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1 cucumber, peeled, halved, deseeded and cut into slices
1cm/
/
inch thick
1 teaspoon black onion seeds (nigella)
4 sprigs of coriander, chopped
Melt the fat in a pan, add the onion and cook until soft. Stir in the chilli and curry paste and cook for 1 minute, then add the coconut milk and water. Finally add the cucumber slices, bring to a simmer and cook for 5 minutes. Finish with the black onion seeds and coriander.
pickled cucumber
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cucumber, peeled, prepared as on here 93 (#ulink_9c4b93ff-6610-545f-83fa-c1cb214c615f)
1 teaspoon golden caster sugar
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar a pinch of salt
2.5cm/1 inch piece of fresh ginger, grated
3 small green chillies, chopped
Combine the cucumber with all the remaining ingredients. It’s good served with curries or boiled ham.
avocado
When an avocado is perfectly ripe, its oil-rich flesh is almost a sauce, a kind of green mayonnaise that goes so well with crustaceans – yes, it’s a refugee from the avocado-and-prawn generation talking – but also matches red chilli, lime and fresh coriander. Avocados are imported into the UK from South Africa, the Caribbean and Mexico. The dark, knobbly-skinned variety, the Hass avocado, has more flavour but some prefer the gentle taste of the smooth, soft-skinned type. Both are available all year round and are as welcome to me as bananas and oranges – fruit that I cannot do without.
avocado mash with coriander and curry oil
Treat this as a starter. It looks dazzling with the yellow oil, particularly if decorated with a few sprouting beans or pea shoots. Smooth-skinned avocados are ripe if the skin gives a little when pressed at the round end; knobbly avocados are ripe when the skin turns from green to a dark greeny-black.
Serves 4
2 teaspoons Madras curry powder
6 tablespoons avocado oil (see the Shopping Guide)
2 ripe avocados
2 tablespoons yoghurt
juice of 1 lime
4 sprigs of coriander, including their roots, well washed
2 shallots, finely chopped
salt
Stir the curry powder into the oil and leave to infuse for 30 minutes. Strain through a fine sieve and reserve.
Peel and stone the avocados, then mash the flesh until almost smooth. Beat in the yoghurt and lime juice. Tear the leaves from the coriander stalks and roots and set to one side. Chop the stalks and roots finely and stir them into the avocado mixture. Season with salt.
To serve, spoon the avocado mash into a neat mound on each starter plate, then scatter over the shallots and coriander leaves. Zigzag the curry oil over the top and eat with toasted flat bread.
kitchen note
If the curry powder does not contain turmeric, add 1 teaspoon to colour the oil a zingy yellow.
watercress
Watercress now grows all year round, and stores well in the fridge. It relies on a supply of clean water to grow and only several days of hard frost will dry up the supply. Most British watercress comes from an admirable co-operative of farms in the south of England, particularly Hampshire and Dorset. Choose this type in preference to French imported – there is no excuse for shops to sell this. Watercress is very underrated, and so English.
The nutritional qualities of watercress were once valued so highly that it was known as poor man’s meat. I use watercress frequently in this book as a replacement for the ubiquitously trendy rocket. Its peppery leaf goes with dozens of dishes, and finds a place in sauces and salads, too. Grumble if you are sold sealed bags of watercress that smell of rank water when opened; it means it has been hanging around a bit.
Watercress has the winning attribute of being slow to change colour from bright green to dull olive when cooked, unlike spinach or herb leaves. For that reason, as well as its powerful, clean flavours, I use it in dumplings and soups and in the simple sauce below.
watercress oil
1 bunch of watercress
6 tablespoons olive oil
a pinch of sea salt
Cut off and discard the lower 5cm/2 inches of the watercress stalks. Either whiz the watercress with the oil and salt in a food processor or pound using a pestle and mortar until you have a smooth sauce.
Use in the same way as Herb Oils (see here (#u08e70ce4-258f-438b-8e51-d5cb35075e10)). Good with roast beef, or zigzagged over toast spread with fresh cheeses or smoked fish.
watercress sandwiches
Children once took watercress sandwiches to school, in place of real meat. They are, in fact, very good and, cut small, are nice to eat with drinks before dinner.
Spread slices of good brown or white bread with farmhouse butter, then sandwich with watercress, the lower stalks cut away.
year-round fruit
Oranges and bananas, mangoes and papayas – I cannot do without them, and rely on a supply to cheer up fruit bowls when the English apples and pears have all been eaten, the berry season is over and soft orchard fruits are a memory in a pickle jar to eat with cold Monday leftover meat. I have travelled to Tobago twice and eaten so-called exotic fruits in their home – ripened in the sun and not in the hold of a ship – and was cheered to find that although they tasted better, it was only marginally so.
These fruits are made for travel. They ripen without sunlight in the dark, in our cold shops and quickly on our radiators. The gentle fingers that pack them in boxes in the Caribbean and Africa do so knowing how easily bananas bruise. I once asked a banana trader in London’s Nine Elms wholesale market why Caribbean bananas are small and curled and South American bananas long and straight. It was a conversation that has always stayed with me. ‘Ah, that is because there is less investment in the banana plantations of the Caribbean,’ he said, ‘and the bananas are picked before they grow to their full size.’ It was 1999 and we were talking about the World Trade Organisation’s decision to apply levies on certain European ‘luxury’ goods to the US, in retaliation for European loyalty to the Caribbean banana market over the largely American-owned plantations in South America/Costa Rica. ‘The Caribbean bananas,’ the trader continued, ‘are picked early because the farmers cannot afford to leave them on the trees even for another week. To me,’ he added, ‘they always look like small, hungry hands.’
This is an analogy of a worldwide problem for food producers. Lack of investment is the enemy of small food production. Along with coffee, tea, chocolate and dried fruits, Fairtrade bananas are now in most supermarkets. They are still small and curled but I am watching with hope.
fresh mango chutney
This chutney can be made in half an hour or less. Eat with sausages or hot ham.
150ml/
/
pint white wine vinegar
3 cardamom pods
120g/4oz golden granulated sugar
1 red chilli, deseeded and chopped
3 mangoes, peeled, stoned and cut into 1cm/
/
inch cubes
1 tablespoon black onion seeds (nigella)
Put the vinegar and cardamoms in a small saucepan and add the sugar. Heat slowly, allowing the sugar to dissolve before the mixture boils. Simmer until the mixture has reduced in volume by about one-third and then remove from the heat. Add the chilli and stir. Pour the mixture over the mangoes and throw the onion seeds on top. You can eat it immediately or store it in the fridge for up to a week.
plantains
If you have never visited an Afro-Caribbean market, you are in for an experience. At Brixton Market in London, you will see some of the most demanding shoppers in action. African and West Indian women, and men, shout at market traders to push prices down and go for bulk deals. They pick up everything, squeeze it and smell it; they are terrific buyers of fresh vegetables and understand their true value.
Plantains are large, banana-like fruits that are eaten cooked. On my trip to Tobago, I ate them sautéed in butter or ghee for breakfast and they were wonderful. Their skins must be completely black before you cook them or they will have no flavour. Eat them with baked chicken legs and Corn Fritters (see here (#litres_trial_promo)).
fried plantain
Serves 2
1 plantain, peeled and cut slightly on the diagonal into slices
1cm/
/
inch thick
ghee or butter mixed with vegetable oil
1 lime
Shallow-fry the plantain slices in the fat until golden on both sides and tender when prodded with a fork. Squeeze a little lime juice over them and serve.
pomegranates
Pomegranates are in Middle Eastern shops all year round, although they are particularly plump and fresh in late summer to autumn. They do keep a long time, though – I bought some for Christmas once and they were still there in April, albeit a little shrivelled, but the pips inside were red and juicy. Pomegranates appear frequently in Iranian cooking. I tend to buy them because I like the look of them, and then use only a few in a pilaff or a salad with oranges and spinach. What to do with the rest? What the Iranians do, of course. Make a pomegranate syrup to eat with roast poultry or game.
pomegranate syrup
I am ever grateful to the exhaustive research of Claudia Roden for this recipe. This is an adaptation of her version.
4 pomegranates
juice of 2 lemons
1 tablespoon golden caster sugar
150ml/
/
pint water
a pinch each of salt and pepper
Cut the pomegranates in half and dig out the seeds. Put them in a food processor and blend for a few seconds – enough to break the skin that surrounds the seeds. Transfer the pulp to a sieve placed over a bowl and squeeze out the remaining juice by rubbing it through with a wooden spoon. Four pomegranates should yield about 300ml/
/
pint.
Put the pomegranate juice in a pan with the lemon juice, sugar, water, salt and pepper. Heat slowly and bring to the boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook until the mixture has reduced by about a third. Add more lemon juice if it is too sweet. Pour into a jar and store in the fridge.
kitchen notes
To eat pomegranate syrup with poultry or game, pour it over browned chicken, mallard or pheasant, then cover and simmer for 1–1
/
hours, until the meat is tender. Thin the sauce with water if you wish.
Throw fresh pomegranate seeds over the pilaff on here 202 (#litres_trial_promo) – substituting pheasant or other game for lamb will be even nicer.
dried fruit
Dried fruit has gone though a renaissance and you can now buy wonderful, freshly dried soft pineapple, plums, figs, cherries and cranberries. I cook them with ordinary dried figs, adding them sliced to stock when braising partridge or pheasant. I make trifle with them too, having discovered by accident when short of fresh berries that they make a much more interesting pudding that is nice for Christmas meals.
winter trifle
Serves 8
480g/1lb dried fruit, such as figs, cherries, pineapples, plums and peaches, roughly chopped
