It is a truth universally acknowledged that a host who has invited people to lunch should not attempt to cook anything they haven't cooked before. So in theory I should have tested Elizabeth David's Sussex stewed steak and raspberry shortbread on the Systems Administrator in advance, before trying them on friends, probably two or three times to be on the safe side. I didn't, because they didn't look that monumentally different to other things I've managed to cook in the past, and if I have to practice each new recipe on the SA before risking it on anybody else, my repertoire is going to expand very slowly, given the infrequency with which I cook.
The Sussex stewed steak and the pudding are both included in At Elizabeth David's Table, a collection of 'Her very best everyday recipes' compiled by Jill Norman, complete with kind introductory words by contemporary foodie luminaries including Jamie Oliver and Simon Hopkinson and muted colour photographs, linked by extracts from the original books and some of Mrs David's articles for Vogue and The Spectator. The Systems Administrator gave it to me a little while back, but this was the first time I'd actually cooked from it. I must have leafed through it when I first received it. I think I thought that the full page photographs of food, roosters and Italian scenery were dreamy, but that the opening pages seemed to include a lot of things that contained either fish or spinach. I was probably biased by my inbuilt suspicion against books that are rehashes of existing material, put together by publishers determined to get some more financial mileage out of a dead writer.
That view turns out to be very unfair to At Elizabeth David's Table. It helps that Jill Norman was Elizabeth David's editor, and knew her well. She has chosen wisely. Elizabeth David's books don't always feel terribly approachable, with her sharp advice about the precise quality of ingredients and instructions to buy cuts of meat that never appear on the supermarket shelves, not even in Waitrose. Rereading the selected recipes, this time with a proper degree of attention, I realised that a high proportion of them sounded achievable, without demands for caul, pig's dripping, five pounds of sea salt, larding bacon, a boiling fowl, or mutton.
To be on the safe side I started on the Sussex steaks the day before we wanted to eat them. The recipe required five or six tablespoons of port, as well as stout and mushroom ketchup, and the SA said that given we had several bottles of port we might as well open one, so I did. This does leave me with the subsidiary question of how to use the rest of it. The SA has volunteered to drink some, while admitting that port nowadays produces a cracking hangover. It also appears that I could use it in a terrine, or oxtail soup, and the SA found a Nigella lamb recipe on the internet that sounded plausible. Elizabeth David promised me that after three hours of slow cooking the toughest piece of meat would emerge beautifully tender, so four steaks described on the packet as Irish were dusted in flour, doused with five tablespoons each of port and stout and two of ketchup, sprinkled with three smallish chopped onions, and given half an hour in the bottom oven of the Aga to get them going, and three hours in the simmer oven. The book said to include a double layer of greaseproof paper under the lid of the casserole, which I dutifully did. We have a wide shallow Le Creuset pan with a close fitting lid, and I wasn't sure the paper would really make any difference, but my rule of thumb is to follow the book as closely as I can the first time round, and then modify things the second time if it seems warranted.
After three hours in the simmer oven the steaks emerged with all the tender and melting qualities of shoe leather, swimming in red-brown liquid which had not reduced to a rich-looking and interesting gravy. The SA said encouragingly that the steaks would probably relax overnight. I thought I would probably not relax overnight, but that several more hours in the simmer oven was likely to improve things in the morning. At least as a consolation I got to drink the left-over stout.
When I woke up this morning I remembered that I had to produce lunch by noon, the point at which our friends were due to turn up and everything was scheduled to be keeping warm so that I could socialise with our guests, and that so far all I had to show for my labours was a dish of shoe-leather and a saucepan of red cabbage. Red cabbage is always worth cooking in advance, because it is one less thing to do on the day, and it improves with reheating. Vitamins in this context are a bourgeois distraction. I remembered to get the raspberries out of the freezer for the pudding, and peeled the potatoes for the mash, and the carrots and parsnips, bought in a fit of anxiety that there would not be enough vegetables for a Christmas-New Year festive lunch. The shoe leather went back in the bottom oven on the hot side of the Aga for another hour, then back into the simmer. The paper lid was starting to look a little the worse for wear, and fragments fell off each time I inspected the meat.
By eleven the Irish steak had finally, miraculously become beautifully tender, and by the time I came to dish it at one it was dropping to melting pieces from the spoon. The gravy was indeed rich. It's lucky we didn't leave serving lunch until half past, since the gravy had reduced about as far as you'd want it to, even with the greaseproof paper. I can heartily recommend Elizabeth David's Sussex stewed steak, only I would not leave it until the last minute to prepare. Give yourself an hour or three's leeway, just to be on the safe side. I included the suggested garnish of fried mushrooms, which definitely add something.
Her Raspberry shortbread is a variant on fruit crumble. The book says that it can be served hot or cold and is excellent. We had ours at room temperature, to avoid the anxiety of trying to keep it hot. That turned out to be a good call as the Aga was full of other things keeping warm. I nearly smashed the dish of mushrooms which were sitting on top of the pan of mashed potato, grabbing the handle of the latter without seeing that the mushrooms were there. The shortbread topping consists of butter rubbed into plain flour in the ratio three to one, with just over half of the weight of the flour in muscovado sugar, and some ginger and baking powder. The resulting mixture forms dry, fine crumbs which you are instructed not to press down over the raspberries, and I'm not sure the baking powder can make much difference. I would not have thought of combining ginger and raspberry, but a little touch of it, half a teaspoon in six ounces of flour, does very well. Some of the flour mixture seems drop down into the juice as the raspberries cook and thickens it slightly, so that the raspberries sit in slightly cloudy, gingery liquid rather than plain juice. Everybody had second helpings, except for the SA who is not crazy about puddings.
The big tabby and Our Ginger mild slight nuisances of themselves all the time we had guests. We kept the cats out of the room while we ate, but the rest of the time they jumped on the dining table, held mock fights, clambered insistently into laps, and clamoured for food every time either of us went near the kitchen. As soon as the visitors departed both cats completely lost interest in gaining our attention.
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