effectively becomes the inside spine of your fat book of pastry. Wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge for at least 20 minutes. **G**

**5** Repeat the rolling and folding process (called a 'turn') between three and five more times, always starting with the shorter ends as top and bottom, and being careful not to press so hard that the layers compact. Chill the pastry for at least 20 minutes between each turn. Dough that's been chilled for more than a few hours may need some time out of the fridge to soften before it can be rolled into the desired shape.

It's advisable to keep a record of how many turns you've done. If time is not on my side (and the kitchen is cool), I will do two turns and then chill the pastry.

**6** When the lamination is complete, thoroughly wrap the dough in cling film and chill for at least 30 minutes or up to 3 days. Or it can be frozen for up to 6 weeks.

**7** For a pie lid, roll out the dough to a diameter slightly larger than your pie dish. If the dish has a rim, it can be brushed with egg and the lid fitted on directly. If not, you can fashion one from dampened offcut strips of pastry fitted onto the dampened edge of the dish. Egg-wash the pastry and fit the lid on top.

**8** Bake at 200°C, making sure you wait for the oven to heat properly – too cool an oven will cause the butter to melt before the rising starts.

A pie crust will need about 30 minutes to rise and turn golden brown.

LEEWAY

**A** If you're adapting a recipe that calls for shop-bought puff, note that these quantities make 500g pastry.

**B** This makes enough rough puff for 6 jam turnovers.

**C** Plain flour is recommended, or a 50/50 mix of plain and strong white flour.

**D** As with shortcrust, butter or a mixture of butter and lard is almost universally recommended.

**E** Rough puff can be made with the same ratio of butter to flour as shortcrust, 1:2. Other recipes call for a very buttery 1:1.

**F** 1 tsp lemon juice added to the water will make the dough easier to work with.

**G** Delia Smith makes a rough puff without any folding. She freezes the butter before grating it into the flour and mixing to achieve the shagginess, then brings it together with cold water.

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Index

**A**

Acton, Eliza **414–15, , , **

Adaniya, Henry ****

Adrià, Ferran **, , , , **

_aïoli_ **529–30**

_aji amarillo_ chillies ****

_aji de gallina_ (Peruvian chicken stew) **, , **

_ajo blanco_ (Spanish garlic & almond soup) ****

_ajvar_ (Serbian red pepper relish) ****

ajwain seeds ****

Albala, Ken **, , , , **

ale barm ****

allemande sauce **, **

Allen, Woody ****

allioli de Codony ****

Allsop, Damian **382–3, **

**ALMOND MILK**

almond milk & honey

sabayon ****

Orgeat **435–6**

**ALMONDS / ALMOND EXTRACT**

almond & orange cake ****

almond & rose angel cake ****

amaretti **290–91**

Bakewell tart **, , **

buckwheat & almond cake ****

_calissons d'Aix_ ****

croissants ****

dacquoise ****

fig, almond & fennel biscotti ****

frangipane **276–7, 298–9**

friands ****

garlic & almond soup ****

gingerbread ****

honey & crème fraîche cake ****

ice cream ****

joconde **331–2**

_lou saussoun_ **, **

orange & almond cake ****

orange flower water & almond choux **103–4**

_panellets_ **292–3**

pastry ****

pesto Trapanese ****

picada **, **

praline ****

'Praluline' brioche ****

romesco sauce ****

saffron, rose, cinnamon & almond _zerde_ ****

spicy chocolate cakes ****

sticky ginger pudding ****

_torta Santiago_ **, , 294–5**

_see also_ Macaroons; Marzipan

amaretti **290–91**

Amaretto chocolate cake ****

ambergris **376–7**

Amis, Kingsley ****

Amis, Martin ****

**ANCHOVIES**

anchovy & thyme cobbler ****

anchovy butter ****

anchovy sauce ****

_haricots à l'anchoïade_ ****

_lou saussoun_ **, **

Anderson, Tim ****

Andrews, Colman ****

Andrews, Julie ****

**ANGEL CAKE , , 324–5**

almond & rose ****

butterscotch ****

clementine ****

'hard boilings' ****

_stracciatella_ ****

Angostura bitters **, , , , **

anise ****

**ANISEED , , , , **

aniseed & sesame

shortcrust pastry ****

aniseed pastry cream ****

breads **, **

_pan de muerto_ ****

aniseed liqueur **, , **

_anko_ (red-bean paste) ****

Ansel, David ****

Antico Masetto, Tuscany ****

**APPLES**

apple & maple syrup

panna cotta ****

apples with Calvados

custard ****

beurre blanc ****

blackberry & apple jelly ****

bread ****

Eve's pudding ****

fritters **, **

_Rahmapfelkuchen_ ****

strudel ****

Arliss, George ****

Armagnac chocolate mousse ****

Arola, Sergi ****

_arroz con pollo_ ****

Artisan du Chocolat, London ****

Artusi, Pellegrino **, , **

**ASPARAGUS**

croquettes ****

risotto ****

soup ****

Assaggi, London ****

Asterix, London ****

atta flour **, , **

Au Bon Pain, Beuvron-en-Auge, Normandy ****

Au Petit Marguery, Paris ****

**AUBERGINES**

aubergine & cheese béchamel ****

aubergine, chickpea, apricot & pine nut pilaf **, **

aubergine chips & Mornay sauce ****

aubergine, walnut & red pepper sauce ****

aubergine with chocolate, rosemary & lemon sauce **377–8**

burnt aubergine, soy & paprika borlotti **, 248–9**

Aunt Sally's, New Orleans ****

avgolemono **, **

**B**

**BABAS , , 66–7, **

banana & spice ****

coconut & brown sugar ****

cornmeal & buttermilk ****

lime ****

rum **26–7, **

rye & Tokaji ****

saffron & raisin ****

**BACON**

bacon & cornmeal gravy ****

broth **221–2**

cornbread ****

Dublin coddle with soda bread ****

mayonnaise ****

quiche Lorraine **470–71**

bagels **, **

baked Alaska **, **

Bakewell tart **, , **

baking powder **, , **

baklava ****

_bakwan sayer_ (Indonesian fritters) ****

Baldini, Filippo ****

**BANANA**

banana & chocolate ice cream ****

banana & milk chocolate truffles ****

banana & spice baba ****

cream pie ****

crème brûlée ****

flapjacks ****

pancake ****

_bánh xèo_ (Vietnamese pancake) ****

Bareham, Lindsey **, **

_barfi_ (Indian fudge) ****

barley **, **

basil pesto ****

Batali, Mario **, **

_batata vada_ (Indian potato fritters) ****

Bath Olivers **47–8**

Battenberg cake ****

Bau, Frédéric ****

bavarois **, 488–9**

bay-leaf crème caramel ****

beans _see_ Black, Borlotti, Broad, Butter, Cannellini, Flageolet _and_ Haricot Beans

Beard, James **, , , , , **

Beard Papa, Osaka ****

béarnaise sauce ****

béchamel sauce **, , , , 180–81, **

anchovy ****

aubergine & cheese ****

Beckett, Fiona ****

**BEEF**

beef & carrot casserole ****

beef bourguignon ****

beef in beer ****

_bitterballen_ **, **

croquettes ****

_feijoada_ ****

_mafe_ **, , , **

meatloaf ****

_pot au feu_ **, 218–19**

stews **, **

stock **158–9, **

tagine ****

beef-dripping vinaigrette ****

**BEER**

beef in beer ****

beer batter ****

cherry beer ****

Beeton, Mrs ****

**BEETROOT**

flatbread ****

gnocchi ****

_beghrir_ (Moroccan semolina pancakes) **, 134–5**

Behr, Edward ****

beignets **, , , **

Bellini jellies ****

Bentley Restaurant and Bar, Sydney **, **

Bercy, sauce ****

Bertinet, Richard ****

besan _see_ Chickpea Flour

Besh, John **, **

**BEURRE BLANC , 534–5**

apple ****

chive ****

green peppercorn **536–7**

lavender & rosewater ****

lemongrass & lime leaf ****

Muscadet ****

red mullet liver ****

red wine ****

snail ****

white currant ****

bicarbonate of soda **, , , **

bigarade sauce ****

_bigoli_ (Venetian wholewheat pasta) ****

Bikila, Abebe ****

birch syrup ****

Birtwhistle, Nancy ****

biryani **, **

**BISCUITS , 350–51**

amaretti **290–91**

Bath Olivers **47–8**

_brutti ma buoni_ ****

cheese **353–4**

chocolate **350–51, **

chocolate chip cookies ****

digestive ****

fig, almond & fennel biscotti ****

ginger / gingerbread **321–2, , **

hazelnut & chocolate ****

_langues de chat_ **340–41**

_ma'moul_ ****

oatmeal & raisin ****

_panellets_ **292–3**

Savoy **333–4**

Turkish Delight ****

_see also_ Flapjacks; Shortbread

_bitterballen_ (Dutch croquettes) **, **

Bittman, Mark ****

**BLACK BEANS** _feijoada_ ****

**BLACKBERRIES**

blackberry & apple jelly ****

vinegar ****

black-bottom pie ****

black pudding, spicy sausage & smoked ham gumbo ****

_The Blair Witch Project_ ****

Blanc, Raymond **, , , **

Blank, Fritz ****

_blanquette de dinde_ **, **

_blanquette de veau_ **, 178–9**

**BLINIS , , , 130–31**

barley ****

buckwheat ****

caraway ****

potato ****

sourdough ****

BLT Steak ****

**BLUEBERRIES**

porcini & blueberry polenta ****

risotto ****

Blumenthal, Heston **, , , , , , , , , **

_bobota_ (Greek cornbread) ****

_bolo de rolo_ (Brazilian rolled sponge cake) ****

Bompas & Parr, London ****

bone-marrow custard ****

**BORLOTTI BEANS** burnt aubergine, soy & paprika **, **

Boston baked beans **, **

Boston cream pie **, **

_bougatsa_ (Greek pastry) ****

bouillabaisse **, , , **

Boulestin, Marcel ****

Boulud, Daniel **, **

Bourdain, Anthony **178–9**

Boxer, Arabella **, **

Bragg, J.L. ****

Brando, Marlon ****

**BRANDY**

Brandy Alexander ****

brandy sauce ****

brandy snaps ****

**BREAD , 21–2, **

bread pakora ****

bread salad **544–5**

brown-bread ice cream ****

_see also_ Brioche; Buns; Cornbread; Flatbreads; Soda Bread; Yeast-risen Bread

Bremzen, Anya von ****

**BRIE **

baked Brie in choux ****

Brie brioche ****

Brierty, Helen ****

Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme ****

**BRIOCHE 25–6, 60–61**

beignets **, **

bread & butter pudding **, , **

Brie ****

brioche fruit tart ****

brioche toast ****

chocolate & Sichuan pepper ****

orange flower water ****

_pan de muerto_ ****

'Praluline' ****

sausage ****

sorbet ****

sweet bread & butter pudding ****

sweetcorn ****

yaki-soba pan-brioche ****

_see also_ Panettone

**BROAD BEANS**

broad bean, onion & dill rice ****

Brook, Stephen ****

**BROTH **

bacon **, **

bean ****

chicken ****

fish **220–21**

gammon/ham **221–2**

lentil ****

octopus **222–3**

_pasta in brodo_ **, , , **

pot au feu **218–19**

rabbit ****

red braise **223–4**

sausage **224–5**

vegetable ****

Brown, Catherine ****

Brown, Pete ****

Brownies ****

_brutti ma buoni_ (Italian almond biscuits) ****

**BUCKWHEAT**

blinis ****

buckwheat & almond cake ****

buckwheat & grappa fritters ****

flour ****

noodles **, , 30–31**

pancakes **116–17, **

pasta ****

polenta ****

buffalo milk ****

Buford, Bill ****

_bujan dalam selimut_ (Indonesian pandan pancake) ****

Bull, Stephen **39–40, **

_bullet de peix_ (Ibizan fish stew) ****

_bumbu kacang_ (Indonesian peanut dressing) ****

**BUNS , 54–5**

burger **, 54–5, **

Chelsea **58–9**

choux **, **

croquembouche ****

ginger **56–7**

hazelnut choux ****

hot-dog rolls **54–5**

lard choux ****

spiral **58–9**

steamed coriander ****

teacakes **54–5**

_buñuelos de viento_ (Spanish choux fritters) ****

burger buns **, 54–5, **

burnt aubergine, soy & paprika **, **

**BUTTER**

anchovy ****

cultured **358–9**

seaweed ****

snail ****

**BUTTER BEANS**

chuckwagon lima beans ****

_fabada_ **, , 246–7**

honey, tomato & dill butter beans **, **

white beans, clams & cider ****

**BUTTERCREAM , , **

Italian meringue **, **

praline ****

**BUTTERMILK , **

cornmeal & buttermilk baba ****

pancakes **, **

pies ****

_sopa Paraguaya_ ****

substitutes **, , , , **

_see also_ Cornbread

**BUTTERNUT SQUASH**

bread ****

butternut squash & fennel risotto ****

butternut squash & ricotta gnocchi ****

butternut squash, feta & chilli cornbread ****

risotto **, **

**BUTTERSCOTCH**

angel cake ****

pastry cream ****

**BUTTER SPONGE CAKE , 336–7**

Battenberg ****

_bolo de rolo_ ****

buckwheat & almond ****

carrot ****

chocolate ****

elderflower ****

fruit ****

marble cake ****

_panetela borracha_ ****

peanut butter ****

pineapple upside-down cake ****

**C**

**CABBAGE**

_pizzoccheri_ ****

strudel ****

_cachapas_ (Venezuelan sweetcorn pancake) ****

_cacio e pepe_ ****

Café de Paris, Monte Carlo ****

_cajeta_ (Mexican/Central American fudge) ****

**CAKES**

almond & orange ****

Battenberg ****

brownies ****

carrot ****

chocolate **, **

chocolate & Amaretto ****

chocolate & ginger ****

chocolate & hazelnut **399–400**

chocolate & lime ****

chocolate & muscovado **400–401**

chocolate fridge cake **371–2, 392–3**

chocolate fridge cake with Rice Krispies **394–5**

chocolate truffle cake **, **

coffee & cardamom ****

'fallen chocolate' ****

flourless chocolate **, 396–7**

friands ****

fruit ****

gâteau Basque ****

gingerbread **, 344–5**

golden syrup ****

hazelnut ****

honey **348–9**

honey & crème fraîche ****

joconde **331–2**

lardy ****

lime & cassia **296–7**

madeleines **332–3**

marble ****

milk chocolate ****

mulled chocolate fridge cake ****

nut-meal ****

olive oil & chocolate **300–301**

raspberry & cassis chocolate ****

Simnel **, **

speculoos Rocher ****

spicy chocolate ****

sticky loaf **, **

stollen ****

Swiss roll ****

_tarte Tropézienne_ ****

tomato soup ****

Tunis ****

Victoria sponge **, **

walnut ****

_see also_ Angel Cake; Butter Sponge Cake; Genoise

Calabrese, Salvatore ****

calamari stuffed in a bun ****

_calissons d'Aix_ (French sweets) ****

Calvados custard ****

Calvel, Raymond ****

calzone ****

Camorra, Frank ****

Campion, Charles ****

**CANNELLINI BEANS ** cannellini bean & sage soup **228–9**

white beans, clams & cider ****

cannoli ****

The Caprice, London ****

**CARAMEL 404–6, 412–13**

custard **486–7**

salted caramel sauce **416–17**

sauce **404–5**

Vietnamese caramel sauce ****

**CARAWAY**

breads **, **

cornbread **80–81**

meringue ****

pastry ****

Carême, Marie-Antoine **, , , , , **

_carne en salsa de almendras_ (Spanish pork & almond stew) **312–13**

Carrier, Robert ****

**CARROT**

beef & carrot casserole ****

cake ****

tomato & carrot soup **230–31**

Caruso, James Campbell ****

_casadielles_ (Asturian pastries) ****

cashew nuts ****

**CAULIFLOWER**

cauliflower, caper & raisin polenta ****

cauliflower, cheese & cumin soufflé ****

celery, onion & herb soda bread ****

_cerneux_ (French walnut spread) ****

Ceviche, London ****

chai-spice custard **480–81**

challah ****

Champagne sabayon ****

chana dal _see_ Dal

_chanfana_ (Portugese goat stew) **240–41**

Chang, David **, **

Chantilly, raspberry cream ****

chapatis **, , , , **

Chapman, Pat **313–14**

charcoal **, **

_charoset_ (fruit & nut paste) **282–3**

Charpentier, Henri ****

Chase, Leah ****

chasseur, sauce ****

_chawanmushi_ (Japanese savoury custard) **471–2**

**CHEESE**

aubergine & cheese béchamel ****

barley pancakes ****

biscuits **353–4**

buffalo milk ****

butternut squash, feta & chilli cornbread ****

_cacio e pepe_ ****

cauliflower, cheese & cumin soufflé ****

cornbread ****

chocolate & blue cheese truffles ****

cream-cheese ice cream ****

_crespelle_ **, , **

gnocchi alla Romana **75–6, 98–9**

gnocchi Parisienne ****

gougères ****

grits ****

mac 'n' cheese pancakes ****

mayonnaise **528–9**

_pane al formaggio_ ****

Parmesan & parsley pasta ****

Parmesan ice-cream sandwich ****

parsnip, Parmesan & sage soda bread ****

pastry ****

_pizzoccheri_ ****

_polenta alla fonduta_ ****

popovers ****

prosciutto & pecorino choux fritter ****

quiche Lorraine **470–71**

radicchio & Gorgonzola risotto **270–71**

sauce **, 183–4**

_sciatt_ ****

soufflés **159–60, 186–7**

sweetcorn pancakes ****

vegan cheese ****

walnut & Roquefort

vinaigrette ****

walnut, cheese & cayenne macaroons ****

_see also_ Brie; Cottage Cheese; Goat's Cheese; Ricotta

cheesecake **468–9, **

Chelsea buns **58–9**

Cherrier, Gontran ****

**CHERRY**

cherry & hazelnut bread ****

cherry beer sabayon ****

cherry, liquorice & coriander seed chocolate sauce ****

**CHESTNUT FLOUR**

bread ****

chestnut & game sauce ****

chestnut & red wine polenta **94–5**

_crêpes Suzette_ ****

pancakes ****

pasta ****

chestnut pastry cream **500–501**

_chi ma kuo cha_ (Chinese fried custard) ****

**CHICKEN**

_aji de gallina_ **, , **

_arroz con pollo_ ****

broth ****

chicken cacciatore ****

chicken chasseur ****

chicken with bread salad **544–5**

chicken with tarragon sauce ****

Circassian chicken **, **

_coq au vin_ **241–2**

coronation chicken ****

croquettes **192–3**

_fesenjan_ **, , , 310–11**

Hainanese chicken rice ****

hash ****

jambalaya **, **

korma ****

_mafe_ **, , , **

_Poularde Edward VII_ ****

risotto ****

tagine ****

chicken liver risotto **268–9**

**CHICKEN STOCK 200–201, **

avgolemono **, **

brown **208–10**

white ****

**CHICKPEA FLOUR**

_barfi_ ****

_batata vada_ **146–7**

chana dal ****

_Mysore pak_ ****

_panelle_ **96–7, **

shortbread ****

_see also_ Dhokla

**CHICKPEAS**

aubergine, chickpea, apricot & pine nut pilaf **, **

chicken tagine ****

_see also_ Chickpea Flour

**CHICORY**

_endives au jambon_ ****

Child, Julia ****

**CHIVES **

chives & cottage cheese bread ****

chive beurre blanc ****

**CHOCOLATE**

baked puddings ****

banana & milk chocolate truffles ****

biscuits **350–51, , **

blonde chocolate ****

brownies ****

chocolate & Angostura sorbet ****

chocolate & blue cheese truffles ****

chocolate & churros **, **

chocolate & Sichuan pepper brioche ****

chocolate chip cookies ****

corn choc chip scones ****

crêpes ****

custard ****

dark chocolate & ambergris sauce **376–7**

dark chocolate & PX sauce ****

dark chocolate, rosemary & lemon sauce **377–8**

egg-yolk chocolate mousse ****

fondant **398–9**

fondue ****

fudge **420–21**

gingerbread ****

hazelnut & chocolate biscuits ****

ice cream ****

Irish coffee ****

melting chocolate ****

meringue ****

milk chocolate ****

milk chocolate, coconut & nutmeg sauce ****

mint & vodka sauce ****

pancakes **138–9**

pasta ****

pastry **, 569–70**

pastry éclairs ****

peanut, chocolate & raisin bars ****

_petits pots au chocolat_ **, , 487–8**

pine nut & currant _petits fours_ ****

potato gnocchi ****

Rice Krispies **394–5**

sauce **368–9, 374–5**

soufflé **, **

speculoos Rocher ****

sponge pudding ****

_stracciatella_ ****

syrup **434–5**

tart **, 380–81**

tempering chocolate **369–70**

toasted white chocolate pastry cream ****

toffee ****

truffles **, 380–81**

white chocolate ****

white chocolate custard **463–4**

white chocolate nog ****

white chocolate sauce ****

white chocolate truffles ****

_see also_ Cakes; Ganache; Mousse

**CHORIZO , , **

_fabada_ **246–7**

red pepper & chorizo dhokla ****

**CHOUX PASTRY , , , **

baked Brie in choux ****

beignets **, , , **

buns **, , , **

_buñuelos de viento_ ****

croquembouche ****

fritters ****

lard choux buns ****

olive oil ****

orange flower water & almond **103–4**

Paris-Brest **, **

_pommes Dauphines_ ****

_pommes Elizabeth_ ****

profiteroles **, , , **

prosciutto & pecorino choux fritter ****

puffs **, **

_religieuse_ ****

_tulumba_ ****

_zeppole_ **, **

_see also_ Éclairs; Gougères

Choron, Alexandre Étienne ****

**CHOWDER 203–4**

clam **, **

fish **232–3**

mussel & garlic ****

potato ****

red wine **235–6**

sweetcorn, sweet potato & crème fraîche ****

tomato (Manhattan clam chowder) ****

Christian, Glynn ****

chuckwagon lima beans ****

**CHURROS , 120–21, , 150–51**

chocolate & churros **, **

cider sorbet **442–3**

Cinc Sentits, Barcelona ****

**CINNAMON**

coffee, citrus & cinnamon jelly **448–9**

crème brûlée ****

flatbreads ****

orange & cinnamon croquettes ****

pastry ****

saffron, rose, cinnamon & almond _zerde_ ****

Circassian chicken ****

citrus risotto ****

The City Tavern, Philadelphia

clafoutis ****

Claiborne, Craig ****

**CLAMS**

clam chowder ****

tomato & clam chowder ****

white beans, clams & cider ****

Clark, Sam & Sam ****

Clarke, Sally ****

Clarke's Restaurant, London ****

clementine angel cake ****

Clift, Montgomery ****

clotted cream **, , 482–3**

Coady, Chantal ****

**COBBLER , , , **

anchovy & thyme ****

**COCKTAILS , , , , , **

Brandy Alexander ****

espresso martini ****

'grasshopper' ****

Mai Tai ****

mint julep ****

piña colada ****

**COCONUT / COCONUT MILK**

_bánh xèo_ ****

béchamel ****

chickpea & coconut dhokla ****

coconut & brown sugar baba ****

coconut & lime custard tart ****

coconut & orange fudge ****

coconut ice ****

coconut, raisin & cashew dal ****

custard ****

custard pie ****

macaroons ****

masala ****

meringue ****

pandan & coconut milk crème caramel ****

pandan crêpes **127–8**

_pol_ roti ****

**COFFEE**

coffee & cardamom loaf ****

coffee & walnut fudge **421–2**

coffee, citrus & cinnamon jelly **448–9**

crème caramel ****

Genoise ****

meringue roulade ****

sabayon ****

Cognac chocolate mousse ****

Coke float ****

collard greens ****

Comptoir Gascon, London ****

consommé **, , **

Contaldo, Gennaro **222–3**

cookies, chocolate chip ****

Cooper, Derek ****

_coq au vin_ **241–2**

**CORDIAL , **

elderflower **, , **

lemon **, **

rosehip **436–7**

**CORIANDER**

coriander seed & fennel bread **48–9**

coriander seed custard tart ****

red pepper, sweetcorn & coriander cornbread ****

steamed buns ****

**CORNBREAD , 78–9**

bacon ****

butternut squash, feta & chilli ****

caraway **80–81**

cheese ****

cornbread custard **81–2**

hush puppies ****

raisin & orange **82–3**

red pepper, sweetcorn & coriander ****

corndogs ****

Cornish saffron loaves & buns ****

**CORNMEAL , , **

bacon & cornmeal gravy ****

batter ****

cheese grits ****

corn choc chip scones ****

corndogs ****

cornmeal & buttermilk baba ****

cornmeal & pineapple cake **341–2**

_coucou_ ****

hoe cakes ****

'Indian pudding' ****

pasta **560–61**

scrapple ****

_sopa Paraguaya_ ****

_see also_ Cornbread; Polenta

coronation chicken ****

Corrigan, Richard ****

**COTTAGE CHEESE**

chives & cottage cheese bread ****

dill & cottage cheese bread ****

parsley & cottage cheese bread ****

_proja_ ****

tarragon & cottage cheese bread ****

Cotter, Dennis ****

_coucou_ (cornmeal with okra) ****

courgette & ricotta gnocchi ****

couscous pilaf ****

**CRAB**

crab stock **214–15**

seafood gumbo ****

**CRACKERS , , , **

charcoal **, **

matzo **, **

soda bread ****

cranberries ****

**CRAYFISH**

crayfish gumbo **164–5**

seafood gumbo ****

**CREAM CHEESE**

ice cream ****

pastry **570–71**

_crema Catalana_ ****

_crema fritta_ **, 504–5**

**CRÈME ANGLAISE , , , 484–5**

bavarois **488–9**

bone marrow ****

Calvados ****

caramel **486–7**

chocolate **487–8**

coconut ****

egg nog **488–9**

honey ****

**CRÈME BRÛLÉE , , , 478–9**

banana ****

brandy Alexander ****

ginger ****

rum ****

strawberry ****

_see also_ Petits Pots de Crème

**CRÈME CARAMEL , , , , 474–5, **

bay leaf ****

coffee ****

jackfruit ****

orange ****

orange flower water ****

pandan ****

Sauternes ****

crème de cacao ****

**CRÈME DE CASSIS**

raspberry & cassis chocolate cake **** vinaigrette ****

crème de menthe jelly ****

crème pâtissière _see_ Pastry Cream

_crème pralinée_ ****

**CRÊPES , , 122–3, 126–7**

_bánh xèo_ ****

chocolate ****

_crêpe aux fines herbes_ ****

_crêpes Bohemian_ ****

_crêpes Suzette_ **, **

_crespelle_ **, , **

ginger ****

_Gundel palacsinta_ ****

lemon ****

orange ****

pandan **127–8**

vanilla ****

crispbreads, rye ****

**CROISSANTS , , , **

almond ****

_croque monsieur_ ****

croquembouche ****

**CROQUETTES , 160–61**

asparagus ****

beef ****

chicken **192–3**

mushroom & cider ****

olive ****

orange & cinnamon ****

saffron, pea & red pepper ****

salt cod **195–6**

serrano ham ****

shrimp **196–7**

sweetbread ****

croutons ****

crumpets ****

cucumber & yogurt soup ****

cullen skink ****

cumin-flavoured breads **49–50**

Curley, William ****

**CURRANTS **

Chelsea buns **58–9**

fruit loaf **54–5**

lardy cake ****

panettone **63–4**

pine nut & currant _petits fours_ ****

rosemary bread **57–8**

white currant beurre blanc ****

_see also_ Raisins

**CURRY **

batter ****

korma **313–14**

_lentilles au curry_ **254–5**

mayonnaise ****

pasta **, **

potato ****

roti ****

roux **156–7**

sauce ****

**CUSTARD**

baked **, , **

_chawanmushi_ **471–2**

Chinese fried ****

chocolate ****

coconut custard pie ****

custard powder **, **

custard shortbread ****

Earl Grey ****

_galaktoboureko_ ****

poor knights of Windsor **469–70**

white chocolate **463–4**

_see also_ Crème Anglaise; Crème Brûlée; Crème Caramel; Custard Tart

**CUSTARD TART 460–61, , 466–7**

coconut & lime ****

coriander seed ****

elderflower ****

lemon ****

saffron ****

yogurt ****

_see also_ Quiche

cuttlefish ink ****

**D**

**DACQUOISE , **

coconut, raisin & cashew ****

**DAL , , **

_makhani_ ****

_panchmel_ ****

_parippu_ **256–7**

tamarind ****

tarka chana **, 252–3**

dashi **, **

**DATES**

date & vanilla halva ****

date slices ****

date syrup ****

marzipan-stuffed dates ****

panna cotta ****

sticky ginger pudding ****

David, Elizabeth **, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , **

Davidson, Alan **, **

da Vinci, Leonardo ****

Davis, Miles ****

deep-frying ****

DeGroff, Dale ****

Delacourcelle, Philippe **178–9**

The Delaunay, London ****

Del Conte, Anna **, , **

Dell'anima, New York ****

demi-glace ****

_détrempe-beurrage_ ****

de Vita, Oretta Zanini ****

Dhillon, Kris ****

**DHOKLA 72–3, **

chickpea & coconut ****

burnt onion ****

garlic, rosemary & black pepper ****

lemon ****

red pepper & chorizo ****

semolina ****

diable, sauce **171–2**

Dietrich, Marlene ****

digestive biscuits ****

**DILL**

dill & cottage cheese bread ****

dill hollandaise sauce ****

Dinner, London ****

_District_ ****

Don Alfonso 1890, Sorrento ****

_Don't Look Now_ ****

Dooky Chase, New Orleans ****

dosas **, , **

_Dougal and the Blue Cat_ ****

drop scones ****

Dublin coddle with soda bread ****

Ducap, Doug ****

Ducasse, Alain **, , **

**DRESSINGS**

green goddess ****

peanut & lime **542–3**

pineapple & cider vinegar ****

raspberry & hazelnut ****

Russian ****

Thousand Island ****

_see also_ Vinaigrette

**DUCK**

duck _à l'orange_ ****

duck burger ****

duck with chocolate & Marsala ****

_fesenjan_ **, , , 310–11**

Vietnamese duck & orange ****

Dufresne, Wylie ****

_dulce de cacahuate_ (peanut 'marzipan') ****

Dumas, Alexandre **, **

Dunford Wood, Jesse ****

Dunlop, Fuchsia ****

**E**

Early, Eleanor ****

**ÉCLAIRS , 100–101, **

chocolate & coffee ****

_éclair au sésame noir_ ****

'egg cream' **434–5**

**EGGS , , 461–2**

avgolemono **, **

egg & dill soufflé **188–9**

egg-nog batter ****

'eggy bread' **469–70**

vinaigrette ****

_see also_ Bavarois; Custard; Meringue

**ELDERFLOWER**

cake ****

custard tart ****

fritters ****

raspberry & elderflower sorbet ****

sugar ****

Ellie, Lolis Eric ****

empanadas **, **

Emy, M. ****

_endives au jambon_ ****

Eno **, , **

_ensaïmada_ (Majorcan savoury bread) ****

_ensaymada_ (Filipino savoury bread) ****

epazote ****

Ephron, Nora ****

Escoffier, Auguste **, , , , **

**ESPAGNOLE SAUCE , , 158–9, 168–9, **

bitter orange (bigarade) ****

demi-glace ****

tomato, mushroom & white wine (chasseur) ****

sauce diable **171–2**

mustard, vinegar & onion (Robert) ****

fruit & nut (romaine) ****

espresso martini ****

The Ethicurean, Somerset ****

Eton mess ****

Eve's pudding ****

**F**

_fabada_ (Asturian bean stew) **, , 246–7**

Fahey, Orese ****

falafel in pitta ****

_farinata_ (Ligurian chickpea flatbread) ****

Farmer, Fannie Merritt **, **

_farofa_ (toasted cassava flour) ****

_fatayer_ (Arabic pasties) **, **

fattoush ****

The Fatty Crab, New York ****

Fear, Annette ****

Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh **, , , **

_feijoada_ (Brazilian black-bean stew) ****

**FENNEL **

butternut squash & fennel risotto ****

choux fritters ****

coriander seed & fennel bread **48–9**

fig, almond & fennel biscotti ****

Fermor, Patrick Leigh ****

_fesenjan_ (Persian walnut stew) **, , , 310–11**

Field, Carol ****

fig, almond & fennel biscotti ****

filé powder **157–8, **

filo pastry **, , **

_fios de ovos_ (Portuguese dessert) ****

**FISH**

broth **220–21**

chowder **203–4, 232–3**

cod with hollandaise sauce ****

fish with beurre blanc **, **

fish with mustard ****

_katsuo_ dashi ****

_romesco de peix_ ****

sole Marguery **523–4**

stock **211–12**

Vietnamese fish in caramel sauce ****

_see also_ Haddock, Smoked; Red Mullet; Salmon; Salt Cod

Fisher, M.F.K. **, , **

**FLAGEOLET BEANS**

with ricotta gnocchi ****

with salt cod **250–51**

**FLAPJACKS , 362–3**

banana ****

passion fruit ****

peanut, chocolate & raisin ****

treacle toffee & orange ****

**FLATBREADS 21–2, 28–9, **

barley ****

cinnamon ****

fattoush ****

millet ****

_missi_ roti ****

_pol_ roti ****

Flay, Bobby ****

Florentines ****

Flowerdew, Bob ****

Floyd, Keith ****

focaccia **, , **

fondant, chocolate **398–9**

Foss, Richard ****

fraisier ****

**FRANGIPANE , 276–7, 298–9**

Bakewell tart ****

_galette des rois_ **301–2**

_Jésuite_ ****

orange flower water ****

pine nut ****

pistachio ****

Pithiviers **, **

upside-down cake ****

vine-leaf fritters ****

Frederick, J. George ****

French fruit tart ****

The French Laundry, Napa Valley ****

French toast **, **

Freud, Clement ****

friands ****

**FRITTERS , , , 144–5**

apple **, **

_batata vada_ **146–7**

beer batter ****

buckwheat & grappa ****

cola batter ****

cornmeal batter ****

curry batter ****

egg-nog batter ****

fruit ****

_panelle_ **96–7, **

saffron batter ****

shellfish ****

sweetcorn, pea & black bean ****

vine-leaf ****

_fritto misto_ ****

**FRUIT**

fritters ****

poaching ****

salads ****

_see also specific fruit_

fruit cake ****

fruit loaf **54–5**

_frutto misto_ ****

**FUDGE 406–7, , 418–19**

bean ****

chocolate **420–21**

coconut & orange ****

coffee & walnut **421–2**

frosting ****

_ful medames_ (Egyptian bean stew) ****

**G**

_gado-gado_ ****

Gagnaire, Pierre ****

_galaktoboureko_ (Greek custard pastry) ****

**GALETTES 116–17**

_galette des rois_ **301–2**

_galettes de sarrasin_ ****

Galetti, Monica ****

**GAME**

gumbo ****

pie ****

_see also_ Rabbit

**GANACHE , , , 382–3, **

dark chocolate & water **382–3**

mendiants ****

milk chocolate & passion fruit **383–4**

peanut butter ****

split chocolates ****

tarragon & mustard ****

Tunis cake ****

**GARLIC**

_aïoli_ **529–30**

garlic & almond soup ****

garlic, rosemary & black pepper dhokla ****

mussel & garlic chowder ****

quince & garlic mayonnaise ****

_garnaalkroketten_ (Belgian shrimp croquettes) **, **

_gastrique_ (caramel with vinegar) ****

gâteau Basque ****

Gault, Henri ****

Gayler, Paul ****

gelatine **410–11, , , **

Gelupo, London ****

**GENOISE 319–20, 328–9, **

brown butter bay ****

chocolate ****

coffee ****

green tea ****

lemon ****

orange flower water **332–3**

quince ****

Gibbs, W. Wayt ****

**GINGER**

crème brûlée ****

biscuits **321–2**

buns **56–7**

crêpes ****

flourless chocolate cake ****

jelly ****

soufflé ****

sticky pudding ****

tablet ****

**GINGERBREAD , 344–5**

almond & ginger ****

biscuits ****

chocolate & ginger ****

Grasmere ****

men/people ****

Glasse, Hannah **, **

gluten **, , , , , , **

**GLUTEN-FREE OPTIONS , , , , **

cakes **, , **

crêpes & pancakes **, **

tempura ****

walnut gnocchi ****

**GNOCCHI**

beetroot ****

butternut squash ****

chocolate ****

gnocchi alla Romana **75–6, 98–9**

goat's / sheep's cheese & ricotta ****

lemon ricotta ****

parsnip ****

potato **, , 106–7**

pumpkin ****

rice ****

ricotta ****

spinach & ricotta **, 112–13**

_szilvás gombóc_ ****

vanilla ricotta ****

walnut ****

gnocchi Parisienne _see_ Choux Pastry

**GOAT**

_chanfana_ **240–41**

curry roti ****

**GOAT'S CHEESE , , , **

goat's cheese & milk panna cotta **454–5**

goat's cheese & ricotta gnocchi ****

red onion & goat's cheese tarts ****

**GOAT'S CREAM , , , **

heather honey & goat's cream mousse ****

Goethe, Johann von ****

golden syrup loaf cake ****

Goldstein, Darra ****

Gonzales, Abel, Jnr ****

**GOOSEBERRY**

mousse ****

tart ****

Gordon, Peter **, **

**GOUGÈRES , , **

black olive **** cheese ****

Graff, Vincent ****

The Grain Store, London **, **

gram flour _see_ Chickpea Flour

Grand Marnier soufflé **189–90**

**GRANITAS , **

strawberry **440–41**

_grano arso_ ('burnt grain') **561–2**

**GRAPEFRUIT** citrus risotto ****

**GRAPPA**

buckwheat & grappa fritters ****

panna cotta **452–3**

grasshopper pie ****

**GRAVY 155–6**

bacon & cornmeal ****

Gray, Rose **, **

Green, Aliza ****

green goddess dressing ****

**GREEN TEA , **

Genoise ****

pastry cream **, **

soba noodles ****

Greenspan, Dorie **, **

_gribiche_ sauce **530–31**

griddle pancakes _see_ Pancakes

Grigson, Jane **, , , , , , , , , , , **

grissini (breadsticks) **, **

grits, cheese ****

Gruber, Billy ****

Guilbaud, Patrick ****

guinea fowl, Majorcan ****

gulab jamun **, , **

Gullu, Fatih ****

**GUMBO , 162–3, , **

black pudding, spicy sausage & smoked ham ****

crayfish **164–5**

game ****

seafood ****

smoked haddock, mussel & okra **165–6**

squirrel & oyster ****

sweet potato, leek, butter bean & filé **166–7**

_z'herbes_ ****

_Gundel palacsinta_ (Hungarian stuffed crêpes) ****

**H**

**HADDOCK, SMOKED**

cullen skink ****

kedgeree **, 258–9**

smoked haddock, mussel & okra gumbo **165–6**

Hainanese chicken rice ****

**HALVA 73–4, 88–9**

date & vanilla ****

pomegranate & orange ****

**HAM / GAMMON**

black pudding, spicy sausage & smoked ham gumbo ****

gammon broth **221–2**

gnocchi alla Romana ****

stock ****

_jambon persillé_ ****

prosciutto & pecorino choux fritter ****

serrano-ham croquettes ****

_z'herbes_ ****

The Hand and Flowers, Marlow ****

Hank's Haute Dogs, Hawaii ****

_harcha_ (Moroccan semolina breads) ****

'hard boilings' angel cake ****

**HARICOT BEANS**

Boston baked beans **, **

_haricots à l'anchoïade_ ****

white beans, clams & cider ****

harira ****

Harris, Valentina ****

hasty pudding ****

Hazan, Marcella **, , , **

hazelnut oil ****

**HAZELNUTS**

cherry & hazelnut bread ****

choux buns ****

dacquoise ****

flourless chocolate cake **399–400**

hazelnut & chocolate biscuits ****

pastry cream ****

picada **, **

praline ****

'Praluline' brioche ****

romesco sauce ****

shortcrust ****

speculoos Rocher ****

sticky ginger pudding ****

_torta Santiago_ ****

Heath, Ambrose ****

Helmsley, Leona ****

Hemingway, Ernest ****

Henderson, Fergus ****

Henry, Diana ****

Henry VIII, of England ****

Hepburn, Katharine ****

Heston, Charlton ****

Hildegard of Bingen ****

Hix, Mark **, , , , **

hoe cakes ****

**HOLLANDAISE SAUCE , 509–10, 520–21**

blood orange ****

brown butter **522–3**

chilli ****

court bouillon **523–4**

dill ****

mint ****

olive oil ****

passion fruit **524–5**

**HONEY **

almond milk & honey sabayon ****

cake **348–9**

custard ****

heather honey & goat's cream chocolate mousse ****

honey & ghee shortbread **359–60**

honey, tomato & dill butter beans **, **

_loukoumades_ (Greek honey doughnuts) ****

meringue **, **

Hopkinson, Simon **, , **

horehound ****

hot-dog rolls ****

Howard, Philip ****

huevos rancheros ****

Hume, Rosemary ****

_humitas_ (Peruvian corn cakes) ****

_hunkar begendi_ ('sultan's delight') ****

hush puppies ****

Hutton, Wendy ****

**I**

Iaccarino, Ernesto ****

**ICE CREAM 320–21, , 490–91**

almond ****

banana & chocolate ****

brown-bread **, **

chocolate ****

cream-cheese ****

ice-cream bombe ****

ice-cream cake ****

ice-cream sandwich ****

ice-cream truffles ****

lemon **, **

_loti_ (Singaporean ice-cream sandwich) ****

mastic **, **

mint ****

olive oil ****

Parmesan ice-cream sandwich ****

pastis ****

pistachio **495–6**

sesame **, **

_stracciatella_ ****

sweetcorn ****

idli **, , **

Iggy Pop ****

'Indian pudding' (sweet cornmeal mush) ****

The Inn at Little Washington, Virginia ****

_Inspector Maigret_ ****

_intxaursalsa_ (Basque walnut cream) ****

Irish coffee **, **

Irish stew with soda-bread cobbles ****

irmik halva **73–4, 88–9**

Ivan Ramen, New York ****

The Ivy, London **, **

**J**

jackfruit crème caramel ****

Jacobsen, Arne ****

jalebi ****

jambalaya **, **

_jambon persillé_ ****

Jarrin, W.A. **, **

jasmine chocolate ganache ****

Jefferson, Thomas ****

Jekyll, Agnes **, **

**JELLY , 410–11, 446–7**

Bellini ****

blackberry & apple ****

coffee, citrus & cinnamon **448–9**

crème de menthe ****

fruit soup ****

ginger ****

kiwi fruit ****

lime **449–50**

milk ****

orange **446–7**

papaya ****

Pimm's ****

pineapple ****

rhubarb ****

_sakura_ ****

Jerusalem artichoke risotto ****

_Jésuite_ (frangipane-filled pastry) ****

joconde **331–2**

Johansen, Signe ****

Johnson, Philip ****

**K**

kachori ****

_kalburabasti_ (Turkish semolina pastry) ****

_Kalter Hund_ (German chocolate fridge cake) ****

Kaminsky, Peter ****

Kaneva-Johnson, Maria **80–81**

_kapusta_ (Polish braised cabbage) ****

Karakoy Gulluoglu, Istanbul ****

Karmel, Elizabeth ****

_kasutera_ (Japanese cake) ****

_katsuo_ dashi ****

_katsuobushi_ (dried tuna shavings) **, **

Katz, Sandor **, **

kedgeree **, 258–9**

keema ****

Keillor, Garrison **, **

_keiran somen_ (Japanese egg threads) ****

Keller, Hubert ****

Keller, Thomas **, , **

Kenedy, Jacob **, , , , **

Kennedy, Diana ****

Kerridge, Tom **, , , **

Kettner's, London ****

key lime pie ****

khaman dhokla **, 84–5**

kheer **262–3**

Kijac, Maria Baez ****

Kitchen, Leanne ****

kitchuri ****

_kithul_ treacle ****

Knausgård, Karl Ove ****

Kochilas, Diane ****

**KOMBU**

bacon broth ****

dashi ****

shiitake & kombu stock ****

korma **313–14**

_kourabiedes_ (Greek shortbread) **360–61**

Krause, Mollie & Robert ****

_kroketten_ (Dutch croquettes) **160–61**

kromeskies ****

Krondl, Michael ****

_kuromitsu_ (Japanese sugar syrup) ****

**L**

**LAMB**

_chanfana_ **240–41**

_hunkar begendi_ ****

lamb & vegetable stew **238–9**

_mafe_ **, , , **

saag gosht ****

stock **212–13**

tagine ****

laminating dough ****

Lane, Frank Walter ****

_lane pelose_ (wholewheat fettuccine) ****

Langan's Brasserie, London ****

_langues de chat_ (tuiles) **340–41**

Lapérouse, Paris ****

lard choux buns ****

lardy cake ****

Laurence, Janet ****

**LAVENDER**

lavender & rosewater beurre blanc ****

shortbread ****

Lawson, Nigella **, , , **

Lebovitz, David ****

_leche meringada_ (Spanish milk drink) ****

Le Corbusier, ****

The Ledbury, London ****

Lee, Jeremy ****

**LEEKS**

leek & oatmeal soup ****

leek soup ****

Legendre, Philippe ****

Leith, Sam ****

Leiths Cookery School **, **

_lekach_ (honey cake) **348–9**

**LEMON**

avgolemono **, **

bread ****

cordial ****

crêpes ****

dhokla ****

drizzle cake ****

egg & lemon sauces ****

Genoise ****

honeycomb mould ****

ice cream ****

lemon & ricotta gnocchi ****

marzipan ****

meringue ****

pastry ****

sauce **176–7**

sherbet lemon shortbread ****

sorbet **, **

tart **, **

toffee **414–15**

lemongrass & lime leaf beurre blanc ****

Lennon, John ****

**LENTILS**

broth ****

kitchuri ****

lentil, apricot & cumin soup **, **

_lentilles au curry_ **254–5**

_misir wot_ **255–6**

uttapam **, **

_see also_ Dal

Lepard, Dan **, , , , , **

Leszczynska, Marie **, **

Lett-Haines, Arthur ****

lettuce soup ****

Leyel, Hilda ****

lima beans _see_ Butter Beans

**LIME**

baba ****

coconut & lime custard tart ****

flourless chocolate cake ****

jelly **449–50**

key lime pie ****

lime & cassia cake **296–7**

lime & clove shortbread ****

Linzertorte ****

Liuzza's by the Track, New Orleans ****

Livingston II, Malcolm ****

**LOBSTER , , , , **

stock **214–15**

Locatelli, Giorgio **, , , , , **

Logan, Andrew ****

_loti_ (Singaporean ice-cream sandwich) ****

_lou saussoun_ (French nut spread) **, **

Louis, Diana Farr ****

Louis XV, of France **, **

_loukoumades_ (Greek honey doughnuts) ****

luchi **, **

_lunu miris_ (Sri Lankan sambol) ****

**M**

Mabey, Richard ****

**MACAROONS , , 288–9**

almond & raspberry ****

'Bakewell' ****

chocolate-decorated ****

coconut ****

macadamia & brown sugar **291–2**

walnut, cheese & cayenne ****

Maccioni, Valter ****

McConnell, Andrew ****

McGee, Harold ****

McGrady, Darren **, , **

McWilliams, Mark ****

madeleines **332–3**

Madison, Deborah ****

_mafe_ (African groundnut stew) **, , , **

Mai Tai ****

Maison Kayser ****

Majumdar, Simon ****

_makhani_ dal ****

_makos teszta_ (Hungarian poppy-seed pasta) ****

Malouf, Greg ****

malt loaf ****

maltaise sauce ****

malted-milk pastry cream ****

_ma'moul_ (Middle Eastern stuffed biscuits) ****

Man, Rosamond ****

Mansfield, Jayne ****

Manzano, Nacho ****

marble cake ****

Marguery, sauce **523–4**

Marie Rose sauce **531–2**

marmalade, Muscat ****

Mars, Frank C. ****

**MARSALA**

duck with chocolate & Marsala ****

zabaglione ****

marshmallow **428–9**

Martin, James **, , **

**MARZIPAN , 274–5, 280–81**

_casadielles_ ****

lemon ****

peanut ****

pistachio ****

_poire_ **284–5**

stollen ****

_tahinov gata_ ****

walnut **285–6**

masa harina **, 32–3, **

Mason, Laura ****

Masters, Alexander ****

mastic ice cream **, **

Mathiot, Ginette **, **

Matisse, Henri ****

matzo **, , **

**MAYONNAISE 510–11, 526–7**

bacon ****

Chantilly ****

cheese **528–9**

curry ****

garlic **529–30**

_gribiche_ **530–31**

Hellmann's ****

miso ****

mustard ****

quince & garlic ****

red pepper ****

remoulade **, **

_rouille_ ****

sea urchin ****

seaweed & wasabi ****

tartare **, **

tuna ****

_see also_ Dressings

Maze, Andrée (La Mazille) ****

meatloaf ****

_melanzane al cioccolato_ (aubergine with chocolate) **377–8**

Mendel, Janet ****

mendiants ****

**MERINGUE , , 424–5, **

almond ****

caraway ****

chocolate ****

coconut **426–7**

coffee ****

dacquoise ****

French **, , **

hazelnut ****

honey **, **

Italian **, **

Italian meringue buttercream ****

kisses ****

lemon ****

mustard ****

pecan ****

rice meringue pudding ****

roulade **, **

rosewater & pistachio **429–30**

strawberry **, **

Swiss ****

The Meringue Girls, London ****

Mesa Grill, New York ****

_m'hencha_ (Moroccan marzipan pastries) ****

_migas de pastor_ ('shepherd's breadcrumbs') ****

milk jelly ****

Millau, Christian ****

millefeuille **, , **

**MILLET , **

fermented millet porridge **95–6**

polenta ****

risotto ****

mincemeat shortbread balls ****

mince pies **, **

**MINT**

mint ice cream ****

mint julep ****

_misir wot_ (Ethiopian lentil stew) **255–6**

miso mayonnaise ****

_missi_ (chickpea, spinach & nigella) roti ****

Mitchum, Robert ****

**MOLASSES**

'Indian pudding' ****

pomegranate & orange halva ****

mole ****

Mollard, John ****

Molokhovets, Elena ****

Momofuku **, **

Monet, Claude ****

Mont Blanc ****

_Moonraker_ ****

Moore, Victoria ****

Morales, Martin ****

Morimoto, Masaharu ****

Morinaga, Taichiro ****

Morito, London ****

Mornay sauce **, 183–4**

Moro, London ****

Morrison, Jim ****

Mother's Restaurant, New Orleans ****

Moulie, Jean-Paul ****

_mouna_ (orange flower brioche) ****

**MOUSSE**

Armagnac & chocolate ****

chocolate **, 370–71, 386–7**

Cognac & chocolate ****

egg-yolk chocolate ****

gooseberry ****

honey & goat's cream chocolate ****

jasmine & chocolate ****

Parfait Amour & chocolate ****

strawberry **389–90**

white chocolate ****

white chocolate & double malt ****

Moyers, Brian ****

_mozzarella di bufala_ ****

_Mr Flip_ ****

Mulot et Petitjean, Dijon ****

Muscadet beurre blanc ****

Muscat marmalade ****

**MUSHROOMS**

mushroom & chervil soup ****

mushroom & cider croquettes ****

sauce chasseur ****

shiitake & kombu stock ****

stock ****

_see also_ Porcini

**MUSSELS**

mussel & garlic chowder ****

smoked haddock, mussel & okra gumbo **165–6**

**MUSTARD**

fish with mustard ****

mayonnaise ****

meatloaf ****

sabayon ****

sauce Robert ****

tarragon & mustard ganache ****

**MUTTON**

_chanfana_ **240–41**

risotto **269–70**

toffees ****

Myhrvold, Nathan ****

_Mysore pak_ (Indian sweet) ****

**N**

**NAAN **

coconut, sultana & almond/pistachio ****

yogurt & nigella seed ****

Nash, Elizabeth ****

_natillas de avellanas_ (Spanish hazelnut dessert) ****

Nelson, Sarah ****

Nesselrode panna cotta ****

**NETTLE**

pasta ****

soup ****

The Nevis Bakery, Fort William ****

New York cheesecake **468–9**

_ni-hachi_ soba **, **

**NIGELLA SEED**

_missi_ roti ****

yogurt & nigella seed naan ****

Nilsson, Harry ****

nixtamal ****

Nobu Matsuhisa ****

_nociata_ (walnut 'marzipan') ****

noisette, sauce **522–3**

Noma, Copenhagen ****

**NOODLES , , , , **

buckwheat **, , 30–31**

ramen **, **

yaki-soba pan-brioche ****

_see also_ Pasta

Norrington-Davies, Tom ****

_nouvelle cuisine_ **, **

_nuoc cham_ (Vietnamese dipping sauce) ****

Nutella **, , , **

**NUTS**

picada **, **

_romesco de peix_ ****

sauces **277–8**

soups **, , **

stews **278–9**

_see also specific nuts_

Nutt, Frederick ****

**O**

_o' bror e purpo_ (octopus broth) **222–3**

**OATS / OATMEAL**

leek & oatmeal soup ****

oatcakes **, 33–4**

oatmeal & raisin

macaroons ****

Staffordshire oatcakes **133–4**

_see also_ Flapjacks

octopus broth **222–3**

oil, cooking ****

Oistins, Barbados ****

**OKRA , **

_coucou_ ****

smoked haddock, mussel & okra gumbo **165–6**

Oldenburg, Claes ****

**OLIVE OIL**

choux ****

ice cream ****

olive oil & chocolate cake **300–301**

olive oil & ouzo shortbread **360–61**

pastry **571–2**

sauce ****

Oliver, Garrett ****

Oliver, Jamie **, **

Oliver, Dr William ****

**OLIVES**

olive croquettes ****

pastry-encased ****

Olney, Richard ****

_om ali_ (Egyptian baked custard) ****

O'Neill, Molly ****

**ONION**

boulangère potatoes ****

burnt onion dhokla ****

celery, onion & herb soda bread ****

_clouté_ ****

French onion soup ****

hush puppies ****

onion & thyme tart ****

sauce (soubise) ****

scones ****

Ono, Tadashi ****

**ORANGE FLOWER WATER**

brioche ****

crème caramel ****

frangipane ****

orange flower water & almond choux **103–4**

**ORANGE**

almond & orange cake ****

bigarade (bitter orange) sauce ****

blood orange (maltaise) sauce ****

blood orange sorbet ****

crème custard ****

crêpes ****

orange & cinnamon croquettes ****

sabayon ****

treacle toffee & orange flapjacks ****

Orgeat **435–6**

_origliettas_ (Sardinian dessert) ****

Orkin, Ivan ****

osso buco **242–3**

Ottolenghi, Yotam **8–9, , , , , **

Outlaw, Nathan ****

ovens ****

**OYSTER **

crackers **, **

fritters ****

fritters with saffron batter ****

seafood gumbo ****

squirrel & oyster gumbo ****

**P**

paella **263–4**

_pain au cidre_ ****

_pain au cumin_ **49–50**

_pain perdu_ **, 469–70**

pakora, bread ****

Palace Hotel, San Francisco ****

Palmer, Charlie ****

_palmiers_ **, **

_paloise_ sauce ****

_pan de mais_ (sweet cornbread) ****

_pan de muerto_ (aniseed & citrus briche) ****

_pan di ramerino_ (rosemary bread) **57–8**

**PANCAKES **

banana ****

_beghrir_ **, 134–6**

buckwheat **116–17, **

buttermilk ****

chestnut ****

Chinese **, **

chocolate **138–9**

coconut & turmeric ****

cream & sherry **125–6**

fruit-cake-flavoured ****

gluten-free ****

griddle **, , 118–19, , 136–7**

mac 'n' cheese ****

ricotta ****

Scotch ****

sweetcorn ****

_veriohukaiset_ ****

see also Blinis; Crêpes; Dosas; Uttapam; Waffles

_panchmel_ dal ****

**PANDAN **

crème caramel ****

crêpes **127–8**

pandoro ****

_pane al formaggio_ ****

paneer ****

_panelle_ (Sicilian chickpea polenta) **96–7, **

_panellets_ (Catalonian macaroons) **292–3**

_panetela borracha_ (Cuban sponge cake) ****

panettone **63–4, **

_panisso_ (Niçoise chickpea polenta) ****

**PANNA COTTA **

apple & maple syrup ****

date ****

goat's cheese & milk **454–5**

grappa **452–3**

Nesselrode ****

jelly & panna cotta ****

piña colada **455–6**

vanilla **, , **

_vin santo_ **456–7**

_pão de abóbora/pão de jerimum_ (Brazilian pumpkin bread) ****

_pão de queijo_ (Brazilian cheese puffs) ****

parathas **, **

Parfait Amour chocolate mousse ****

_parippu_ (Sri Lankan dal) **256–7**

Paris-Brest **, **

parkin **, **

**PARMESAN**

ice-cream sandwich ****

_pane al formaggio_ ****

Parmesan & parsley pasta ****

parsnip, Parmesan & sage soda bread ****

**PARSLEY**

Parmesan & parsley pasta ****

parsley & cottage cheese bread ****

sauce **184–5**

snail butter ****

**PARSNIPS**

parsnip, Parmesan & sage soda bread ****

parsnip gnocchi ****

**PASSION FRUIT**

flapjacks ****

hollandaise sauce **524–5**

milk chocolate & passion fruit ganache **383–4**

sorbet ****

**PASTA , , 558–9**

_bigoli_ ****

buckwheat ****

chestnut ****

chocolate ****

corn **560–61**

curry-flavoured ****

_grano arso_ **561–2**

_makos teszta_ ****

nettle ****

_origliettas_ ****

Parmesan & parsley ****

_pasta in brodo_ **, , , **

porcini ****

rotolo ****

rye ****

saffron ****

spelt ****

spinach **, **

squid ink ****

_tagliatelle alla bagna brusca_ ****

wholewheat ****

_pastéis de nata_ (Portuguese custard tarts) **, **

pastis ice cream ****

Paston-Williams, Sara ****

**PASTRY**

almond ****

brioche dough ****

caraway ****

cinnamon ****

hot-water **, 554–5**

puff ****

rough puff **, 574–5**

seed ****

strudel **548–50**

suet **, **

sweet **552–3, , **

_see also_ Choux Pastry; Shortcrust Pastry

**PASTRY CREAM 464–5, 498–9, **

aniseed ****

butterscotch ****

chestnut **500–501**

green tea **, **

hazelnut ****

malted milk ****

tea ****

toasted white chocolate ****

_see also_ Millefeuille

_pâte royale_ ****

_pâte sablée_ ****

Paterson, Archie ****

patties, Jamaican ****

pavlova ****

**PEACHES**

Bellini jelly ****

Peach Melba soufflé ****

peach sorbet **443–4**

**PEANUT BUTTER**

cake ****

sauce ****

_tahinov gata_ ****

**PEANUTS**

brittle ****

_dulce de cacahuate_ **, **

marzipan ****

peanut & lime dressing **542–3**

peanut, chocolate & raisin bars ****

**PEARS**

pear & chicory salad with sherry-vinegar jelly ****

pear & walnut soup ****

_poire_ **284–5**

**PEAS**

pea pod stock **213–14**

_risi e bisi_ **213–14**

saffron, pea & red pepper croquettes ****

soup **, **

pease pudding ****

**PECAN NUTS**

meringue ****

pie ****

praline **, **

'sandies' ****

sweet potato & pecan scones ****

tassies ****

Pedroso, Celia ****

_pekmez_ (fruit-juice syrup) ****

Pellacio, Zakary ****

Pepper, Lucy ****

peppercorn beurre blanc **536–7**

**PEPPERS**

aubergine, walnut & red pepper dip ****

red pepper & chorizo dhokla ****

red pepper, sweetcorn & coriander cornbread ****

saffron, pea & red pepper croquettes ****

Perkins, John ****

**PESTO , , 307–8**

_palmiers_ ****

pesto Trapanese ****

scones ****

Peterson, James ****

_petits pots au chocolat_ **, , 487–8**

**PETITS POTS DE CRÈME **

chai spice **480–81**

triple crème **482–3**

pheasant ****

Philp, Robert Kemp ****

picada **, , **

Pieroni, Andrea ****

**P IES , **

banana cream ****

black-bottom ****

Boston cream **, **

buttermilk ****

coconut custard ****

game ****

grasshopper ****

key lime ****

mince ****

pecan ****

pork **, **

pumpkin ****

Scotch ****

pikelets **, **

pilaf, aubergine, chickpea, apricot & pine nut **, **

piña colada panna cotta **455–6**

**PINE NUTS**

aubergine, chickpea, apricot & pine nut pilaf **, **

frangipane ****

pesto ****

pine nut & currant _petits fours_ ****

sauce romaine ****

stuffing ****

**PINEAPPLE**

pineapple & cider vinegar dressing ****

pineapple upside-down cake ****

polenta & pineapple cake ****

_pipián_ (Mexican sunflower-seed sauce) ****

piquante, sauce ****

**PISTACHIO NUTS , **

frangipane ****

ice cream **495–6**

rosewater & pistachio meringue **429–30**

Pithiviers **, **

pizza **, , **

_pizzoccheri_ ****

_plátanos calados_ ****

Plath, Sylvia ****

Platina, Bartolomeo ****

plums ****

_poire_ eau-de-vie **284–5**

_pol_ (coconut) roti ****

**POLENTA , 92–3**

cauliflower, caper & raisin ****

chestnut & red wine **94–5**

gnocchi alla Romana **75–6, 98–9**

millet ****

_polenta alla fonduta_ ****

polenta & pineapple cake ****

_polenta incatenata_ ****

porcini & blueberry ****

scrapple ****

squid ink ****

**POMEGRANATE**

_fesenjan_ **, , , 310–11**

pomegranate & orange halva ****

_pommes Dauphines_ ****

_pommes Elizabeth_ ****

_Le Pont-Neuf_ (French pastry) ****

poor knights of Windsor **469–70**

popovers **, , , **

**PORCINI**

pasta ****

porcini & blueberry polenta ****

**PORK**

_carne en salsa de almendras_ **312–13**

curry ****

_fabada_ **246–7**

_feijoada_ ****

pies **, **

pork with apple beurre blanc ****

red braise **223–4**

scrapple ****

stock ****

_see also_ Bacon; Chorizo; Ham/Gammon; Sausage

porridge, millet **95–6**

porridge oats _see_ Flapjacks

Postgate, Oliver ****

_pot au feu_ **, 218–19**

**POTATOES **

_batata vada_ **146–7**

blinis ****

boulangère ****

bread ****

_bullet de peix_ ****

cullen skink ****

curry ****

farls **108–9**

jacket potato chowder ****

_panellets_ **292–3**

_pizzoccheri_ ****

_pommes Dauphines_ ****

_pommes Elizabeth_ ****

_see also_ Gnocchi;

Sweet Potatoes

Potts-Dawson, Arthur ****

**PRALINE **

pecan **, **

praline brioche ****

rose **, **

Pralus, Auguste ****

**PRAWNS & SHRIMPS**

potted shrimps ****

prawn cocktail **531–2**

prawn risotto ****

seafood gumbo ****

shrimp croquettes **196–7**

shrimp in cornmeal batter ****

Prejean's, Lafayette ****

pretzels ****

Price, Paul ****

_The Prisoner_ ****

profiteroles **, , , **

_proja_ (Serbian cornbread) **, **

prosciutto & pecorino choux fritter ****

Proust, Marcel **, **

**PRUNES , , , **

mulled chocolate fridge cake ****

Puck, Wolfgang **, , **

_pudim abade de Priscos_ (Portuguese custard dessert) ****

puff pastry **, **

**PUMPKIN**

bread ****

gnocchi ****

pie ****

soup with Thai spice **229–30**

The Punch Bowl Inn, Crosthwaite, Lake District **48–9**

_Punschkrapfen_ (Austrian rum & apricot cake) ****

_pupusas_ , refried bean ****

puris **, **

**Q**

quail ****

queen of puddings ****

quesadillas **, **

_queso blanco_ (white cheese) ****

**QUICHE**

Lorraine **470–71**

onion & thyme ****

tarragon, leek & sour cream ****

**QUINCE **

quince & garlic mayonnaise ****

quince Genoise ****

**R**

**RABBIT**

broth ****

rabbit cacciatore ****

radicchio & Gorgonzola risotto **270–71**

radish-top soup ****

_ragi_ (Indian millet flour) ****

_Rahmapfelkuchen_ (German apple cake) ****

**RAISINS**

oatmeal & raisin biscuits ****

peanut, chocolate & raisin bars ****

raisin & orange cornbread **82–3**

raisin soda bread **, **

saffron & raisin baba ****

sauce romaine ****

stollen ****

ramen noodles **, **

Ramsay, Gordon ****

Ransome, Arthur ****

**RASPBERRIES**

almond & raspberry macaroons ****

chocolate-filled ****

raspberry & cassis chocolate cake ****

raspberry & elderflower sorbet ****

raspberry & hazelnut dressing ****

raspberry & hazelnut vinaigrette ****

raspberry cream Chantilly ****

raspberry vinegar **, **

Ravintola Aino, Helsinki ****

ravioli Caprese ****

_rebozados_ (Spanish fritters) ****

red braise **223–4, **

**RED MULLET , , **

red mullet liver beurre blanc ****

Redi, Francesco ****

Reichl, Ruth ****

Reinhart, Peter ****

remoulade **, **

Restaurant Gundel, Budapest ****

retsina **493–4**

Rhodes, Gary ****

rhubarb jelly ****

**RICE , , **

_arroz con pollo_ ****

aubergine, chickpea, apricot & pine nut pilaf **, **

biryani **,**

broad bean, onion & dill ****

dosas ****

gnocchi ****

jambalaya **, **

kedgeree **, 258–9**

kheer **262–3**

kitchuri ****

meringue pudding ****

paella **263–4**

pudding soufflé ****

_risi e bisi_ **213–14**

roasted vegetable spiced rice **264–5**

uttapam **, **

_see also_ Gumbo; Risotto

**RICE FLOUR , **

_bánh xèo_ ****

halva ****

tempura **142–3**

**RICOTTA**

butternut squash gnocchi ****

gnocchi ****

goat's/sheep's cheese & ricotta gnocchi ****

lemon ricotta gnocchi ****

ricotta pancakes ****

spinach & ricotta gnocchi **, 112–13**

spinach & ricotta soufflé **190–91**

vanilla ricotta gnocchi ****

_risi e bisi_ **213–14**

**RISOTTO **

asparagus ****

blueberry ****

butternut squash **, **

butternut squash & fennel ****

chicken ****

chicken liver **268–9**

citrus ****

Jerusalem artichoke ****

millet ****

mutton **269–70**

prawn ****

radicchio & Gorgonzola **270–71**

risotto bianco **266–7**

saffron (Milanese) ****

Ristorante Savini, Milan ****

The River Cafe, London ****

Roahen, Sara ****

Robert, sauce ****

Robertson, Chad **, , **

Robertson, Robin ****

Robuchon, Joël **, , , , **

rocket pasta ****

Rococo Chocolates, London ****

Roden, Claudia **, , , , , , , , **

Rodgers, Judy **, , , **

Roemer, Philip ****

Rogan, Simon ****

Roganic, London ****

Rogers, Ruth **, **

Roka, London ****

romaine, sauce ****

_romesco de peix_ **, , **

romesco sauce **, **

Ronay, Egon ****

Roosevelt, Theodore ****

Root, Waverley **, , , , **

Roscoe, Thomas ****

Rose, Evelyn ****

rosehip syrup **436–7**

**ROSEMARY**

bread **57–8**

chocolate, rosemary & lemon sauce **377–8**

garlic, rosemary & black pepper dhokla ****

Rosengarten, Frederic ****

**ROSEWATER**

lavender & rosewater beurre blanc ****

rosewater & pistachio meringue **429–30**

Rothko, Mark ****

**ROTI **

curry ****

_missi_ ****

_pol_ ****

_roti jala_ (Malaysian pancakes) ****

_rotolo_ ****

_rouille_ ****

Round, Jeremy **, **

**ROUX 154–6**

brown ****

dark/'chocolate' roux **, , , , **

golden **, , **

white **, **

Roux, Michel **, , **

Roux, Michel, Jnr **, , , **

Roux at the Landau, London ****

Rudner, Rita ****

_rugelach_ (cream-cheese pastries) **570–71**

Ruhlman, Michael **, **

**RUM**

babas **26–7, 66–7, **

_galette des rois_ **301–2**

punch **, **

_Punschkrapfen_ ****

_Rahmapfelkuchen_ ****

syrup **, , **

truffle ****

Rumpolt, Marx ****

Rundell, Mrs ****

Russian dressing ****

**RYE F LOUR **

crispbread ****

cumin-flavoured bread ****

hoe cakes ****

pancakes ****

pasta ****

potato & rye bread ****

rye & Tokaji baba ****

sandwich loaf ****

**S**

saag gosht ****

**SABAYON 508–9, 514–15, **

almond milk & honey ****

Champagne ****

cherry beer ****

coffee ****

ice cream ****

lemon sabayon tart ****

mustard ****

orange ****

sauce **514–15**

Sadaharu Aoki, Paris **, **

**SAFFRON**

Cornish saffron loaves & buns ****

custard tart ****

fritter batter ****

jalebi ****

pasta ****

risotto ****

saffron & raisin baba ****

saffron, pastis & tomato sauce ****

saffron, pea & red pepper croquettes ****

saffron, rose, cinnamon & almond _zerde_ ****

St John restaurant, London ****

Salat, Harris ****

**SALMON**

chowder/soup ****

salmon & apple beurre blanc ****

stock ****

_salsa di nocciole_ (hazelnut pastry cream) ****

_salsa di noci_ (walnut sauce) ****

salsa verde **543–4**

**SALT COD**

croquettes **195–6**

with flageolet beans **250–51**

fritters ****

Samuelsson, Marcus ****

_sanguinaccio_ (Italian blood-pudding dessert) ****

_satsivi_ (Georgian nut stew) **, , **

**SAUCES**

allemande **, **

anchovy ****

aubergine & cheese ****

avgolemono ****

bacon & cornmeal ****

béchamel **, , , , , 180–81**

Bercy ****

beurre blanc **, 534–5**

bitter orange (bigarade) ****

blood orange (maltaise) ****

brandy ****

bread ****

brown butter (noisette) **522–3**

caramel **404–5, 416–17**

cheese (Mornay) **, 183–4**

cherry, liquorice & coriander seed chocolate ****

chestnut & game ****

chocolate **374–5**

chocolate mint & vodka ****

Choron ****

court bouillon **523–4**

curry ****

dark chocolate & PX ****

dark chocolate, rosemary & lemon **377–8**

demi-glace ****

diable **171–2**

dill ****

espagnole **, , 158–9, 168–9, **

fruit & nut (romaine) ****

hollandaise **, 509–10, 520–21**

lemon **176–7**

Marguery **523–4**

Marie Rose **531–2**

milk chocolate, coconut & nutmeg ****

mint ( _paloise_ ) ****

mousseline ****

mushroom & chervil ****

mustard & onion (sauce Robert) ****

olive oil ****

onion (soubise) ****

parsley **184–5**

passion fruit **524–5**

peanut butter ****

picada **, , **

piquante ****

romesco **, **

roux-based **154–5**

sabayon **514–15**

saffron, pastis & tomato ****

seafood ****

sherry & cream ****

tahini ****

tarator **, , 304–5**

tarragon ****

tarragon & shallot (béarnaise) ****

tomate, sauce ****

tomato, mushroom & white wine (chasseur) ****

vanilla ****

velout _é_ **, , , , 174–5**

Vietnamese fish sauce **, **

walnut & cream ****

white chocolate ****

white sauce **, , 180–81**

_see also_ Dressings; Mayonnaise; Vinaigrette

s _aucisson_ brioche **, **

sauerkraut bread ****

**SAUSAGE**

black pudding, spicy sausage & smoked ham gumbo ****

brioche **, **

broth **224–5**

corndogs ****

Dublin coddle with soda bread ****

game gumbo ****

jambalaya **, **

red braise **223–4**

toad in the hole ****

_z'herbes_ ****

_see also_ Chorizo

Sauternes crème caramel ****

Savage, Brent ****

savarins **, 66–7**

Savoy biscuits **333–4**

Scappi, Bartolomeo **, **

Scarpato, Lombardy ****

Schneider, Maria ****

Schnuelle, Leona ****

Schwabe, Calvin W. ****

_sciatt_ (Italian buckwheat fritters) ****

**SCONES , , , 39–40, **

corn choc chip ****

onion ****

pesto ****

sweet potato & pecan ****

Scotch pie ****

scrapple ****

sea urchins **, **

**SEAFOOD**

sauce ****

stew ****

_see also_ Crabs; Clams; Fish; Lobsters; Mussels; Oysters; Prawns; Shellfish; Shrimps

seasoning ****

**SEAWEED**

butter ****

seaweed & wasabi mayonnaise ****

stock ****

_see also_ kombu

**SEMOLINA**

_beghrir_ **, 134–5**

dhokla ****

gnocchi alla Romana **75–6, 98–9**

halva **73–4, 88–9**

_harcha_ ****

_kalburabasti_ ****

saffron, rose, cinnamon & almond _zerde_ ****

sooji/rava dhokla ****

Senn, Charles ****

**SESAME**

ice cream ****

sesame & soy vinaigrette ****

_see also_ Tahini

Seuss, Dr ****

_Seven_ ****

_Seven Brides for Seven_

_Brothers_ ****

sfogliatella ****

sgroppino ****

The Shake Shack ****

**SHELLFISH**

fritters ****

stock **214–15**

Sheraton, Mimi ****

**SHERRY**

cream & sherry pancakes **125–6**

sherry & cream sauce ****

shiitake & kombu stock ****

Shopsin, Kenny ****

Shopsin's, New York ****

**SHORTBREAD , 322–3, 356–7**

black pepper ****

chickpea ****

chocolate ****

cultured butter **358–9**

custard ****

honey & ghee **359–60**

lavender ****

lime & clove ****

olive oil & ouzo **360–61**

sherbet lemon ****

**SHORTCRUST PASTRY , , , 551–2, 566–7**

aniseed & sesame ****

caraway ****

cheese ****

chocolate **569–70**

hazelnut ****

rose ****

shrimps _see_ Prawns & Shrimps

'shrub' (drink) ****

Simmons, Marie ****

Simnel cake **, **

Simon, André **, , **

_The Simpsons_ ****

Skinner, Thomas ****

Slater, Nigel **, **

Smith, Delia **, , , , , , , , , , , , **

Smith, Michael ****

Smollett, Tobias ****

**SNAIL**

beurre blanc ****

butter ****

soba noodles **, 30–31**

_sobrassada_ ****

**SODA BREAD , , , , , **

celery, onion & herb ****

bread & butter pudding ****

crackers ****

croutons ****

parsnip, Parmesan & sage ****

raisin **, **

treacle ****

_see also_ Cobbler; Scones

_sopa Paraguaya_ (cornbread soup) ****

_The Sopranos_ ****

**SORBET 409–10, 440–41, **

'Alaska' ****

blood orange ****

chocolate & Angostura ****

cider **442–3**

lemon **, , **

passion fruit ****

peach **443–4**

raspberry & elderflower ****

strawberry **440–41**

watermelon mojito ****

soubise sauce ****

**SOUFFLÉ , 159–60, 186–7, **

cauliflower, cheese & cumin ****

chocolate ****

egg & dill **188–9**

'fallen' chocolate **, **

ginger ****

Grand Marnier **189–90**

Peach Melba ****

praline ****

rice pudding ****

roulade ****

spinach & ricotta **190–91**

**SOUP 202–204**

asparagus ****

avgolemono **, **

cannellini bean & sage **228–9**

consommé ****

cucumber & yogurt **, **

cullen skink ****

French onion ****

garlic & almond ****

leek ****

leek & oatmeal ****

lentil, apricot & cumin ****

lettuce ****

mushroom & chervil ****

nettle ****

pea **, **

pear & walnut ****

pumpkin soup with Thai spice **229–30**

puréed **202–3**

radish top ****

tarator **, **

tomato & carrot **230–31**

turnip with brown bread & browned butter ****

vegetable **226–7**

watercress ****

_see also_ Broth; Chowder

sourdough **24–5, **

spaetzle ****

Speck, Maria ****

speculoos Rocher ****

**SPELT , **

pasta ****

**SPINACH**

saag gosht ****

spinach & ricotta _crespelle_ **, **

spinach & ricotta gnocchi **112–13**

spinach & ricotta soufflé **190–91**

spinach pasta **, **

spoom ****

Spry, Constance **, **

Spurlock, Morgan ****

The Square, London **, **

**SQUID INK , **

pasta **, **

polenta **, **

squirrel & oyster gumbo ****

Staffordshire oatcakes **133–4**

Steadman, Ralph ****

steak Diane ****

steamed sponge pudding ****

Stein, Rick **, , **

**STEW 204–5**

_aji de gallina_ **, **

bean **205–6, 246–7**

beef in beer ****

_chanfana_ **240–41**

chicken & wine **241–2**

Circassian chicken ****

duck with chocolate & Marsala ****

_fabada_ **, 246–7**

_fesenjan_ **, , , 310–11**

lamb & vegetable **238–9**

_mafe_ **, , , **

nut **278–9**

osso buco **242–3**

_romesco de peix_ **, , **

seafood ****

Vietnamese duck & orange ****

sticky ginger pudding ****

**STOCK **

beef **158–9, **

chicken **200–201, 208–10**

clarifying ****

dashi **, **

fish **211–12**

game bird ****

lamb **212–13**

mushroom ****

pea pod **213–14**

pork ****

pork & chicken ****

salmon ****

shellfish **214–15**

shiitake & kombu ****

turkey ****

veal **215–16**

vegetable ****

stollen ****

_stracciatella_ ****

**STRAWBERRIES**

crème brûlée ****

granita **440–41**

meringue **, **

mousse **389–90**

sorbet **440–41**

_A Streetcar Named Desire_ ****

_strozzapreti_ **, **

**STRUDEL 548–50, 556–7**

apple ****

cabbage ****

**SUET PASTRY , **

caraway-flavoured ****

dumplings ****

roly-poly ****

**SUGAR **

cooking **404–5**

_see also_ Syrup

summer pudding ****

Swedish Princesstorte ****

sweetbread croquettes ****

**SWEETCORN**

brioche ****

ice cream ****

pancakes ****

red pepper, sweetcorn & coriander cornbread ****

_sopa Paraguaya_ ****

sweetcorn & polenta **92–3**

sweetcorn, pea & black bean fritters ****

sweetcorn, sweet potato & crème fraîche chowder ****

**SWEET POTATOES**

sweet potato & pecan scones ****

sweet potato, leek, butter bean & filé gumbo **166–7**

sweetcorn, sweet potato & crème fraîche chowder ****

**SWISS ROLL **

Charlotte royale ****

Mont Blanc ****

**SYRUP 407–9, 432–3**

brown sugar ****

chocolate **434–5**

Muscat marmalade ****

Orgeat **435–6**

raspberry vinegar ****

rosehip **436–7**

tamarind ****

violet **437–8**

_see also_ Cordial

Szathmáry, Louis ****

_szilvás gombóc_ (Hungarian plum dumplings) ****

**T**

tablet ****

taco shells ****

tagine **, 244–5**

tagliatelle **, **

**TAHINI**

halva ****

tahini sauce ****

_tahinov gata_ ****

Le Taillevent, Paris ****

_tamagoyaki_ (Japanese omelette) ****

tamales ****

**TAMARIND **

dal ****

syrup ****

Tamimi, Sami **, **

_taragna_ ('black polenta') ****

tarator **, 277–8, 304–5, **

tarka chana dal **, 252–3**

**TARRAGON , , , , , , **

butter ****

sauce ****

tarragon & cottage cheese bread ****

tarragon & mustard ganache ****

tarragon & shallot sauce ****

tarragon, leek & sour cream tart ****

tartare sauce **, **

_tarte au citron_ ****

_tarte Tropézienne_ ****

Tartine Bakery, San Francisco **, **

Tasca da Esquina, Lisbon ****

tassies ****

**TEA**

Earl Grey custard ****

ice tea ****

_see also_ Green Tea

teacakes ****

Temple, Shirley ****

tempura **, 142–3, **

Thatcher, Denis ****

Thatcher, Maggie ****

Thompson, David ****

Thoreau, Henry David ****

Thorne, John ****

Thousand Island dressing ****

**THYME , , , , , , **

anchovy & thyme cobbler ****

boulangère potatoes ****

_pain au vin & aux herbes_ ****

pumpkin seed & thyme oatcake ****

toad in the hole ****

**TOFFEES , 406–7, 412–13**

butter ****

chocolate ****

lemon **414–15**

treacle ****

**TOMATO**

honey, tomato & dill butter beans ****

sauce tomate ****

soup cake ****

tomato & carrot soup **230–31**

tomato & clam (Manhattan) chowder ****

_torta di grana saraceno_ (buckwheat & almond cake) ****

_torta di nocciole_ (hazelnut cake) ****

_torta Santiago_ (almond cake) **, , 294–5**

**TORTILLAS , , **

masa harina **32–3**

refried bean _pupusas_ ****

taco shells ****

tortilla soup ****

_tourte aux blettes_ (sweet Swiss-chard tart) ****

**TREACLE**

soda bread ****

toffee ****

toffee & orange flapjacks ****

_trou normand_ ****

Tribeca Grill, New York ****

Tru, Chicago ****

_True Detective_ ****

**TRUFFLES**

chocolate **, 380–81**

chocolate & blue cheese ****

ice cream ****

white chocolate ****

Tsuji, Shizuo **, **

_tulumba_ (deep-fried choux in syrup) ****

**TUNA**

tuna casserole ****

_vitello tonnato_ ****

Tunis cake ****

**TURKEY**

_blanquette de dinde_ **, **

stock ****

Turkish Delight biscuits ****

**TURMERIC , , **

coconut & turmeric pancakes ****

in dal **, , , **

Jamaican patties ****

Turner, Brian ****

turnip, brown bread & browned butter soup ****

Turpin, Ben ****

_turrón de Doña Pepa_ ****

21 Club, New York ****

Tyree, Marion Cabell ****

**U**

Ude, Louis-Eustache ****

Uhlemann, Karl ****

upside-down cake **, **

uttapam **, **

**V**

vacherin glacé **, **

vadai ****

**VANILLA**

crêpes ****

panna cotta **, , **

pastry ****

sauce ****

vanilla & ricotta gnocchi ****

**VEAL**

_blanquette de veau_ ****

_carne en salsa de almendras_ **312–13**

osso buco **242–3**

stock **215–16**

_vitello tonnato_ ****

**VEGETABLES**

_bollito misto_ ****

'holy trinity' **, **

lamb & vegetable stew **238–9**

_mafe_ **, , , **

mirepoix **, , **

in pasta ****

roasted vegetable spiced rice **264–5**

soup **226–7**

stock ****

_see also specific vegetables_

**VELOUTÉ SAUCES , , , , 174–5**

allemande **, **

Bercy ****

curry ****

lemon **176–7**

mushroom & chervil ****

peanut butter ****

saffron, pastis & tomato ****

seafood ****

tarragon ****

_veriohukaiset_ (Finnish blood pancake) ****

Victoria sponge **, **

Villas, James ****

_vin santo_ panna cotta **456–7**

**VINAIGRETTE 512–13, 540–41**

balsamic vinegar ****

beef dripping ****

cassis ****

peanut & lime ****

raspberry & hazelnut ****

sesame & soy ****

walnut & Roquefort ****

vine-leaf fritters ****

**VINEGARS **

balsamic ****

raspberry ****

_see also_ Vinaigrette

violet syrup **437–8**

_vitello tonnato_ ****

Vongerichten, Jean-Georges **, , **

**W**

waffles **, **

Wainwright, Alfred ****

Wallace, David Foster ****

**WALNUTS**

aubergine, walnut & red pepper dip ****

Circassian chicken ****

cake ****

coffee & walnut fudge **421–2**

_fesenjan_ **, , , 310–11**

gnocchi ****

_Gundel palacsinta_ ****

marzipan **285–6**

pear & walnut soup ****

pesto **307–8**

_salsa di noci_ ****

tarator **277–8, 304–5**

walnut & cheese oatcake **354–5**

walnut & Roquefort vinaigrette ****

walnut, cheese & cayenne macaroons ****

Walsh, John Henry ****

Wareing, Marcus **, **

**WASABI**

seaweed & wasabi mayonnaise ****

watercress soup ****

watermelon mojito sorbet ****

WD~50, New York ****

weights & measures ****

Weir, Robin ****

Welsh cakes ****

wheat flour **, **

**WHISKEY**

chocolate cream liqueur ****

whiskey sour ****

**WHISKY**

white chocolate & double malt mousse ****

White, Marco Pierre **, **

**WHITE SAUCE 180–81**

aubergine & cheese ****

bacon & cornmeal ****

cheese (Mornay) **, 183–4**

parsley **184–5**

sherry & cream ****

vanilla ****

Whitley, Andrew **, **

Wignall, Michael ****

Willan, Anne **, , , **

**WINE**

chestnut & red wine polenta **94–5**

_coq au vin_ **241–2**

duck with chocolate & Marsala ****

Muscadet/white wine beurre blanc ****

_pain au vin & aux herbes_ ****

red wine beurre blanc ****

red wine chowder **235–6**

rye & Tokaji baba ****

_see also_ Sherry

Wishart, Martin ****

Wolfert, Paula ****

Wright, Clifford A. **, **

Wright, John **, , **

**Y**

yak milk ****

'Yankee Doodle' ****

**YEAST-RISEN BREAD 23–5, 44–6**

apple ****

bagels **, **

bread rolls **44–5**

challah ****

cherry & hazelnut loaf ****

chestnut ****

coriander seed & fennel **48–9**

cumin-flavoured **49–50**

dill & cottage cheese ****

focaccia **, , **

fruit loaf **54–5**

lemon ****

_pain au vin & aux herbes_ ****

pizza bases ****

potato ****

pumpkin ****

rosemary **57–8**

round loaf **44–5**

rye ****

sauerkraut ****

wholemeal ****

_see also_ Brioche; Buns; Croissants

**YOGURT**

baked custard ****

cake ****

cucumber & yogurt soup ****

yogurt & nigella seed naan ****

Yorkshire mint pasties ****

Yorkshire pudding **, , , , , , , , **

Young, Kay ****

Young, Paul A. ****

_yutangza_ (steamed coriander buns) ****

**Z**

zabaglione **, 514–15, **

_zeppole_ **, **

_z'herbes_ ****

Zuni Cafe, San Francisco **, **
Credits

_Breakfast at the Wolseley_, by A.A. Gill. Quadrille, 2008.

_My First Summer in the Sierra_, by John Muir. Houghton Mifflin, 1911.

_Grimble_, by Clement Freud. Collins, 1968.

_Classic Bull: An Accidental Restaurateur's Cookbook_, by Stephen Bull. Macmillan, 2001.

_Brideshead Revisited_, by Evelyn Waugh. Chapman & Hall, 1945.

_English Bread and Yeast Cookery_, by Elizabeth David. Allen Lane, 1977.

_Kitchen Essays_ (1922), by Agnes Jekyll. Persephone Books, 2008.

_English Bread and Yeast Cookery_, by Elizabeth David. Allen Lane, 1977.

_Heat_, by Bill Buford. Jonathan Cape, 2006.

_Between the Woods and the Water_, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. John Murray, 1986.

_Walden_, by Henry David Thoreau. Ticknor & Fields, 1854.

_Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art_, by Shizuo Tsuji. Kodansha, 1980.

_Green Mangoes and Lemon Grass_, by Wendy Hutton. Kogan Page, 2003.

_Eating for Britain_, by Simon Majumdar. John Murray, 2010.

_Leaving Home_, by Garrison Keillor. Viking Press, 1987.

_An Appetite for Ale_, by Fiona Beckett & Will Beckett. Camra, 2007.

_Roast Chicken & Other Stories_, by Simon Hopkinson. Ebury, 1996.

_The Best Soups in the World_, by Clifford A. Wright. John Wiley, 2009.

_The Elements of Cooking_, by Michael Ruhlman. Scribner, 2007.

_La Varenne Pratique_, by Anne Willan. Crown, 1989.

_Floyd's American Pie_, by Keith Floyd. BBC Books, 1989.

'Squirrel Salad... You must be nuts!' by Vincent Graff. _Daily Mail_, 2 August 2010.

_Guide to Good Food and Wines_, by André Simon. Collins, 1952.

_Hedgerow: River Cottage Handbook No. 7_, by John Wright. Bloomsbury, 2010.

_The Independent Cook_, by Jeremy Round. Barrie & Jenkins, 1989.

_Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles_, by James Beard. Arcade, 1995.

_Hugh Fearlessly Eats It All_, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Bloomsbury, 2006.

_The Square, The Cookbook, Volume 2: Sweet_, by Philip Howard. Absolute Press, 2013.

_Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction_, by Anna C. Chave. Yale University Press, 1989.

_Guide to Good Food and Wines_, by André Simon. Collins, 1952.

_The Oxford Companion to Food_, by Alan Davidson. OUP, 1999.

_The River Cottage Meat Book_, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Hodder & Stoughton, 2004.

_Italian Food_, by Elizabeth David. MacDonald, 1954.

_Daniel: My French Cuisine_, by Daniel Boulud & Sylvie Bigar. Grand Central Publishing, 2013.

_The Clatter of Forks and Spoons_, by Richard Corrigan. Fourth Estate, 2008.

_The Unforgettable Dishes of My Life_, by Egon Ronay. Gollancz, 1989.

_Moby-Dick_, by Herman Melville. Harper & Brothers, 1851.

_New England Sampler_, by Eleanor Early. Waverly House, 1940.

_Eat Portugal_, by Celia Pedroso & Lucy Pepper. Leya, 2011.

_The Food of France_, by Waverley Root. Cassell, 1958.

_Paula Wolfert's World of Food_, by Paula Wolfert. HarperCollins, 1988.

_Men Without Women_, by Ernest Hemingway. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927.

_The Backyard Beekeeper's Honey Handbook_, by Kim Flottum. Crestline, 2009.

_Food_, by Waverley Root. Simon & Schuster, 1981.

_Barcelona_, by Robert Hughes. Vintage, 1992.

_Short and Sweet_, by Dan Lepard. Fourth Estate, 2011.

_Sugar-plums and Sherbet_, by Laura Mason. Prospect Books, 1998.

_Taste of Honey_, by Marie Simmons. Andrews McMeel, 2013.

_I Still Have It... I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It_, by Rita Rudner. Random House, 2008.

_Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles_, by James Beard. Arcade, 1995.

_Moby-Dick_, by Herman Melville. Harper & Brothers, 1851.

_How to Drink_, by Victoria Moore. Granta Books, 2009.

_College Girls_, by Lynn Peril. W.W. Norton, 2006.

_Beans: A History_, by Ken Albala. Bloomsbury, 2007.

_Kitchen Essays_ (1922), by Agnes Jekyll. Persephone Books, 2008.

_The French Menu Cookbook_, by Richard Olney. Simon & Schuster, 1970.

_The Gourmands' Way_, by Justin Spring. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017.

_Modern Cookery for Private Families_, by Eliza Acton. Longman, Brown, Green & Longans, 1845.

_The Book of Sauces_, by Charles Senn. The Hotel Monthly Press, 1915.

_Molecular Gastronomy_, by Hervé This. Columbia University Press, 2002.

_Jane Grigson's Fruit Book_, by Jane Grigson. Michael Joseph, 1982.

_Cooking Craft_, by S. Elizabeth Nash. Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd, 1926.

_The English Cookery Book_, by John Henry Walsh. G. Routledge & Co, 1858.

_Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking_, by Marcella Hazan. Knopf, 1992.

Extracts from _Breakfast at the Wolseley_ by A.A. Gill reprinted by permission of Quadrille. © 2008 A.A. Gill. Extracts from _Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder_ by Evelyn Waugh, reprinted by permission (first published by Chapman & Hall 1945, Penguin Classics 1999). © 1945 by Evelyn Waugh. Extracts from _Classic Bull: An Accidental Restaurateur's Cookbook_ by Stephen Bull reproduced with permission of Pan Macmillan through PLSclear. © 2001 Stephen Bull. Extracts from _The Complete Short Stories_ by Ernest Hemingway published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. from _Men Without Women_ by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright © 1927 by Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright renewed 1955 by Ernest Hemingway. All rights reserved. Recipe here from _Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey_ by Rick Stein published by BBC Books. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 2009. Recipe here from _Nigellissima_ by Nigella Lawson published by Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 2012. Recipe here from _How To Be A Domestic Goddess_ by Nigella Lawson published by Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 2000.
About the author

Niki Segnit's first book, _The Flavour Thesaurus_ , won the André Simon Award for best food book, the Guild of Food Writers Award for best first book, and was shortlisted for the Galaxy National Book Awards. It has been translated into thirteen languages. On BBC Radio 4, she has contributed to _The Food Programme_ , _Woman's Hour_ and _Word of Mouth_ , and her columns, features and reviews have appeared in _The Guardian_ , _The Observer_ , _The Times_ , _The Times Literary Supplement_ , _The Sunday Times_ and _Prospect_ magazine. She lives in London with her husband and two children.
Acknowledgements

Thank you to my husband, Nat, who has given a vast amount of time and thought to this book. Not only do I benefit from the brilliance of his mind but the resilience of his digestive system. Comfort food can be quite threatening in large quantities: sixteen consecutive nights of panna cotta is more of an ordeal than it sounds. I am also massively indebted to my agent, Zoë Waldie, who has been so supportive of my work over the last ten years, and somehow manages to combine wild enthusiasm with an indispensable sense of perspective. It has been as great a pleasure to work with Richard Atkinson, my commissioning editor at Bloomsbury, as it was the first time around: he has that rare ambidexterity, an equal feeling for the big picture and small detail. This book would not have been possible without his commitment to getting things just-so. Alison Cowan edited the text and recipes, an enormous task she approached with patience, deep knowledge and a unique enthusiasm for testing anything involving lentils or beans. Also at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle, Natalie Bellos, Lisa Pendreigh, Lena Hall and Kitty Stogdon have all been an invaluable help in turning a big idea into a big book. Thanks also to Amanda Shipp, Thi Dinh, Jen Hampson and Arlene Alexander for ushering it into the world so skilfully and stylishly.

A Practice for Everyday Life designed _Lateral Cooking_ and put so much thought and craft into making an unusual book both beautiful and easy to use. I don't think I ever left their offices without a smile on my face.

As one of his many thousands of fans, I asked Yotam Ottolenghi to write the foreword because there's no one who better encapsulates the pleasures of creativity in the kitchen, and the part food writing might play in the process. I get a little ping of happiness every time I see his name on the cover.

Deiniol Pritchard at The Fat Duck and Lucy Thomas at Tastemakers were generous enough to help me with a number of food-science questions. And I must thank all the cooks, chefs, authors and bloggers I've read and consulted, for their tips, hints and explanations. Out of a combined sense of paranoia and control freakery I have for the past seven and a half years refused to tell anyone, other than the select band of collaborators who needed to know, what this book was about. I must now offer my apologies to the friends who still bothered to ask me, year in, year out, how it was going, and put up with answers as non-specific as they were long-winded: Dudi Appleton, Polly Astor, Alexei Boltho, Emma Booty, Pete Brown, David Foy, James Lever, John Lowery, Kerry Millet, Antonia Quirke, Clare Reihill and Liz Vater. Thanks to you all for the support, late nights and long lunches. In the latter half of the long haul, Bruna Dos Reis and Eleanor Hardy helped make the writing possible by keeping two small children (and often their mother) entertained.

Finally, this book is dedicated to my very special friend Sarah-Jane Ingram. It was SJ and her friend Beverley, on a holiday in the South of France many years ago, who made me want to learn to cook. Admittedly the motivation was more attracting boys than perfecting my cheese soufflé, but in time the secondary benefit displaced the first, and furnished a hobby that has given me daily pleasure and the privilege of having written two books.
**BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING**

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK

This electronic edition published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

**BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING** and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain in 2018

Text © Niki Segnit, 2018

Foreword © Yotam Ottolenghi, 2018

Illustrations © A Practice for Everyday Life, 2018

Niki Segnit and A Practice for Everyday Life have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author and Illustrator respectively of this work.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

For legal purposes the Credits constitute an extension of this copyright page.

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-4088-5689-5 (HB)
ISBN: 978-1-5266-0414-9 (eBook)

**PROJECT EDITOR** Alison Cowan

**DESIGNER** A Practice for Everyday Life

**ILLUSTRATOR** A Practice for Everyday Life

**INDEXER** Vicki Robinson

To find out more about our authors and their books please visit www.bloomsbury.com where you will find extracts, author interviews and details of forthcoming events, and to be the first to hear about latest releases and special offers, sign up for our newsletter.

#

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Contents
  4. Foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi
  5. Learning to Cook Sideways
  6. Bread
  7. Cornbread, Polenta & Gnocchi
  8. Batter
  9. Roux
  10. Stock, Soup & Stew
  11. Nuts
  12. Cake & Biscuits
  13. Chocolate
  14. Sugar
  15. Custard
  16. Sauce
  17. Pastry
  18. Bibliography
  19. Index
  20. Acknowledgements
  21. eCopyright

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook