Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities (18 page)

I go for hot Italian sausages here, since it’s the contrast between the sweet, fruited bread and the fieriness of the sausage that I love; but it would work with the milder variety, too. You can’t, however, substitute normal breakfast sausages: the rusk in them would add too much breadiness; that element is elegantly provided already.

If you don’t like the dried fruit in panettone, then go for a tall, round loaf of pandoro instead. In either case, be sure to brush off all the bits of visible sugar from the top. I just slice off the sugar-covered bits.

For stock, I simply use good shop-bought concentrate whisked into cold water. If you’re starting off with hot stock, make it up first and leave it to cool a little before mixing in with the eggs.

Serves 10–16 as part of the Christmas feast, or 8–10 if not

2 onions, peeled

3 sticks celery

4 × 15ml tablespoons olive oil

1kg Italian sausages

4 eggs

500ml chicken stock

500g panettone, cut into 2–3cm cubes

salt to taste

large handful of chopped parsley, plus more to serve

• Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6. Lay out the panettone cubes on a large baking sheet, and toast them in the oven for 10 minutes, till they are crisp and golden at the edges. Allow to cool. Obviously, this step can be done well in advance, just be sure to keep the toasted cubes in an airtight container.

• Chop the onions and celery finely, but don’t go so far that you end up with a mush.

• Put 2 tablespoons of the oil into a pan and, when warm, add the celery and onion and cook gently, stirring every now and again, for 10–15 minutes until softened.

• Add the remaining oil to the pan, then squeeze the sausages out of their casings into the pan and squish and turn with a wooden spoon to break the pieces up as much as possible and mix with the celery and onion. Cook the sausagemeat for about 10 minutes, or until the pinkness has left it, stirring regularly with your wooden spoon. You can do everything up till this stage in advance if you like.

• Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6 (if it isn’t on already) and grease an ovenproof dish (approx. 33cm × 19cm), pretty enough to serve from, put in the toasted panettone cubes and add the sausage, celery and onion: I use my hands to blend everything together well.

• In the bowl that had the sausages, celery and onion (to save on washing up) whisk the eggs with the stock (adding salt if it isn’t already salty, so taste the stock first) and pour this over the stuffing, leaving it to soak in for 5 minutes or so before baking, uncovered, in the oven for 45 minutes. It will be dark golden and crisp on top, eggily soft – but utterly firm – underneath.

• Sprinkle with chopped parsley and use a large spoon to serve.

MAKE AHEAD TIP:

Make the sausagemeat and celery mixture. Cool, cover and keep in the fridge for up to 2 days. Toast the panettone cubes and store in an airtight bag or container for up to 1 week. Finish with the eggs and stock when ready to use.

BACON-WRAPPED CHIPOLATAS

It’s embarrassing – or should be, though happily I don’t believe in feeling ashamed of anything I eat – but I used to be a little sneery about bacon-wrapped chipolatas. How foolish one can be. They are now a must-have.

I make life easy for myself by cooking them early – about an hour or two in advance – and then covering with foil (in the main to stop marauders, and I include myself here as they are dangerously pickable) and reheating at the last minute in a very hot oven, such as the one the potatoes will be roasting in later.

If the bacon’s not very thin, it makes sense to roll it out: you can do this most efficiently by putting lots of rashers on some clingfilm on the kitchen surface, covering with another layer of cling, and rolling with your rolling pin. Half a rasher is plenty for one little sausage; pancetta slices, if you opt for these, are best used one per chipolata.

Cooking 50 of them may seem over the top, but these get snaffled up (especially by children) faster and more greedily than you could believe.

Serves 10–16 as part of the Christmas feast, or 8–10 if not

25 thin rashers streaky bacon, or 50 very thin slices pancetta

50 cocktail sausages or small chipolatas

approx. 3 × 15ml tablespoons vegetable oil

• Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6; though if I’m doing this much earlier and don’t need the oven at this temperature anyway, I cook them for 40–45 minutes at 180°C/gas mark 4.

• Make sure your bacon (or pancetta) is thin enough to be unbulkily pliable (pancetta comes thinner sliced, but it generally costs a lot more) and if not, roll out to make thinner, then cut each rasher of bacon in half vertically. Wrap each fine half-slice of bacon round each cocktail sausage; there’s no need to firm with a cocktail stick, as I’ve never had any unravelling. The bacon, when thin, seems to get sticky and adheres dutifully to its sausage.

• Spoon the oil into a roasting tin and arrange the sausages, each with the end bit of bacon down (though they may roll), and roast for 30 minutes or so, until the bacon is crisp and the sausages cooked. The only way to be sure is to make the ultimate sacrifice and taste one.

• Take out of the oven and wrap the tin in foil. If you’ve let the sausages burn a little, however, it may be better to remove them to a large piece of foil and wrap them in it, forming a loose but tightly sealed package; otherwise the sausages will continue to fry a little in the tin.

• When you are almost ready to eat, reheat the sausages by posting the foil-wrapped tin, or parcel, in a hot oven for about 10 minutes. Or cook them from scratch about 45 minutes before you need them.

MAKE AHEAD TIP:

Roll the chipolatas in bacon, as directed, cover and keep in the fridge for up to 2 days ahead. Cook in the oven as directed.

FREEZE AHEAD TIP:

Freeze the bacon-wrapped chipolatas in sealable bags for up to 3 months. Thaw overnight in the fridge. Cook in the oven as directed.

PERFECT ROAST POTATOES

Needs must and all that, so I have always been an open anti-perfectionist, but in truth (and I’m sorry to repeat what I’ve said before) it is impossible to cook roast potatoes without needing them to be perfect, which to me means sweet and soft inside and a golden-brown carapace of crunch without. And, strangely, no matter how many tricksy things you may succeed at in cooking, no matter what techniques you may master, nothing gives quite the contented glow of achievement that cooking a good tray of roast potatoes does.

Unfortunately there is concomitant decline when you feel you’ve failed. The brutal truth is that you either get it right or you don’t, and anything less than perfect is a disappointment.

There are three crucial things that I think make the difference: the first is the heat of the fat – if it’s not searingly hot, you don’t stand a chance, and since goose fat has a very high smoking point and tastes good, it is my annual choice here; the second is the size of your potatoes – you want them relatively small, so that the ratio of crunchy outside to fluffy interior is optimized; and, finally, I think dredging the potatoes – and this is a family practice, inherited through the maternal line – in semolina rather than flour after parboiling, then really rattling the pan around to make the potatoes a bit mashed on the surface so they catch more in the hot fat, is a major aid.

Serves 10–16 as part of the Christmas feast, or 8–10 if not

2 × 320g jars goose fat

2.5kg potatoes, such as King Edward’s

2 × 15ml tablespoons semolina

• Preheat the oven to 250°C/gas mark 9. If you don’t have a double oven, you will have to do this as soon as the turkey is out of your single oven, which, for me, is very much later than the parboiling stage.

• Put the fat into a large roasting tin and then into the oven to heat up, and get frighteningly hot. 20–30 minutes should do it.

• Peel the potatoes, and cut each one into 3 by cutting off each end at a slant so that you are left with a wedge or triangle in the middle.

• Put the potatoes into salted, cold water in a saucepan, and bring to a boil, letting them cook for 4 minutes.

• Drain the potatoes in a colander, then tip them back into the empty, dry saucepan, and sprinkle the semolina over.

• Shake the potatoes around to coat them well and, with the lid clamped on, give the pan a good rotate and the potatoes a proper bashing so that their edges fuzz and blur a little: this facilitates the crunch effect later. I leave them to rest at this stage. If you don’t, you’ll need to have preheated the oven earlier!

• When the fat is as hot as it can be, tip the semolina-coated potatoes carefully into it (they splutter terrifically as you put them in) and roast in the oven for an hour or until they are darkly golden and crispy, turning them over halfway through cooking.

• If the oven’s hot enough, they may well not need more than about 25 minutes a side; but it’s better to let them sit in the oven (you can always pour off most of the fat) till the very last minute.

• When everything else is served up, transfer the potatoes to a large (warmed if possible) serving dish and bring to the table with pride in your heart.

MAKE AHEAD TIP:

Peel the potatoes the day before. Keep submerged, whole, in cold water in a cold place. Drain, cut and cover with fresh, salted water to parboil and then roast as directed.

MAPLE-ROAST PARSNIPS

These used to be, until about three years ago, honey-roast parsnips, but I prefer the less intense sweetness, the smokier richness, of the maple syrup. Added to which, being runnier, the syrup makes a better, and lighter, coating for the nips. I have got a bit lazier, too: when cooking them in the very hot potato oven, I used to parboil the parsnips first and then cook them in the higher heat for 15 minutes. Now, I don’t parboil, and I don’t even peel. I find they are fine, and won’t burn in the potato oven, so long as they are given about 10 minutes less time, plus are lower down in the oven and cut as uniformly as you can. I make sure the thick parts of the parsnip are thinly sliced and leave the thin part long and straggly. Nevertheless, do keep an eye on things and don’t leave them in the oven for longer than they need.

Serves 10–16 as part of the Christmas feast, or 8–10 if not

1kg parsnips

125ml vegetable oil

80ml maple syrup

• It seems foolish to say “preheat the oven”, when it’s frankly going to be on anyway, but if you were cooking these to go alongside, say, some cold, leftover turkey, then you need a hottish oven, say 200°C/gas mark 6, and would need to cook them for around 35 minutes. If you’re using the potato oven, 20–25 minutes should be fine.

• Halve the parsnips crossways, then halve or quarter each piece lengthways, so that you have a bundle of spindly, shard-like lengths. Cut any thick part into a thinner – rather than square – chunk.

• Put these fawn twigs of parsnip straight into a roasting tin, pour the oil over, smoosh them about and then dribble the maple syrup over them and roast until tender and stickily brown.

• Be careful as you taste to test: the sugar content of the parsnips, more even than the syrup, make these blisteringly hot.

MAKE AHEAD TIP:

Cut the parsnips into lengths the day before and keep in the fridge in a sealable bag.

CHRISTMAS SPROUTS

This is the absolute basic, non-negotiable version of my Christmas sprouts. They need to be buttery, and they need crumbled, sweet chestnuts. I get my chestnuts in vacuum-sealed packs. My mother, against all her instincts, always roasted and peeled her own chestnuts, but then again, my mother always cried on Christmas Eve.

But if this is my basic version, there are many variants on the same theme. For my Pancetta Sprouts I start off (before the chestnuts) with 250g pancetta cubes, fried in 2 teaspoons of vegetable oil, so that the chestnuts are softened in bacon fat (to which I add 2 tablespoons of butter) and then splosh in 60ml marsala and let it bubble away to become a thick syrup before returning the drained sprouts to the pan along with 2 handfuls of chopped Italian parsley. For my Pecan Sprouts, I slice 4 fat or 6 thin spring onions and soften them in 2 teaspoons of garlic oil before adding the butter and chestnuts, then the drained, cooked sprouts, plus 100g toasted chopped pecans for the final tossing together, keeping some to sprinkle over. And for my Bean Sprouts, as it were, I throw 250g trimmed green beans, in short lengths, into the big pan once the sprouts have had a minute’s bubbling and then carry on as for my basic Christmas Sprouts, but add the zest and juice of a lemon when the sprouts and beans are united with the buttery chestnuts; once the lemon juice has bubbled and reduced by about half, I decant and turn the mix, in the serving dish, in a drizzled tablespoon of best-quality olive oil. So, I like to play sometimes, but it’s for pleasure not necessity: the sprouts here simply say Christmas.

Serves 10–16 as part of the Christmas feast, or 8–10 if not

100g butter

fresh nutmeg

Maldon or table salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

• Bring a pan of water to the boil for the sprouts, adding salt once it boils.

• Cut the stalk-end off the sprouts, just a thin slice, and let the outer blowsier leaves fall away. If you have any large sprouts, cut an “X” in the bottom, so that they cook at the same time as the smaller ones do.

• Roughly chop or break the chestnuts so that some are cut in 2, some in 3; you don’t need them whole but nor do you want mealy rubble. Plus, they’ll break up further as they get turned in the butter.

• Cook the sprouts lightly, in the salted boiling water, for 5 minutes or so, then drain them. You don’t want these mushy: you need them tight and nutty.

• Melt the butter – either in the pan the sprouts were cooked in, or in a casserole that you can serve them in – then toss in the chestnuts to warm through and add the cooked, drained sprouts.

• Add fresh nutmeg and salt and pepper to taste, then coat well with the butter in the pan before turning out into a warmed dish, or serving in your casserole.