The celery softened in the end, and I was rather pleased with the bean casserole. The flavours of the bean and tomato filling had melded by the time the celery was finally cooked, without the beans collapsing, and the recipe included enough herbs for it to taste of something else besides beans. Which are pretty bland, even a committed vegetarian would have to admit. The instructions for the bread crumb and cheese topping were vague since Rose Elliot just said 'crumbs' without specifying how many, so I used a lot, having a leftover lump of unsliced wholemeal bread in the fridge, and it came out good and cheesy and very crunchy. The Systems Administrator only took a small helping, blaming inactivity for the loss of appetite, but I fear the truth is that the SA is not awfully keen on bean casseroles.
Baked beans are allowed (I heard a great story about Jane Grigson, who was lamenting she found it so hard to think of things to feed her infant daughter. Somebody asked why she didn't just give the young Sophie baked beans? What a good idea, said Jane Grigson, only the trouble is, they take so long to cook). Ours are tinned. And the SA will eat dal once in a while, especially if it's offered up with some other curry as well. But any kind of bake that looks as though it might have escaped from a Cranks restaurant is an object of polite suspicion.
Tonight we were back on the meat, with a pork stew from The Essential Goa Cookbook by Maria Teresa Menezes. I have never been to Goa, and have only the haziest idea of what their food is supposed to taste like, but I think I must once have eaten something described as Goan in a curry house and liked it enough to want to find out more The flavours of southern India are overlaid in Goan cooking with the traditions of Portugal, but I have never been to Portugal either. Never mind. The pork stew is very straightforward There is a list of ingredients, pork, onions, garlic, ginger, turmeric and cumin, chilli and vinegar. You are supposed to grind cloves and cardamon seeds finely, but I just put the whole spices in, and substituted ground cinnamon for grinding my own stick. The instructions are concise: Mix all the ingredients and cook on a low heat till done.
I like the economy of Maria Teresa Menezes' style. You feel it belongs to a previous age, yet the book was originally published as recently as 2000. Maybe she wrote the recipes down decades ago then they languished unpublished in a drawer, as she was born in 1926 . The Systems Administrator liked the pork stew a lot, and said so. I thought it would have benefited from really slow cooking, and if I'm doing it again I'll try putting the ingredients together at lunchtime and letting them spend all afternoon in the simmer oven of the Aga, which sits just below boiling. It would probably taste good reheated the next day, to give the flavours a chance to develop. They are pleasantly sour, because of the vinegar (the only added liquid), and quite hot, though how hot depends on your chillies.
I made a pudding as well, using some of our own apples, and served with what the SA considers to be proper custard, that is made with Bird's custard powder rather than eggs. Wanting something simple and traditional, I turned to the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book. Although I refer to it quite frequently when I want to know the answer to a question like how to make saute potatoes, I hadn't really looked at the illustrations for ages. Blimey, those glossy colour photos of food served up in round wooden bowls laid out on a brown hessian cloth, brown wooden salt and pepper mills in view. Food styling dates as quickly as hairdos and cars. My copy of Good Housekeeping is definitely from the same era as The Sweeney.
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