Chicken in cumin sauce

As anyone who’s had the misfortune to walk through a town centre with me will confirm, I can’t resist a charity shop. I have to go in and inspect the cookery books, looking for original, interesting or just plain sticky, well-used tomes.

One of my latest buys (£2.50, thank you Peckham Scope) was Seven Hundred Years of English Cooking by Maxime McKendry. With a joint of pink beef glistening on the cover, it romps through the history of English food, giving the original recipe and a modern interpretation of dishes such as 14th century roast peacock (tricky to recreate unless you have an ornamental garden near you and a bag big enough to hold an angry peacock), 17th century Bartelmas beef, Victorian whim-whams and 20th century tomato soufflés.

Encouraged to bring history to life, I’ve popped on a cap and veil, strewn my kitchen with hay and stopped brushing my teeth. That’s right, I’m cooking like it’s 1499 and I’ve started with Chicken in cumin sauce.

The recipe has been given a little tweaking, with honey added in at the end to round out the flavours and I fried the bacon in duck fat because I have some in my fridge (just fry the bacon in its own fat if you’re short on poultry lard, adding oil to fry the chicken if necessary). It’s a hearty, savoury dish that’s good with buttered winter greens and slabs of bread for dipping.

Chicken in cumin sauce
Serves 6–8

500ml bottle beer (I used Pedigree)
100g day old wholemeal bead, torn into small pieces
1 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp duck fat
2 rashers good quality back bacon, chopped
1 (1.7–2kg) chicken, jointed into 8 pieces
1 tbsp honey

1 Place the beer, bread, spices and salt in a bowl and stir to mix. Set aside.

2 Melt the duck fat in a large casserole dish over a medium high heat. Add the bacon and fry, stirring, until golden. Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon or tongs, shaking off the fat. Add the chicken pieces and fry, turning once, for about 15–20 minutes, until golden brown on both sides – you’ll probably need to do this in 2 batches.

3 Blitz the beer and bread with a hand-held blender to combine into a smooth sauce. Return the chicken to the casserole. Add the beer sauce with the bacon and bring to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low, cover and cook for about 1 hour, until the chicken is tender.

4 Lift the chicken out of the pan with tongs and arrange on a warm serving platter. Stir the honey into the sauce, taste and season. Serve with buttered green vegetables and bread.

The Underground Restaurant, Secret Location, London

When I saw that The Underground Restaurant was holding an evening based on Patrick O’Brian’s novels, featuring the finest dishes from the Royal Navy’s repertoire, I knew I had to go. Crusty, creamy fish pies, boiled puddings so dense they can double as canon balls and lashings of rum is my kind of diet. So wearing our best approximation of 18th century naval wear and waving swords, we set sail for North London.

Once we’d shed our coats, we were given a warm glass of rum grog to wrap our frozen fingers around. A glowing pink drink with a slice of lemon wallowing in its depths (and thanks to that lemon, I didn’t get scurvy all evening), it tasted a bit like Cinnamon Aftershock. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but as it was hot and I was cold, I managed to drink the lot down.

Settled at a table by the fire, we chit chatted with other guests and poured out our weekly allowance of 1 pint of wine each, and then poured out some more. MsMarmiteLover came in to introduce the menu and furnished us with with a few salient facts to keep our conversation flowing.

The top fact was that Dutch sailors used to hang their Edam in cloth soaked in wax and herbs over horse manue and the ammonia from the manure dyed it red. Thus, the iconic red Edam cheese wax we see today. It’s a good fact. I expect to tell it a lot this week.

The first course was Blind Scouse Soup and Hard Tack. The soup was fantastic; a vegetarian version of the Liverpudlian winter warmer with potatoes, carrots, butter beans, barley and handfuls of fresh parsley idling in pools of broth.

The Hard Tack lived up to its name. A rectangle of pastry that had been baked into submission – if rock hard flour can be described as submissive – we had a go at chewing it and didn’t lose any teeth. But it was easier to eat after a good soaking in the soup.

Stargazy Pie and Dog’s Body were our main course. The pie was brought to the table whole, with herrings’ heads and tails poking up through the pastry as if they were leaping and swimming through the crust. When I sank the serving spoon into the pie a beautiful, creamy sauce bubbled up around it.

Dog’s Body turned out to be a pease pudding made from dried split peas that would be exactly the sort of thing you’d want to eat with a pie if you’d spent the day climbing the rigging, splicing the mainbrace, scrubbing the decks and firing canons at the French. I hadn’t. I’d walked from the tube station and I had to retreat, defeated, from my serving.

You’d think that being too full to manage all my Dog’s Body would mean I’d pass on the cheese course. But you don’t know me and my obsessive relationship with cheese. Some slithers of Cheshire cheese, ammonia-free Edam and a slippery drizzle of honey made it passed my lips on an oatcake or two.

I also managed quite a bit of my Boiled Baby and custard. It was the sort of pudding that builds empires – and walls if you run low on bricks. A slab of spiced suet denseness stuck with raisins, I found it remarkably light in the sense that I don’t think I could have beaten anyone to death with it.

Coffee and ratafia biscuits rounded off the evening and we heaved ourselves from our table at 11pm. The meal was £30 each plus £5 corkage per bottle. Another underground restaurant (The Underground Restaurant) and another great night out.

Thatched lamb pie

My fingers are cold, but wearing gloves indoors seriously restricts my ability to do anything other than polish glass with my mitteny hands. My feet are cold, but I can’t get more socks on. In fact, I don’t think I have any more socks. Just as the country’s thermometers hesitatingly nudge past 5°C and everyone strips down to their vests, my body throws itself into reverse and insists that it’s all got a bit Siberian around here.

Without more clothes to put on or notches on the central heating dial to turn to, I’m forced to generate heat from within. This means porridge in the morning and pie at night. The benefits of a potato topped pie is that you can generate plenty of cosy steam boiling the potatoes and then cuddle up to the oven door while the pie bakes to a golden crisp.

This pie serves 2 people fairly generously, so I don’t think you need to bother with cooking extra veg, but if you’ve been out tilling in the frozen fields then a heap of buttered greens might be appreciated.

Thatched lamb pie
Serves 2

750g waxy potatoes, scrubbed
2 tsp oil
250g lamb mince
150g leeks, washed, trimmed and thinly sliced
220g carrots, peeled and finely chopped
2 sticks celery, trimmed and finely chopped
2 anchovies, chopped
1 bay leaf
300ml red wine
30g butter, melted

1 Bring a pan of water to the boil and add the whole potatoes. Bring back to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Drain and leave until cool enough to handle.

2 Meanwhile, heat 2 tsp oil in a medium pan and add the lamb mince. Fry, stirring, over a medium heat for 5 minutes, until starting to brown. Add the leeks, carrots and celery and fry, stirring, for 10 minutes, until the vegetables are softened.

3 Add the anchovies, bay leaf, wine and stock and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes, until thickened. Meanwhile, peal the potatoes and coarsely grate. Stir the butter into the potatoes to coat and season with a little salt. Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180°C/fan oven 160°C.

4 Season the lamb to taste and remove the bay leaf. Transfer to a small (1 litre) ovenproof dish and top with the grated potatoes. Bake for 45 minutes until golden and crisp.  Serve immediately.

Rhubarb and ginger cake

I’ve turned my gimlet glare towards the lonely tins and packets that haunt my kitchen cupboards again. The things I bought and then ignored, sometimes for years. Why have I been ignoring them? And, in the case of the tin of the rhubarb in light syrup, why did I buy it? The only people who normally have tins of rhubarb in their cupboards are old people who’ve suffered a box from their church’s harvest festival.

Canned into longevity, rhubarb in syrup is murky pool of green sludge. It looks like something you’d serve up at a kid’s Hallowe’en party with a humourous name, like Dead Man’s Slime or Mummy’s Snot, to squeals of delight. There’s no chance you can put this in a bowl, pour over some Tip Top and be thanked for providing dessert.

So I’ve turned it into a cake, which let’s me use up some of the dark brown sugar mountain, the self raising flour drift and the inexplicable half pack of ground almonds that I always have in my cupboard (where do you come from half pack of almonds?).

If you don’t have a tin of rhubarb in syrup loitering in your kitchen, trim and chop 250g rhubarb into 1/2 inch chunks and simmer with 5 tbsp water and 1–2 tbsp sugar until tender and the juices are syrupy. Drain, keep the syrup and use the rhubarb in place of the tinned stuff. Any syrup you don’t use makes a nice martini shaken with some cold gin and vermouth (don’t bother trying with the tinned syrup, it isn’t flavoursome enough).

Rhubarb and ginger cake
Serves 8–10

50g butter, plus extra for greasing
110g dark brown sugar
3 eggs
150ml soured cream
110g self raising flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp ground ginger
75g ground almonds
540g tin rhubarb in light syrup, drained and syrup reserved
80g stem ginger in syrup, drained and chopped
200g icing sugar
Pared orange zest, to serve

1 Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180°C/fan oven 160°C. Grease a 20cm round cake tin with butter and line the base with a round of baking parchment.

2 Beat the butter with the sugar until fluffy and combined. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then beat in the soured cream. Sift in the flour, bicarbonate and ground ginger and stir to mix. Stir in the rhubarb and stem ginger. Scrape into the prepared cake tin and bake for about 40 minutes or until golden, risen and firm to the touch.

3 Poke a few holes in the top of the cake and spoon over 2 tbsp of the reserved rhubarb syrup. Leave to cool in the tin. Sift the icing sugar into a bowl and stir in 3–4 tbsp of the rhubarb syrup to make a smooth icing. Spread over the cake and leave to set. Sprinkle with pared orange rind just before serving. The cake will keep in an airtight tin for 3–4 days.

Sunday lunch at Hix Oyster and Chop House, Farringdon

At the end of 2009 Hix, Soho, was the big restaurant opening that had everyone in London who thinks with their stomachs talking and praising and slathering. I read, I wanted but I had Christmas presents to buy. So Hix went onto my list for January.

And I was going to book a table at Hix until I noticed that Hix Oyster and Chophouse in Farringdon did Sunday lunches. Dinner with friends is nice, but isn’t a Sunday lunch with sherries at one end, coffee at the other and plenty of dripping red roast beef in the middle better? A table for 6 was booked and last Sunday. DJ, Leonard, The Enigmatic Mr S, Mr B and Lennard from NY gathered around a table wisely covered in paper cloths.

DJ, Leonard, Mr S and I arrived first, so we had a glass of sherry each and our waiter brought over a bowl of beetroot and parsnips crisps. These were delicious to much on, especially the scrunchy strands of parsnip, and we devoured the lot.

Mr B and Lennard arrived at the same time as a loaf of crusty, chewy white bread, and our waiter brought over a second bowl of beetroot and parsnip crisps so they wouldn’t miss out. They nearly did, as I was determined to eat more than my fair share. I nearly managed it, too.

The starters were potted smoked salmon ‘Hix Cure’ with toast, bath chaps with piccalilli and watercress, and Gladys May duck’s egg mayonnaise. A plate of each was brought to the table and we passed them around, politely trying to take as much as we could without seeming like it.

The potted salmon was the best of the three. A little vat of smooth, moreish salmon pâté with not quite enough toast (there’s never enough toast, no matter how much the kitchen sends out. It’s one of the rules of dining out).

The bath chaps were wafer thin strips of delicate porkiness that were completely overwhelmend if you ate them with the piccalilli. That’s not to say the piccalilli wasn’t good, it was. But I’ve always suspected that piccalilli is better eaten on its own. It’s an egotistical relish that never gives way to other flavours.

The duck’s egg mayonnaise was the least successful of the three. Halves of almost hard-boiled duck’s eggs were blanketed in mayo and both of them tasted of nothing. If it hadn’t been for the sprinkle of cayenne, I wouldn’t have been 100% sure I was eating anything.

The main event was roast rib of Herefordshire beef, brought to the table on a board with a pile of flowerpot-sized Yorkshire puddings. There were 4 or 5 thick slices of carved meat and then half a joint of boned, rolled beef left to carve.

This was a bit inexplicable. Perhaps they were intending to come to the table and lean over us, carving the beef with a flourish. If they were, they hadn’t counted on how fast we rip through food. The sliced beef was distributed and DJ, because she was closest, set about the joint. The table was soon splattered with blood.

The beef was perfect. Thick, tender and juicy. The Yorkshires were puffy and crisp, with slightly soft bottoms – exactly how I like them. Roast potatoes were crunchy and fluffy and the buttered greens had a hint of winter bitterness about them that went well with the heap of buttery bashed neeps (swede). We had three gravy boats in circulation at any one time.

A roast is a difficult meal to get right. There are a lot of elements that all need to be ready to serve at the same time and if you over cook something or get it wrong, there’s no way to cover it up. But the roast at Hix was as good as my mum’s, which is the highest praise you can heap on a Sunday lunch.

Dessert choices were Amedei chocolate mousse, blood orange and Sipsmith gin jelly or Gorwydd Caerphilly with walnut oatcakes. I had the jelly and was rewarded with a glass of refreshing citrus jelly topped with a dab of cream. It was exactly the sort of light pudding you should have after a roast, but in my heart I longed for a crippling slab of crumble and custard.

If the mousse hadn’t been so airy, it could’ve played the role of the crumble well. It was an über chocolate pudding, an embarrassment of riches and Leonard have to give up halfway through hers. Unusually, I wasn’t interested in the cheese so I didn’t ask how it was. Mr S ate the lot, so I’m assuming it was good.

We finished with coffees and teas and left 5 hours after we arrived, replete and glowing. The set Sunday lunch (crisps, starters, roast and choice of desserts) costs £34.50 and on top of that we had 4 sherries, 2 bottles of wine, a bottle each of still and sparkling water, 4 coffees and 2 teas. Including service, our bill was £55 each. It was worth every penny.