olive oil
2 garlic cloves, chopped
300ml/½ pint passata
1 x 400g/14oz can chickpeas
1 teaspoon ground coriander seed
½ teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon sugar
300ml/½ pint stock
salt and black pepper
juice of half a lemon
To serve: extra olive oil, wholemilk yoghurt, parsley or other fresh herbs
Heat the oil in a large pan and add the garlic, passata, chickpeas, spices and sugar. Cook over a medium heat for a few minutes, stirring occasionally, then add the stock. Bring to the boil, then simmer for 5 minutes. Taste and add salt if necessary, then add pepper. Stir in the lemon juice. Either eat this soup with the chickpeas left whole, or mash them a little with a potato-mashing tool. You can also transfer the soup to a liquidiser or food processor and process to something smoother. Serve with a little olive oil poured over, a spoonful of yoghurt and some fresh herbs.
Clam, cider and potato chowder
My mother used to trawl through recipe books, looking for ideas that were practical and contained ingredients she could buy in our local market town (incidentally a very narrow remit, yet still a familiar one to many, all these years later). She was always good at spotting not only a decent, do-able recipe in the depths of some book or other, she also had a talent for picking out ideas that would look pretty. She used to cook a lovely white fish chowder, made with monkfish, prawns and waxy potatoes. With a few spikes of spring onion here and there, it was a lovely palette of pink, green and white. Monkfish was cheap then. No one appreciated it as they do now. It is now popular, expensive and over-fished in places. Clams, on the other hand, have all the sweetness this stew-soup needs, yet are easy to buy, quite economical – and ecologically sound.
SERVES 4
3 walnut-sized lumps of butter
1 celery stick, with its leaves if possible, finely sliced
1 large leek
1kg/2lb 4oz new or young waxy potatoes (yellow fleshed are best), washed and quartered
600ml/1 pint fish, vegetable or chicken stock
600ml/1 pint dry cider
1kg/2lb 4oz venus or other small clams, washed under running water
300ml/½ pint whipping cream or crème fraiche
fried white bread, to serve
Melt the butter in a pan and add the celery and the white part of the leek, sliced and washed beforehand (finely chop the tender green part of the leek to add later). Sauté the vegetables over a gentle heat, then add the potatoes. Cook for another 2 minutes, adding a ladleful of stock to prevent the potatoes sticking.
Add the remaining stock and the cider, and bring to the boil. Cook until the potatoes are just tender, then add the cream and all the clams. Add the remaining green part of the leek, put a lid on the pan, bring it to the boil and cook for about 3–5 minutes. The clams should open fully – discard any that do not. If you can, remove some – or even all – of the clam shells, leaving the meat in the soup. Eat with hot fried bread.
Kitchen note
Cockles, mussels or queen scallops can also be used, even mixed. I sometimes make this soup with raw organic tiger prawns.
Coconut tea
As much as I love the clever, inspired cooking of southern Europe, at least once a week we eat something at home made with coconut, lemongrass and warming spices like cumin and cinnamon. I cannot pretend to be an expert on this kind of cooking. I am not well travelled enough to have seen much of it in situ and I have relied on books to give me the basics of authentic South-east Asian cooking. But then it does not really matter. When you do travel to the places where these dishes come from, you find they are not made the same way in any one place, and you can adapt, providing the raw materials you use are genuine – or appropriate.
Coconut is under-used in the West yet processed the right way it is a highly nourishing ingredient. I avoid canned coconut milk, which often contains starch and emulsifiers to give it a creamy texture, and prefer to make a ‘tea’ from the flesh. Travelling in Sri Lanka this year I had breakfast with Champika Sajeewani, mother of two-year-old Sewwandi. Champika’s family are part of an organic farming producer group. They grow tea and spices and their products have Fairtrade certification.
Coconut spiced soup with chicken
Champika is known for her delicate cooking, and she showed me how to brew fresh coconut flesh to make a stock to add to curries. I cannot buy fresh coconut in the UK but I have used unsweetened desiccated coconut to very decent effect. The bonus is that you have a byproduct of soaked coconut to use in biscuits, or to make the raw pickle that is added to this gently spicy soup.
SERVES 4
4 chicken thighs, deboned, skinned and sliced
1 tablespoon raw coconut oil or olive oil
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1 stalk lemongrass, crushed with a rolling pin but left whole
1 medium onion, finely chopped
4cm/1½in piece fresh ginger, grated
2–3 teaspoons mild curry powder
¼–½ teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
200g/7oz desiccated coconut or fresh coconut flesh if available – soaked in 1.2 litres/2 pints boiling water for 5 minutes to make a ‘tea’
salt (optional)
FOR THE RELISH:
4 tablespoons soaked coconut flesh
1 handful of mint leaves
1–2 shredded, deseeded red or green chillies
1 chopped shallot
Cut the chicken into small pieces and put in a pan with the oil, garlic, lemongrass, onion, ginger and spices. Warm it all through until the onion softens, then add the strained coconut ‘tea’. Bring to the boil and simmer the broth for about 10 minutes until the chicken is cooked. Meanwhile, combine the ingredients for the relish.
Taste the broth and add salt if necessary. Serve hot with a spoonful of the dry coconut relish, removing the stick of lemongrass from the soup beforehand.
Kitchen note
It is fine to substitute the desiccated coconut with 1 block of coconut cream melted in 1 litre/1¾ pints boiling water. Blocks of coconut cream are easy to find in ethnic shops and supermarkets and are the most natural form of processed coconut, better than canned coconut milk. One-third of the block is fat, the rest flesh and you can choose how much of each you want to include. Adding the fat will make this soup richer.
A sub for ‘cuisine grandmère’
Just thinking about Jacqueline makes me hungry. I have to come clean and admit that the grandmother’s table I talk of so nostalgically in this book was not heaving with food she cooked herself. My grandmother could barely make toast. She ran a business with her husband in France and they employed a live-in housekeeper who cooked. Jacqueline was Belgian, and in kitchen matters she was my grandmother’s body-double and collaborator for every meal. Only she did all the work. She was married but had no children, and my grandmother was convinced she was better at French food than the French themselves. ‘Except she can’t make omelettes,’ she complained. Jacqueline shopped each morning, stopping for a tall glass of blond beer in the bar next to the épicerie. She was like a mother to all of the grandchildren. She dished out advice, some of it remarkably unscientific. ‘Les cornichons,’ she whispered to me, watching me