My parents are coming to supper tonight, and so I have offered to cook. After some thought I have hit on a chicken dish that can be assembled in advance, and a pudding that is supposed to be nice eaten cold, to avoid having to do anything much in the kitchen once they're here. I remember the time they arrived early, and I was still making Bird's custard, which seemed to take for ever to thicken as they stood over me next to the Aga, and I wished they would take their drinks and go on a self-directed tour of the garden for ten minutes. In my anxiety to get it to set I added extra custard powder, and by the time we were ready for pudding the Bird's had the consistency of half-hardened cement. I should add that I was not making instant custard out of frugality, but because my dad likes it.
This time they are getting a Piedmontese chicken recipe out of the book of the Two Greedy Italians programme. I have edited down the instruction to use 600ml of white wine to a generous glassful, since most of a bottle of Pinot Grigio sounds excessive to me. The Systems Administrator uses a glassful in Gary Rhodes' Lancashire hotpot, and it just gives it a little lift. Chicken pieces are cooked with carrot, celery, bayleaf, peppercorns, slices of lemon and some wine and wine vinegar. The whole thing can be assembled ages in advance and left to marinade in the fridge, which is where it is at the moment.
Cooking for my parents plus the SA is complicated by the fact that my mother can't eat pips and doesn't like garlic, my father has high cholesterol and is supposed to have a healthy low fat diet, and the SA isn't at all keen on meat dishes with fruit or cinnamon. I seem to end up rotating through roast chicken, chicken stewed with red peppers or mushrooms, lamb stewed with rosemary, and goulash. Oh, and there is a Delia recipe for pork with olives, which probably contained garlic in its Spanish homeland, but works without. Searching through books for a change it's difficult to find something new that can be prepared in advance and won't disagree with someone. The Piedmontese chicken is supposed to be served with rice, but I might ask the SA to cook that, since I struggle not to make rice sticky when it's for two people, let alone four.
Pudding is an adventure into my file of cookery clippings. There is a recipe for Lancastrian lemon curd tart, cut out of the FT I know not how many years ago, since I have sloppily omitted to write down the date, or the author. It is illustrated with a charming detail of Still Life with Game Fowl, Fruit and Vegetables by Juan Sanchez Cotan, which the National Gallery has or had on loan from the Prado. I have probably had the recipe for at least fifteen years without cooking it before. It sounds like a good idea. You blind bake a shortcrust pastry flan base. Fine, I can do shortcrust pastry. You cool it completely, fill it with homemade lemon curd, cover it with an almond topping that is basically more lemon curd with almonds in it, and cook it.
Lemon curd is easy, as long as you have a double boiler. I use a recipe out of the Good Housekeeping book I've had since I was a teenager. It says on the front cover of roast chicken and other stories by simon hopkinson (his lower case throughout, not mine) that it was voted the most useful cookbook of all time by Waitrose Food Illustrated. I suppose it might be. It has five different ways of cooking brains, three things to do with smoked haddock and seven aubergine recipes. On the other hand, if you want to make a fruit crumble but don't know the recipe for crumble topping, or aren't sure how long to cook a piece of beef for (I suppose nowadays you read the instructions on the plastic wrapping), or want to knock out some scones or mince pies, or like the idea of soup or bubble and squeak given you have some leftovers but don't know where to start, Good Housekeeping is honestly more useful. It assumes you know nothing, and would like to learn the basics to at least the standard of a competent sixties housewife, which is not a bad place to start. Nowadays we like our beef rather pinker than they did then, and the list of common scone making faults is enough to send you straight to the cake aisle of Tesco, but it is a good book. I am fond of it, and refer to it oftener than I do to simon hopkinson, though his works better as food porn.
I'll tell you what the lemon tart is like when we've eaten it. Preliminary observations are that it is difficult to tell when almond sponge over lemon curd is done, and that the 200 degrees C cooking temperature given for the sponge in the newspaper is too high. I'd set a timer for a lot less than it said, but was following my nose and found I had to move it to a much cooler oven after eleven or twelve minutes. The edges of the pastry have caught, but they were bound to, given they were twice cooked. I'll trim them off when the tart has cooled. Lemon tarts in restaurants never have crusts. Next time I'll know not to bother to cover the rim of the tin, if I do it again, though an edge might help stop the thing collapsing during cooking. I think it looks just edible enough that I won't dash down to the shop for a bought pudding instead. Fingers crossed.
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