about 50°C/125°F in the centre. Leave the meat to rest for 20 minutes, covered with foil in a warm place.
While the venison is roasting, prepare the vegetables: melt half the butter in a pan, add the shallots and cook until soft. Add the barley, stir-fry for a minute or two, then cover with water. Bring to the boil, turn down to a simmer and cook for about 15 minutes. Add the kale and cook for another 10 minutes, until both barley and kale are tender. Beat in the remaining butter and season with salt and pepper. To make the sauce, put the oil in a pan, add the garlic and onion and cook gently until tender. Add the blackcurrants from the marinade and cook until they are soft. Beat in the butter and season with salt and pepper to taste.
Have ready some warm plates before you carve the venison, as it cools very quickly. Serve a few slices to each person, with a little sauce and the barley and kale beside.
Due to their extraordinarily high nutrient content, more blackcurrants are grown in Britain than their relatives, red or white currants. Both have a more subtle, elegant flavour – especially redcurrants, which are delicious used in fools, ice cream and also in this pudding, which I like to call a biscuit that becomes a cake after it has sat for a while. It is quite easy to make, needing patience more than anything, but the end result will look like the work of a master pâtissier. Eat it with clotted cream or thin, creamy vanilla custard.
Serves 8
225g/8oz softened unsalted butter
70g/2½oz light brown muscovado sugar
175g/6oz ground almonds
225g/8oz superfine plain flour or Italian ‘00’ flour, plus extra for dusting
a few drops of vanilla extract, or the seeds scraped out from ‘A vanilla pod
approximately 450g/1lb redcurrants, pulled off the stalks with a fork (you can use previously frozen fruit)
caster sugar
Cream the butter and sugar in a mixer or using an electric beater until light and fluffy. Fold in the ground almonds, followed by the flour and vanilla, and mix to form a dough. Wrap the dough in a plastic bag and put in the fridge to rest for about 1 hour.
Preheat the oven to 150°C/300°F/Gas Mark 2. Divide the dough into quarters. Roll out each on a piece of baking parchment dusted with a small scattering of flour. Use a 23cm/9 inch plate as a template and cut around it, discarding the pastry trimmings to leave a neat round. Transfer each sheet of pastry to a baking sheet and bake for 12–15 minutes, until golden. The colour of the biscuit is important; it should be reasonably ‘high baked’ – so a good golden colour without being burnt. Leave to cool on the baking sheets.
To build the cake, transfer the least perfect biscuit round to a flat plate. Scatter a third of the redcurrants over the whole surface in an even layer. Sprinkle just a little caster sugar over them before lowering the second biscuit on top. Repeat with the remaining layers, using all the redcurrants so the top of the cake is biscuit, not fruit. It really does not matter if layer 1, 2 or 3 breaks (the biscuit is necessarily fragile) but try to keep number 4 intact for looks purposes.
Leave the cake to sit for at least 2 hours – the juice from the redcurrants will seep into the biscuit and the whole thing should amalgamate nicely into a crumbly cake you can cut (using a very sharp knife) into slices and serve with cream or custard.
Purple Sprouting Broccoli with Little Brown Lentils
I could write poetry to welcome purple sprouting broccoli, when the fresh new season’s spears hit the shops. It is just at that moment when potatoes are getting big and carrots enormous; the frosts are killing the softer vegetables and no other way can be found to eat squash. I have written before how purple sprouting, at its best, jostles for position with asparagus as a favourite seasonal pleasure – it wins because it is cheaper.
Buying broccoli
Farmers’ markets are the best source of the freshest broccoli, both purple sprouting and the boring kind. Supermarkets sell plenty, but the delay as the broccoli travels from farm to depot for cleaning, trimming and packing is reflected in its slight toughness and reduced sweetness. To find a farmers’ market near you, look at your local council website or for a London farmers’ market, see www.lfm.org.uk.
Purple Sprouting Broccoli with Little Brown Lentils
When you want vegetables to sit patiently and ready on the table while you get on with other things, this is the way to do it. When I made this originally, I liked it a lot, but when I ate the leftovers as I did the washing up I liked it ten times more – so make in advance and leave it. Do not refrigerate; if it is served chilled, the flavour is lost. For a warm dish, reheat any leftovers the next day, when the broccoli will darken and the whole thing amalgamate. Eat with red chilli and lumps of fresh acidic cheese.
Choose broccoli that feels tender right down to the tip of the stem and whose flowers are still closed. The leaves should not be enormous, but young enough for the flower heads to be visible.
Serves 4
200g/7oz small brown lentils
2 garlic cloves, peeled and pressed with the flat side of a knife to crack them a little
2 wineglasses of red wine
water or chicken stock
2 sprigs of thyme
450g/1lb purple sprouting broccoli
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Put the lentils in a pan with the garlic and wine, then cover with enough water or stock to come about 1—2cm/½—¾ inch above the pulses. Add the thyme, bring to the boil and simmer for about 25–35 minutes. Test – the lentils should be soft in the centre but the skins should not be falling off.
Strip any big tough leaves from the broccoli, and peel away any tough skin on the stalk using a potato peeler. Bring 4cm/1½ inches of salted water to the boil in a large pan and add the broccoli. Cook until just tender, then lift out with a slotted spoon and leave to drain on a dry cloth.
Put the broccoli in a bowl. Stir the oil and vinegar into the lentils, then season with salt and black pepper if necessary. Tip this mixture over the broccoli and leave the whole dish to perform its alchemy.
When very lightly cooked until it is just tender and still grass green, then blitzed with stock and finished with a lemon-scented cream, broccoli soup is a heavenly way to eat what can be a tedious vegetable. The key to giving this soup a light, fresh spring vegetable flavour is in timing the cooking perfectly, and gentle reheating.
Serves 4–6
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 white onion, chopped
1 garlic clove, sliced