Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities (19 page)

MAKE AHEAD TIP:

Trim the sprouts the day before and keep in the fridge in a sealable bag.

ABOVE:

FRONT: Pancetta Sprouts; BACK LEFT: Pecan Sprouts; BACK RIGHT: Bean Sprouts

BUTTERNUT ORZOTTO

Let me first explain what I mean by “orzotto”: orzo is the Italian word for barley; so an orzotto is a risotto that is cooked with orzo rather than riso.

Now, in the normal run of things, a risotto made with barley rather than rice would have disadvantages, chiefly that you wouldn’t get that desirable, stickily binding starch emanating from the grains (due to their relative gluten content), so you wouldn’t end up with a squishy risotto texture. But I use the barley for a reason: unlike proper risotto, orzotto can be made in advance and, indeed, seems to benefit from it. Stirring a risotto for visiting vegetarians at the same time as plating up Christmas lunch would be impossible: this one’s easy. And it’s very, very good: all you need to do is add a little mascarpone to the pan as it reheats, and tinker a little. Although I made this last Christmas for altruistic reasons, it became a truly self-serving exercise: I had three helpings.

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

1 butternut squash, approx. 1kg unprepared weight

4 × 15ml tablespoons olive oil or garlic oil

1 teaspoon ground mace

1 onion, peeled and finely chopped

500g barley

125ml dry vermouth, or white wine

1.2 litres hot vegetable stock, such as Marigold, plus more for reheating

1 × 250g tub mascarpone

75g pine nuts

1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh sage, plus a few small leaves

salt and pepper

• Preheat the oven to 220°C/gas mark 7 and slice the butternut, remove the seeds and cut into approx. 2.5cm cubes. I don’t peel it, but you do need a big knife and a bit of brute force (and bravery).

• Tumble the butternut cubes out onto a shallow oven tray (I use a Swiss roll tin) with 2 tablespoons of the oil and half a teaspoon of the ground mace, and swoosh about to slick all the pieces before roasting for about 40–50 minutes, or until tender. Some of the butternut, chiefly the skin-sides, will be scorched and caramelized: this is a good thing.

• Meanwhile, gently cook the chopped onion for about 10 minutes in the remaining oil. I do this in my wide, shallow round casserole (about 30cm × 7cm deep) that I’m going to serve it in the next day.

• Turn up the heat to medium, add the barley to the butternut cubes, and stir for about 2 minutes, turning the barley in the mixture, then turn the heat up to high, add the vermouth or wine and let it bubble down a bit.

• Add the hot vegetable stock (unlike with a risotto, there is no need to add the liquid gradually and cautiously), put a lid on the pan and let the orzotto cook gently for about 30 minutes, or until done but still nubbly. In a narrower, slightly deeper pan, this could take 40 minutes and you might have to stir midway through.

• When the squash is tender, take it out of the oven and put half of it (judging by eye only) in a blender with half the mascarpone, and liquidize. Stir this into the cooked barley and season to taste. You can leave for a day or for up to 3 days at this stage.

• On reheating (or straight away if you’re not doing any of this in advance), add the remaining mascarpone plus, if needed, some fairly weak vegetable stock (the longer the orzotto stands in advance, the thicker it will be so the more liquid you will need to add; I just boil some water and crumble in a few Marigold bouillon granules) along with the remaining squash cubes and mace. Stir gently but firmly and reheat; this should take about 15 minutes on a gentle heat, with the lid on.

• While the orzotto is reheating, or when it is hot (a few minutes on the hob but off the heat, with the lid clamped on, won’t hurt it), toast the pine nuts by tossing them in a hot, dry frying pan until they turn deep gold.

• Stir half the pine nuts into the orzotto and scatter the remaining half, along with the chopped sage, on top. Garnish with a few sage leaves.

MAKE AHEAD TIP:

Leave the cooked squash, mascarpone and barley mixture, covered, in the fridge for up to 3 days. Reheat as directed. Toast the pine nuts up to 3 days ahead and keep in a sealable bag.

BEETROOT ORZOTTO

This is my favoured Christmas orzotto variant, which I wouldn’t actually serve with the turkey first time around (though it’s fantastic alongside cold turkey and generally breathes glamorous life into any meal of cold leftovers) but have done with goose (perfect, if you’re willing to go without the red cabbage) and would love it with pork, too. I put it here simply because the ingredients, but not the method, vary (other than missing out the roasting stage, as cooked beetroot is used). It is a satellite recipe and needs to be near the Mother Ship.

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

1 onion, peeled and chopped

500g barley

2 × 15ml tablespoons olive oil or garlic oil

1 teaspoon dried thyme

125ml Noilly Prat or other dry vermouth, or white wine

1.2 litres vegetable stock, plus more for reheating

500g cooked beetroot (not in vinegar), diced into 1cm cubes

1 × 148ml pot sour cream, plus more for serving if wished

50g chopped pecans

3 × 15ml tablespoons chopped chives

• Cook the onions and barley as in steps 2 and 3 for the butternut orzotto; the only point of difference is that you add the teaspoon of dried thyme when the onion has softened.

• Liquidize half the beetroot cubes with half the sour cream, then stir into the cooked barley. When it is all mixed (and somewhere between puce and magenta) you may put it aside for the time being if reheating later, or carry on.

• When reheating (or not), add the remaining beetroot cubes and sour cream, plus boiling water or weak stock to thin it down if necessary. As this beetroot variation yields less bulk than the butternut, you may find further liquid unnecessary.

• Toast the chopped pecans, as you do the pine nuts, and, before giving the orzotto one final stir, sprinkle with nuts and chives. If you wanted to, you could let everyone dollop a little sour cream on their serving of bright and sweet orzotto, too.

MAKE AHEAD TIP:

Leave the cooked onion, barley and (half) beetroot mixture, covered, in the fridge for up to 3 days. Finish and reheat as directed.

ABOVE:

Beetroot Orzotto (back); Butternut Orzotto (front)

ULTIMATE CHRISTMAS PUDDING

I don’t deny it: there is something unattractively boastful about calling one’s own recipe “ultimate”. But having soaked my dried fruit for this pudding in Pedro Ximénez – the sweet, dark, sticky sherry that has a hint of liquorice, fig and treacle about it – I know there is no turning back. It’s not even as if it’s an extravagance: the rum or brandy I’ve used up till now are more expensive and do the trick less well. This is sensational. I love the same fruits, too, steeped in the magic liqueur, but this here is the Queen of Christmas puddings. It has to be tried, and clamours to be savoured.

I know that many of you, tradition be damned, are resistant to Christmas pudding, and I do understand why. But you must try this. For until you do, you probably think all that dried fruit is, well, dry, and the pudding heavy. Yet this is far from the case: the fruit is moist and sticky, and the pudding mystifyingly, meltingly light.

A note on Christmas pudding generally, though I admit it’s not my first foray into this; traditions, even if not followed to the letter, can’t be wholly dispensed with just because they have lost their novelty – that is precisely their point. So, faithful readers, please forgive my ageing-lecturer style repetitiveness here. Traditionally, you should have all the family in the kitchen as you make your pudding, each one giving a stir in turn, the youngest first and going upwards in age. To honour the three kings, you are meant to stir from east to west, but I don’t have a compass and am not good enough at geography to work that one out. Stir-up Sunday, when we are supposed to make our puddings, falls near the end of November, on the Sunday after Trinity, and is – as I’ve told some of you before – a religious rather than a culinary injunction, as in “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people”. But personally I have never managed to make my puddings quite so efficiently in advance.

Some cooks like to use only 13 ingredients, symbolizing Jesus and his apostles, but a little bit of superstition enters in as well, since charms were traditionally included in the mix: a thimble, to suggest that whoever found it in their portion would stay a spinster, a coin to indicate riches, a ring to signify a wedding on the horizon, and so on. These days you’d be hard put to find such charms, though I own some pretty ancient ones. Clearly, we’re just interested in money, as now it’s coins that most of us bury in the pudding. (And some advice here: do clean them first; the best, if alarming way, is to soak them overnight in sugary cola. The Health & Safety recommendation is to wrap the coins in greaseproof paper even if they have been cleaned, but I unapologetically disobey. You must make up your own mind.)

There is still more than a whiff of the pagan about the pud: not only is each person meant to make a wish – superstition superseding faith – as they stir the mixture in advance; but the flaming of the pudding, as you serve it, is a nod to the pagan winter solstice celebration, in which fire and light and warmth are brought into our chill darkness.

And to reiterate the little English history lesson I gave in Feast, actually, the Christmas pudding was once seen as a religious affront. Oliver Cromwell banned it as a “lewd custom”, dismissing the rich pudding as “unfit for God-fearing people”, and the Quakers magnificently condemned it as “the invention of the scarlet whore of Babylon”. I used to fear that the Quakers made Christmas pudding sound more exciting than it is, so I’ve long done my bit to come up with a pudding that the scarlet whore of Babylon would be truly proud of. I don’t recant any earlier recipes, but this one, definitively, is it.

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

150g currants

150g sultanas

150g prunes, scissored into pieces

175ml Pedro Ximénez sherry (see

Stockists

)

100g plain flour

125g breadcrumbs

150g suet

150g dark muscovado sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon baking powder

grated zest of 1 lemon

3 eggs

1 medium cooking apple, peeled and grated

2 × 15ml tablespoons honey

sprig of holly to decorate

125ml vodka to flame

Eggnog Cream

to serve

1 × 1.7 litre/3 pint heatproof plastic pudding basin with lid

• Although I stipulate a capacious 1.7 litre/3 pint basin, and cannot extol the utter gloriousness of this pud too much, I know that you’re unlikely to get through most of it, even half of it, at one sitting. But I like the grand, pride-instilling size of this, plus it’s wonderful on following days, microwaved in portions after or between meals, with leftover Eggnog Cream, or fried in butter and eaten with vanilla ice cream for completely off-the-chart, midnight-munchy feasts. But it wouldn’t be out of the question – and it would certainly be in the spirit of the season – to make up the entire quantity of mixture, and share between smaller basins – a 2 pint one for you, a 1 pint one to give away. Three hours’ steaming both first and second time around should do it; just keep the one pudding for yourself, and give the other to a friend, after it’s had its first steaming, and is cool, with the steaming instructions for Christmas Day.

• Put the currants, sultanas and scissored prunes into a bowl with the Pedro Ximénez, swill the bowl a bit, then cover with clingfilm and leave to steep overnight or for up to 1 week.

• When the fruits have had their steeping time, put a large pan of water on to boil, or heat some water in a conventional steamer, and butter your heatproof plastic pudding basin (or basins), remembering to grease the lid, too.

• In a large mixing bowl, combine all the remaining pudding ingredients, either in the traditional manner or just any old how; your chosen method of stirring, and who does it, probably won’t affect the outcome of your wishes or your Christmas.

• Add the steeped fruits, scraping in every last drop of liquor with a rubber spatula, and mix to combine thoroughly, then fold in cola-cleaned coins or heirloom charms. If you are at all frightened about choking-induced fatalities at the table, do leave out the hardware.

• Scrape and press the mixture into the prepared pudding basin, squish it down and put on the lid. Then wrap with a layer of foil (probably not necessary, but I do it as I once had a lid-popping and water-entering experience when steaming a pudding) so that the basin is watertight, then either put the basin in the pan of boiling water (to come halfway up the basin) or in the top of a lidded steamer (this size of basin happens to fit perfectly in the top of my all-purpose pot) and steam for 5 hours, checking every now and again that the water hasn’t bubbled away.

• When it’s had its 5 hours, remove gingerly (you don’t want to burn yourself) and, when manageable, unwrap the foil, and put the pudding in its basin somewhere out of the way in the kitchen or, if you’re lucky enough, a larder, until Christmas Day.

• On the big day, rewrap the pudding (still in its basin) in foil and steam again, this time for 3 hours. Eight hours’ combined cooking time might seem a faff, but it’s not as if you need to do anything to it in that time. And by the way, when I give it its Christmas Day steaming, I sit it in the bottom of my pot, in the water, and steam the Chocolate Pudding in the top part of my steamer.

• To serve, remove from the pan or steamer, take off the lid, put a plate on top, turn it upside down and give the plastic basin a little squeeze to help unmould the pudding. Then remove the basin – and voilà, the Massively Matriarchal Mono-Mammary is revealed. (Did I forget to mention the Freudian lure of the pudding beyond its pagan and Christian heritage?)