Nigella Bites (13 page)

CREME BRULEE

The first thing you should know about crème brûlée is that it’s not hard to make. And few puddings are as voluptuously, seductively easy to eat. I never make mine in little individual ramekins (though there’s nothing to stop you if that’s what you prefer) but in one large dish: there is something so welcoming about a big bowlful, the rich, smooth, eggy cream waiting to ooze out on the spoon that breaks through the tortoiseshell disc on top.

You don’t need me to tell you about the blowtorch bit; this has been rehearsed enough. But it isn’t a gimmick or a gratuitous act of showmanship: just the best way of burning the sprinkled-over sugar to instant, brittle compactness. You can get a blowtorch now from more or less any kitchen shop; and there’s something curiously satisfying about wielding it.

600ml double cream

1 vanilla pod

8 egg yolks

3 tablespoons caster sugar

approx. 6 tablespoons demerara sugar

Put a pie dish of about 20cm diameter in the freezer for at least 20 minutes. Half-fill the sink with cold water. This is just a precaution in case the custard looks as if it’s about to split, in which case you should plunge the pan into the water and whisk the custard. I’m not saying it will – with so many egg yolks in the rich cream, it thickens quickly and easily enough – but I always feel better if I’ve done this.

Put the cream and vanilla pod into a saucepan and bring to boiling point, but do not let boil. Beat the eggs and caster sugar together in a bowl, and, still beating, pour the flavoured cream over it, pod and all. Rinse and dry the pan and pour the custard mix back in. Cook over medium heat (or low, if you’re scared) until the custard thickens: about 10 minutes should do it. You do want this to be a good, voluptuous crème, so don’t err on the side of runny caution. Remember, you’ve got your sinkful of cold water to plunge the pan into should it really look as if it’s about to split.

When the cream’s thick enough, take out the vanilla pod, retrieve the pie dish and pour this crème into the severely chilled container. Leave to cool, then put in the fridge till truly cold. Sprinkle with demerara sugar, spoonful by spoonful, and burn with a blowtorch till you have a blistered tortoiseshell covering on top.

Put back in the fridge if you want, but remember to take it out a good 20 minutes before serving. At which stage, put the bowl on the table and, with a large spoon and unchecked greed, crack through the sugary carapace and delve into the satin-velvet, vanilla-speckled cream beneath. No more talking: just eat.

The point about weekend food is not that you’ve got more time to cook it, but that you’ve got more time to eat it. I like to do the sort of cooking that gets on with itself slowly, so that I can potter about the house unencumbered and invite people to lunch without having to slave from first thing in the morning. Most of all, the food shouldn’t be about performance and high-strive presentation, but about lingered-over plenty.

Warm Shredded Lamb Salad with Mint and Pomegranate

Peppers with Feta and Almonds

Turkish Delight Syllabub

Slow-Roasted Aromatic Shoulder of Pork

Creamy Potato Gratin

Stir-Braised Savoy Cabbage with Nigella Seeds

Easy Sticky-Toffee Pudding

SATURDAY LUNCH FOR 6–8

Warm shredded lamb salad with mint and pomegranate

Red peppers with crumbled feta and almonds

Turkish Delight syllabub

This is – give or take – a regular kitchen fall-back position for me on Saturdays. It can be streamlined or amplified to suit how I feel and who’s coming, but the main thing is that most of the food is prepared either in advance or without strenuous effort. Most times, if it’s lunch, I wouldn’t go full out with pudding, but just buy huge wedges of two or three cheeses, maybe leaving the feta on the peppers out of the equation, and let people pick their way to a languorous conclusion. And this is the point of this sort of meal: it is about mood, pace, companionship. Why else are you going to be cooking for people?

WARM SHREDDED LAMB SALAD WITH MINT AND POMEGRANATE

The virtue of this is that you can cook the lamb overnight, which means all you need to do is shred the meat, dress it and make the salads at lunchtime itself. Or put it in the oven at a slightly higher temperature, but still unfrenetically low, in the morning and fiddle about as people arrive. You do need to serve the lamb salad warm rather than cold (a bit of fat provides flavoursome lubrication at anything above room temperature; once cold we’re talking congealed, waxy whiteness – not such an attractive proposition), but if you keep the lamb tented with foil once it’s out of the oven – should you need to hold it for longer than an hour or two – that shouldn’t pose problems.

If it’s not the pomegranate season you have a choice: either use pomegranate molasses (a tablespoonful or so, diluted with an equal amount of water) which you can get at some supermarkets now, or just use lemon juice and maybe even a little very-finely-grated zest.

1 shoulder of lamb (approx. 2½kg)

4 shallots, halved but not peeled

6 cloves garlic

1 carrot, peeled and halved

Maldon salt

500ml boiling water

small handful freshly chopped mint

1 pomegranate

Preheat the oven to 140°C/gas mark 1.

On the hob, brown the lamb, fat-side down, in a large roasting tin. Remove when nicely browned across its middle (you won’t get much more than this) and set aside while you fry the vegetables briefly. Just tip them into the pan – you won’t need to add any more fat – and cook them, sprinkled with the salt, gently for a couple of minutes. Pour the water over and then replace the lamb, this time fat-side up. Let the liquid in the pan come to a bubble, then tent with foil and put in the preheated oven.

Now just leave it there while you sleep. I find that if I put the lamb in before I go to bed, it’s perfect by lunchtime the next day. But the point is, at this temperature, nothing’s going to go wrong with the lamb if you cook it for a little less or a little more.

If you want to cook the lamb the day you’re going to eat it, heat the oven to 170°C/gas mark 3 and give it 5 hours or so. The point is to find a way of cooking that suits you: you know what sort of pottering relaxes you and what makes you feel constrained; how much time you’ve got, and how you want to use it. Don’t let the food, the kitchen or the imagined expectations of other people bully you.

With that homily over, about an hour before you want to eat, remove the lamb from the tin to a large plate or carving board – not that it needs carving; the deal here is that it’s unfashionably overcooked, falling to tender shreds at the touch of a fork. This is the best way to deal with shoulder of lamb: it’s cheaper than leg, and the flavour is deeper, better, truer, but even good carvers, which I most definitely am not, can get unstuck trying to slice it.

I get on with the peppers while the lamb’s sitting meekly, but you could equally have done this earlier, too (and see below for instructions). But to finish the lamb salad, simply pull it to pieces with a couple of forks on a large plate. Sprinkle with more Maldon salt and some freshly chopped mint, then cut the pomegranate in half and dot with the seeds from one of the halves. This is easily done; there’s a simple trick, which means you never have to think of winkling out the jewelled pips with a safety pin every again. Simply hold the pomegranate half above the plate, take a wooden spoon and start bashing the curved skin side with it. Nothing will happen for a few seconds, but have faith. In a short while the glassy red, juicy beads will start raining down.

Take the other half and squeeze the preposterously pink juices over the warm shredded meat. Take to the table and serve.

What I do with the leftovers is warm a pitta bread in the microwave, and then spread it with a greedy dollop of hummus, then take the chill off the fridged lamb in the microwave (and see notes on cold fat, above) and stuff the already gooey pitta with it. Add freshly chopped mint, black pepper and whatever else you like; raw, finely chopped red onion goes dangerously well.

PEPPERS WITH FETA AND ALMONDS

This is really a vegetarian take on that classic combination of charred, peeled peppers and anchovies. And if it makes little sense in talking about a vegetarian version when this is paired with the lamb salad, above, then let me reassure you that there is no need to do it all. This pepper and feta combo, with a rocket (or other green) salad, some griddled aubergines dressed, as with the lamb above, with pomegranate and mint (or if you’re not feeling up to that, just a bowl of good shop-bought hummus) and a pile of warmed pitta breads, would make the perfect Saturday lunch, vegetarians or no.

8 red or yellow peppers or a mixture of both

100g feta (or 200g if not serving the lamb)

couple of squeezes lemon juice

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

75g blanched or flaked almonds

2 tablespoons freshly chopped parsley

Peeling peppers is a time-consuming and fiddly job, but it isn’t difficult – and this is a distinction that’s important to remember. Like most tasks of this order, culinary or otherwise, the space it takes up in your head is greater than the actual demands of the activity, but if the idea of charring and then peeling eight peppers really appals, then don’t do it. The world is not going to fall apart if you buy a jar of ready-peeled and oil-softened peppers, nor do you lose the right to occupy your own kitchen if you ignore my suggestion altogether. Make a tomato salad; buy some tabbouleh from the deli.

But meanwhile at stately Wayne mansion, preheat the grill as hot as you can get it, and then sit the peppers on a rack below. When the skin turns black and blistery, turn them; you want to char them on every side. You can do this also, if you’ve got a gas cooker, just by holding them with a long fork over the hob, but it can get tiresome to say the least.

When the peppers are black and charred, remove them (trying not to burn yourself) to a large bowl and cover immediately with clingfilm. Leave for 10–20 minutes.

Then uncover and, one by one, peel and de-seed the peppers. Don’t get worried if the odd bit of skin (or indeed pip) remains. Cut or tear into wide chunks/strips (I don’t like this too dinky) and arrange on a large plate. Crumble over the feta, then squeeze over lemon juice and drizzle with oil. Scatter over the almonds and sprinkle on the parsley – and that, frankly, is it.

Leftovers can be stuffed into pitta breads, as with the lamb, above, but the sweet, salty mix is also lovely as a sauce for pasta (better without the almonds, though I’d bet they’d all be picked off anyway by the time you got to leftover stage). Cook some penne, reserve a coffee-cupful of the cooking water on draining, then toss the pasta back into the hot pan with half the reserved water and a small bowlful of peppers and feta. Toss around so that everything begins to cohere (but not actually cook) and turn into a bowl. Eat.

TURKISH DELIGHT SYLLABUB

This hasn’t got the temple-aching sweetness of Turkish Delight, nor its palate-cleaving glutinousness, but rather it is a cloud-light spoon-pudding version which attempts to catch its aromatic essence – perfect after the lamb and pomegranate salad above. That it requires no cooking, merely some pouring and whisking, doesn’t hurt either.

I use Cointreau here, simply because I have an enormous bottle of it and I prefer not to have to whip out to the shops every time I want to make something, but if you’ve got any other drink which you feel would make a suitable base, then feel free to use it in its stead.

The quantities below make enough syllabub to fill, billowingly, eight 150ml glasses; I give spoon measures before the metric ones just because it makes the whole operation more relaxed if you dispense with weighing and measuring. And the vague amount of cream specified is just meant to indicate one of those old-pint tubs which hasn’t been properly made metric, and therefore is a strange measurement.

12 tablespoons Cointreau (approx. 175ml)

juice of 2 lemons

8 tablespoons (approx. 125g) caster sugar

just under 600ml double cream

2 tablespoons rosewater

2 tablespoons orangeflower water

2 tablespoons pistachios, finely chopped

Combine the Cointreau, lemon juice and sugar in a large bowl (I use the bowl of my KitchenAid mixer) and stir to dissolve the sugar, or as good as. Slowly stir in the cream then get whisking. As I said, I use my freestanding mixer for this, but if you haven’t got one, don’t worry – but I would then advise a handheld electric mixer. This takes ages to thicken and doing it by hand will drive you demented with tedium and impatience. Or it would me.

When the cream’s fairly thick, but still not thick enough to hold its shape, dribble in the flower waters and then keep whisking until you have a creamy mixture that’s light and airy but able to form soft peaks. I always think of syllabub as occupying some notional territory between solid and liquid; you’re aiming, as you whisk, for what Jane Grigson called ‘bulky whiteness’. Whatever: better slightly too runny than slightly too thick, so proceed carefully, but don’t get anxious about it. You can anyway probably see the texture it is from the picture, below.

Spoon the syllabub in airy dollops into small glasses, letting the mixture billow up above the rim of the glass, and scatter finely chopped pistachios on top. In How to Eat, there’s a recipe for pistachio crescents which would be fabulous dunked into and eaten with this. But only if you feel like it: the cool, fool-like smoothness of this is perfect as it is.

SUNDAY LUNCH FOR 12

Slow-roasted shoulder of aromatic pork with creamy potato gratin

and stir-braised Savoy cabbage with nigella seeds

Easy sticky-toffee pudding

You are just going to have to believe me when I tell you that there is such a thing as a lazy Sunday lunch for twelve and, keep calm, I propose you cook it. The reason you should believe me is that I am not someone who churns out vats of food without the merest furrowing of a brow or clenching of a knuckle. True, I like cooking, and I like my friends, but having to feed too many of them in my kitchen at one time can turn me into someone positively curdled with resentment and panic. I’d like to be calm, I’d like to be unflappable, but some things are just never going to come to pass.