Nigella Bites (3 page)

Tumble the fruit over the egg-washed dough and then sprinkle the crumble on top of that. Put in the oven for 15 minutes, then turn down to 180°C/gas mark 4 and cook for a further 20 minutes or so, until the dough is swelling and golden at its billowing edges and the crumble is set; don’t expect it to be crunchy.

Remove from the oven and, if you can, wait five minutes or so before cutting it into greed-satisfying slabs.

If I’m being honest, for me all food is comfort food, but there are times when you need a bowlful of something hot or a slice of something sweet just to make you feel that the world is a safer place. We all get tired, stressed, sad or lonely, and this is the food that soothes.

Mashed Potato

Salmon Fishcakes

Double Potato and Halloumi Bake

Chicken Soup and Kneidlach

Kneidlach

Lemon Risotto

Stovetop Rice Pudding for Emergencies

Chocolate Fudge Cake

MASHED POTATO

No, I haven’t gone mad, thinking you need a recipe for mashed potato, it’s just that I couldn’t even broach the subject of comfort food without starting off here. Plus, there are pointers, suggestions I want to make to ease the labour involved. The first is, buy a potato ricer. It’s a cheap, handheld contraption with a punctured base and a lid that you press down. You put the cooked potato in, squeeze, and out come white worms of fluffy mash – as you can see. The beauty is that you don’t need to peel the potato. The skin, or most of it – and you can pick up the few straggly bits that get through the net – stays inside the ricer. Otherwise, if it’s a necessary bowl of mashed potato just for one that you’re after, I suggest you bake the potatoes (Marfona are best here) for 1–1½ hours at 220°C/gas mark 7 and then just scrape out the flesh and fork it fluffy in a bowl with the milk and butter: greater expenditure on fuel but very little in effort. Plus you get to eat the crunchy skins: divine with a good sprinkling of Maldon salt and a dribble of extra-virgin olive oil.

Mashed potato always seems to taste best if the milk or cream you add to it is warm; I just stick a jug in the microwave with the milk and butter and heat for a minute or so and then pour in while beating. And even if you’re using a potato ricer, you do need to beat. A wooden spoon will do: the point is you need to get air into it.

I hesitate before giving quantities, so please regard the specifications below as the merest guidelines. This is about how much you need per person, but then, I would not be appalled to eat a bowl of mash myself made from 500g raw weight of potatoes. It may well be, too, that you don’t like your mashed potato as buttery and creamy as I do; I have learnt that there are many people with more austere tastes than mine, though I’m not sure here is the place to indulge them. And – as seems to be the rule with cooking – the more people you have eating, the less per head they seem to need.

250–350g potato, such as Maris Piper or King Edward, per person

approx. 75g warm full-fat milk or cream

approx. 50g unsalted butter

salt and pepper, preferably white

freshly grated nutmeg

Boil the halved or chunked (but unpeeled) potatoes in a large pan of salted water. When they are soft enough to mash, drain them thoroughly then push the potato pieces through a potato ricer.

With a wooden spoon, beat in the warm milk or cream and butter and season with salt, pepper and some freshly grated nutmeg to taste. Eat alone and straight from the bowl, for the quintessential comfort food.

SALMON FISHCAKES

This is one of the most comforting suppers I know and has the great virtue of being both a storecupboard standby and a useful way of using leftover mashed potato. A useful way, too, of using up cold boiled potatoes – just push them through the masher and proceed as normal. If the mashed potato has been very buttery and soft to start with they will be harder to mould, but not impossible; you may just find you need to give a sturdier coating of matzo meal before frying. Talking of which, I often do this somewhat differently than specified below: I make the patties, then freeze them (on a clingfilmed baking sheet) until hard, then bag them up; when I want to eat them, I dip them, stonily unthawed, into the egg and matzo meal, fry them on both sides in hot oil until golden and then sit them on kitchen towel in a baking tray in an oven preheated to 120°C/gas mark ½ for about 40 minutes or until warmed through. And you could leave them here for about 3 hours without doing any damage.

The reason I use matzo meal rather than breadcrumbs is that I find bought breadcrumbs horrible and I am presuming that for an undemanding recipe like this you are not going to want to plan ahead and busy yourself making them from fresh. Matzo meal is now anyway widely available at supermarkets, and well worth keeping in store. And I use tinned salmon here because I think, strangely enough, that’s how they taste best (if it’s good enough for Marguerite Costa, it’s good enough for me) and it means you can have the wherewithal for these about the place at all times. I do have to warn, though, that, the unfried mixture smells absolutely vile. Just hold on to the thought that, once cooked, it tastes wonderful. And with these fat bronzed coral slabs, I suggest frozen peas and tomato ketchup. I don’t even like tomato ketchup much but just as with shepherd’s pie, it’s an essential here.

Makes 7–9 x 7cm-diameter fishcakes.

for the fishcakes:

350–500g cold mashed potato

418g tinned salmon, preferably organic

15g unsalted butter, melted (if the mashed potato hasn’t got any butter in it)

fat pinch cayenne pepper

grated zest of ½ lemon

salt and pepper

1 egg

for coating and frying:

2 eggs

100g matzo meal, preferably medium

50g unsalted butter

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

In a large bowl, and preferably with your hands, mix together all the fishcake ingredients.

Cover a baking sheet with clingfilm, plunge your hands back into the mixture and form fat, palm-sized patties. Place these on the baking sheet and stand in the fridge to firm up for about 20 minutes to an hour – or considerably longer if that helps.

Beat the eggs in a shallow soup bowl and sprinkle the matzo meal onto a dinner plate. One by one, dip the fishcakes into the beaten egg and then into the matzo meal, sprinkling and dredging over as you go to help coat them. When you’re all done, put the butter and oil in a large frying pan, heat till it begins to fizzle and then fry the fishcakes on each side until the crusts are golden, and speckled brown in parts, and the soothing centres are warmed through.

DOUBLE POTATO AND HALLOUMI BAKE

I first made this for a piece I was writing for Vogue on the mood-enhancing properties of carbohydrates, as promoted by such books as – and how’s this for a title? – Potatoes not Prozac. The fact that shortly after filing the article I went on a low-carbohydrate diet should not worry us too much here, for I should say that no one has eaten this without being mad for it. It’s a simple idea, and as simple to execute. What’s more, there’s a balance between the components – bland and sweet potatoes, almost-caramelised onion and garlic, more juicy sweetness with the peppers and then the uncompromising plain saltiness of the halloumi (which you should be able to get easily in a supermarket) – that seems to add to the eater’s equilibrium in turn. You could substitute feta, or do without the cheese altogether if you wanted to serve this as a side dish to roast chicken, say, but in which case be generous with the Maldon salt once the bake comes out of the oven.

And forgetting about pseudo-scientific and other optimistic theories for a while; this is so upliftingly beautiful to look at: real good-mood colours.

Serves 2–3.

1 large sweet potato, the orange-fleshed American variety

1 large Desirée potato or other red/firm potato

1 red onion

1 yellow pepper

1 red pepper

½ head of garlic

4 tablespoons olive oil

black pepper

125g halloumi cheese, sliced as thinly as you can

ovenproof baking dish, 25 x 15cm

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6.

Cut the sweet potato into rough 4cm cubes and the Desirée slightly smaller (2½cm) as the sweet potato will cook more quickly. Halve the red onion, then cut each half into 4–6 segments, discarding any tough outer skin. De-seed the peppers and cut into 2½cm squares, and separate the cloves of garlic. Put everything into a large roasting tin or whatever you want to use (it should be big, otherwise use two dishes) and, using your hands, give the vegetables a good coating of olive oil. Season with black pepper, but no salt as the cheese will make it salty (and anyway, the salt will make water leech out). Cook for 45 minutes, by which time the vegetables should be cooked through and here and there tinged with brown. You’ll need to turn the oven up to maximum or light the grill for the endgame: so place the thinly sliced cheese on top of the bake, and put it back in the very hot oven or under the grill until the cheese has melted and turned slightly brown on top, about 5–10 minutes. Serve straight out of the roasting tin.

CHICKEN SOUP AND KNEIDLACH

Yes, this is quite a palaver to make (although it’s time-consuming rather than laborious, which is a significant distinction) but there is nothing more comforting to eat. This isn’t tribal sentiment; for all that it’s known as Jewish Penicillin, I wasn’t raised on it, but eating it makes me feel I should have been, that indeed we all should have been. (That scientists have recently found chicken broth to contain anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties is interesting for those on the lookout for non-patented flu remedies, but true believers – culinary as much as devotional – never needed any such corroboration.)

What we ate at home, rather, was boiled chicken with rice, and I suppose for that reason I like rice in the soup, if it’s to have anything – though it truly is at its best as a pure, gold, soothing liquid. But actually it is traditional to sully its purity with starch: go for lokshen (vermicelli) or go native with kneidlach, which are best described as cracker-meal dumplings. I always used to think that in order to appreciate these you really needed to have been brought up on them. I wasn’t and remained resistant. But I’ve since found that they do not have to be the digestion-challenging cannonballs that tradition all but decrees. (Not, you understand, that stodge, in this context, is exactly bad.) Just make sure to whisk the egg well before adding the other ingredients and what you come up with are toothsome dumplings that are soothingly fluffy as well as comfortingly substantial. So I’m happy to give you my friend Olivia Lichtenstein’s recipe for them and urge you to get mixing and rolling. The fat used should be schmalz (chicken fat), which will be available at any kosher butcher’s; failing that – dietary laws considered – it should be goose fat or margarine. But at the risk of offending the laws of Leviticus – and forget risk, it’s a dead cert here – I use butter. But, you know, schmalz is not hard to make: just pluck out the gobbets of chicken fat that cluster just inside the cavity and melt them in a small pan over low heat. That should be more than enough to provide the two tablespoons required here.

As for the chicken in your pot: it really has to be a boiler. A boiling chicken yields up flavour like nothing else, and its flesh needs long cooking, so it doesn’t go stringy after hours of boiling. If you can’t get hold of a boiling chicken, then you’ll have to use a roasting one, but don’t cook it for more than an hour and a half. You can then take the meat off the bones, put the carcass back in the stock and carry on cooking it, though you may still need to bump up the flavour; in which case, I’d recommend a glug or two of Benedicta’s Touch of Taste Concentrated Chicken Bouillon.

For some reason, chicken soup seems to get hotter than any other liquid known to humankind: unless you’re careful, you’ll sear your throat before you soothe it. But soothe it you truly will: this is amazingly restorative stuff.

Serves 4 (or 8 Gentiles).

2 small or 1 large boiling chicken

1 unpeeled onion, halved

1 stick celery

2 carrots, peeled and chunked

a few stalks of parsley

a few peppercorns

2 bay leaves

1 tablespoon salt

Put all the ingredients in a large stockpot, cover abundantly with water, and bring to the boil. Skim to remove all the grey scum that will float to the surface, then let cook at a simmer for about 3 hours. Just keep tasting: when the broth tastes golden and chickeny, it’s ready. Remove the chicken and, if you like, leave the soup to get cold so you can remove any fat that collects on the surface. That way you accrue some schmalz, too.

Reheat the stock, and serve it as a plain soup, or add a few carrot batons – from about 2 carrots, say – and cook in the soup, adding some torn up pieces of chicken to warm through at the end. I like to add freshly chopped parsley.

KNEIDLACH

As I said, schmalz you’ll have to get from a kosher butcher unless you can render or skim enough from the chicken above, but matzo meal is available at supermarkets (I prefer to use the medium rather than the fine ground). It’s worth trying these dumplings at least once: there are days when only stodge will do. And, to be fair, made properly, these aren’t heavy so much as dense: I am relying on your charity to appreciate the distinction here.

Makes about 20.

1 egg

30g schmalz, margarine or butter, melted

3 tablespoons water or soup stock

100g medium matzo meal

pinch of salt and a grind of pepper

Whisk the egg in a large-ish bowl, then whisk in the melted schmalz (or whatever). Carry on whisking as you add the water or soup stock, the matzo meal and salt and pepper, and mix together into a rough paste; if it’s too stiff to feel that it might be malleable later, add a little more water. Put in the fridge to chill for an hour (or leave overnight if you wish) then dig out small lumps of paste and roll them into walnut-sized balls between the palms of your hands. Cook the kneidlach in boiling, salted water and simmer for about 40 minutes (you can just cook them directly in the soup, but I’ll do anything to preserve its unstarchy clearness). They are cooked when they rise to the surface. Add to the soup, and ladle out generously into waiting bowls. The etiquette here is, when people have the spoon halfway towards their mouth, before they’ve even had one spoonful, and therefore have yet to exclaim about how wonderful it is, to ask, querulously, ‘It’s all right? Is there anything wrong?’ while sighing longsufferingly.