Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (16 page)

One of the first to see the possibilities of the new product was Raymond Oliver, owner of one of France’s most famous restaurants, the Grand Véfour in Paris, and by 1970 several of his colleagues had followed his lead. Duckling or steak au poivre vert became immensely popular.

Preserved in a light brine, in their own natural juices, or in piperine, the extract of the pepper itself, the little green pepper berries are wonderfully aromatic without being fiery. Their applications are many, one of the best being as a fish seasoning. Or, combined with cinnamon and a scrap of garlic, they make an original and interesting spiced butter to serve with steak or chicken, or again, fish. They can be applied rather like garlic slivers to a boned loin of pork before it is rolled and tied ready for cooking, for a very successful roast.

Once the tin of green peppercorns has been opened the contents
should be transferred to a glass jar with well-fitting stopper, and refrigerated. In this way they will keep for a week or so, or they can be stored in the freezer.

GREEN PEPPER AND CINNAMON BUTTER

Crush 2 teaspoons of green pepper berries with a small sliver of garlic and a half-teaspoon of ground cinnamon. Into the mixture work 45–60 g (1½–2 oz) of butter. When thoroughly amalgamated add a scant teaspoon of salt – less if you have used salted butter. Store in a small covered jar in the refrigerator, or make in larger quantities and store in the freezer, keeping a small jar in the refrigerator for current consumption.

Coriander, ground cumin and/or ginger can be combined with the cinnamon in this recipe, or used instead, and proportions of the spices can be increased or diminished according to taste.

CHICKEN BAKED WITH GREEN PEPPER AND CINNAMON BUTTER

For a 1.25–1.5 kg (2½–3 lb) roasting chicken (dressed and drawn weight) have ready 45 g (1½ oz) of the spiced butter described above.

Lift the skin of the chicken, rub salt and then the butter well over the flesh, making a few gashes with a small sharp knife in

the drumsticks and thick part of the legs so that the spices will penetrate. Put a little more of the butter inside the chicken. If possible leave for an hour or two before cooking.

Put the chicken, with a few bay leaves, into a shallow baking dish into which it will just fit. Cook, uncovered, on the centre shelf of a moderate oven (180°C/350°F/gas mark 4), allowing 20 minutes on each side and 20 minutes breast upwards. Baste with the juices each time the chicken is turned. At the end of the cooking time the skin should be beautifully golden and crisp.

Serve with lemon quarters and watercress, and the buttery juices poured into a little sauce boat.

A simple green salad with a very light dressing is the best accompaniment.

This recipe also works well with pheasant. For a young bird of about 850 g (1¾ lb) dressed and drawn weight, the timing and temperature are as for the chicken. But the pheasant should be wrapped in well-buttered paper or foil.

PORK CHOPS WITH WHITE WINE AND GREEN PEPPERCORNS

Pork is always the better for a mild degree of spicing. The following is a most successful and easy recipe.

Buy two loin chops about 2 cm (1 in) thick and if possible with the rind left on. (Nowadays English pork chops bought without the rind have been divested also of most of their fat, which results in dried out, shrunken meat.)

Rub the chops with plenty of salt and a cut clove of garlic. Sprinkle them with flour. Put them in a heavy enamelled cast-iron skillet or other pan which can be transferred to the oven and which has a lid. Add no fat or liquid. Let the chops heat gently at first, then increase the heat so that they brown a little on each side. Add 2 or 3 bay leaves and a few dried fennel stalks. Pour in a glass (125 ml/4 fl oz) of dry white wine or vermouth. Let it bubble fast for a few seconds. Cover the pan. Transfer it to the centre of a moderate oven (170°C/325°F/gas mark 3), and cook for 20–30 minutes until the chops are tender.

Remove them to a serving dish, keep them hot while the pan is returned to the top of the stove so that the juices can bubble and reduce a little. Stir in a teaspoon of strong yellow Dijon mustard. When this is smoothly blended add a heaped teaspoon (more if you like a strongly spiced sauce) of green pepper berries. Crush
them slightly as you stir them into the sauce, which should be poured sizzling over the chops. Serve swiftly.

A dish of sweet eating apples, cored, peeled, sliced and gently fried in butter with a sprinkling of sugar makes a delicious accompaniment. For each chop allow two apples.

LOIN OF PORK SPICED WITH GREEN PEPPER

A most original and subtly spiced dish.

Ask the butcher for a joint of loin of pork weighing about 2 kg (4 lb). The meat should be boned and the rind should be taken off, but do not have the meat rolled or tied. It is important to cook the meat with the bones and rind in the pan, so make sure that you get these put in the parcel with the meat. Other ingredients are 2 teaspoons of fresh whole green peppercorns, a clove of garlic, salt, approximately 1 teaspoon each of ground cinnamon and ginger, bay leaves, dried fennel stalks, about 450 ml (¾ pint) of good clear jellied stock, or failing stock, a tumbler of white wine or dry vermouth and plain water.

Put the meat flat on a board, rub it very thoroughly with salt, then with the cinnamon and ginger. Spread very small thin slivers of garlic at regular intervals along the length of the joint, then press in the green pepper berries, distributing them evenly. Roll the meat into a bolster shape, tie it securely with fine string.

In a baking dish put the bones, the rind, several bay leaves and branches of dried fennel. On top put the joint.

Start the cooking with the meat uncovered and placed low down in the oven (170°C/325°F/gas mark 3). After 30 minutes add the stock or wine and water mixture. Leave another 10 minutes, then cover with foil and cook for another 2¼ hours.

Remove the meat to a dish, strain the liquid through muslin into a glass bowl or jug. When cool put in the refrigerator so that the fat sets. Next day take off the fat. (Keep it; re-melted and stored in a pot, it will make lovely fried bread.) Serve the meat cold, with the jellied stock separately in a bowl or sauce boat. Enough for 6–8 people.

The bones and trimmings of the joint can be cooked again to make a second batch of stock which can be stored for the next time you cook a chicken or piece of pork with
poivre vert
.

An extra flavouring for this pork dish is a small piece of root ginger peeled, sliced and put in the baking pan with the bay leaves and
fennel, and a little extra vermouth or white wine or even Madeira can be poured over the meat during the last 10 minutes of cooking.

GREEN PEPPERCORN AND CREAM SAUCE FOR FISH

This is a simple sauce, so gently spiced that it cannot overwhelm even the most delicate of fish. The only ingredients needed are very fresh double cream (for 2 allow 150 ml/5 fl oz), 30 g (1 oz) of unsalted butter, 1 teaspoon of green peppercorns, 2 teaspoons of chopped parsley, salt.

First crush the green peppercorns in a bowl or mortar. In a small frying or sauté pan melt the butter, over low heat. Stir the crushed green peppercorns into the warmed butter.

Quickly add the cream, increase the heat, stir very thoroughly, tipping the pan so that the butter and cream amalgamate to form a sauce which, although not thickened, is coherent. Pour into a warmed sauce boat and stir in a pinch of salt and the parsley.

The sauce should be made only at the last minute, when the fish is ready to serve. It is delicious with freshwater or sea trout, baked in the oven (in buttered foil), and with white fish such as halibut and turbot, either poached or baked.

Introduction from Williams-Sonoma booklet 1974; recipes from booklet published by Elizabeth David 1972

Is there a Nutmeg in the House?

Joseph Nollekens, the great eighteenth-century English sculptor, was almost as celebrated for his wife’s, and his own, parsimonious habits as for his splendid portrait busts of the eminent men and women of his day. After his death in 1823, an ex-apprentice, one John Thomas Smith, wrote a gossipy memoir of his late master, in no way stinting the warts. Smith’s acute sense of comedy and his relish in his own jokes go far toward softening the edge of even his more malicious anecdotes. One of the most richly absurd of these reveals Mrs Nollekens scrounging free spices from the grocer while her husband filches them from the dinner table at that august establishment the Royal Academy of Arts:

The Grocer, of Margaret Street, has been frequently heard to declare that whenever Mrs Nollekens purchased tea and sugar at his father’s shop, she always requested, just at the moment she was quitting the counter, to have either a clove or a bit of cinnamon to take some unpleasant taste out of her mouth; but she never was seen to apply it to the part so affected, so that, with Nollekens’s nutmegs, which he pocketed from the table at the Academy dinners, they contrived to accumulate a little stock of spices, without any expense whatever.

Nollekens and his Times
, 1828

I find it rather amiable of this mostly unamiable pair that they should have bothered with a half dozen cloves here, a few bits of cinnamon bark and a couple of nutmegs there. I wish that Smith had told us more. Did they secrete their little hoards in special spice boxes, did the Royal Academicians take their own pocket nutmeg graters out to dinner or were graters as well as nutmegs – no doubt for flavouring the punch at the end of dinner – on the house?

It was a civilised fad, that eighteenth-century love of portable nutmeg graters for the dining-room, and the drawing-room hot drinks, and for travelling. I see no reason why we shouldn’t revive it. It is far from silly to carry a little nutmeg box and grater around in one’s pocket. In London restaurants such a piece of equipment comes in handy. Here, even in Italian restaurants, I find it necessary to ask for nutmeg to grate on to my favourite plain pasta with butter and Parmesan, and for leaf spinach as well. To my mind, nutmeg is essential to these dishes, as indeed it is to béchamel sauce, cheese soufflés, and nearly all other cheese mixtures. Yet how many times, I wonder, have I been told by an apologetic waiter that there is no nutmeg in the house?

In Italy, a kitchen without a nutmeg would be a contradiction in terms, the
noce moscato
or musky nut being as necessary to Italian cooking as Parmesan cheese and oregano and for that matter salt. It isn’t that the Italians have a heavy hand with spices. On the contrary they are rather sparing with them, using them in subtle combinations for flavouring delicate cream cheese and spinach stuffings for cannelloni and ravioli, sometimes producing the unexpected pleasure such as the nutmeg, white pepper and clove mixture with a distinct whiff of juniper berry which I
remember as the spicing for a grilled chicken eaten out of doors at a Tuscan country restaurant now alas vanished, and tiny shreds of lemon peel with chicken livers in the sauce for home-made pasta in the same enchanting place.

In English cooking nutmeg is used less imaginatively than in Italy. It goes into pudding and cakes and sweet creams, it is grated over milk junkets, cream curds, and the Christmas brandy butter. Our savoury dishes such as potted meats, sausages, and pie fillings are seasoned with mace rather than with nutmeg. The tradition is probably based on some sort of logic. Mace is a part of the same fruit as the nutmeg and has a similar aroma but coarser, less sweet and more peppery.

To be precise as to the distinctions and differences between nutmeg and mace, the nutmeg tree,
Myristica fragrans
bears a plum-like yellow fruit which splits open when ripe to reveal white flesh and in the centre a bright scarlet lacy wrapping enfolding a single hard brown seed. The seed is the nutmeg, the lacy covering or aril, the mace.

The
Myristica
is a native of the Moluccas, the Indonesian islands known to the old traders as the Spice Islands, and although the nutmeg appeared in England at least as far back as Chaucer’s day – he mentions it in connection with ale – it became generally known in Europe only much later, after the discovery of the Spice Islands by the Portuguese in 1512. Nowadays our sources of supply are mainly the West Indies and the Philippines.

Williams-Sonoma booklet, July 1975

ITALIAN SPICE MIXTURE

I noted down this formula about twenty years ago when reading through Luigi Carnacina’s
Il Gourmet Internazionale
. Recently I have been mixing and grinding various blends of spices in a small electric coffee mill, and the Italian one seems to me exceptionally successful.

The original quantities were: 125 g (4 oz) of white peppercorns, 35 g (just over 1 oz) of grated nutmeg, 30 g (1 oz) of juniper berries, 10 g (1/3 oz) of cloves.

For my own use I have reduced the quantities as follows: 3 teaspoons of white peppercorns, approximately ½ a small nutmeg, 1 teaspoon of juniper berries, ¼ teaspoon of whole cloves.